Will Web-based e-mail replace e-mail clients like Outlook? Some of these AJAX-based clients do a great job, others not so great. But I think something like Outlook, which you can use whether you are online or off, is something that people will never completely lose the need for.

Live Communication Server, Exchange and Outlook used to be run in separate divisions of Microsoft. Now they're in the same one. Does that cement Outlook as the central dashboard for all communication?

I think it's fair to say that Outlook is already de facto the central dashboard, yes. With Outlook 2007, you still have to have Office Communicator running in the background, but you don't have to launch it to send an instant message. You can also see your co-workers' presence. Going forward, we are looking at how to even better integrate things into Outlook, though we are still very early on this. We want to make it easier for you to do voice over IP, Web conferencing, IM, all from the same place.

What is your personal e-mail style? Are you a filer or a piler? I'm a filer and a deleter. I don't like to keep old things around. So I only have seven folders. Fortunately, it's not just me that influences Outlook development. We have 80 people in our engineering team, including architects, developers and testers, which is about the same as the Excel or Word team. Everyone has a different e-mail style. The faster search in Outlook 2007, for better or worse, does let you be less organized. I have a manager who, the only thing he does, is take all of his e-mail and piles it into another folder. When he needs to find something, he just searches for it.