Outlook

Did you know that we spend about 13 hours a week in our email inboxes? Replying, responding, forwarding and emoticon-ing takes prime productive time away from the big stuff, like working on your strategy to take over the market and planning the office Super Bowl pool.

Configuring Outlook to connect to your email provider can be a confusing and difficult experience. We often ask end-users to understand the difference between POP, IMAP and SMTP. They must configure incoming and outgoing server hostnames. They need to specify authentication settings and check server port numbers. This is all very confusing and leads to frustrated customers and increased calls to administrators and support.

There has been a lot of conversation recently about large companies implementing “zero email” policies.  At first blush, this sounds great!  No more emails about the bathroom on the third floor in the Australian office being closed on Saturday (I work in the US)? No more global emails that the QRC group is having a team outing (does anybody even know what QRC stands for or what they do)?  No more 100-deep email threads asking to ‘unsubscribe’ from a mailing list?  Perfect!

There’s been some buzz lately about the fact that Microsoft has decided to fully document the Outlook PST storage format and open it up for developers to freely code against.  So what does this mean? . . .

With the smell of freshly brewed coffee in the air, I open up Microsoft Outlook and head straight to my calendar to start scheduling meetings. Being a technical project manager, part of my job includes scheduling meetings—and in any given session, I easily schedule 5+ meetings for 15+ folks.