Jean-Benoit Paux's blog

Microsoft released last week Office 2010 Technical Preview on Connect and it is time to speak about it !

I really appreciate this new version, for a lot of reasons (conversation display in Outlook, improvements of UI in most of apps of the suite etc.) but I’d like to emphasis on one improvement I was asking for a long time : the ability to have multiple Exchange Accounts in the same Outlook process (without using App-V, run-as or other tips to launch multiple Outlook).

You can ask why do I have 2 Exchange accounts, but it is simply because I’ve got my Avanade corporate account and my personal Exchange server (Exchange 2007 but soon Exchange 2010)

So how to do this ?

1. Close Outlook
2. Go to control panel
3. Search “Mail”
4. Click on New Account
5. Enter your account settings (and use Autodiscovery !)
6. Launch Outlook

As you can see it is really straightforward so abuse of it !

I’ve got now my two Exchange accounts, as we had before for POP/IMAP :

If you often use PowerShell as script language you well know the out-* and export-* cmdlets.

I often use export-csv and open the result in Excel or out-GridView in PowerShell v2 (useful cmdlet BTW) for a nice graphical interface. I sometime use Excel API to create an Excel sheet directly or to import data but something was missing : simplicity.

These are an excellent solutions but why don’t we use Excel directly with an out-excel cmdlet ?

I just found this cmdlet there : http://pathologicalscripter.wordpress.com/out-excel/ and it is working very well ! So have fun using it.

Since Windows 2000, it is possible to configure which settings must be displayed in the control panel. You can hide some items or on the other side, only display the ones you choose.

To configure this you will have to edit a GPO (or the Local group policy).

The settings to edit are depending of what you want to achieve:

User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Control Panel\Hide specified Control Panel Items
or
User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Control Panel\Show only specified Control Panel Items

In Windows Vista or Windows 7, you must enter the values defined in the MSDN documentation instead of the different .cpl you want to display. You can find the different settings there : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc144191(VS.85).aspx

If you want to restrict/show only the Display part in which you can set the resolution, display output, DPI, you’ll not find it in the previous link. The option is as simply as its name : Microsoft.Display.

You’ll now be able to restrict this view and have this kind of control panel