Chapter 3: Configuring Profiles in Outlook

This chapter discusses what makes profiles tick. The chapter covers the elements of a profile and factors to help you decide where to locate key components, such as the folders where Outlook messages and other items are stored. You also learn how to create and set up profiles.

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On weekdays, you're a high-flying corporate executive, but on weekends, you have a mind only for racquetball, watercolor painting, and your family. On Saturday morning, you ignore the business messages and check in with your relatives and friends via e-mail. Just as you change from your office suit to a sweatshirt and jeans on Saturday, you can switch the way your Outlook e-mail is set up, to reflect the different way you behave on weekends. You check a different mail account and maybe even use a more laid-back AutoSignature.

That’s just one example — perhaps a trivial one — of why you might want to set up Outlook so that you can use it in more than one way. Another example would be a husband and wife who share a computer at home. Or, consider a system at the office that’s only occasionally used for sending and receiving faxes.

Outlook gives you the ability to store multiple configurations like these on a single machine and choose which configuration to apply for any given session. These configurations are called profiles, and, in this chapter, we discuss what makes profiles tick.

In the first part of the chapter, we look at the elements of a profile and factors to help you decide where to locate key components, such as the folders where Outlook messages and other items are stored. In the second half of the chapter, you learn how to create and set up profiles.

WHAT'S IN A PROFILE?

A profile stores information about your mail accounts, folders, address book, and the types of messages you can send. The profile can be very simple, consisting of just the Exchange Server transport service and your Outlook Address Book, as seen in Figure 3.1, or it can contain many information services and more than one set of folders.

Most of the settings related to profiles are configured with the Mail and Fax applet in the Control Panel. However, settings related to the Outlook Bar shortcuts, Rules Wizard, and AutoSignature are stored in separate files. We get to those a little later in the chapter.

A number of other settings are stored as part of the profile but are handled through the Options dialog box in Outlook itself. We cover those as we discuss Outlook functions in Parts II and III of this book.

Table 3.1 lists the services and other Outlook settings that are stored in your profile and configured through the Mail and Fax applet in the Control Panel.

TABLE 3.1: ELEMENTS OF A PROFILE
Element	Description
Services Storage Folders	Separate storage locations such as Personal Folders; also, settings that determine whether you use an offline message store with Exchange Server
Address Books	Outlook Address Book, Personal Address Book, and other add-on address lists
Transport Services	Services, such as Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Mail, Internet Mail, and Microsoft Fax, that deliver your messages
Settings Delivery Location	The folders where incoming mail will be delivered
Delivery Order	The order in which Outlook delivers messages using different transport services
Preferred Address List	The address list shown first when you open the Address Book
Personal Address List	The address list where you want to keep personal addresses — almost always the Personal Address Book
Check Names Order	The order in which Outlook tries to match addresses on outgoing messages with addresses on various address lists

User Profiles vs. Outlook Profiles

If you use Windows NT, then you should be familiar with the concept of a user profile, because you must log on with a valid user name. A user profile may include the way your desktop looks, the programs on the Start menu, and the Outlook profiles available to you. Outlook profiles are part of the Windows user profile.

For Windows 95, distinct user profiles are not required. By default, Windows 95 uses the same user profile for everyone who works at a particular computer. Even if you do log on with a specific user name, you may share a profile with all other users.

You can change Windows 95 so that each user has a discrete Windows user profile. In the Control Panel, run the Passwords applet, switch to the User Profiles tab, and select “Users can customize their preferences and desktop settings.” Once you make this change and restart Windows, you should see different Outlook profiles if you log on as a different user.

Profiles for Roving Users

If you don’t sit at the same desk every day, you need to take steps to make sure you can use Outlook the same way at each machine you visit. Unless you have a network logon procedure that copies your Windows user profile from a central location, you must set up a profile on each computer.

If you see a Windows NT domain logon option or a Novell NetWare logon option every time you start Windows, then your network is at least capable of storing your user profile on the server. Check with your system administrator to see whether your profile is currently being saved and, if not, to have the settings for your user ID changed so your profile is saved on the server. If it is, then you should see the same Outlook profiles and other Windows settings, no matter which machine you log on from.

If you use Windows without connecting to a Windows NT or NetWare server, then your Windows user profile cannot be stored centrally. Instead, you must create a new Outlook profile on each machine you use, taking care to set the profile up for your specific e-mail account(s). An important part of that process will be setting the location of your Personal Folders file, which we discuss later in this chapter.

When to Use Multiple Profiles

Just as a single user might have a profile on several machines, a single machine might have several profiles on it for different users. A single user might also need more than one Outlook profile. Table 3.2 lists several reasons for using multiple profiles.

TABLE 3.2: REASONS FOR USING MULTIPLE PROFILES
Reason	Description
Troubleshooting	An important first step in troubleshooting is to isolate the particular Outlook service that seems to be causing a problem. This is most often done by creating a new profile with only that service, plus your usual folders and address book.
Managing a Microsoft Mail Postoffice	If you are responsible for managing the workgroup postoffice, you may have two different accounts — one account for your personal mail and a separate account for the postoffice manager. Create two profiles, one for each account.
Separate services that don’t coexist well	Many users like to keep Microsoft Fax in its own separate profile, for use only when fax services are needed, because Outlook starts more slowly when the Microsoft Fax services must be loaded.
Different users on the same machine	The best way to handle multiple users on a single machine is to have each one log on to Windows under a separate user ID. Where this is not practical, you need to create an Outlook profile for each user.

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