When once it was fun to guess the age of a tree by counting its growth rings, it's now more common (and more fun) to guess the age of your virtual pal by counting how many friends they have on their social networking site. Apparently, a typical 22-year old has around 1,000 online friends, whereas anyone in their fifties has a mere 20. Teenagers have an average of 450 friends on social networks, and girls have more friends than boys have.

But the older you are, the less popular you appear to be: people in their thirties tend to have between 100 and 200 friends, while those in their forties have between 50 and 100. However there is an argument that friends does mean something different to a 20 year-old than to a 50-year old. The explosion of social networking has meant that lines and boundaries have become a little blurred. And this also explains how people relate to government and business in a new way.

While it looks like it's not just your fitness console that predicts your age, you can be assured that Microsoft Office 2007 has the tools to keep you socially savvy in the world of leisure and business, connecting with people inside and outside your organisation. You can instantly search your Office Outlook 2007 information; organise your tasks and flagged mail items; share your calendar and contact information; connect and work with your Windows SharePoint Services, and simplify the way you track sensitive or malicious information.

Using the to-do Bar and instant search, you can organise and quickly locate email information. Through new calendar publishing and sharing capabilities, electronic business cards, and improved access to Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services technology information, you can more safely share any data stored in Office Outlook 2007 with co-workers, friends, and family, no matter where they are located. Office Outlook 2007 makes it easier for you to prioritise and control your time. Office Outlook can be used at home with any Internet email provider or at work using Microsoft Exchange Server.

Office Outlook 2007 can be used as the everyday program for sending and receiving e-mail messages, but is equally applicable to more advanced scenarios that require the integration of many kinds of information. With Office Outlook 2007 users can work with data stored in Windows SharePoint Services, anywhere, any time. People can share and publish calendars through a variety of mechanisms like Microsoft Office Online, calendar snapshots, and publishing Internet calendars. Co-workers can easily share information with each other using Exchange sharing requests.

A recent survey stated that the majority of the population feels deprived without Internet or email connection, even for a short period of time. The poll found that 53 per cent of us feel upset when denied access to the Internet and that 40 per cent experience loneliness when not able to go online. Younger people found it harder to give up technology, while often the over-40s coped better. Online and digital technology influences our friendships, the way we communicate, the fabric of our family life, our work lives, our purchasing habits and our dealings with organisations. With Outlook 2007 you need never feel deprived or lonely.