Vista Sidebar Gadgets - Beyond the toy zone...

Ryan's Look at Outlook Programmability - Outlook Gadgets Now Available

"I’m happy to announce that tonight the first two official Office gadgets went live on gallery.microsoft.com!  If you’re running Windows Vista and Outlook 2007 then I encourage you to go out and download the gadgets and get the experience of the Outlook To Do bar from the Windows SideBar. ..."

It's gadgets like this that will realize the value of the Vista Sidebar.

The ones that come with Vista are pretty much toys. They are cool but, IMHO, soon they are just taking up CPU cycles. For me, the gadgets that sell the Sidebar are those that are like "System Tray++" utilities. Utilities that provide quick information with more detail than can be shown in a system tray icon.

Those mentioned above are examples of what I mean.

Personally though I like the Outlook Info Gadget, which I've been using for a bit. One easily configurable gadget with all the related info. Another category I like are the system monitoring/ping/harddrive space gadgets.

And once Vista starts deploying at work, I'm thinking about writing some gadgets for business process monitoring, status tracking, reporting, etc. Gadgets that will let people see at a glance the status of work stuff they are interested in. To see a quick list of tickets/alerts/things...

I'm also thinking of TFS gadgets. A simple and easy way to monitor TFS projects for new work items, etc.

In the end, I feel that it's gadgets that provide active, live information that will truly sell my business users on the Sidebar...

(via Robert McLaws: Windows Vista Edition - Microsoft Posts First Official Outlook Gadgets)