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> I understand there are some missing features compared to the old one There are some people that use Outlook for...well I'm not sure what but things that go w
by thewebguyd 4mo ago
> I understand there are some missing features compared to the old one
There are some people that use Outlook for...well I'm not sure what but things that go way beyond email and calendar. I've been using the web app for several years now, it's fine. When I was new in IT, I always struggled to see what the big deal was with Outlook desktop. The web mail has folders, rules, shared mailbox support, integrated calendar, etc.
What more do you need out of email?
Well, turns out a lot. People treat email has a permanent data store. I've encountered folks with multiple PST files archiving 10+ years of email. I ran into people that needed to queue up a bunch of offline emails in their outbox to send when they're on network again (ok, I kind of get this use case), and I came across all manner of horrors of COM Add-ins.
Anyway, the root of the problem is people using email for everything it was never intended to do or be. If "new" Outlook can break some of those habits, we'll all be better off for it.
- KetoManx64 4mo agoOutlook COM addons + AutoHotKey was one of the ways that I learned programming back in the day. Email arrives > check the sender > if sender is $company > check for keywords and then run excel macros based on that > generate PDF report and automatically generate an outlook email, attach and send the file. Good times, it feels like we're getting less and less flexible with the hackability of our corporate workflows as time goes on.
- emeril 4mo agoso true - I use some outlook vba to send mass emails programmatically
- pishpash 4mo agoMore like email became stripped down and no longer what it was. Mailboxes were always a permanent data store, there were mail files on disk.
- warumdarum 4mo agoA self sorting shield against to much information if you are at the hub of some organization..
- impendia 4mo ago> People treat email has a permanent data store. Is this strange? I'll be trying to solve some problem, half-remember an email conversation from several years ago on something relevant, and want to look it up. This feels like the most natural thing in the world to me, and it's not like the ability to save emails is new. Why, exactly, would a forced change of habits be for my own good?
- esikich 4mo agoNo, not conversations, actual data. Think reports, invoices, large PDFs, etc. Emailing files to yourself, that sort of thing. Then they end up with multiple PSTs.
- pm3003 4mo agoNot even counting Sharepoint syncs...
- rescbr 4mo agoI very much prefer Outlook's indexing compared to Sharepoint's shitty UI and search capabilities.
- thewebguyd 4mo agoI mean, yeah if your choice is between Email or SharePoint, email wins every time. But I've seen enough corrupted PST files in my days to never trust Outlook/Exchange as permanent file storage. Now with "New" Outlook you don't even get that, you get an ODT cache file, everything else is permanently server side in Microsoft land. Enterprise "productivity" software is fundamentally broken.
- tevrede 4mo agoCopilot search is great for searching SharePoint
- photios 4mo ago
- jen20 4mo ago> People treat email has a permanent data store. Email the protocol has this built in. > If "new" Outlook can break some of those habits, we'll all be better off for it. It won't, since email is in fact the best data store available to most people in enterprises (especially compared to things like Sharepoint). It might finally accelerate the move away from Exchange though. Here's hoping.
- tracker1 4mo agoI don't know about that... unless a good open-source option comes out for corporate email that matches what Outlook/Exchange/M365 offers for calendars and scheduling. That last part is the real point of integration... then real time chat and messaging status baked in... it's hard to beat. You have services and applications that offer pieces, but none integrate as well. In the early 2010's I think that both Blackberry and Mozilla had an opportunity to create their own competition in the space and neither did. Google is pretty close, but IMO still a much lesser experience, reinventing a new chat app every other year didn't help their cause at all.
- jen20 4mo agoGoogle seems most likely to capitalize. GSuite is standard practice even among many large companies provided they were founded in the past ~15 years and aren't on the Microsoft teat. Their search is also _so much_ better than Outlook that it's even more useful as a forever-store.
- tracker1 4mo agoI'm not disagreeing with the search aspect.. I will say that GSuite still doesn't do as well for calendar/scheduling integrations, or messaging beyond email for that matter... it used to, IMO, be as good for interactive messages before they nuked Hangouts in favor of whatever of the half dozen incompatible corp/public chat apps they've had along the way. When Hangouts had integrated Google Voice and SMS in the app, imo, that was peak poweruser useful.
- x______________ 4mo ago>and I came across all manner of horrors of COM Add-ins. It works both ways, I ran into a situation where a random Add-in was enabled on the web client and affecting the desktop client behavior despite not being in the list of Add-ins, and could only be disabled from the web client.
- theeyescanner 4mo agoYeah this is pretty much the only thing protecting us from Records Retention Policy(tm). Because the legal office thinks discovery is toooooooo risky, we have to delete all of the information we used to develop long lived business processes. When I wrote this god and I understood it, now god only knows.
- cagey 4mo agoThe last [US] BigCorp I worked for deployed (in Outlook) automatic deletion of all emails older than their Records Retention threshold. It was incredibly frustrating to have essentially all design/rationale history (from the key players involved) go into the auto-shredder with nobody but me caring. The only workarounds that could avoid the auto-shredder were enormously labor intensive, and of course, debatably violated Record Retention policy.
- jburgess777 4mo agoI never understood the mindset which seemed to interpret “we must preserve this for 5 years” as “we must _delete_ everything after 5 years”. I understand they want to minimize storage costs but they are destroying institutional knowledge. I have recently wanted to refer back to my notes on some older services and discovered that all my old notes have been deleted.
- jemmyw 4mo agoI think the rationale is that they don't want any liable behavior to be discoverable. Institutional knowledge could be in a controlled document storage and the email thread where you negotiated some kickbacks 6 years ago is shredded.
- patates 4mo agoFunny enough, COM is still the fastest way to read calendar data.
- jerlam 4mo agoPretty much any app that's been around a while will have all kinds of advanced features that the average user will never use, and eventually becomes detrimental. Hence there's always a group of users and product managers asking to rewrite the app to focus on "the basics". There's all flavors of "lite" apps and Firefox started as a stripped down version of Netscape. A lot of older email apps have a prominent "offline" mode that if you accidentally activate it, basically stops the app from sending or receiving any email. I guess a lot of executives demanded the feature because they were handling all their email while on a plane without connectivity.
- CamperBob2 4mo agoAnyway, the root of the problem is people using email for everything it was never intended to do or be. If "new" Outlook can break some of those habits, we'll all be better off for it. If ever there was a recipe for doing a terrible job at building software, that's as good a way to put it as I think we will ever see.
- tracker1 4mo agoBeyond just email, the group scheduling and calendar experience is pretty much the best you're going to find. Google does pretty good, but it's still not nearly as good as the integrated corp experience with Outlook for scheduling... that said, I hate that I now get teams messages for meetings more than a business day in the future... I have outlook for that, I don't need it in teams... having a calendar and notifications in teams is fine, but limit notifications to things in the near future.