Jeff Lill told me about this setting. I was complaining that Outlook is taking FOREVER (minutes) to connect to our Exchange server (says "trying to connect" in the status bar). He said he thinks the culprit is the speed-auto detection option. Apparently, Outlook will have a different behavior for a slow connection speed than a fast one (download only headers instead of the whole message). But this check takes quite some time to establish.

If you're always using a high-speed connection, the performance of connecting to Exchange can be drastically sped up by turning off this option (uncheck File/ Cached Exchange Mode/On Slow Connections Download Only Header).

If anyone still cares about the sonics - you can import their 2006-2007 game schedule into Outlook from this file I made.

- Save to your local machine
- In Outlook: Open your calendar
- File/Import and Export...
- Import from another program or file
- Comma Separated Values (Windows)
- Browse to the File Location on your machine
- Select your calendar folder (default)
- Click "Finish"

Outlook to Windows Mobile Sync

Quoted: Download the latest version of Microsoft ActiveSync for your Windows Mobile powered Pocket PCs and Smartphones.

Google Calendar looks pretty great. Import from Outlook is only one time (CSV export, then import) - would be even better if this could synch with Outlook.

Calendars can be shared, free-busy only public, multiple calendars per user, XML or iCal format sharing.

Marc and I worked together for many years in Office. But I think he's stretching the analogy to say that adding Groove to Office has the same significance as when we added Outlook.

For one, email was an established tool across businesses and individuals, and certainly within corporations when we shipped Outlook in 1997. If anything, Outlook was a late comer to the communication suite. I don't know anyone who uses Groove today (other that MSFTees). It's positioned as a peer-to-peer collaboration tool. But I don't think the benefits of peer-to-peer as opposed to web-service are well established.

Second, MS is adding Groove to a niche "Enterprise Version". When we added Outlook to Office in '97, it went into the Standard version. I later heard user surveys indicating that as many as 30% of upgrade sales were due to the inclusion of Outlook in Office. Groove is NOT going to be driving significant sales of Office.

Quoted: If you think back to when Outlook was first included in Office, it came at a time when email wasn’t a standard part of the IW desktop, and most collaboration was document based. Now email is ubiquitous, and Outlook is at the center of many individual information worker’s day. With Groove we hope to transform the ways that teams work together, using the workspace as the framework for efficient collaboration, and providing another place and tools for work to happen.