Look Outlook: Lookout!

I guess it depends what kind of Outlook user you consider yourself. I know of people that religiously file every email into its specific folder, nicely categorized into many levels of hierarchies. I'm not one of them. Although I still do have a significant number of personal folders in Outlook, I mostly just leave stuff in the Inbox and then do weekly archives of stuff that's older than a month. Works ok for me. The question is now, of course, how to find things again among those thousands of emails. The regular Find function in Outlook is crap, as it takes forever to find anything. That's where I liked Lotus Notes a lot better. Yes, those Notes indexed grew to ridiculous file sizes, but at least it worked.

Recently, during a vendor briefing (Hey, Mark!), I learned about X1. I looked it up, but dismissed it quickly, since it costs money and I wasn't going to shell out a license fee for a search function in the days of Google-ish business models. Then a few days later, over a business breakfast, an AR person (Thanks, Robert!) told me about LookOut for OutLook. Cute name. Apparently, even Microsoft itself must have thought it was decent, as they apparently bought the company and made it part of the MSN Sandbox.

Afer a quick download of the latest 1.3.0 version, I installed LookOut in a few seconds and the next time I started Outlook, I found a new toolbar. Then, LookOut went ahead and indexed mail files, calendars and anything else I selected (took about an hour or so) and from then on, searching within Outlook is a breeze. The first search takes a few a few seconds, because Windows needs to instantiate the application, but after that, LookOut finds everything within a second or two. Very cool and a real productivity booster. I just leave the LookOut window open and search happily ever after.