Microsoft Opens Up Outlook, Offers W7 USB Install App Comments

Ahem, it is already possible to have outlook synched and accessible via multiple devices. Personally I have outlook accessing multiple email accounts and am also accessing the same accounts via my N95 with the Nokia Messaging app - Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo mail and others.

"The PST file clumps together a user's entire email, calendar and contacts information and is locked to a single machine. Over time the file bloats to many gigabytes in size, slows Outlook operation to a snail's pace and brings your world crashing down around you should anything happen to it."

1. PST files are not locked to a single machine. I have transferred mine over multiple PCs.
2. Only people who do not know how to archive their PST files properly will see theirs swell up to multiple GBs. My main Outlook file is a slender 80MB whilst my archived file is about 200MB after compressing. Every year I create a new archive PST and then backed up to an external drive and optical disc, never to be seen again.
3. I rather trust my data on my own PC than the 'cloud'.

@Kaurisol
You are accessing multiple e-mail accounts across different devices - not the Outlook .PST file. Two completely different things.

In regards to the USB/DVD tool it would be nice if they could release something similar for those that have the Retail DVD

Kind of related: get your Facebook calendar showing in Outlook or Google: http://blog.seanbonner.com/2009/10/24/facebook-events-to-google-calendar/

We moved my small business away from a hosted MS exchange environment (using outlook) to google premier a few months ago. Running a mixture of Windows 7 and XP we are finding the sync tool doesn't do a fantastic job... outlook is not as sweet as it once was.

The web interface is fine, but at the moment if you want offline access outlook is the only game in town.

Google does do a very good job of offering mail/contacts/calendar on all of our mobiles though... iphone, blackberry and windows dumbphone.

About bloody time!

Kaurisol,

Yes, you can copy your entire pst file, but you can't extract a small subset of data from it without installing office on your second machine.

Recently I wanted to extract the contacts information from an enormous pst file on my mac at home, and found that I couldn't, because the file is not "open". Worse than that, even if I had bought Office for Mac I wouldn't have been able to read the file because the Mac version uses a different file structure. I know I was compounding the problem by using a Mac rather than a PC, but I was frustrated by not finding any lightweight utilities on the web which enabled access to the data within the pst files.

Its just a shame that MS is so backwards looking. I honestly don't think they would have ever made this change if it weren't for the threat from google et al.