Don’t worry, I’m not going mad in my old age nor have I gone over to the dark side. I’m referring to this article on the CIO web site. It’s hard not to be sarcastic about it, so I’m not even going to try to not be sarcastic. Quite frankly, if people can make a living out of writing articles like this, then I’m going to put fingers to keyboard and start on my latest masterpiece of journalism ’10 reasons why people who own a toaster should buy a loaf of bread’.
It’s interesting that CIO are running another Outlook-based article entitled “7 reasons not to use Microsoft Outlook for your company’s e-mail”. Just seven. How lazy of them. I have to say that it’s easier to debunk the 10 pro-Outlook reasons than it is to agree with the 7 counter-Outlook arguments. Top of my list for the arguments against would be “you’ll end up running Exchange”. Instead they bang on about HTML-based e-mails. But they do at least recognise Outlook’s propensity to corrupt it’s own mail box.
Before I start to stick the proverbial boot in, let me state that I recognise that the CIO article is not written in the context of reasons why Outlook should be used in preference to Lotus Notes. Anyway, let’s crack on and look at those 10 oh-so compelling reasons…
1. Outlook and Microsoft Exchange play well together – “if your e-mail server runs Microsoft Exchange, Outlook is a no-brainer”. Not a good start really. My first thought was that you could replace a few words and come up with “if your e-mail server runs Lotus Domino, Notes is a no-brainer”. When I have conversations with customers about the bird-brained idea of moving to Exchange (spend hundreds of thousands of pounds and arrive at an e-mail solution that does less than the one you had) it’s never about Exchange – no-one has ever told me that they think Exchange is superior to Domino. And even if they did I wouldn’t give them any credence – it requires more servers, the ‘upgrades’ are more difficult, the clustering is poor, and the up-time is consistently shown to be inferior. Outlook is the reason why companies choose Exchange…so if you have Exchange, why wouldn’t you use Outlook?
2. Outlook plays well with Active Directory – and you’d hope so wouldn’t you? Seeing as Microsoft have mandated Active Directory in an Exchange environment it’s what’s known as Hobson’s Choice.
3. Outlook integrates with many devices and applications – okay, to a certain extent I have to take this one on the chin. Outlook’s third party support is very broad. Good job done. However, I’m amused that the article states BlackBerry support as a key factor. Domino, Sametime, Connections… announcements from Lotusphere about Domino Designer, XPages, Quickr and Symphony. I know another vendor who could trump Microsoft’s BlackBerry integration.
4. Outlook makes it easy to organize your assets – not immediately apparent what this means, but a read-through reveals that it refers to rules, out-of-office, colour-coding and follow-up flags. I don’t believe Outlook is the only e-mail client on the market to offer this – there isn’t one thing listed that Notes doesn’t offer. But how about recipient marking (i.e. that e-mail was sent to you only, or you and two other people), does Outlook have that? How about Outlook’s ultimate inbox? You remember, the one where you copy all of your old e-mails back into your inbox. Genius.
5. Outlook plays nicely with SharePoint – “Outlook users can opt to receive notifications of new or changed content by e-mail, then click through to the SharePoint site”. Wow. This is where the sarcasm can really kick in. URLs in e-mails, whatever next? SharePoint can integrate with Notes courtesy of Mainsoft’s plug-ins. Outlook 2007 can integrate with Lotus Quickr, thanks to an extension Lotus provide. Notes also supports integration with Quickr, Connections, Activities and Sametime (and a whole lot more). What I’m saying is that Outlook isn’t necessarily the pinnacle of integration between e-mail and collaborative solutions.
6. Outlook expedites workflow – surely no-one believes that Outlook is the most flexible client solution for workflow applications? “Companies can set up workflows for functions such as online voting. For example, if a group wants to decide on a location for a festive lunch, the coordinator can send a message offering several options”. Now that’s what I call mission-critical. Sarcasm meter goes into the red, and rightly so.
7. Outlook’s user interface is familiar – not to me it isn’t. Who’s it familiar to? Answer: existing Outlook users. Isn’t that what we call a self-fulfilling prochecy? Here, read this instruction manual – it’s in Vietnamese but the words should be very familiar to Vietnamese people. Okay, I know what they’re getting at. Outlook is (by a smaller margin than most people think) the market leader for corporate e-mail, and therefore if someone arrives from another company there’s a slightly higher chance they’ll have used Outlook in the past. However, thanks to that new ribbon thingy, is Outlook 2007 instantly familiar to Outlook 2003 users? I’ll take advice and comments on that one.
8. Outlook offers integrated calendar, tasks – who wrote this article? Someone who’s been frozen in ice for 15 years and whose last experience of e-mail and calendars was Microsoft Mail and Schedule Plus?
9. Believe it or not, Outlook has pretty good security – I’ll go for ‘not’. They’re actually missing some words here, and the missing words are “compared to previous versions of Outlook”. Compared to Notes it sucks. The article talks about junk mail filtering (like, wow), blocking external content, and disallowing executable attachments… which I don’t believe is any substitution for a managed Execution Control List based on verified signing authorities and the control that provides. I once likened Outlook security to a Ford Escort Mark II – I had one, and I could open a locked door with a wooden ice-lolly stick.
10. Outlook offers one-stop e-mail – yeah, okay, Outlook’s implementation of this approach to e-mail is pretty good. I think it’s better in Mozilla Thunderbird, but Outlook can have a few brownie points.
Look out for CIO’s next article ’10 reasons why people who can’t spell Vista should carry on running XP or buy a Mac’.
Oh, by the way, Ed Brill and I posted at round-about the same time. He’s so much more diplomatic than I am.
darrenjadams
Ed is more diplomatic, but you are more fun to read
RoB
LOL!!!!! Wow, that was great… very nice post!!!
“junk mail filtering (like, wow)”
You gotta take that one on the chin, too, Darren. Natively, Notes/Domino doesn’t do a very good job of this without a truckload of tuning.
That being said… hilarious and spot-on.
@4 – hi Nathan… okay, but on the big topic of security if you walk into a government or finance customer junk mail filtering won’t be top of their list. In my experience many organisations want to handle junk mail before it even hits their network… so not at the client level. I remember someone telling me (as their justification for purchasing Black Spider) that 95% of their inbound e-mail was spam… hence would be a big impact on their bandwidth and mail server load. That’s why solutions like Lotus Protector are important.
@4 – Agreed on the junk mail. Outlooks filtering is pretty pathetic. We use Postini external to our company, and it does a great job (though I wish they would stop fetching HTML and images when I open it on their site to verify the content). 90% of the time when something does end up in my Junk Mail folder in Outlook 2007, it’s a false positive.
Very entertaining article, and probably more enlightening that the CIO one, which I admit I did not read.
However, it does bring to mind the recent Gartner report by Tom Austin. In it he talks about how companies consult with them (Gartner) about Outlook as a mail client and points out that they (the clients) are being driven by ‘bottom-up’ user demand – end users who “like” Outlook – because they use it at home, etc. He cautions that IBM had better learn how to do a better job of marketing to the end user populations – and I have to agree…(although I admit I don’t know how). Maybe we can help the CIO office explain what “business requirements” are and why they matter?
Hi Glenn… firstly, completely agree that bottom-up demand is creating a stir (although sometimes it’s top-down from new CIOs and CEOs) and that we need to market to end users.
I’m always going to disagree with statements about people using Outlook at home… typically they use Outlook Express or some kind of web mail. Of course, Microsoft made a clever (if accidental) move in getting people to associate Outlook Express with full Outlook. If someone says “our users like Outlook and use it at home” I just ask for proof… if they’re telling me 5,000 people all use Outlook at home then they must have conducted some sort of survey, right…?
Hey nice article!!
I really agree with you in some terms, but for me working with Outlook is only acceptable with an search add-in or add-on! Because the integrated search function sucks…We use Lookeen (lookeen.net) and it does a great job!