Clinging to Outlook, Only 25% of Yahoo Employees Willing to Eat Mail “Dogfood”

Until recently I was working for a big software company (40k+ employees), where we were also using Outlook as the main communication tool (+ Lync recently).

The interesting thing was, that each person has found an own solution to the massive amount of information you need to keep and look up later. There were of course wikis, portals and stuff but most of the people always kept the most relevant information in their inboxes.

This would manifest in: - Folders with "Dummy"-Mails, used for storing notes - Actually using the notes function - 4 or 5 level deep folder hierarchies of mails - "Complex" categories on mails for finding information

I have no insight into the processes at Yahoo, but I suspect at least some of the things work similar over there. The problem is, migrating these kind of (mostly unstructured) information is painful and could take weeks - provided the new mail system would even support such an abuse.. If there is no alternative in place, the next step would possibly be One Note, or worse Notepad.

I also think Microsoft missed a huge opportunity by not positioning Outlook as more than a e-mail tool but a shared information system. I even worked in a team for a few month, which developed a "Mail Publish" solution, where you've got a button in your Outlook which would upload your mail to a server and index it, so the whole team could get to the information..

(disclaimer: my startup depends on Outlook, but this is less relevant to this specific problem)