Outlook RPC > Sliced Bread
People 'looking' for reasons to upgrade Office 2003 should look no further than just the way Outlook can reduce the pain-in-the-arse task of e-mail processing and management. Let's face it, the once powerful time-saver of email has become a burden and nightmare. How much do you spend in it a day? One, two, four hours? More!? I doubt any less...
Outlook really does fix a lot (note this does not read all) of what's wrong with e-mail. And before you go getting cross with the Outlook team because they did nothing to improve solution development with the product, focus on it from a user's standpoint. 'Cus ultimately everyone is a user (or used) by email.
A few days back I pointed out how happy I was with the junk mail filter, now I want to point out another gem referred to as Outlook RPC, (or more expressedly Remote Procedure Call (RPC) over HTTP) which frees you from OWA or having to have a RAS connection to get a rich-client mail experience. Now, I log on to my Exchange email account without dialing in, inserting a smart card, or connecting to anything but the Internet. Very nice. Shame too... because OWA is really vastly improved to in Office 2003. Too bad I will never use it ;-)
For more on Outlook in general, look here.