Well, I, for one, enjoy folks who like shouting into the wind.
Keep this discussion going for as long as you like. Perhaps by the time you have completed flogging this issue into the ground (circa 2010 or so) you will get the idea that it is not going to happen.
--
Milly Staples [MVP - Outlook]
Post all replies to the group to keep the discussion intact. All
unsolicited mail sent to my personal account will be deleted without
reading.
After furious head scratching, The Blue Max asked:
| Well articulated, Don, not to mention a breath of fresh air! In our
| opinion, these basic, useful features should definitely be included
| in Outlook, while letting the Administrator or Owner ENABLE or
| DISABLE the features they do or don't want for themselves! You're
| 100% correct in pointing out that many other features could be
| equally abused, but are not targeted.
|
| And talking about bloat, we actually think there would be a rather
| healthy small business market for several additional features now
| absent from Outlook. As a small business, we'd love to see
| additional modules that would allow Outlook to become a true
| communications center for small businesses.
|
| In otherwords, allow Outlook or a companion product to become a common
| repository for ALL forms of communication including email, newsgroup
| messages, rss feeds, faxes, voice messages, not to mention automated
| answering, automated messaging, computer dialing for voice calls,
| voice call recording, and video communications! It only seems
| logical to manage all these forms of direct communication from one
| cental location.
|
| Ironically, today's hardware is powerful enough, we have the disk
| space, so why not provide an efficient program to manage ALL our
| small business or personal home communications from one center? Over
| the years, there have been several great comm programs that have
| nearly accomplished this end, so how can we characterize these useful
| functions as 'BLOAT' for a Microsoft product? We for one, would love
| to see a comprehensive, yet inexpensive, solution for ALL of our
| small business and personal communications needs.
|
| Thanks again, Don, finally an honest voice that appeals to a good
| sense of reason.
|
|
| ************************
| "Don Caton" wrote:
|
|| ||
|||
|||| And the premise that newsgroups are not useful and have the
|||| potential to be abused in a corporate environment is equally
|||| absurd.
|||
||| While intelligent people may disagree on this, the fact remains
||| that the guys on the front row do not consider it absurd. Where I
||| work, we have our own internal NNTP server and it serves strictly
||| local newsgroups. I had to submit special exemption paperwork
||| making a business case to allow our firewall to be configured in
||| such a manner as to permit access to the msnews.microsoft.com NNTP
||| server and it's the only external NNTP server we're allowed to
||| access. I had to _prove_ that the company would save money by
||| allowing access to these newsgroups.
||
|| Brian:
||
|| Sorry, that didn't come out the way I meant it.
||
|| Newsgroups have the potential to be abused, no question about it.
|| What I meant to say was that everything else you can do in Outlook
|| has the same potential to be abused as well. So why use this
|| argument only against newsgroups?
||
|| There are tons of RSS feeds that an employee could subscribe to that
|| have nothing to do with that person's work, but I don't see the same
|| argument being made against RSS feeds in OL 2007.
||
|| There is nothing inherently bad about newsgroups that made them
|| unsuitable for business use; they are an information source, just
|| like email, RSS, web sites, etc. Like everything else, newsgroups
|| have the potential to be abused, but access to them can be
|| controlled via firewalls and other means, just like your company
|| does.
||
|| And if newsgroup access were added to OL then policy settings could
|| also be added to control or disable it.
||
|| From a purely selfish standpoint I don't care, as I will be able to
|| continue to sell my newsgroup add-in for OL2007. But IMO, none of
|| the reasons thrown about for not including them in OL2007 hold
|| water. MS might have a very good reason for not doing it, but only
|| they know what that is.
||
|| --
|| Don Caton