Chad Eldridge

Started to use the Outlook 2010 beta today.  I plan to update this post in the next few days with a detailed descriptions and review of how things are and how they work.  First impressions are good, however I do not see much of a change from the 2007 environment.  The ribbon has for sure changed to an extent and the coloring of the main theme.  One thing I am seeing right now is that the OCS communicator contact list has been brought into the main client screen.

As for issues within the first hour of use I do have some issues with the way threaded email works.  Threads of non-related email are for some reason being filtered into a single thread instead of threads following a correct hierarchy.  Emails that have no pertinence to each other are now grouped together.  Preferentially I would like to see email threads being sorted by the subject, which is probably a setting I am yet to find.

In the meantime feel free to go download and install it yourself.

http://www.microsoft.com/Office/2010/en/outlook/default.aspx

Edit 1:

Meeting requests have been greatly simplified over the way Outlook 2007 handled them.  Now when you receive a meeting request it will show you your calendar for that period of time directly in the request, thus eliminating your need to switch over to calendar view to verify that time slot.  Here is a screen shot of what that looks like:

Edit 2: 

The OCS Client screen embedded into Outlook: