Joe said:
I have Office 2003 (including OL) running in WinXP Pro (SP3) with about 2GB
of memory in my laptop. I have separate profiles for work vs. personal use.
I am self-employed so it's only my personal desire to keep work and personal
stuff separate. But it is a hassle to switch between profiles. Of course,
I can't just switch. I have to first close OL, then usually close
Outlook.exe in Program Manager, Processes (it almost always keeps running
there), then restart OL and finally select the alternate profile. And then
back again later.
I understand that OL2007 would let me switch easily between profiles. Can
you tell me if this is true and if I can run OL 2007 with Office 2003 (minus
OL 2003, of course)? I make heavy use of Word 2003 (It's good enough and I
am reasonably facile with it; I'm not at all sure that the investment of
time I'd need to become as facile with Word 2007 is justified; maybe later)
and minor use of Excel and Power Point. If I get Office 2007 can I just
install OL? And will it run well in XP? If the answer is yes to both
Office 2003 and XP, I'll order it right away! Thanks!
I haven't tried this but it might work *if* Outlook permits multiple
concurrently logged on Windows account to concurrently access Outlook.
Windows XP has its Fast User Switching (FUS) feature to let you have more
than one Windows account logged in at a time. You could create a Windows
account for your personal use and another Windows account for your business
use. Not only would this have you using different messages stores (.pst
files) for each account but it would also separate your personal and
business data, like your letters or other docs under the %userprofile% path
which is separate for each account.
If you flip between mail profiles more than a couple times to switch between
them in Outlook, the time to unload Outlook, reload it, select another mail
profile, and wait to load Outlook is probably no longer than using FUS to
log onto your other account and load Outlook there. When you're doing your
personal stuff, you're under your personal-use Windows account. When you're
doing business stuff, you flip instantly to your business-use Windows
account.
This flipping between concurrently logged on Windows accounts using FUS will
depend if Outlook will run another instance of itself under the other
currently logged on account. If Outlook refuses to load itself as another
unique instance with the mail profile for the other Windows account then you
might want to look into using virtual machines. You would need another
license for Windows to run it as a guest OS. You could then have complete
separation of all your business and personal activities between the host OS
and the guest OS. You'd do your personal stuff in the host OS and the
business stuff in the guest OS. If all you're doing is e-mail for business
stuff, you could use some Linux variant (since many have GUIs that noobs can
understand) and do your e-mail there inside a virtual machine to eliminate
having to buy another license of Windows.
Then there's the easiest method if complete separation of personal and
business data is not a requirement: use rules. Presumably you do NOT use
the same account(s) for personal and business use. Create folders in
Outlook that are for business-use only. Use a rule for incoming e-mail that
checks through which account an e-mail was delivered and moves business
account e-mails to your business folders in Outlook. The remaining problem
is selecting the correct account when you compose new e-mails (replies
default to going out through the same account through which the original
e-mail was delivered). One method I've heard of is to define a bogus e-mail
account in Outlook, one that doesn't specify valid mail hosts so it will
fail when you try to send new e-mails. Because of the error, you will have
to click the Accounts button to select a non-bogus account through which to
send your e-mails. It's a stub-your-toe-as-reminder trick. Outlook won't
let you NOT select an account as the default (if it did then it would have
to prompt as to which account you wanted to use when sending a new e-mail).
To keep your outbound e-mails organized between personal and business use,
you would need to also define an outbound rule that check through which
account you send them and move those e-mails into your personal or business
Sent Items folder. Of course, you would be mixing your personal and
business e-mails inside the same message store (.pst file); however, you
would have separation of them by putting them into personal-use and
business-use folders.
Oh, I don't know if this is quite the place to ask, but will synching my
Blackberry get the profiles confused on the computer?
Never used a PDA. Don't know if it must sync to mail profiles or if it can
separately poll your e-mail accounts (which means you should be using an
IMAP e-mail account).
