How To: Achieve Compliance with Microsoft Outlook Part 1

First things first: if you're going to use Microsoft Outlook to achieve compliance, you're going to need to purchase a copy of Microsoft Outlook. Look, we know you don't want to spend anything at all on this compliance system, but you gotta get a legal copy of Outlook. Do you really want to start your compliance efforts by breaking the law?

So which version of Microsoft Outlook do you need? Well, honestly Microsoft Outlook 2007 is far and away the best, but anything beyond Outlook 2000 will do. Really what you need is the ability to create and customize task forms. What's a task form you ask? Doesn't matter right now. Just know that Outlook 2007 is much better than Outlook 2003 is slightly better than Outlook XP is much much better than Outlook 2000. Of course, this had better be the case or why did we give Microsoft so much money over the years ...

So the long and short of this post is that we recommend Outlook 2007. There is so much about 2007 that is better than 2003 that it is easy to recommend it; so much so, in fact, that we won't go into it all here. However, one feature we will note here is that Outlook 2007 works much better with SharePoint. What's SharePoint, you ask? Hey, we'll get to it ... I thought you learned to stop asking those questions! To wrap up, if you can part with a little money and you want the best compliance system platform, go buy Microsoft Outlook 2007. If instead you have an older version of Outlook, you'll be just fine, but it'll be harder for you to follow along since this How To series will use Outlook 2007 methods and screenshots. That's it for today. Tune in next Monday for Part 2 of How To: Achieve Compliance wiht Microsoft Outlook!