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Javier Soltero: The Outsider Microsoft Tapped To Reinvent Outlook (windowsitpro.com)
v3rgEz writes: In a wide ranging interview, IT Pro talks with Microsoft's Javier Soltero about his plans to help Redmond get its groove back when it comes to email, walking a fine line between keeping traditional Outlook users (and IT administrators) happy while radically reworking software that hasn't seen a huge shakeup since 2003.
"while radically reworking software that hasn't seen a huge shakeup since 2003."
Oh yeah, because sane people really want THAT! Particularly if the "huge shakeup" is only being done because the software hasn't had a "huge shakeup" since n number of units of time. I'm sure the new Outlook is going to be great!
Like?
And this is the problem. Nobody has ever heard of it. And that's if you can name something that does even a significant fraction of what Exchange does.
Email? Yes. Calendars, appointments, meetings, events, alerts, and schedules? Yep. Contact organizer? Sure. To-do lists? That too. Instant messaging? With, Lync/Skype For Business, yes, that's actually part of what Outlook/Exchange handle. All of this integrated so your emails go to contacts, your meetings auto-notify everyone and keep track of attendees, your IM's go to the same contacts, and your To-do items get checked off of the Project server and Team Foundation server, as well as cause an update to be posted to Sharepoint? One and done.
You won't find a replacement for this at any price, especially if you're a FOSS zealot that won't consider for-profit software. You might find a proprietary "replacement" that does some of these things poorly and/or isn't as tightly integrated with other business organization software. But probably not, because Microsoft hasn't been the type of company to just let competition survive. They didn't become a convicted monopoly for nothing, you know.
As much as everyone hates being at Microsoft's mercy, you have to admit that they do make a damned fine integrated office software stack. Expensive and locked-in, yes. But don't complain that it doesn't work, because that makes you look petty, and more, a liar.
>> keeping traditional Outlook users (and IT administrators) happy while radically reworking software that hasn't seen a huge shakeup since 2003
And...why would you want to do that? Microsoft Office has basically remained unchanged since the late 1990s and it's still raking in money. Outlook "competitors" like Thunderbird are still dropping like flies and you want to piss off your huge customer base to...what exactly? Follow Marissa down the tech drain?
Outlook isn't the fucking problem, exchange and its bastardised architecture is.
No. Outlook is also a fucking problem.
The architecture of the data stores is an ongoing cluster-fuck.
A single-file data file-based data store that's simply allowed to grow into obscene, unstable, performance destroying sizes.
More-over, if you crash one of the files, your chances of actually recovering anything is somewhere between "Pray for a miracle" and "Just start over".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Please don't. It's hard to think of a more bloated resource hog, far too much for what it is supposed to do, and yet still lacking in basic features in other areas.
I despise Exchange, all the more because I have been so long forced to administer it (since the Exchange 97 days).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
yeah really.. I've never seen such a slow GUI on an MS product before. Whatever GUI widget they're grafting over win32 runs like a dog even on 4ghz cpus and powerful gpus.
1. Scrolling is choppy an interactions have visible latency.
2. There's too much white space.
3. The layout is nearly impossible to memorize. What's worse is that it's obviously a kludge in progress: some of the dialogs that haven't been grafted yet hark back to the win32/mfc days, and ironically, they're still nice and quick.
I don't want my desktop applications to behave like tablet apps. I want full functionality, no wasted space, and lightning fast interfaces. There's no excuse for not having that last one on modern machines.
I've half considered moving (back) to pegasus mail for personal use on windows.
http://www.pmail.com/
I recently had the latest and greatest Office 2016 foisted upon me.
At best everything is harder to see (I mean, what's up with greyed out backgrounds for text boxes in Excel that used to be white? Sure it "looks nicer" but now you have to just "know" you can type there...)
Moving strongly into the Windows 10 way of doing things, pretty much just means everything you want to do is an extra click or two away... and not obviously labeled.
As far as Outlook in particular, it acts differently than all other apps for mousing over the minimize/maximize/close buttons - they don't highlight when the window doesn't have focus. If you have the non-gaudy color scheme, that makes it really hard to see.
Everything in general is harder to see. Come on, this is a "work" app, it is not supposed to be subtle. I doubt anyone is using Outlook because they like the way it looks!
I guess Microsoft is trying to catch up with Apple in skipping the "affordance" and "signifiers" steps of good design.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The name is all the advice of what to do with it that you need.
It took about a decade before all that you would have expected in version 1 was going. All the fun of configuration by registry hack, a fifty step bare metal recovery procedure with possible showstoppers at every step and memory leaks that meant a scheduled reboot once a week to avoid the thing freezing up.
So, to those that say "no other single thing can replace MS Exchange"? MS Exchange itself is a suite of applications so why insist on replacing many with one?
Search in Outlook is a complete joke. It sometimes works if you search for just one word, but as soon as I put two words in, I get so many results that it could just as well show the entire inbox.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
FTA:
He pointed to the implementation of âoelikesâ and âoementionsâ in the Outlook clients as examples of changes that he thinks are helpful.
In a sane world, that alone would disqualify him for the position.
So, to those that say "no other single thing can replace MS Exchange"? MS Exchange itself is a suite of applications so why insist on replacing many with one?
Because one "Suite" that can be installed by clicking next, next, finish (and maybe some checkboxes), and is supported as a unit by the publisher, is whole lot different from 'Hey I cobbled together 50 different things that sort of do something similar but not quite, and good luck getting enterprise support for it, and pray that upgrading one package in that mix doesn't break the entire thing'.
That's why.