Topics in this chapter   Updating Outlook Profiles     Locating and Configuring Outlook Settings     Using Automatic Message Encoding     Unicode Support

Unicode Support

In an increasingly interconnected world, organizations frequently need to communicate and share data with multilingual audiences inside and outside of the organizations. This can be a challenge if several code pages are needed to support all languages that are required for collaboration. However, an international character encoding standard — Unicode—allows users to more easily share documents across languages.

As in Microsoft Outlook 2000, Microsoft Outlook 2002 supports Unicode only in the body of mail messages. Outlook data — such as Contacts, Tasks, and the To and Subject lines of messages — is limited to characters defined by the current system code page of the user's computer.

The Outlook 2002 user interface also does not implement Unicode but uses languages that are supported by the current system code page. (Note that the English user interface is supported on any system code page.)

Note that Terminal Services allows only one system code page to be configured per computer. This means, for example, that the Chinese and Greek user interfaces cannot be supported for different users of the same Terminal Services server. To provide user interfaces for a multilingual user community that spans multiple code pages, you may need to implement multiple Terminal Services servers with different system code pages. However, some related locales share a single code page (for example, most West European locales share a single code page). Also, many East European locales require only a small set of code pages.

See also

For more information about how code pages work and how Unicode provides better support for multilingual organizations, see Unicode Support and Multilingual Documents.

For more information about using Unicode in other Office XP applications, see Taking Advantage of Unicode Support.