Skype Toolbars for Outlook and IE are released

If you have been a beta user of the Skype toolbars then you will know just how useful they are.

If not, imaging you are hungry, you use your PC to go to your favourite online pizza company to browse the menu, so why shouldn’t you be able to make a SkypeOut call directly from the web page and order your pizza? The toolbars let you do exactly that.

The IE toolbar will automatically scan though a web page looking for numbers that could be phone numbers, when it finds one it lets you know by highlighting the number.

Hovering over the highlighted area will produce a pop up window that enables you to place a call directly from Skype.

Neat eh?

The outlook toolbar integrates into Outlook and lets you call your Outlook contacts without having to copy and paste numbers into the Skype client.

Both the toolbars are free and can be download from http://www.skype.com/products/skypetoolbars/

If you’re looking to learn a little more about the toolbar functionality before you install, watch some demos, or maybe learn a little about how they were developed then take a look over in the Learning Zone to see our latest video interview with our very own Mr Toolbar - Peter Kalmström.

Introduction to the Skype toolbars

We catch up with Peter Kalmström, the Program Manager for the Skype toolbars to find out what they are and see some demos.

Find out more in the Skype Channel on the Learning Zone.

Comments

Hello! It's very nice that Toolbars were released. But may be you have more ideas of using it. I think it's possible to connect tollbars to any mail server with WEB interface (as a one of ideas), may be it will to use more APIs. What do you think about it?

Good luck

Thanks Dmitriy - any feature requests you have for the toolbar please put them here and I make sure they get to the right people.

Lester

Lester,
I found two technical inconveniences with Skype Toolbar for IE, that I would like to share with you.
The uninstall feature got one more.

1. When using Google from the toolbar, I got the result set from Google UK. I am in the USA, so 50 or more million people would prefer Google USA. Same comment applies to Brazil, India, Mexico, Russia and counting.
2. When I entered another profile in the same XP Home Edition PC, the google search button was not operative.

UNINSTALL
1. Although the product gently reminded me that it would close all IE instances, I didn't pay enough attention, and selected Yes. Guess what, I was in the middle of a five minutes message upload and it was killed.
I consider that the best behavior is to say to the user: "One or more instances of IE are running, so please close them before proceeding with the uninstall. Click Yes when you are done." And the uninstall version should check again until is cleared.
By the way, I have SkypeOut and Recently SkypeIn.
My account is georglopes.

Thanks
Ricardo Lopes

May we have some news on your plans for Firefox and Thunderbird?

Sorry to ask a question for technical support here but I can't remove the SKYPE toolbar for Outlook. Actually, since I installed this toolbar, My Outlook 2000 is running very very slow.

Please help

I share the comments from lawrencesundance where both outlook2k on w2k and outlookxp on xpprof, both connected to exchange server, are very very slow after installation of toolbar. Is there a solution?