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.
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- Adam Cogan 
Fix the situation where there is no end user visibility when it starts compacting.
Surely by Outlook 2010 we should be able to see what it is doing…. create a Log file
Microsoft Outlook Data file is very close to the maximum. Performance will suffer as additional compacting will be kicking in. [OK]
Slow Outlook – Add a KB explaining the compacting reason
Outlook gets really slow when your mailbox hits certain sizes eg. 1.9GB (for 2007 ANSI) or 19GB (for 2007 Unicode) or 48GB (for 2010 Unicode)
Outlook gets really slow when your mailbox gets near its maximum… it kicks in a whole lot of CPU processing
The performance problems happen because the OST/PST silently takes it upon itself to compact much more aggressively than it would in a situation in which it’s got “room to spare”.
Note: It’s also worth looking over the information in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940226, which covers some of the more common root causes of Outlook performance issues. In particular, the table about SSDs can be useful for setting expectations (and keep in mind that the Vista WinSAT tool is fundamentally different than the Win7 WinSAT tool and you should download the Vista one and run it on your win7 machine if you want to compare your numbers to the numbers in the chart).
(feels like an eternity… actually, you think it is hung… but it does complete)
Figure: Takes so long you need more information
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”
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
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