a worse outlook

By Todd Stadler · Wednesday, May 9, 2001 11:59pm

I don't even understand what's so great about Outlook in the first place.

Our group at work, haven to many people comfortable with, if not experts in Unix or Linux, was forced to switch to Outlook for calendaring needs in the past year. There was no end to the groaning.

For one thing, it's a scheduling system based on e-mail. I can't even begin to guess why this seemed like a good idea. Did no one realize that, due to the way the Internet is designed, e-mails sent in some order aren't guaranteed to arrive in that order?

That means that if somebody schedules a meeting and then changes its time or location soon after, I may receive the second e-mail first, and the first e-mail last, which means Outlook is not aware of the change that was sent out second. Great!

I have countless meetings on my calendar that are incorrect because of this problem. Some of them are even cancelled, but Outlook isn't aware of this. Sigh. It's not that I'm completely anti-Microsoft, but I don't understand this one.