Andrews Family

In Vista, Microsoft has bundled some ‘new’ applications for common tasks. To start, they’ve basically included the capabilities of Microsoft Outlook in Vista. Windows Mail is a new application for all of your email tasks and it is very similar to Outlook. It has everything I’m looking for in an email client and since it isn’t very different from Outlook, I won’t spend much time on it.

Windows Calendar, another new application, fills the role of keeping your schedule. Again it is very similar to Outlook’s calendar but it does have a few new features. One nice thing is that it allows for multiple calendars which is useful since most homes have the same Windows user for everyone. Now each person can have their own seperate calendar, but you can see them all overlayed together. For example, I set up seperate calendars for Jenny and I as well as another calendar for family activities. That way I can put things like my dentist appointment on my calendar and family vacation days on the family calendar and I can look at all of the activites that I am included on together by showing both of those calendars. Another new feature is the ability to subscribe to other calendars through the iCal protocol. I went out and found a calendar for Nebraska football which I subscribed to. Now all of the Husker games are on my calendar and it automatically updates the game time and TV station.

Vista also handles your contacts for you with Windows Contacts. Each contact is a seperate file (*.contact) so it is more of a new built-in file type rather than an application, but it handles everything well.

The thing I think is really cool about all of these things being included in Vista, is that you no longer need Microsoft Outlook. Outlook was really the only piece of software which a typical user needed for which there wasn’t a good open-source (free) solution. Open Office is an excellent replacement for the rest of Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, and Powerpoint) and its free. So that will save you some money.

Next time we’ll take a look at some of the multi-media features they’ve included with Vista.