So I’ve been back on Outlook 2003 at work for close to two weeks now. Net-net, I’m … satisfied that making the change back from Gmail was the right decision, but by no means an unalloyed one.
On the positive side …
- I love being able to drag and drop into the mail — not just attachments (which Gmail just started allowing) but being able to cut and paste images, drag other messages as attachments, etc.
- I love having fonts (hell, even bolding) that sticks with the messages I send to other Outlook users.
- I love full access to the corporate Global Address List (GAL), including all the data about individuals kept therein.
- I love having the calendar system working cleanly, being able to see others’ free-busy reliably (and vice-versa), being able to forward appointments to others reliably …
So on the other hand …
- My dear Lord, Outlook is a slow, kludgy, awful, memory-hogging, network-sucking, CPU-monopolizing monster. And it’s prone to crash. And it’s prone to lock up my machine while it’s syncing to my machine. And it goes down at least once a day.
- It’s slow to start. Oh, and it takes forever and a day to close and finish its last sync and shut down its processes. And if you rush it, you’ll end up with a database repair when you try to fire it up again.
- Outlook Web Access (OWA) is less functional in some areas than the desktop client, but it performs much better, but it loses some of the advantages of the advantages noted above. I know some folks who, because of the problems with the client, still run OWA instead. (Note: OWA really only runs full featured in IE, not in Firefox or Chrome … but I may be able to use the IE Tab extension in Chrome to work around that. Might be worth a try, even if I lose some functionality from the desktop.)
- I dearly miss my high-speed, full message Google search on mail. *sigh* The alternatives within Outlook are a step or two lower quality (restricted to a given folder, no flexible field searching, etc.)
- I miss Google’s excellent tools for viewing attachments inline, rather than having to download and open up the native application. It was often much faster and easier to use the native tool. (OWA has this capability to some degree.)
So overall, as far as working better communicating with the company, Outlook is the winner. As far as working on my machine … I miss Gmail.
Okay, that’s the last of those posts for a while …
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