Benefits of running in Unicode mode on the Exchange server

The Unicode character encoding standard enables the sharing of messages and other items in a multilingual environment when the languages involved span multiple code pages.

Non-Unicode systems typically use a code page–based environment, in which each script has its own table of characters. Items based on the code page of one operating system rarely map well to the code page of another operating system. In some cases, the items cannot contain text that uses characters from more than one script. Additional information on scripts and code pages is available in Outlook Help.

For example, consider two people— one is running the English version of the Microsoft Windows XP operating system with the Latin code page and the second person is running the Japanese version of the Microsoft Windows XP operating system with the Japanese code page. The second person creates a meeting request in the Japanese version of Outlook 2002 with Japanese characters in the Location field and sends it to the first person. When the person using the English version of Outlook 2002 opens the meeting request, the code points of the Japanese code page are mapped to unexpected or nonexistent characters in the Latin script, and the resulting text is unintelligible.

Note Since Microsoft Outlook 2000, the body of Outlook items is Unicode, and the body of the item can be read irrespective of the language in which the item was created. However, all the other item properties such as the To, Location, and Subject lines of messages and meeting items and the ContactName and BusinessTelephoneNumber properties of contact items will be unintelligible in earlier versions of Outlook.

The universal character set provided by Unicode eliminates this problem. Unicode was developed to create a universal character set that can accommodate most known scripts. Unicode uses a unique, multi-byte encoding for every character; so in contrast to code pages, every character has its own unique code point. For example, the Unicode code point of Greek lowercase zeta ( ) is the hexadecimal value 03B6, and Cyrillic lowercase zhe ( ) is 0436.

Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 is fully capable of using Unicode. The code page system of representing text also exists in Outlook. However, Unicode mode is recommended and is the default mode if the configurations of your profile, Exchange server, and administrator settings allow it. Also, the mode is automatically determined by Outlook based on these settings and cannot be changed manually.

Running Outlook in Unicode mode on the Exchange server will also ensure that by default, the Offline Folder files (.ost) and Personal Folders files (.pst) used for the profile have the ability to store multilingual Unicode data and also offer greater storage capacity for items and folders. If Outlook is running in non-Unicode mode on the Exchange server, and you would like to switch to Unicode mode, contact your administrator.