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."
A cool feature of Outlook is when somebody is on holidays, you can access their mailboxes. An uncool feature is in the UX, it combines all emails when you are using the view of “Show as Conversations”.
For example, in the UX, a thread groups all emails from different mailboxes, regardless of who the email was sent to. This causes confusion as you assume the email was sent to you.
Suggestion: Microsoft Outlook should change its logic and not include the emails from other mailboxes in the Conversation view.
❌Bad Example – Outlook groups an email from Stephan’s mailbox into Jimmy’s conversation
The Microsoft Dynamics 365 App for Outlook is a really useful tool for integrating Dynamics 365 and Outlook, especially for tracking appointments. However, it could be improved to make it even better!
Cancelling an appointment in Outlook should delete the appointment in Dynamics 365
If an appointment is tracked to Dynamics 365, there are 2 steps required to remove it: – Untrack and delete from the Dynamics 365 App – Cancel the appointment
There should be a way to delete the appointment in Dynamics 365 when it is cancelled – either as a popup each time you cancel in Outlook, or as a global setting in Dynamics 365.
This would potentially solve another issue – currently, it is not possible to track/untrack single occurrences of a series of appointments. If cancelling an appointment in Outlook also deleted it from Dynamics 365, then a single occurrence could also be deleted that way.
Figure: Outlook | Dynamics 365 App | “Recurring appointment occurrence cannot be tracked”
Passwordless sign-in with the Microsoft Authenticator app is a great solution for signing in with MFA, while removing our reliance on passwords – as per: Do you use MFA instead of typing a password?
However, occasionally something goes wrong with Passwordless sign-in, and a password needs to be entered. When this happens, the default sign-in method switches to using a password and the Authenticator app, and users don’t bother to (or don’t know how to) change it back.
There should be a way to set Passwordless as the default sign-in method, so that even if a password is entered once, the next time a sign-in happens it goes back to using Passwordless.
At SSW we have so many Teams and Groups – almost all set to public. Since people can join so many, they poke around, join a group, and never leave. That means they are included in every calendar appointment and every team email and the noise was reported as an employee dissatisfaction.
Access Review has been invaluable because it effortlessly removes users when they no longer need access. We have set it to run every 3 months and they need to say they are still a member.
❌ The Access Review email does not look like anything SSW SysAdmins would send, so it gets deleted mistakenly by many people in our company.
Having the ability to customize the email is important.
Suggestion:
Email subject – Give the ability to edit
Email body – Give the ability to edit text
Email body – Give the ability to add an image
Email body – Having placeholders for significant fields, like Group, would be ideal (see ‘SSW SugarLearning’ in the image)
From address – Currently employees think it is ⚠️spam from Microsoft, not from SSW SysAdmins. So it would be a big bonus if we could send the notifications from our own email address to prevent any confusion.
Figure: ❌ Bad example – Email shows limited context and looks just like a lot of other notifications that we get
Patch Manager Plus is a great product, saving time and improving security by automatically installing updates for Windows and third-party applications. Read more about it here: Do you automate update and patch management?
Each time an automatic deployment is run, an email notification is sent with a report of the patches installed. However, it can be easy to miss if there have been any failed patches since there is nothing to make them stand out. Additionally, there is no way to edit the email template that is used.
❌ Figure: Bad example – The failed patch does not stand out at all
If the text was red and a ❌ emoji was added, it would make it clearer that a patch has failed:
✅ Figure: Good example – it’s obvious that a patch has failed, and action is required.
When I fill in forms for my company, I should be able to find each one (just like I do a Microsoft Word doc I created).
I understand that a Form is not a file stored in a Document Library like other Office docs, but I do think you could hack something so it could be surfaced.
Figure: In this view I should be able to see the Microsoft Forms responses I’ve submitted
When I navigate to https://forms.microsoft.com I see all the Microsoft Teams. Even ones, with no Forms in them, or which have been inactive forever. That’s a lot of visual noise.
Moreover, the Teams seem to be randomly ordered. It would be nice if they were ordered by last updated by default and we could choose a different ordering (e.g. Alphabetical) if we wanted.
Help me be able to find the team easier by
Hiding Teams with 0 forms
Allowing Teams to be ordered by last updated and alphabetically.
Figure: See red box – There are a bunch of teams with 0 forms, they should all be hidden by default!
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