Even though this blog is just a part-time thing (albeit one which is slowly taking over my life), I’m not yet able to give up my day job and become a full-time writer. Even so, I am in the fortunate situation that I do get fed a certain amount of information – information that I want to pass on, but which I can’t until after a certain deadline has passed, usually as the result of a non-disclosure agreement. A few days ago, Microsoft launched SCVMM 2008. I knew some things about SCVMM from public events but I was also told things under NDA and I wanted to get the word out as soon as I was allowed to. With my blog that’s easy enough to do (WordPress allows me to publish a post with a future date and time) but I also wanted to share information with colleagues via e-mail… so I needed a way to send an e-mail message in the future.

As it happens, I already have that capability in Microsoft Office Outlook (I just didn’t know I did) – and as described at My Digital Life, all I needed to do was set a Do not deliver before date and time in the message options. I went out for a while and came back to find that the message sitting in my Outbox had been delivered at the pre-appointed time (I tested first of all with some information that was not really time-critical – just in case!).

Whilst on the subject of Outlook, my friend, colleague and trusted advisor, Garry Martin, told me about a utility he had come across that allows multiple copies of Outlook 2003 or 2007 to run side by side using different profiles. Yes – that’s right – one copy of Outlook connected to, let’s say, work e-mail and the other to, perhaps, GMail. It’s called Extra Outlook! and I’ve yet to try this myself (GMail as a Google Chrome application shortcut is working well for me on my work PC and I use Apple Mail on the Mac) but it certainly sounds useful.