You can already remove attachments in Outlook—but only one at a time, which gets to be a big waste of time.

Outlook Attachment Remover (clever name, huh?) does just what it says, but in addition to removing attachments from one message at a time, you can scour an entire folder clean. This works well if you are on an Exchange server with a mailbox size limit, or you just want to put a bit of spring back in Outlook’s step.

Outlook Attachment Remover Frees Up Inbox Disk Space [Lifehacker]

For quite a while now, I have been using Plaxo to manage my contacts. The great advantage of Plaxo is that it syncs with a variety of software—I use it with Outlook (two different copies), Thunderbird (ditto), and Gmail. The mobile version of Plaxo is also fast enough that you can access it even from an older smartphone instead of your local contacts.

With Plaxo, you can also sync your Outlook calendar(s), tasks, and notes.

LinkedIn does much the same thing, along with the social networking aspect. Both LinkedIn and Plaxo will automatically update contact information for any of your contacts who are also members, which is a handy feature.

Enter a new player, Keepm, which focuses solely on contact management. It will import from Gmail, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, etc. For someone who just needs a central contacts repository and does not want to muck about with all the social networking that comes with Plaxo and LinkedIn, Keepm looks like a simple, lightweight, and central contact manager.

[via Lifehacker]

Here comes something I have been wanting for a long time: an easy way to sync my Outlook Calendar with Google Calendar so that I can share my schedule with my wife. Oh, and co-counsel, I suppose.

Since I am always changing from one program to another, it also makes it easier to track my calendar through other applications like Thunderbird, Evolution, Rainlender, etc. Now if only all those programs played nice with iCalendar .ics files. (They all import and/or read them; only some will write to them properly.)

Find out more and download the Google Calendar Sync tool from Google.

Lifehacker posted yesterday about Xobni, a new Outlook productivity plug-in. Xobni runs as a sort of sidebar, and displays information about the people who e-mail you. Among other things, it shows related contacts, e-mails, and files. I downloaded the beta version and started using it this morning, and there are two features in particular that are just plain awesome.

First, Xobni grabs phone numbers from e-mails and displays them as a Skype link in the Xobni sidebar. I am switching my business phone to Skype, so this is incredibly useful. But even if you do not use Skype, it is pretty nice not to have to go digging for the phone number. Fair warning: it only seems to grab one phone number, which may not be the one you want.

Second, Xobni has an awesome “schedule time with” link. If you click it, it automatically generates an e-mail to the contact with your availability–pulled from your calandar–already filled in. I would hope to see some configuration options for this in the future. For example, it would be helpful to be able to select the days and define a workday vs. a non-workday scheduling activity. But still, this is pretty cool, and saves a step over TimeBridge, which I posted about yesterday.

There are other cool features, as well. I love that Xobni tells me what time of day the contact e-mails me. It feels like I am spying on my contacts’ work habits. (And sleep habits.)

The to-do list on the organizer is not very useful, since I organize by category. The stay-in-touch list is a nice idea, but not all that useful, since I don’t really want to stay in touch with most of my contacts. If I could select a few contacts with whom I actually do want to stay in touch, this would be pretty sweet.

I also do not have much use for the feature that shows what files I have exchanged, since I remove attachments as a matter of course to keep my IMAP folders slimmed down. This would probably be useful for others, however.

All in all, I am loving Xobni.

One of the biggest pains about managing a law practice is scheduling meeting, conferences, and other get-togethers with clients, opposing parties and attorneys, etc., all of whom have crowded calendars. TimeBridge goes a long way toward simplifying the process of setting meetings.

Here’s how it works: pick a few possible meeting times, and enter the e-mail addresses of the attendees (or their staff). They send it back with their availability, and TimeBridge either confirms the meeting time or asks for more possible times.

It also has a plug-in for Outlook and Google Calendar so you can use it without leaving the comfort of your PIM.

[via Lifehacker]

One of the problems with using Outlook to manage e-mail is that there is no easy way to manage attachments. Outlook is not a good place to store attachments. Outlook basically rolls all your information–e-mails, attachments, tasks, appointments, and contacts, into one .pst file. So the more attachments, the more data Outlook has to manage, and the slower it runs. I’ve heard that if your .pst file gets above 1 GB, Outlook borders on unusable. I’m not there yet.

You can remove attachments (after saving them to your client file, of course) one at a time, but this is tedious and inefficient.

There are a slew of add-on programs to help with this. Can anyone recommend a few to try to start? If not, I am going to start plowing through them, one by one.

I have mentioned the Activities tab in Outlook several times, but I don’t think I have explained exactly how to get to it. The Activities exists as a tab in Outlook 2000-2003, and as a button in Outlook 2007. Open up any contact and look just under the task bar and menu, and you should see several tabs (2000-03) or the Ribbon (2007). The second tab is the Activities tab. The Activities button should be visible on the default Ribbon in 2007. Click it, and all your e-mails to and from that contact should show up in a few seconds. If you have linked any contacts, appointments, or tasks to that contact, those will show up as well. This is how I track cases (using contacts in a separate folder as cases) similar to the way

One of Outlook’s most astonishing omissions–which is in no way remedied in version 2007–is the lack of a way to go directly from a contact to a printable envelope. My workaround is pretty good, although not as pretty as I would like. I just create a folder called ‘Envelopes’ inside my My Documents/Business Files directory and organize envelopes by lastname, firstname.doc. I then attach those to my contacts using the attach files feature.

It works fairly well, although I still think it is ridiculous that Microsoft has not yet seen fit to give us a direct link from contacts to envelopes.

Since I have started using Outlook as my personal information manager (PIM), I have found a few helpful blogs as I dig in and coax the functionality I need out of a program not specifically targeted at lawyers.

These blogs are each part of MSDN, the Miscrosoft Developers’ Network, and the bloggers are therefore folks with intimate knowledge of Outlook. Their comments bear listening to, because they can show you how to use Outlook for more than just checking your e-mail.

Ryan’s Look at Outlook Programmability
Task and Time Management in Outlook
Outlook 12

Outlook is, by default, set up to organize your life by contact. The “activities” tab (or button, if you have upgraded to 2007), connects you to all the tasks, appointments, and contacts associated with a particular contact. This works well in some worlds, but not so well for law offices, where you really want to track all the to-dos, appointments, and e-mails associated with a particular case.

The solution is pretty easy, actually. At left, you can see how I organize my folder tree and my “Matters - open” folder. E-mails are automatically associated with contacts, so you just need a way to group a set of contacts (parties, attorneys, witnesses, etc.), tasks, and appointments. I just set up a separate folder for my open cases and name them with my file number and case name. I associate the file with the contacts relevant to the file, and link all tasks and appointments to the “matter” contact. That way everything is linked. Click on the “Activities” tab/button of your matter to bring up all the contacts, tasks, and appointments, on that case. Click on the individual contacts to get to the e-mails associated with the matter.

When creating a new task or appointment, just use the “Contacts” field at the bottom of the form to link it to the matters. If you get an e-mail related to a matter but that isn’t from a contact in your address book, just right-click on the e-mail in your Inbox and select “Message Options.” One of the options is a “Contacts” link where you can associate that message with your matter.

And there you go. Matters-based organizing in Outlook. Easy as pie.

Edit: The key to organizing in Outlook by case/matter is getting to know your “Activity” tab/button (Outlook 2007 at right–yes, I am evaluating Office 2007, but I am holding off on my review until I have lived with it for two weeks). In Outlook 2002/2003, this is a tab in every Contact form. Open up the contact, click on the Activity tab/button, and you can see every e-mail to and from that contact as well as every contact, task, and appointment you have associated with that contact. You have to associate everything but e-mails manually, but it is just as quick as doing it in TM. Quicker, actually, as long as TM takes to save a form.