Looking for Advice--long question

[Joe McGuire]

I am looking for advice on how to set up OL 2003. I am organizing my now
solo law practice to run out of my home office. I have been using OL for
years for personal use (with WinXP) on my home (and home office) laptop and
also for years for my work (on a different computer/system) originally with
Exchange with different firms I have been associated with but more recently
in stand-alone mode to which I have remote access. My business e-mail goes
to an e-mail server and then to OL on that remote PC and also to my PDA (a
new Blackberry at the moment). Personal e-mail goes through Comcast.
However, I plan to switch the work e-mail to a Comcast business plan that,
as I understand it, provides an on-line Microsoft Exchange Server and a
unique e-mail domain name. Exchange sounds very advantageous--and I won't
have to worry about having to be the IT guy.
My question is how best to configure OL 2003 on my home/home office
computer. I think I want to keep all the work e-mail separate from the
personal stuff in all respects (Inbox, Junk, Sent, Archive etc.). I am not
sure that merely having separate Inboxes for each e-mail account is a great
answer--examples: I don't want to reply to a work e-mail on my personal
account; Sometimes good work e-mail ends up in the Junk box and I have to
mark it as Not Junk and restore it to the (correct) Inbox. On the other
hand, I'd prefer to have only one calendar. At present I accomplish that by
simply keeping all my appointments, personal and otherwise, on my work
version of OL. Contacts? At present I have work Contacts on the work
version of OL and personal on the other, but combining these might be
simpler. Actually there's already a fair degree of overlap.
Should I set up two different profiles for OL? Is that the term? Does this
provide the maximum separation between work and personal? Can I run both at
the same time or do I have to log out of one to get to the other? Or
(horrors!) do I have to reboot the computer to switch between the two? (A
deal killer!) Is there a middle ground short of total separation that I
should consider?
I appreciate any help figuring this out.

 

[Roady [MVP]]

As you are using hosted Exchange, then you could also access additional
mailboxes by setting the proper permissions on the mailbox.
You probably can provide yourself with Exchange level Full Mailbox Access
permissions and Send As permissions on both the work and personal mailbox.
Then configure your work account as the primary mailbox and add your
personal mailbox as a secondary mailbox.
See http://www.howto-outlook.com/howto/permissions.htm

If you are leaving your personal account as a POP3 account, then you might
want to upgrade to Outlook 2007 as it allows you to designate a different
store location for each account.
See http://www.howto-outlook.com/howto/sortmail.htm

 

[Joe McGuire]

Thanks! In the first of your suggestions, does "additional mailbox" mean
sub-folders under a single "mailbox," e.g. much the way I can easily create
subfolders for my Inbox? If so, would I have to create similar subfolders
for Outbox, Sent Items, Junk Mail? Or do you mean one Outlook Today mailbox
for work and another for Personal, both under a single Profile but otherwise
separate? Would that mean that I could be sure that, say, a reply to a Work
e-mail would be sent on the Work e-mail account, and a reply to a Personal
e-mail would go out in the Personal account and they'd not get confused?

Go to Office (or at least Outlook) 2007? This may sound antedeluvian to a
Microsoft MVP but upgrading in Office always inspires a certain dread in
me. I am a lot more proficient in Word (2003 and prior) than most ordinary
souls but it seems pretty clear that I probably must start all over again if
I go to Word 2007 and end up with no discernible advantage at the end of a
steep learning curve. I'm sure that Word 2007 with its ribbons etc.
provides advantages rivalling the Second Coming to a handful of users but I
am not sure these mean much to the simple folk like me. Is OL 2007 as
intimidating--not to you, of course, but to the unwashed like me? Can I use
OL 2007 with Word 2003? (I don't use Excel or PowerPoint very much) More
to the point, does the store advantage with OL 2007 clearly outclass the
advantages of your first recommendation or even the comparative simplicity
of merely using two profiles?

Joe McGuire

 

[Roady [MVP]]

An additional mailbox means a complete separate list of folders representing
all the standard folders in a mailbox. You could see it as having 2 separate
pst-files in your current configuration.

The second part of your question is mostly personal and which features you
use on daily basis and how you work on a daily basis. As for the technical
questions;
-If you are hosting both mailboxes on the Exchange server, then you can
manage it easily with Outlook 2003. Only when you start mixing Exchange and
POP3 accounts will Outlook 2007 have a benefit regarding maintaining
separate store folders for each account in a single mail profile.
-Yes, you can use Outlook 2007 and keep the rest of your Office 2003 suite
installed. There are only a few more advanced features that will not play
nice or fully integrate with each other anymore.
-With an Exchange connection you only have one outgoing account. This is why
you need to provide yourself Send As permissions on the additional mailbox.
You can then specify the From field.
-Having separate mail profiles always remains an option ;-)