Microsoft Office 2010 has reached the RTM (release to manufacturing) milestone, which means that it is now code complete and ready for release to the market.  This latest version of Office will become generally available next month.

Office 2010 includes Microsoft Outlook 2010, which sports a refreshed user interface and a range of new features to improve usability and productivity for email users, particularly in business environments.

The Ribbon

First introduced in other Office 2007 applications the Ribbon interface is now also included with Outlook 2010.

The 2010 version of the Ribbon is an improvement over the controversial 2007 implementations, with customizable tabs to make your most commonly used tasks and options more accessible.

Included in the Ribbon are Quick Steps, which are a series of buttons that you can configure to perform custom actions that you frequently take, such as creating a button to start a new email message for your team, or a button to archive an entire conversation in one click.

Conversation Management

Outlook 2010 has new views for combining and collapsing conversations so that they do not clutter up your inbox and their message sequence is not scattered among other inbox items.  You can also see your own sent items in the conversation which avoids the need to hop into the Sent Items folder to find your own messages.

As well as making it easier to follow ongoing conversations the new Ignore Conversation option lets you opt out of all further emails in that conversation, so that you can remove yourself from ongoing group emails without having to ask the senders to exclude you.  One of the best outcomes of this new feature will be a reduction in complaints from people caught up in “Reply All” email threads that they don’t want to be a part of.

And when you are replying to a message Outlook will now warn you if you are not replying to the most recent email in the conversation.

Multiple Mailboxes

While previous versions of Outlook allowed you to connect to multiple mailboxes in the same organization, Outlook 2010 now supports connections to multiple mailboxes across different organizations.

This is especially useful for administrators, consultants and road workers who need to access multiple email systems at different times during the day, and makes identity management less complicated without having to worry about “Send As” configurations for different mailboxes.

Large Mailbox Support

Exchange Server 2010 has had a database architecture overhaul to permit much larger mailboxes and databases.  Fortunately Outlook 2010 has also received an overhaul to its offline cache file so that it can handle these much larger mailboxes.  Where the previous version of Office could support up to around 2Gb cache files without risking corruption, Outlook 2010 can safely support up to 20Gb cache files.

Mail Tips

For Exchange Server 2010 environments running Outlook 2010 one of the best new features for reducing unnecessary email traffic is Mail Tips, particularly in larger organizations.

Mail Tips are a series of prompts and warnings that appear in Outlook 2010 to let the user know when they are about to take a potentially undesirable action.  For example, Mail Tips can warn a person when they are about to Reply All to an email that they were originally BCC’ed on, thereby revealing that they received the original email.

It can also warn of simple mistakes such as composing an email that would exceed size limits, or sending an email to a mix of internal and external recipients (e.g. risk of information leakage).

Because these warnings appear before the email is actually sent, in large companies Mail Tips can be useful for warning about:

Sending to too large a distribution group

Recipients who are currently Out of Office

Automatic responses such as “this mailbox is not monitored”

Sending to a moderated distribution group

Sending to recipient you do not have permission to send to

Though Office 2010 does come with other great new features you can see from just these five that it will be a big improvement for email users.

via 5 Killer New Features of Outlook 2010.