There are some people that use Outlook for...well I'm not sure what but things that go way beyond email and calendar. I've been using the web app for several years now, it's fine. When I was new in IT, I always struggled to see what the big deal was with Outlook desktop. The web mail has folders, rules, shared mailbox support, integrated calendar, etc.
What more do you need out of email?
Well, turns out a lot. People treat email has a permanent data store. I've encountered folks with multiple PST files archiving 10+ years of email. I ran into people that needed to queue up a bunch of offline emails in their outbox to send when they're on network again (ok, I kind of get this use case), and I came across all manner of horrors of COM Add-ins.
Anyway, the root of the problem is people using email for everything it was never intended to do or be. If "new" Outlook can break some of those habits, we'll all be better off for it.
Good times, it feels like we're getting less and less flexible with the hackability of our corporate workflows as time goes on.
Is this strange?
I'll be trying to solve some problem, half-remember an email conversation from several years ago on something relevant, and want to look it up.
This feels like the most natural thing in the world to me, and it's not like the ability to save emails is new. Why, exactly, would a forced change of habits be for my own good?
At the personal level, it wouldn't be. It makes a lot of sense, and I do the same with Fastmail.
At the corp level where it's often in M365 cloud, you've got hard limits from Microsoft on one hand (100GB primary mailbox - period), and corporate data retention limits on the other. Legal often has strong opinions on how long you are allowed to retain emails which you may or may not be able to personally override. Could be just a few years, which forces a different strategy.
I'm not sure on the details of Google, but one imagines corp workspaces have equivalent interests.
Edit: We were on GSuite.
But I've seen enough corrupted PST files in my days to never trust Outlook/Exchange as permanent file storage.
Now with "New" Outlook you don't even get that, you get an ODT cache file, everything else is permanently server side in Microsoft land.
Enterprise "productivity" software is fundamentally broken.
Email the protocol has this built in.
> If "new" Outlook can break some of those habits, we'll all be better off for it.
It won't, since email is in fact the best data store available to most people in enterprises (especially compared to things like Sharepoint). It might finally accelerate the move away from Exchange though. Here's hoping.
That last part is the real point of integration... then real time chat and messaging status baked in... it's hard to beat. You have services and applications that offer pieces, but none integrate as well.
In the early 2010's I think that both Blackberry and Mozilla had an opportunity to create their own competition in the space and neither did. Google is pretty close, but IMO still a much lesser experience, reinventing a new chat app every other year didn't help their cause at all.
When Hangouts had integrated Google Voice and SMS in the app, imo, that was peak poweruser useful.
It works both ways, I ran into a situation where a random Add-in was enabled on the web client and affecting the desktop client behavior despite not being in the list of Add-ins, and could only be disabled from the web client.
When I wrote this god and I understood it, now god only knows.
There's all flavors of "lite" apps and Firefox started as a stripped down version of Netscape.
A lot of older email apps have a prominent "offline" mode that if you accidentally activate it, basically stops the app from sending or receiving any email. I guess a lot of executives demanded the feature because they were handling all their email while on a plane without connectivity.
If ever there was a recipe for doing a terrible job at building software, that's as good a way to put it as I think we will ever see.
I exclusively used the web UI because it always ran faster for me, except for a small number of things it couldn't do.
1. You can't run all the rules on your inbox to sweep the piled up email after a weekend reboot. No such option while it is still present in the legacy native Outlook.
2. You have no option of deleting an entry in your calendar without sending a decline. I am in many groups and sometimes just want to clean up my calendar without sending declines. Again, very much present in the native program.
No one expects genuine innovation from MS, but at least they could put some effort into feature parity. Too much to ask for in the days of Copilot I guess.
Isn't new outlook lives in the cloud? So this shouldn't be a usecase.
I'm not sure what you mean. I have rules running regularly to move messages around, delete messages older than X in some folders. It all runs fine. Maybe there are some other kinds of rules I'm not aware of? But I do remember that back when "old outlook" was still the main thing, I needed to be running for the rules to apply, which meant that interacting with a different client was always... funny.
> 2. You have no option of deleting an entry in your calendar without sending a decline
Could this be a config flag somewhere? I've just run a test and invited my MS account from a personal mailbox. On the event, once accepted, there are two separate actions: decline and delete. I've received the "accepted" mail, but haven't received anything after "deleting" the event.
2. When you select a slot in the calendar screen and press delete, the only options you get are cancel and decline.
All this is applicable for the PWA. The native client works fine.
The delete button I was talking about is in Outlook running in a browser: https://i.imgur.com/k4ejdw4.png
Pressing the delete key on my keyboard brings this up: https://i.imgur.com/SBVkpVf.png
Clicking delete doesn't send any notification to the other side, where this account still shows as having accepted the invite (the other side is a different Office 365 organization).
I haven't really been able to use outlook.office.com in anything but Edge, which on my Windows machine automatically authenticates with M365. In other browsers I regularly get stuck in an auth redirect loop between different Microsoft domains when I open the site. Sometimes it helps to clear all cookies and re-login (which is a real pain with 2FA and all) but it only ever helps once: If I close and re-open the site, I'll have to do it again.
How people voluntarily pay for this crap is beyond me. (In my case it's forced upon me by my client. On my own machines I switched to Linux in 2010 and never looked back.)
Bonus points for it running fine on Linux, too. I understand there are some missing features compared to the old one (can't recall which), but for basic corpo emailing it works perfectly for me.
I now have 0 reasons to use Windows at work, so, for once, I'll nonironically cheer MS for a job well done!