What's wrong with Outlook for business

[Mantvis]

Actually, Outlook is a nice tool for business users, however it has so many
places to improve, especially in organizing yourself:

1. There's no CC: field in a Task Assignment, (so that a manager knows
what's the progress of the tasks given between his subordinates).
2. The meeting organizer does not have an option to not participate in the
meeting organized (secretary for example, who needs only to take care of a
Meeting Room resource).
3. Task and Appointment recurrence is flawed -- not possible to set
something to occur more than one day in a month (say, something always
happens on 15 and last day of every month).
4. Task groups don't exist. There have to be a possibility to name a group
of tasks, which itself gets completed when all the tasks in a group get
completed. And in Outlook Today, those tasks belonging to one group should
stick together.
5. Commmenting inside a Contact or anywhere should have the possibility like
in Replying and Forwarding, prefix each comment by a user name and surname
and a date (so that experience info about a contact can be collected by
multiple users).

This is how much I have thought of from a first 5 minute brainstorm -- each
of these advancements would effectively improve Outlook as an organizer.

I will be writing this to mswish as well.

 

[Brian Tillman]

3. Task and Appointment recurrence is flawed -- not possible to set
something to occur more than one day in a month (say, something always
happens on 15 and last day of every month).

This can, of course, be emulated by two such items, one of which recurs on
the 15th day and one on the last day.

 

[doug ransom]

A couple more.

No way to stay on top of multiple public folders. I need to subscribe
to about 20. I don't want to have to go through each one to see whats
new. With shortcuts, I can't even tell which ones are new. I'd like a
single view of unread messages in reverse chronological order.

Notes and tasks and contacts entered in a pda, especially if you draw or
record voice, will not sync.

Attempting to sync your calendar at work to your pda, then sync to
outlook at home is a big disaster.

Lose your categories when you switch computers. They also don't sync.

No unified view of tasks and messages with follow-up flags.


Doug

 

[Mantvis]

Well, this is what you say it is, "to emulate", in other words, a
work-around.

A... one more from me. Not possible to change recurrence rule "from now on".
If you change something in recurrence, it changes all your items from the
begining and duplicates the ones which we completed long ago.

Mantvydas

 

[Brian Tillman]

A... one more from me. Not possible to change recurrence rule "from
now on". If you change something in recurrence, it changes all your
items from the begining and duplicates the ones which we completed
long ago.

I haven't seen that. I open series of items with recurrences and modify
those recurrences with some regularity. All items in the series change, but
I never get duplicates. The old ones go away because they no longer exist.
They've been changed.

 

[Mantvis]

Oh, I'm sorry. I wasn't exact enough.

You're talking about the Calendar Items and I was talking only about the
Tasks.

You don't get an option of opening all the occurences, when opening tasks.
So you just open one current task, and modify its occurence, press ok and...
this is the place, where occurence should ask -- would you like to modify
all the occurences, or only those which are going to recur from now on.

To replicate what I'm saying.. Try some task to recur every day with no end
date. Mark it as complete every day. And on a fourth day, change a schedule
to complete after 10 occurences. You'll see what'll happen. It's going to
generate a totally new series of tasks, duplicating those completed before.
If it were to ask, "leave the old ones intact?", it wouldn't have changed
anything.

Mantvydas