Lookout is lightning-fast search utility integrated with Microsoft Outlook™. Built on top of a powerful search engine, Lookout is a search engine that can search all of your e-mail (or other Outlook folders) from directly within Outlook in a matter of seconds.

You can use Lookout to search:

·            E-mail messages

·            Contacts, calendar, notes, tasks, etc.

·            Data from exchange, POP, IMAP, PST files, Public Folders

·            Files on your computer or other computers

You just enter your search term and press Enter. The results are instant. Lookout will find your search terms hiding nearly anywhere in your Outlook mailbox - subjects, bodies, phone numbers, addresses, etc. Lookout can search through any number of designated folders and sub-folders, but displays the results in one window.

If you maintain a centralised e-mail public folder that contains all the outgoing and incoming mail sent to and received from the various contacts that staff members within your organisation deal with, then Lookout becomes particularly useful. We do this for example with our Outlook-based CRM system called MX-Contact. In these cases, you can be searching a folder that can contain possibly tens of thousands of e-mails.

Searching for example for the letters “abcsystems.com” will retrieve a list of all e-mails that contain this in any e-mail address, or anywhere in the body of the e-mail.  This in effect adds some CRM functionality to Outlook in the sense that one can easily and quickly retrieve all e-mail that is say relevant to one customer, partner or supplier, even if this e-mail is spread across several different folders.

The Lookout results window displays the e-mails, documents, contacts, etc. found in a grid from which you can easily double-click an item to open that particular e-mail.

This is really useful for both Sales and Support people, where you’re either looking for an e-mail containing some keywords relating to a situation that has arisen, or trying to find the solution to a problem that you know has already been answered before.

So yesterday when I received an enquiry about Managed Exchange from China, I quickly wanted to find any other e-mails on the same subject. Keying in the words criteria “china+exchange” displayed the following list in under a second, with over 10,000 e-mails indexed.