Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365
office-watch.com
office-watch.com
Meanwhile my ISP still offers a webmail client which doesn't require JS at all, and it's been like that for nearly 3 decades, proving that it is absolutely possible.
I'm very, very skeptical that anything short of Microsoft's bankruptcy could cause enterprises to seriously reconsider their software. It's just too convenient to pay one vendor for everything Microsoft brings to the table.
How can we keep the first part of this cycle and some how stop it from getting to the second?
On prem Exchange is being made as wanky as possible to run and has been for some years. Updates are excruciatingly painful and there is no technical reason I can fathom for that other than give them: "death by a thousand cuts".
We have an all in one Exchange box so no fancy stuff and it really is painful to watch updates and there is no technical need for it. Its not even a subtle nudge. I've had updates take multiple hours.
I'm old enough to remember when email (let alone the www) didn't exist. MS were eventually very clever in the '90s and noughties and have kept on top of things since. They don't have a total monopoly but quite a decent slice of the "market". The goal is silo off users in their cloud. On prem does not make them anything like enough cash.
They will lose a few customers to Linux and Apple but the full on subscriptions model will more than fix up the finances.
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 Exchange is build new machines, patch them fully, install new Exchange version and move all the mailboxes over.
We just let the kiddies crack on and widdle in public but we are still here!
Every now and then you will note a comment here that looks a bit more ... insightful than the rest - it might be bollocks or not. Search the username etc. or follow the threads and someone will eventually note who made it.
You will find some remarkable people hereabouts. The rest is the usual noise of any other social.
But if MS keeps changing shit I may as well move on to new horizons.
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 blah. very blah.
But it gets the job done, and I hate it a little less than the alternatives.
I did get Mutt up and running last week, Oh what joy it was to get it to integrate with Gmail.
I will say that if your macOS based MailMate is the best mail client for me.
Sadly I am often on the Windows end of things.
As a programmer, if I could eliminate email at work altogether, it’d have a net benefit to my productivity.
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.
I still miss my BlackBerry 10 messaging merging email, SMS, BBM…
I did like BBM BB on Android “hub” was horrid
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.
“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.
> 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).
Once it goes web or “new” it’s a laggy piece of crap, still maybe not as bad as g suite though
?????
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.
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.
I mostly look after the mail systems myself because no one else really seems to give a shit! Provided it carries on working. We have been all in on prem for a good 25 years now and I run a separate Exim n Dovecot with rspamd setup for a few vanity domains.
Evo just works. It does have a fair few quirks of its own but nothing as nasty as Outlook. I doubt it will be too popular here - it only runs on Linux.
I use Outlook for Mac at home and for Window at work. It's ironic that the Mac version is so much nicer than the Windows version. The Windows version feels like a wrapper around outlook.live.com.
Offline support – what Microsoft is calling “offline” use of new Outlook isn’t great in practice. I speak from experience on some recent long-haul flights where I was grateful to have classic Outlook as a workable replacement.
PST support – at the moment Outlook (new) can only read emails in PST files from classic Outlook. No write access or reading of contact or calendar data.
Secure email – Microsoft is now promising S-Mime encryption for later this year.
Cross-mailbox – it’s still not possible to move items between mailboxes.
Mail merge – only classic Outlook works with Word’s Mail Merge to emails.
How they think they can get away with this I have no idea.
Turn off automatic updates.
There's already been a privilege escalation found this year in Thunderbird.
I too was disappointed to see Thunderbird copy the atrocious Outlook layout. I am sorry, I get 50 e-mails a day, not 3. Outlook is a child's toy and I hope Thunderbird does not turn into one as well.
In Outlook 2010 I could do a search for all messages from a given sender with specific words in the subject and an attachment of at least 100KB and get results.
Outlook for years had these recurring issues:
- mail profile gets corrupted - requiring me to re-setup my mail accounts
- from time to time, emails would sit in the Outbox not going anywhere. Then I'd notice hours or a day later. Frustrating. Have to restart Windows to fix it.
Maybe the New Outlook is better, but when I first tried it, it was missing lots of stuff.
They didn't respond when I pointed out the official notification that classic outlook was intended to be deprecated (and apparently now is)
While Outlook classic is not dead and buried yet, it's firmly sitting in the casket while Microsoft is pushing down to close the lid.
Given it is the enterprise that "cares" about classic Outlook due to legacy COM addins, "new users" don't matter so much as they would deploy the correct version required for their userbase.
Yes, I'm discounting home users or users with their own small tenant, but there are clear and easy ways to get classic Outlook if that is what you want/need.
What I would be happy with is if I could use markdown (sans html tags) everywhere. In my emails, in notes, hell I would love if I could use it in word.
You'd be surprised how quickly "it's not possible" turns into "oh we'll get right on that"
That is, does every piece of hardware we own become (vehicles, appliances, computers, accessories, &c) a spyware vector?
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.
it's reasonably performant, doesn't crash more than once a day, has a very customisable UI (easily altered for maximum information density), can be scripted and has zero AI slop
(cf. teams)
so of course they're sunsetting it