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Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365

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Re: Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365

#51

Post by kjellsbells »

OC remains superior for power users. For example, if you fly a lot, offline mode barely works on New Outlook, but is rock solid on Classic. In day to day use, the density of emails and other information on the screen is far higher in OC than New, and no amount of tweaking the view density can get New close to OC.

Classic also supports really powerful programmability, such as forms and custom views, and although I accept that the golden age of MAPI has long passed, its a shame that nothing in New comes close.

However, that speaks to Microsoft and their vision for what they call Modern Work. In this vision, it is Teams that is the center of the universe. Teams is the thing that gets the platform treatment with plug-ins and apps and polish. Outlook is relegated to something the old business people use, and as the generations shift from writing long form messages to thinking anything over a paragraph is tl;dr, I can see Outlook dying off in a few years.

Re: Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365

#53

Post by stackskipton »

p_ing wrote: post #50
stackskipton wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Updates are excruciatingly painful and there is no technical reason I can fathom Technical reason is they don't really want to do them and they are difficult to get right. Office365 does not run Exchange updates, so they don't get properly exercised. The only reason they haven't dropped support for in place updates is customer screaming but trust me, Exchange team would love to. Proper Office365 way to update Exchan…

Is that the proper way in EXO? SPO had individual file replacements. SharePoint stamps were not pave-and-build.

For Exchange it is. Microsoft officially puts out patches for Exchange and technically patching is supported, it's just Exchange Online does not do it so it's poorly tested and when working with Microsoft 8+ years ago, they told us to rinse and replace. I developed a bunch of Powershell scripts to do it before I stopped being Exchange admin.

Re: Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365

#55

Post by perching_aix »

486sx33 wrote: post #42
perching_aix wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

> 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.

Re: Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365

#56

Post by perching_aix »

xnyan wrote: post #44
perching_aix wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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 lik…

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).

Re: Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365

#57

Post by ThinkBeat »

sshine wrote: post #14
ThinkBeat wrote: post #5

Outlook is an odd duck. It is an application with so many flaws or weirdness and I dont like it. Though, being honest, I do hate it a bit less than all the other alternatives in that space. If I am in a "Microsoft powered enterprise" Outlook empowers me to be ridiculously productive. compared to GSuite/Workspace. If you are outside a Microsoft sphere it is harder to justify it. I use Gmail a lot. THe web interface is…

> Outlook empowers me to be ridiculously productive As a programmer, if I could eliminate email at work altogether, it’d have a net benefit to my productivity.

I prefer the asynchronous nature of email. I can close my email client when I need to focus properly on something.

When I need a break, I can go get another mug of coffee, open the email client, and work my way through it.

This is far preferable to instant messages popping up at random times and distract me from my focus.

Of course, I can just close the IM app as well, but there is an expectation that I have to respond to an IM promptly, and not responding is far more likely to cause a problem.

After all, if it was not deemed urgent by the sender it could have been an email message instead. Of course, a lot of people just use whatever IM there is entirely instead of email removing the asynchronous option entirely,.

Nothing is perfect. You will still have people who send you an email. Then two minutes later show up, tapping you on the shoulder and asking if you saw that email they just sent.

All that is made worse by everyone sitting on tables in a giant warehouse.

With cubes, there was a slightly bigger threshold, for physically disturbing someone.

With an office and a closed door, the threshold is substantial.

Re: Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365

#58

Post by p_l »

perching_aix wrote: post #55
486sx33 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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…

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.

Re: Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365

#59

Post by 1oooqooq »

Neonlicht wrote: post #32
layer8 wrote: post #12

I believe that Microsoft is shooting themselves in the foot with that forced migration, at least in the Windows enterprise world. It’s a bit like if they were replacing Excel with a half-baked version of Google Sheets.

Well speaking for myself: the reason why I keep using Microsoft stuff is because I grew up with it. The first computer that I owned came with 98SE. At this point in my life I do not really want to learn new programmes. But if MS keeps changing shit I may as well move on to new horizons.

interesting data point. someone born in the 90s thinking like someone born in the 40-60s... i guess the 70-80s generation really misplaced a lot of hope on the latter generations on these matters.

Re: Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365

#60

Post by rbanffy »

Tyr42 wrote: post #39
rbanffy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would kill for something that merged Teams and email into a single flow of messages and responses in multiple subjects and threads. I still miss my BlackBerry 10 messaging merging email, SMS, BBM…

You know, Gmail does let you search chat messages too. I thi k it's is:chat. Maybe is:chat OR in:inbox would get you halfway there?

Yes, but it's not in the same stream. And nobody I know or work with uses Google Chat (or whatever the name is now)
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