A slow or error-prone Outlook might mean your Personal Folders—the place where all your appointments, messages, and other data are kept—are corrupt and in need of some fixin’. The How-To Geek shows you the ins and outs of using a built-in Outlook tool to back up and repair your data, and hopefully get Outlook moving a little swifter once again. The Geek’s tutorial should work for most any running version of Outlook. For a backup-only solution, try another free Microsoft tool.
We’ve got IMAP for email, iCal and other syncing options for calendars, but what about our address books? Most likely you use a combination of proprietary services like Facebook and other social networks, desktop address books, cell phone and webmail contact lists to keep track of who’s who in your life, but there’s still no easy way to maintain and sync your digital Rolodex wherever you need it.
Now that Google’s released the Contacts API—which lets apps easily access your Gmail contacts list—it feels like we’re a step closer to the possibility of a central, sync’ed address book. (Though the API uses a Google-specific data format.)
We’ve published some crazy-ass workarounds for syncing your address book the way you can do email with IMAP, and we’ve questioned people in charge of these things about possible solutions like LDAP, but so far, nothing feels like an adequate solution.
Do you have trouble keeping track of contacts? What’s your dream contact application syncing scenario? Tell us where you’d like to see Google’s Contacts API—or just the state of contact management overall—to go from here in the comments.
Source : Lifehacker
Never email another Microsoft Office document from Outlook that includes private hidden data again with the SendShield Outlook plug-in. We’ve all heard the horror stories of revisions, comments and author notes revealing more than the document sender intended, like when a Google employee inadvertently published internal secrets in the notes of a PowerPoint slideshow. The SendShield Outlook plug-in scans office documents you attach to new messages for hidden data and alerts you if there’s potentially sensitive info included, listing each item within Outlook’s interface. You can even delete the hidden data right within SendShield’s list, without modifying the original file, and scan documents attached to incoming messages as well. SendShield is a free download and works with Outlook 2003 and 2007—Windows only, of course.
Quad Tek 