Searching for Information in Outlook

If you’re like me, Outlook 2003 has become THE central location for just about everything you need on a day-to-day basis. I have a little web design business on the side, that business has picked up dramatically in the past 6 months causing me to keep track of more information than I ever needed to in the past.

Within Outlook, that information can consist of obviously e-mail (personal, business, and all the “webmaster@clientdomain.com” addresses currently pushing 30). On top of that though now is that I’ve begun using Outlook Tasks and Notes much more as well. Of course with the addition of more clients, there’s also more contacts that are now in various address books that I’ve begun setting up and using categories with too! It becomes an onslaught of information and data, but data that I love having available and couldn’t imagine not having available to me. So, the challenge then becomes finding the information I need quickly.

Michael Affronti encourages me with some of his posts related to search functionality in Outlook 12. The key feature seems to be a persistent search bar that is available across all the modules that starts as both simple alpha/numeric text field, but also expands to allow to build more advanced queries for finding just the information you need.

This will become only that much more important with the other features coming in Outlook 12. Specifically, RSS integration. The question for me related to RSS integration though is will I forgo the ability to stay on top of my RSS via the web through Bloglines, in exchange for the features of RSS in Outlook 12? What I’d really like to see is a shared system somehow, maybe something integrating Microsoft Live with my Outlook RSS Aggregator?