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Can I open more than one instance of Outlook at a time?

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Summary: Outlook is designed to be a single-instance application. There's an unwieldy trick to get more than one that may, or may not, be useful.

I need to open more then one instance of Outlook at the same time with a different profile on each instance. Can this be done?

Yes and no. But most probably no.

Outlook is a single instance application so for any user session you can have one - and only one- instance of outlook running.

There is a 'trick' you can play. Windows XP will allow you to stay logged in as one user while logging in as another. Select Logoff and then Switch User. The first account remains logged in while the second account logs in as well. Each of these users can have their own copy of Outlook running. The caveat of course is that they must be different user accounts on the machine.

Article C1978 - June 2, 2004

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Recent Comments
25 Comments

You can also right click on Mail, Calendar, Contacts, etc (bottom right side) and select "open in new window"

Posted by: Jim Macemon at February 1, 2007 9:17 AM

Hello,
Is there a way to have OL running with a specific profile... and also be able to open TASKS with a separate profile.. essentially, adding another TASKS Section to use..

Posted by: HomeTeam at April 17, 2007 2:14 PM

I made a copy of outlook.exe (OL 2000) named outlook2.exe. But outlook2.exe would use the same profile as the aleady started outlook.exe even with the /profile parameter.

Posted by: Roger at April 25, 2007 4:40 AM

it is possible to see two person profile in one outlook express.let suppose that i have open outlook account with one user name.in the left panel it shw inbox of this user only.i have to configure the outlook in such a way that when i open outlook with a specific account person .in the left panel it show the inbox of other user and that user also.how can i configure this in outlook express.waiting for reply

Posted by: deepak at April 27, 2007 10:14 PM

u can emulate outlook by installing emclient, run outlook and emclient concurrently, can have one profile running on outlook. a different profile running on emclient. emclient have email function, calendar, tasks..

Posted by: michael low at June 17, 2008 1:13 AM

It is possible to get two accounts running using the ExtraOutlook program found here: http://www.hammerofgod.com/download.html It includes the story of how they found a way to get two separate instances running with different profiles.

Posted by: Schmalls at August 15, 2008 6:28 AM

Using the ExtraOutlook program works very well. Thanks!

Posted by: TPETERSWA at January 27, 2009 4:16 PM

Create some accounts on youre pc then in the run prompt type runas /U:\ "%outlookdir%\outlook.exe"

is youre hostname
the account name
%outlookdir% is the full path to youre outlook installation

the more you make you might need to create a new profile if you have not opened outlook before

Posted by: Kevin at May 5, 2009 1:34 AM

I have a user that cronically has multiple session of outlook open at one time. Yesterday she had 32 individual session open. It there a way to only allow one at a time?
Bill

Posted by: Bill Siebert at October 8, 2009 5:22 AM

You can also open up multiple instances of different calendars, there is even an overlay mode.

I found a really easy-to-understand write-up on this here: http://www.groovypost.com/howto/microsoft/outlook/subscribe-add-google-calendar-ical-outlook-2007/

Posted by: Baxter at October 13, 2009 9:29 PM

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