For last week or so, I have been running Office 2010 Technical preview now. I received my connect invite over a week ago and after hour long download and install process I got my office 2010 32 bit version working on win 7 install :).

One thing that you will notice straightaway is that Outlook now has ribbon interface. And in fact it was much needed in outlook IMO.

 

Some of the new things that I really like about new outlook are:

Conversation View

This was much needed feature especially if you are lazy person like me in clearing your inbox. Conversation view actually groups all your emails based on the relevancy of the messages. All emails are grouped based on the subject and outlook automatically works out redundant content of conversations and shows you only most important messages.

Clean up conversation

Another brilliant feature that allows you to delete unnecessary messages from your mailbox without having to loose the latest copy. One of the major benefits of  cleanup conversation is that it allows you to trim down the size of the mailbox and keeps all relevant messages for your record. It also keeps track of who replied to which messages.

 

Quick Steps

Another much needed feature that I think is going to make people hooked to outlook 2010 (like me… who now hates using 2007 at work).

The ribbon in the inbox has a new section for quick steps that allows you to perform multiple actions with single click.

 

For instance, I like to store some of my important emails into another folder which is part of different outlook file. Moving an email into that locations generally involves a series of steps but with quick steps it is just a single click on the toolbar. The best bit is that you have full control over these action steps so if you want outlook to provide you with a single click step and it is not available you can create your own quick step. You can even manage/customize existing Quick steps which is just awesome!

So far outlook 2010 experience is looking very promising to me.. I am really amazed that how stable is this CTP release. I guess lot of it is due to improvements that Microsoft development teams have brought in with their development process.

Well done MS.. looking forward to future release :)