A
Alex Griffin
Hello Outlookers,
Just put in an Exchange 2003 environment with Outlook 2003. The
finance director had a few comments....
1. Is there anyway to edit the Email Shortcut Menu? By the shortcut
menu I mean the one you get when you right click in the window with
the list of all your emails from a given folder. In OE he says he had
the option to "Copy to Folder", which he used extensively apparently.
He does not want to "Move" he wants to "Copy". I googled and looked
through MS's resources but I cannot find a way to do this.
2. He also whinged about things like the fact that the folders are
ordered in a different fashion between Outlook and Outlook Express, I
doubt there is any thing that can be done about this, but his
complaints are valid and do highlight an area where MS could improve.
As far as I am concerned, Outlook should be able to do everything that
OE can do, and then also extra things with bells and whistles. I
think MS should spend more time making sure the user experience is the
same if not better when moving from OE to Outlook.
And last of all, a pure whinge. After the upgrade it transpired we had
sales users who liked to do mail merges and word merges and all sorts
of merges between Outlook and Word. We bought our licenses for Office
XP just on a year and a half ago, we only recently bowed down to
pressure to install an Exchange server because the pointy hears wanted
to share their calendars and do other fluffy stuff that Exchange
allows the users to do. We'd played around with Exchange 2000 and
found it very lacking, but Exchange 2003 with a few new things like
RPC over HTTP (still too fiddly but a step in the right direction) and
its other improvements looked good enough to us that we would
implement it if pushed. So we did..... Anyway 2 weeks into the
migration we do the sales department, and a few hours after they have
Outlook 2003 installed, we start getting complaints that their email
templates and merges do not work. I go over to take a look and of
course discover that Outlook depends on Word to do Email templates
(don't even get me started on the philosophy of needing a text
processor to create a template for an email program), and not only
does it depend on Word, it depends on having the SAME VERSION of word.
To me this smacks of MS just trying to push its customers down an
upgrade path which they do not need. We needed Outlook 2003 due to the
RPC over HTTP and would not even have considered implementing Exchange
without this, but we could see nothing else in Office 2003 that was
required and not having a budget for it, we did not get any Office
2003 licenses, and were just planning on using Office XP with Outlook
2003. After some research I have of course learnt that for years
Office components will only interact with other components from the
same version, and I've got to say, that sucks, and it smacks of
everything that MS critics complain about.
Anyway, any help with point 1, would be appreciated. Thanks!
Just put in an Exchange 2003 environment with Outlook 2003. The
finance director had a few comments....
1. Is there anyway to edit the Email Shortcut Menu? By the shortcut
menu I mean the one you get when you right click in the window with
the list of all your emails from a given folder. In OE he says he had
the option to "Copy to Folder", which he used extensively apparently.
He does not want to "Move" he wants to "Copy". I googled and looked
through MS's resources but I cannot find a way to do this.
2. He also whinged about things like the fact that the folders are
ordered in a different fashion between Outlook and Outlook Express, I
doubt there is any thing that can be done about this, but his
complaints are valid and do highlight an area where MS could improve.
As far as I am concerned, Outlook should be able to do everything that
OE can do, and then also extra things with bells and whistles. I
think MS should spend more time making sure the user experience is the
same if not better when moving from OE to Outlook.
And last of all, a pure whinge. After the upgrade it transpired we had
sales users who liked to do mail merges and word merges and all sorts
of merges between Outlook and Word. We bought our licenses for Office
XP just on a year and a half ago, we only recently bowed down to
pressure to install an Exchange server because the pointy hears wanted
to share their calendars and do other fluffy stuff that Exchange
allows the users to do. We'd played around with Exchange 2000 and
found it very lacking, but Exchange 2003 with a few new things like
RPC over HTTP (still too fiddly but a step in the right direction) and
its other improvements looked good enough to us that we would
implement it if pushed. So we did..... Anyway 2 weeks into the
migration we do the sales department, and a few hours after they have
Outlook 2003 installed, we start getting complaints that their email
templates and merges do not work. I go over to take a look and of
course discover that Outlook depends on Word to do Email templates
(don't even get me started on the philosophy of needing a text
processor to create a template for an email program), and not only
does it depend on Word, it depends on having the SAME VERSION of word.
To me this smacks of MS just trying to push its customers down an
upgrade path which they do not need. We needed Outlook 2003 due to the
RPC over HTTP and would not even have considered implementing Exchange
without this, but we could see nothing else in Office 2003 that was
required and not having a budget for it, we did not get any Office
2003 licenses, and were just planning on using Office XP with Outlook
2003. After some research I have of course learnt that for years
Office components will only interact with other components from the
same version, and I've got to say, that sucks, and it smacks of
everything that MS critics complain about.
Anyway, any help with point 1, would be appreciated. Thanks!