One of the new things in Outlook 2010 is the "People Pane." At the bottom of e-mail windows (both the inbox view and individual messages), the People Pane is a panel that can show recent e-mail from a contact, any appointments that you have with them, and a few other bits and pieces of information.

It's a neat little feature, especially when used in tandem with the Outlook Social Connector (part of Outlook 2010, and available as a download for Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007). Making the Outlook Social Connector work is not quite as convenient as it should be; actual connections to social networking sites use providers that have to be installed separately—on its own, the OSC doesn't really do anything. But once you have the providers installed, the People Pane can show even more information—LinkedIn status updates, new photos posted to Facebook, that kind of thing.



The People Pane in action

One of the things the People Pane does is to show a little picture of your contacts. Outlook contacts can have pictures added to them, though I suspect most people don't bother. One place they do bother adding contacts to is their social networking profiles, and the People Pane will, with the OSC, retrieve profile pictures from Facebook and the other social networking sites it connects to.



But of course, not every person will have a picture available. So the People Pane has a fallback picture. A default, for when it can't find a better picture to display.
The default is just a silhouette:

That isn't just anyone's silhouette, however. Our eagle-eyed editor-in-chief, Ken Fisher, noticed that the silhouette has a striking resemblance to one William H. Gates III. Quite how he noticed this is anybody's guess—we suspect he has a framed picture of the Microsoft founder and philanthropist mounted on his wall.

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Is that Bill Gates staring back at you from Outlook 2010?

Posted By: JMH
25 Sep 2010