Do you agree that products always have room for improvement?
"Every day there are little things in software that we find annoying. Some write books about it, like Annoyances.org, but I thought this site would be more constructive.
BetterSoftwareSuggestions.com is proudly maintained by myself and the developers at SSW."
- Adam Cogan 
We all know what SPAM is… and Outlook seems to catch most of that fine.
But there is a 2nd level of SPAM, and that is newsletters you subscribe to, but rarely get to read… but you will ‘one day’
I would love another mailbox called ‘Junk Newsletters’ and it picked up my newsletters.
Figure: We need another folder “Junk Newsletters” and button “Not a Subscribed Newsletter”
I don’t see users (aka knowledge workers) use the Quick Access Toolbar… I don’t even see advanced users like developers use it.
I think it would be great to have it automatically learn how we use the application and put shortcut commands there.
Then encourage me to use the shortcut commands, by having it give a visual indication (eg. flash) when I use the normal slow menu.
Figure: It would be great to see the Quick Access Toolbar grow from this…
Figure: To this… automatically
PS: I would also like to see it in VS.NET
If I type “Brian”
Figure: Then click “Check Names”
It will change to “Brian Norton”
Instead of giving me a choice of “Brian Norton” and “Brian Noyes”
Figure: The reason is it only looks in the “Global Address List”
Figure: I want it to also look in the “Contacts” Address Book too.
PS: My iPhone uses the same data, but works as I expect.
Summary points
Suggestion for the Outlook Team
Figure: Change the “Check Names” button to this style
Figure: Make the order more discoverable by adding “Change Order” under “Check Names” button that would take you to
Address book
Figure: Address Book
Figure: There should be a way of setting some appointments to low importance (eg. Daily Standup) and not printing it
Figure: What we need is 2 more checkboxes under this one
I am travelling in (say) NZ and accessing the Net through the Hotel’s broadband access system. If I have to reboot I save all my current open tabs when I close down Internet Explorer.
After I reboot and reopen IE every page is redirected to the hotel broadband login homepage. Aaaaaaaaaahhhh… Not happy. I won’t be able to remember and I am not going through all my history for the last week.
Figure: All pages have been redirect to hotel page
It is not that uncommon to configure Outlook on a server.
Figure: I think the Outlook team can do better than this…. as a minimum a web page with all the download links
There are 2 options to fix this:
There should be a right click option for opening all SharePoint items.
Figure: Add a right click option “Open All ‘SharePoint’ (12 items)”
Figure: The drill-though menu would open like this
We need an ‘Edit’ button.
Figure: When someone else adds an item to your calendar (like a PA), you will see this email. There should be an ‘Edit’ button
Gmail allows me to take my email offline and run standard SQL queries against it Not just email…. Contacts, Calendar and Tasks.
I wish I could do that with Outlook.
Figure: Google Gears allows storing data locally in a fully-searchable database
When you are a damaged PST or OST you get this.
Please give me a % complete (and any other info, like the part it is up to)
It should also alert users that this is not fixing corrupt data.
Eg. This is a consistency check only checking the free space – the non-data regions of the file (the free space that needs to be used). Therefore, this check progresses has nothing to do with the data itself (i.e. it is not folder-by-folder, it is region-by-region in the file).
Figure: Please give me a % complete