I apologize right up front, this post has nothing to do with Exchange Server.

The Windows 7 taskbar is one of the coolest features of Windows 7. Although there were a number of subtle changes I liked in Windows Vista, the Windows 7 improvements are more useful than features like Flip 3D in Vista. Flip 3D looked great in demos but I just never used from day to day.

Windows Vista introduced the ability to mouse over the running applications in the taskbar and get a little thumbnail preview of what it is doing; however there are three important improvements in Windows 7.

First, as you mouse over grouped applications, Aero Peek will show the active application window and then hide all of the other application windows. This helps to pinpoint the selected application window more quickly. You can see in the following screenshot that as I moused-over one of the Internet Explorer thumbnails, Aero Peek shows the moused-over instance and hides all of the other active windows.

The second improvement, is the Thumbnail Toolbars. Some applications like Windows Media Player and the Zune Player offer a toolbar on the thumbnail, that allows you to interact with the application. As you can see in the screenshot the Zune player lets you pause, skip forward and back, and favorite the current song without having to bring up the full application.

Third, apart from hovering over the applications in the taskbar, some applications have a jump list menu. The jump list menu is accessed by right-clicking on the application on the taskbar and will provide a quick way to perform common tasks. For example the Outlook 2010 jump list gives the option to run tasks like creating a new e-mail message or a new task.

These little improvements and others go a long way to giving Windows 7 a fresh and fun feel, something that Windows has not had for far too long.

If you haven’t had a chance to work with Windows 7 yet, you can download a trial copy here. You can also read more about the interface improvements here.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled Exchange related programming.