What do you get when you cross Skype with Outlook?

Skype is a communications engine that enables you to talk, write, watch video images, listen, and chat instantly with a variety of contacts. When you use Skype, you can reach skypers, nonskypers, and text messagers, all from one program. Outlook is also a communications engine that helps you manage communications with your contacts as well as information about your activities and your schedule. With Outlook, you compose, receive, and archive emails, make appointments, schedule your time, and share your calendars and folders. Both Skype and Outlook are amazing programs that offer access to a broad circle of friends, associates, and family. So it stands to reason that both programs work with much of the same information (contact information, that is).
Consider the following strengths of each program:

• Skype lets you connect with your contacts by exchanging information through the Web and extends that outreach with sound (voice calls), sight (video), live text messaging, and file transfer.
• Outlook connects you with your contacts by moving information around through various networks, extends its reach to organizing and scheduling your activities, and even gives you a way to send information to hundreds (or thousands) of people at one time.

Without any integration between the contact information stored in Skype and Outlook, you can quickly get caught up in switching back and forth between the two programs to replicate and update the same information in each one. This inefficient jockeying is the quintessential example of electronic pencil pushing at its worst. So to alleviate the annoying repetition and duplication, Skylook (a software plugin used with Outlook) was born.