Outlook-ing for Google

Microsoft Outlook is a product in the Microsoft Office package, and it used by a variety of businesses and in personal homes as the main means of sending and receiving email. The program is aesthetically reminiscent of the themes that Microsoft has designed into all of their 2012 Office package, which makes it easy to navigate if you have worked with any of the Office products before.

One the program is open, there are a variety of options on how you can use Outlook to your advantage. It has an inbuilt calendar and task manager, along with an easy to use and  functional contact base, along with a working inbox and outbox for your email uses. Once you have created events in the calender, it is an easy issue to then send an email with those particular details out to various others, which would load quickly onto their computers. Each part of the program interacts with the others, with tasks and the calender easily tied into the email system for ease of access. This would be of particular benefit to businesses wanting to use a unified system.

The program itself seems fairly easy to use at a first glance, and that would be a correct. It is easy to navigate through the various functions of the Outlook program - but the program itself can be a bit restricting merely in its own design Because the program is based only on your one computer, all of the settings, emails and events that you have saved on it are locked to that one computer. Whereas Google Calenders can be integrated into your mobile phone for ease of access and for quick reference, the Outlook programming can only be found on the computer that is installed on. 

This too can be slightly restricting for businesses, if they are constantly on the move. Desktop notifications of events are a handy integrated tool of the program, but not if you are somewhere else. Google Calenders has an ease of access that the Outlook program doesn't have, but, the Outlook program's Calender is more user friendly. The task lists are easier to use than the Google alternative, and do not require an internet connection to view.

And of course the program has its email, which can be forgotten under all of the other features that the software boasts. The email program is just like any other, with varying files for junk mail, and other folders to sort email's into. The inbox itself is fairly straight forward, not unlike the Google alternative, if only for layout.

To summarize everything here; I believe that the Outlook is a reliable and trustworthy program, capable of performing all of a businesses needs or demands with little hassle. However the program itself can be a bit restricting if needed for quick reference on a different computer or handset, since all the program only stores the information on the single machine. Depending on the Business type, Microsoft Outlook is absolutely one of the best choices when it comes to email and calender software.