X
xfile
But IMO, none of the reasons thrown about for not including them in OL2007
Precisely!
hold water.
Precisely!
hold water.
xfile said:But IMO, none of the reasons thrown about for not including them in
OL2007 hold water.
Precisely!
xfile said:Hi,
I did some research on the net and is it true that Outlook 2007 still does
not support newsgroup?
With all the technologies available, why MS insists us to use two programs
for daily task?
Is it so hard for it to understand that many of us wish to use only one
program?
Don Caton said: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.
xfile said:Can you find any function from Notepad that is not covered by Word,
and any functions of Paint is not covered by any image software?
Will anyone expect to use both Word and Notepad for doing word
processing?
Milly Staples said:While I understand and appreciate your views on the usefulness of newsgroups
for the technically skilled or informed users, how many corporations have
secretaries/clerks/janitors/etc. who will NOT be inclinded to post to
technical discussions but engage in the behaviors you have noted that are
all to prevalent?
--Â
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, xfile asked:
| Dear Don,
|
| Thank you very much for your balanced and detailed explanations.
|
| I've not heard the term - transport provider, for a long time and
| almost forgot about it. And yes, I could comprehend what you meant
| and thanks for that again.
|
| During the 15+ years of working in tech industry with a business major
| background, I had to train myself to learn various technologies to the
| degree of every details, including assembling components and systems
| and writing codes, and so on, all simply because refusing to accept
| craps from engineers.
|
| Speaking of non-business activities, I've seen so many engineers
| using IM for chatting, surfing sites for trading personal stocks, and
| exchanging porn pictures with emails, instead of coming to newsgroups
| like this or others for searching assistance or providing ones.
|
| Now I run my own business, heavily depended on IT, but outsourced all
| to 3rd party service providers.
|
| What also counts is the "intension" of doing something rather than
| judging solely by the "behavior". That is, any tool can be abused
| and used for non-business-related purpose, and on the other hand, can
| also be used to improve productivity for the benefits of all.
|
| Over the years, I have learned so much from various newsgroups and
| forums (and from people like you), and I even demanded our engineers
| (while at the last company) to participate some forums and newsgroups
| to exchange skills and tips. I just don't get the idea for why some
| people have the thoughts for newsgroups are not business-related?
|
| Once again, thank you for your kind explanations. I will wait and
| see if such add-in will be provided in the future.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| || ||
||| Finally, speaking of overhead. BCM is truly an overheard and with
||| almost no
||| integration with contacts. Do you really think adding newsgroup
||| will increase additional overhead to Outlook and why is it not for
||| OE?
||
|| No, it would not "increase additional overhead". This excuse is
|| often thrown about, but having written a newsreader add-in for
|| Outlook, I can tell you it has absolutely no basis in fact. And I'm
|| sure if you ask the authors of any of the other newsreader add-ins,
|| they will tell you the same thing.
||
|| Outlook is basically a UI around one or more MAPI-compliant
|| databases (the .pst and .ost files). Things like emails, tasks,
|| contacts, etc. are simply records in one of these databases.
||
|| In order to send and receive messages or other items, Outlook loads
|| "transport providers". A transport provider is basically a DLL that
|| contains code that knows how to connect to a specific type of data
|| source, and how to read/write records in a MAPI database. Each
|| account you set up in Outlook is associated with a particular
|| transport provider.
||
|| To send and retrieve POP3 email for example, Outlook loads the POP3
|| transport provider. Outlook ships with transports for POP3, IMAP,
|| HTTP and Exchange servers. If you want to retrieve email from Lotus
|| Notes, you would install a Lotus Notes transport provider. Likewise
|| for any other information source that someone has written a
|| transport provider for.
||
|| In Outlook 2007, MS added the ability to retrieve RSS feeds and that
|| was done by writing a transport provider that knows how to connect
|| to an RSS feed.
||
|| To access newsgroups in Outlook, all you need is a transport
|| provider that knows how to connect to a NNTP server. If third-party
|| vendors such as myself can write one (using the horribly outdated
|| and incomplete MAPI documentation), there is no reason why MS
|| couldn't write one too. And the idea that this would add "overhead"
|| to Outlook is simply absurd. It would add no more "overhead" than
|| the supplied POP3 transport does.
||
|| Outlook is slow, IMO, because it is based on MAPI, a circa-1993
|| technology that's overly complicated and all but obsolete. I'm a
|| little surprised that MS hasn't switched to SQL server databases by
|| now, but perhaps there is too much legacy and third-party code that
|| would break to make that practical.
||
|| And the premise that newsgroups are not useful and have the
|| potential to be abused in a corporate environment is equally absurd.
|| I've sold a number of site licenses to large corporations and I'm
|| sure the other newsgroup add-in vendors have as well. Employees can
|| waste company time on personal email and RSS feeds too, and Outlook
|| has the ability to connect to any web site so you can surf porn
|| sites all day long without ever leaving Outlook. Companies that are
|| worried about this can block access to HTTP sites, and they could
|| block access to NNTP servers just as easily.
||
|| As to why MS doesn't add newsgroup capabilities to Outlook, only
|| those folks within Microsoft who make those decisions know the
|| answer to that.
||
|| --
|| Don Caton
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