Although not a new feature, the ability for Outlook to cast your calendar in multiple time zones is quite a useful one, as the work teams get more and more geographically dispersed.  It is easy to set up.  Go to File, Options and select Calendar. Scroll down until you see the section on Time Zones – choose the two time zones you work most frequently in. If you travel between them quite a bit, you can readily swap the one that you are currently in. All your appointments will shift to center the business hours squarely in the middle of your screen.

If you have quite a large span of hours between your time zones, you can ensure that business hours in one region do not scroll out of view by expanding your business hours.  In the same dialog box, you can change the work hours to be from 12AM-12AM, and then click on Saturday and Sunday, if you are in MEA, as those are working days for a good part of the region.

Your final screen should look something like this.

By default, Outlook will use your corporate Global Address Book (GAL) as the data source to check names.  When you type an email address into the “To”, you can hit CTRL+K and this will validate the letters you have typed against matching names in the GAL.  What if you want it to search your personal repository of contacts instead? You can change the default address book by clicking on the Contacts tab in the left hand Outlook pane.  At the right of the ribbon, click on the Address Book button.

Select Tools, Options. Then choose the Address Book you wish to use. If you do not see your desired address book listed, you can select the Add button to add a new list.

Most of us at Microsoft spend most of our time in Outlook and the flow of email sometimes can get overwhelming. Categories, Rules and Alerts are one way to prioritize the flow. You can take this one step further and color code your inbox as such:

Outlook 2010 moved the location for Automatic Formatting. Although I had set this up on my previous machine, today when my teammate, MM asked me where it was, it took me a bit of time to remember.  Instead of Tools, Options, it is now located under the View menu. Click on the View Settings menu to begin.

Click the Conditional Formatting button

You can change any of the existing ones for Unread messages (bold), Expired messages (strike through). Or you can add your own. Let’s do that! Click the Add button.

Now you need to add “rules” or in this case they are called – conditions. Click the condition button. In my case, I want to change the “Where I am” option. I choose the “on the To line with other people” option. You can create as many of these as you would like.

Select a formatting font for these messages – Click on the Font button and then adjust the settings for the Font. In my example, I opted to see any emails that have me in the To with other people as red:

Now I can see any email sent directly to me in red:

A fun one to add is “Not to me” – I code those in light grey. This takes a bit more advanced work to set up.  Follow the same steps as above, and after you click on the Condition button, instead of selecting “Where I am” choose Advanced. Then in the Fields box, select All Mail Fields and pick To.  And another criteria that uses the CC field and doesn’t contain your name. Then select “doesn’t contain” and type in your name. For Font, choose Silver.

Don’t you hate it when suddenly you are in the midst of a massive Reply All fest on a large distribution list?  Have you been guilty of being one of those people?  If so, you need to take some of my good friend Brian Keller’s advice on etiquette for large distribution lists.

However, for those of you who are victims there is a saving grace!  In Outlook 2010, you can simply right click on a message in that nasty thread and select Ignore. 

And with a simple “Ignore Conversation”, you and your inbox will live forever after in bliss and happiness and any future messages in that conversation will be send to your Deleted Items folder.