If you haven't received the latest announcement from Microsoft in their beta release of Microsoft Office 2010, there are quite a few changes and a lot of WOW factors to check out with this latest build. In respect to Unified Communications, Outlook 2010 and Exchange 2010 have definitely risen the bar when it comes to presence and mobile management with new mobile features and integrated presence and conversation tracking with Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2.
To start, users now have access through Outlook 2010 to change their mobile preferences, how they are alerted, and even build “follow-me” rules for voicemail through their own user management console. The user interface is pretty intuitive and the fact that the beta works like production is nice too! Below you can see the new Options main screen of the Outlook 2010 client and if you look down at the bottom, you can see a specific section for voice mail management:
After clicking on the voice mail tab, you will be presented with several sub-menu options that allow you to change voice mail rules, alerts, configure Outlook Voice Access, setup your voice mail greeting, and configure text alerts for your email, voicemail, and calendar to your mobile device as depicted below. The following screens depict the new voice mail rules menu options and how to create a new rule:
The following screen shows you the list of mobile phones that are connected to your Exchange 2010 account (notice that this works for iPhone and Windows Phone) and you can even click on each individual device to see device info (handy if you need to copy and paste the IMEI number):
The following screen shows how you can configure your Outlook 2010 Voice Access service and greeting as well as the ability to configure notifications:
Last but not least, and more for those who are not using Outlook Mobile, you can receive text messaging alerts for calendar, voice mails, and emails as seen below:
To download Outlook 2010 today, you must have access to the beta software via MSDN or other means online. Though Office Live Meeting Conferencing integration is not yet released for 64-bit PCs, it’s still worth the install for the mobile and presence features within Outlook 2010. For more info, visit http://office.com/beta.