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 
Make it easy to find all the appointments in your inbox (that you have not accepted or declined).
Eg. I want to say something like “Type: Calendar” or “Type: Appointment” however neither one works.
Figure: Add option “Type” to allow you to find appointments
Figure: Search help needs a list of all options you can manually type (that is not in the “Criteria” dropdown)
OWA 2007 should add a Refresh button on the right click menu:
Figure: Need add Refresh button on the menu
OWA 2007 should add a FormatBrush button to copy the format from one place to other places, which also make it consistent with Outlook like other buttons.
Need add ‘Open folder’ menu item on right click menu in the search results.
Figure: Right click menu needs ‘Open folder’ or ‘Open email location’ if you want to be consistent with Vista Search like below
Figure: Outlook needs this ‘Open file location’ in their search results
Be aware that people create new email addresses all the time and for all types of reasons, eg. for mailing lists.
Figure: Looking up the address’ contact
When looking up a contact and the email address does not exist. This message box is not good enough. It should say “Here are a list of suggestions that have email addresses that are very close.”
Figure: This dialog is not good enough
Sometimes you just want to sync quickly (eg. over GPRS) and one big, fat and unexpected 10MB email is coming without you knowing and without a way to skip it. So please improve this dialog, so you can see if you have a bottleneck and give an option to skip the email.
Figure: My UI suggestion would be to show the top 5 emails in size (sorted descending) with a button on each row “Skip for now”
I think it would be great to never receive another email from a person without a subject!
Figure: Bad example – No Validation when sending an email
Figure: Good example – Validation when sending an appointment
Well actually they can add images as same as emails. but because they are stored as RTF (instead of HTML like normal email messages) so they convert to 4-5MB attachments.
The worst thing is the syncing problems with Windows Mobile devices.
PS: I think it should be easier to insert Live maps (or google maps) for directions.
Figure: The Appointment with large image
Add a ‘Configure’ button to ‘Indexing Status…’ form:
Figure: This Indexing Status form needs a ‘Configure’ button to take you to the below form
That takes you to ‘Indexing Options’ form:
Figure: You need to be able to easy to get to the ‘Indexing Options’ form from Outlook
The problem I find with Outlook 2007 (also occurs in Outlook 2003) is that I often close down Outlook, wait a short while then shut down Vista… yet invariably when I start up again, it says the data files weren’t closed properly. I can only presume this has something to do with the fact that it seems to keep receiving mail even when it’s shut down. I have had the Outlook OST file so corrupted it was impossible to recover it, so I had to re-synchronize > 10+ GB of mails.
I use two laptops (both Vista) and I would say that at least 60% of the time I start up Outlook 2007 on one, it says the file was not closed properly. I don’t know what is causing it, but it just adds to the many pain points of Outlook 2007.
The likely cause of this is that some “3rd party” application is keeping Outlook running.