UNIX snob meets Outlook
I am by profession a UNIX systems admin. I work with a group of other UNIX admins. We used to do mail with a Solaris system running Cyrus and using whatever clients we wanted, typically mutt with end-users using Eudora.
There was a big push to unify calendaring across the organisation — there had previously been quite a few different departmental calendaring systems, some Exchange, some various web apps, plus a central Oracle Calendar system serving about 2,000 users.
Much to the horror of my colleagues (and, to be honest, me too) the organisation chose Exchange to replace all those calendar systems plus our nice simple comprehensible mail server.
Resistance plans were made. Vows to “never use that abomination” were made. Most of my colleagues have stuck with mutt talking to the Exchange IMAP interface, grudgingly using Outlook Web Access when they absolutely can’t avoid using the calendaring service. I believe some are forwarding back off Exchange to random UNIX systems.
I took a different approach. Why, I asked myself, should I try to make myself more efficient by using my comfortable tools? Management clearly doesn’t want me to be efficient, so why give them more than they’re asking for?
So I decided to try and use Outlook. Did not exactly have high expectations. They were exceeded.
The first step was to switch from mutt to Thunderbird. I’ve been a text snob for at least a decade so that was a pretty big move. Still not thrilled with Thunderbird but it’s a better IMAP client than mutt is ever likely to be.
Moving from Thunderbird to Outlook was relatively painless. The big change (text to GUI) was already done. Here are the things that I changed from the defaults in Outlook to make it a usable environment:
- View->Reading Pane->Bottom;
- Tools->Options->Mail Format->Stationary and Fonts->Fonts then set all of the fonts to be bigger (or whatever it is you need);
- View->Arrange By->Custom (for every folder!):
- Other->untick “use multi line layout in widths smaller than…” and make sure “Always use single-line” is selected;
- Other->Turn off autopreview;
- Other->Increase the column and row font sizes;
- Fields->remove any fields you really don’t care about;
That has been enough to make Outlook reasonable from a visual-impairment perspective. Which is moderately interesting.
More interesting, though, is how it has changed my workflow and efficiency. Much to my surprise it’s worked pretty well. It’s extremely easy to mark a message as requiring followup, which means it’ll appear in the default “For Follow Up” virtual folder. It’s equally as easy to mark it as completed when it’s done with. This alone has made me less likely to forget to do things that’ve been requested.
The task list has also proven useful, particularly combined with drag-and-drop of messages, contacts, and meetings. My one complaint would be that the Palm conduits (including Chapura’s PocketMirror) don’t copy text from these linked items into the notes field when synchronising.
All of this is doable with other tools. But the integration with Exchange, being able to get at the content from anywhere with Outlook or a web browser, is very handy and somewhat more difficul to replicate with a good user interface.
The main requirements for this sort of thing to be workable, in my opinion, are (a) fairly lax Windows domain policies so you can customise Outlook; and (b) sufficiently fast desktop and server systems so you’re not sitting around waiting for the application.
Would I use Outlook as an IMAP client? Why bother? It’s not very good in that role anyway, stick with Thunderbird if you’re not working with Exchange. But frankly, while it’s not for everyone it’s not at all as bad as the typical UNIX bigot makes it out to be either.
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