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> If I am in a "Microsoft powered enterprise" Outlook empowers me to be ridiculously productive What does that mean in more detail? I only have typical corpo O

> If I am in a "Microsoft powered enterprise" Outlook empowers me to be ridiculously productive What does that mean in more detail? I only have typical corpo Outlook experience, and I find it passable at the best of times. Not even necessarily as the fault of Outlook.

486sx33 2y ago
It means you can get through 300 emails in 1/10 the time as you can in Gmail. Outlook’s layout and software is FAST. Once it goes web or “new” it’s a laggy piece of crap, still maybe not as bad as g suite though
- perching_aix 2y ago
  > Outlook’s layout and software is FAST. ????? Updating mailboxes takes forever. Wrangling a significant number of mails takes forever, but notably it at least finishes, much unlike in the new, web based version. Opening links takes forever. Randomly loses connection to the server which it cannot reestablish without a restart. Are we talking about the same Outlook? It's also a bog standard email client, I cannot even hope to imagine what you find different on its layout.
  - p_l 2y ago
    Outlook "classic" is an Exchange client first an email client second. [1] A lot of speed depends on corporate setup, so I'll skip that. But integration, end to end, over core groupware elements like emails, distribution lists, calendars, contacts, etc is something nothing else does as well in my experience - though 3rd party components differ in quality (both of the solutions and how they got deployed) I can mimic or even do better on personal scale but group level? Nothing comes close, if only because they end up connecting disparate data sources with disparate protocols and everything gets a slight case of Chinese whispers or desynchronization (sure, you can reliably send ICS files as invitations, but they don't synchronize, etc) [1] a particularly funny aspect of this is that Outlook and Exchange do not support HTML Email directly - they have to wrap it in RTF, despite there existing a MAPI datatype for HTML content - if you use it, the MAPI library literally crashes opening the mail store.
xnyan 2y ago
In my experience this means network effects. Microsoft has been very successful in pushing its entire stack at enterprises, and there’s a benefit to knowing that everyone in the org has the same tools and will actually use them. Like, I can send someone docx in an email and can expect that anyone can open and edit it with instruction. “Most people can get an email and open a document without instruction” may seem like a low bar to you, but in my experience with run of the mill enterprise it’s massively better than the alternatives. Also, Outlook as a whole is inarguably bloated, but it’s an order of magnitude faster than Gmail at the basic act of opening and navigating between emails.
- perching_aix 2y ago
  The biggest integration I can think of is the calendar and the reaction emojis on emails. Previewing Office documents I don't really do, but that sounds fairly trivial as well. > it’s an order of magnitude faster than Gmail at the basic act of opening and navigating between emails There must be a tremendous difference between consumer and business gmail then, cause I'm honestly unable to imagine this. Outlook is generally not fast, and will reliably choke when wrangling an appreciable amount of mails (a few thousand or more).

486sx33 2y ago

It means you can get through 300 emails in 1/10 the time as you can in Gmail. Outlook’s layout and software is FAST. Once it goes web or “new” it’s a laggy piece of crap, still maybe not as bad as g suite though

perching_aix 2y ago
> Outlook’s layout and software is FAST. ????? Updating mailboxes takes forever. Wrangling a significant number of mails takes forever, but notably it at least finishes, much unlike in the new, web based version. Opening links takes forever. Randomly loses connection to the server which it cannot reestablish without a restart. Are we talking about the same Outlook? It's also a bog standard email client, I cannot even hope to imagine what you find different on its layout.
- p_l 2y ago
  Outlook "classic" is an Exchange client first an email client second. [1] A lot of speed depends on corporate setup, so I'll skip that. But integration, end to end, over core groupware elements like emails, distribution lists, calendars, contacts, etc is something nothing else does as well in my experience - though 3rd party components differ in quality (both of the solutions and how they got deployed) I can mimic or even do better on personal scale but group level? Nothing comes close, if only because they end up connecting disparate data sources with disparate protocols and everything gets a slight case of Chinese whispers or desynchronization (sure, you can reliably send ICS files as invitations, but they don't synchronize, etc) [1] a particularly funny aspect of this is that Outlook and Exchange do not support HTML Email directly - they have to wrap it in RTF, despite there existing a MAPI datatype for HTML content - if you use it, the MAPI library literally crashes opening the mail store.

xnyan 2y ago

In my experience this means network effects. Microsoft has been very successful in pushing its entire stack at enterprises, and there’s a benefit to knowing that everyone in the org has the same tools and will actually use them. Like, I can send someone docx in an email and can expect that anyone can open and edit it with instruction. “Most people can get an email and open a document without instruction” may seem like a low bar to you, but in my experience with run of the mill enterprise it’s massively better than the alternatives. Also, Outlook as a whole is inarguably bloated, but it’s an order of magnitude faster than Gmail at the basic act of opening and navigating between emails.

perching_aix 2y ago
The biggest integration I can think of is the calendar and the reaction emojis on emails. Previewing Office documents I don't really do, but that sounds fairly trivial as well. > it’s an order of magnitude faster than Gmail at the basic act of opening and navigating between emails There must be a tremendous difference between consumer and business gmail then, cause I'm honestly unable to imagine this. Outlook is generally not fast, and will reliably choke when wrangling an appreciable amount of mails (a few thousand or more).