Jerry N said:
Perhaps with previous versions, the program wouuld not actually close
until the last open message was closed, but that's not the way it works
now. With Outlook 2003, if you have one or more open messages, and close
the main Outlook program, all the open messages also close. Previous
versions of Outlook did not behave this way; you could close the main
program and your open messages would remain open. Even with Outlook
Express, you can close the main program and any open messages will remain
open. What is the reason for this change in Outlook 2003?
Jerry
It is correct behavior to have children windows forced closed if their
parent is closed. You exited the main application so it closed its child
processes. To have the children remain open and simply hide the parent's UI
would mislead users into thinking that they closed the program when in fact
it is still running. If a program wants to force a user to close the
children windows first before being able to even access the parent window,
the developer needs to code the child windows to be "modal" windows: you
can't click on or do anything with the parent window until the child window
is closed. With the ability to have multiple child windows open at a time
and wanting them to be independent of each other (so you can edit any of
them at any time instead of just the last one opened), I'm not sure you can
make them modal to the parent window.
Don't expect Outlook to EVER follow the behavior of Outlook Express, or
Thunderbird, or Eudora, or Pegasus Mail, or any other e-mail client.
Outlook and Outlook Express are unrelated products. One is not a "lite"
version of the other, they are not kin or same-family products, and are as
separate as Word is to WordPerfect. Sharing a common name in the product
title does not equate or associate the products as big and little brother
products. Outlook Express used to be called Internet Mail and News. It was
unfortunate that Microsoft renamed it to Outlook Express because every days
there are lots of users that confuse it as having something to do with
Outlook.
As far as Outlook 2003 behaving differently than prior versions, I don't
have 2 different versions to compare alongside each other. At work, I use
OL2003 and at home it's OL2002. With OL2003, closing the main program
causes its child processes to close (forcing an prompted save for changed
work). My recollection with OL2002 is that closing the main program also
closed the child windows. How far back and how old is the version to which
you are comparing behavior against the latest versions of Outlook? OL2000
versus OL2003 means there is likely changes in behavior, as would any
product in which there were 2 major version changes. Even between OL2002
and OL2003, there are changes in the default reading pane layout (all
vertical but you can make it look like before), changes in the menu
hierarchies (i.e., their order and how grouped), the loss of the Outlook Bar
replaced with a substitute pane of rolled buttons, and so on.
If the company is migrating from OL2000 to OL2003, it very likely isn't
because of some monster necessity provided in OL2003. Cached mode is nice
to reduce traffic volume but obviously OL2000 was a workable solution
before. Personally I have found no bang-for-the-buck for me to spend money
to switch from OL2002 to OL2003. It is likely that they want their help
desk folks to support just one version rather than a mixed bag of versions
where each has different setup, features, and behavior.
