Outlook 2000 was magic, even if it had more security warnings than a trip to Yemen. The current iteration of Outlook that they’re pushing with Office 365 is an absolute disaster, as if they’ve dragged it down to Teams’ level and let it rot away.
The big problems is outlook like every mail client from the early 2000s collected tons of features during the mail client wars where every client needed to do a billion different things, so now there’s dozens of random little features baked in that very few people use but those who do have built entire business processes around.
For example I observed while working at a bank that the backend finance people would use the voting feature to vote on whether to bundle certain loans together. I’ve never before or since seen anyone in any business actively use that feature. There’s lots of other little features and tunables buried deep in Outlook and it’s a royal pain as an IT person to quickly learn about whatever obscure feature a user is complaining stopped working and of course figure out what the intended workflow for the feature is to begin with before I can even start troubleshooting how to fix it
I can’t blame Microsoft for wanting to greenfield Outlook development to a new standard base that’s shared between webmail and the application, but holy crap the amount of technical debt Outlook accumulated is going to take ages to escape from.
Personally, I don’t mind Outlook (new). It sends and receives emails, it shows my Teams meetings on the calendar, and it lets me easily schedule calendar events and Teams meetings, which is all I really need. Most importantly it bypasses a ton of annoying quirks of Outlook (classic)'s license verification and M365 authentication so I generally encourage my users to use it if they don’t otherwise have a strong preference, because it saves me tickets (especially the dreaded “outlook lost teams integration” complaints where Outlook (classic) misplaced its own extension for communicating with Teams (new) and usually involves uninstalling all versions of Teams then installing Teams (Classic) and upgrading it in-place 3x to resolve)
I prefer the new color.
And hot take: I like the icons of O365 for Wort Word, Outlook, Excel and Powerpoint. And I prefer those over 2007. But I can compromise with the icons from 2013.
Agreed, the current batch of Office icons - and the updated versions rolling out soon - are excellent. I’m a big fan. But I still wish Outlook was gold.
I’m still pissed off that they dropped the gold(ish) colour for Outlook.
Outlook 2000 was magic, even if it had more security warnings than a trip to Yemen. The current iteration of Outlook that they’re pushing with Office 365 is an absolute disaster, as if they’ve dragged it down to Teams’ level and let it rot away.
As you can tell, I’m not a fan.
The big problems is outlook like every mail client from the early 2000s collected tons of features during the mail client wars where every client needed to do a billion different things, so now there’s dozens of random little features baked in that very few people use but those who do have built entire business processes around.
For example I observed while working at a bank that the backend finance people would use the voting feature to vote on whether to bundle certain loans together. I’ve never before or since seen anyone in any business actively use that feature. There’s lots of other little features and tunables buried deep in Outlook and it’s a royal pain as an IT person to quickly learn about whatever obscure feature a user is complaining stopped working and of course figure out what the intended workflow for the feature is to begin with before I can even start troubleshooting how to fix it
I can’t blame Microsoft for wanting to greenfield Outlook development to a new standard base that’s shared between webmail and the application, but holy crap the amount of technical debt Outlook accumulated is going to take ages to escape from.
Personally, I don’t mind Outlook (new). It sends and receives emails, it shows my Teams meetings on the calendar, and it lets me easily schedule calendar events and Teams meetings, which is all I really need. Most importantly it bypasses a ton of annoying quirks of Outlook (classic)'s license verification and M365 authentication so I generally encourage my users to use it if they don’t otherwise have a strong preference, because it saves me tickets (especially the dreaded “outlook lost teams integration” complaints where Outlook (classic) misplaced its own extension for communicating with Teams (new) and usually involves uninstalling all versions of Teams then installing Teams (Classic) and upgrading it in-place 3x to resolve)
I’m holding to old outlook for as long as I can. I’ll bitch and moan when they rip it out of my hands.
I prefer the new color.
And hot take: I like the icons of O365 for
WortWord, Outlook, Excel and Powerpoint. And I prefer those over 2007. But I can compromise with the icons from 2013.Edit: Halo is leaking :p
Wort wort wort!
I was wondering what you meant. Until I carefully read my post again and noticed…
All I can say is WORT WORT WORT
Agreed, the current batch of Office icons - and the updated versions rolling out soon - are excellent. I’m a big fan. But I still wish Outlook was gold.