This chapter was a good, basic overview of using Microsoft's suite of tools for communications purposes including e-mail, calendaring, newsgroups and instant messaging.
I'm not sure that I would ever be in the position to use their somewhat kludgy tools like Windows Live mail and Windows Live Messenger, but the calendaring tool is pretty useful. Now that my life runs on Android and GMail, I think Microsoft has missed the boat. I literally don't know anyone who still uses their email suite; using Windows Live Mail to read newsgroups, forsooth!
Having said all that, it is possible that I will be stuck in a corporate environment someday where an incredibly short-sighted or cheap (or both!) management mandate the use of these very basic tools, so it was helpful to get to know them.
Other nuggets of knowledge in this chapter including subscribing to, viewing and deleting RSS feeds and Web Slices using Internet Explorer. Again, I will continue to use the other browsers out there like Chrome and Firefox (99% Chrome, really) to view RSS feeds, and as I had never heard of the Web Slice technology until I read through this chapter it doesn't seem to be taking the world by storm or anything.
The chapter also gives a brief brushing by the concepts behind chat rooms, blogs, wikis and social networking. As Microsoft doesn't have any purposed software for those platforms it does not go into any great deal, however.
Have a great week -- until my next installment in the wild, wacky, wonderful world of Windows 7!
No comments:
Post a Comment