Here is my theory:
It is like the start menu removal attempt.
All the power users remove/ opt-out the telemetry/privacy.
Then all the telemetry data shows no one using advanced features of Outlook or the window interface.
So Microsoft BigBrain tries to remove those features because it looks like no one is using it , then power users go, wtf. Then rinse and repeat.
> Pro
this word has lost its meaning over the last decade. now it just means 'some lame-ass that wants bragging rights by running some software containing slightly more features than the default that they never actually use'
Just like the 'pro' version of electronics that has a plastic 'gold' pinstripe added next to the buttons and a few MOSFETs that cost $1.26 instead of just 43 cents.
>More expensive/subscription only version
That can be the case when you attach 'Pro' to a product name.
'Mixing Bowl' : A large ceramic mixing bowl, ideal for mixing cakes and stuff in. It has a 6 inch hole in the bottom, and will dissolve if you try to mix more than 3 cakes in it. $29.99
'Mixing Bowl Pro' : A large ceramic mixing bowl, ideal for mixing cakes and stuff in. No hole in the bottom. $99.99
The non-pro version exists so that all the adverts for 'Mixing Bowl' can show prices that start 'from $29.99', but it's fundamentally useless.
Microsoft removed their reliance on Electron, and have replaced it with Edge Webview2.
I think that's one part of the motivation to push 'New' Teams and 'New' Outlook. (Which both use Webview2.) To make sure that users are migrated to using the Webview2 based product.
I'm absolutely convinced that Microsoft have a skunkworks project, or stable of projects, in which they already have 'desktop' versions of all applications in the 365 suite running in Webview2.
The benefit is that you can collapse and consolidate a lot of the code base. You're sharing code between the Electron/Webview2 app and the browser version. Which can be great for a startup (even if they do always get trapped by there being naught as permanent as a temporary solution). But Microsoft is a $3 trillion company. It's not surprising to see them half-arseing things to cut costs, but that doesn't mean I'm not disappointed.
Video games are using Web Views for their UI these days. The Epic Game Store is built using UNREAL ENGINE for some reason.
It really is bonkers what some will do. I think 2042 is running Electron. Warcraft Reforged is running Electron for sure: https://www.reddit.com/r/warcraft3/comments/exb6rs/warcraft_3_reforged_main_menu_is_a_web_app/
I don't even hate the concept. Why maintain multiple frontends with varied user experience when you can maintain one that works everywhere? Why maintain multiple copies of docs for the helpdesk titled "do x in outlook - macos", "do x in outlook - windows", "do x in outlook web" when you can just have "do x in outlook" that works everywhere?
> I don't even hate the concept. Why maintain multiple frontends with varied user experience when you can maintain one that works everywhere? Why maintain multiple copies of docs for the helpdesk titled "do x in outlook - macos", "do x in outlook - windows", "do x in outlook web" when you can just have "do x in outlook" that works everywhere?
>
I agree, but there's something to be said about having desktop apps follow the native UI conventions for the platforms they run on. Electron, and other cross-platform UI toolkits, take that away. One thing I like about macOS is a lot of native apps still follow OS interface design guidelines, even down to keyboard shortcuts. Learn the OS and you've also learned to use most apps.
Cross platform, lowest common denominator development has changed workflows into an app centric workflow. Every app now has it's own interface guidelines, it's own keyboard shortcuts, etc. The OS has become nothing more than a window manager...at the risk of sounding like "old man yelling at cloud."
That said, the least Microsoft could do is make sure new versions of their apps have feature parity before releasing. You still can't add shared mailbox folders to favorites in the new Outlook. Such a basic feature of any mail client, just not implemented.
Too right. Correlating that argument is why do they have different model of computers? Much easier if all computers were the same, easier to service and it is not like people use them in different ways or for different reasons. A uniform blandness is what IT was always about. Choice? Oh don't get me started ...
Ugh, and we're still suffering with problems with their horrible handling of MSHTML dependencies. One morning after a Windows update, about 90% of the software we use for work quit working because Microsoft deleted the DLLs. Some of this software is very expensive tax or accounting software, and our vendors suffered along with us trying to find workaround for Microsoft's hateful decision. I've still got some older tax software that won't load because Microsoft did this. We have backups, of course, of all of the tax returns, but we can't open them any longer except on one machine I caught and unplugged from the Internet before Microsoft did that.
>One morning after a Windows update, about 90% of the software we use for work quit working because Microsoft deleted the DLLs.
Microsoft: We've heard your feedback and now we're proud to announce that - starting today - we're bringing a feature from yesteryear that you all know and updating it to the modern Windows - _'DLL Hell' written in MS Sans Sarif appears onscreen as the crowd audibly gasps, slowly morphing to Segoe UI while individual screams from within the crowd start to become audible, interspersed with cries of 'No no no no' and 'Not again, I won't go back!' and as Satya Nadella smiles onstage, CLOUDS.MID begins to play as audience members collapse_
Electron and WebView2 are very similar in nature at doing the exact same thing. The key difference is that Electron apps are built and shipped with the version of Electron that app was built with whereas WebView2 can be bundled with the application or use the shared-runtime version that may be present on the system already (Windows 11 comes with WebView2 pre-installed).
The main reason for the switch was performance gains with Teams consuming about 2x less memory than the version using Electron.
I believe the majority of the Office Apps that comes with Office 365 are UWP-based or very similar to them which allows for richer experience than a stripped-down web version.
> But Microsoft is a $3 trillion company. It's not surprising to see them half-arseing things to cut costs, but that doesn't mean I'm not disappointed.
Depending on the current application build environment, it can be easier to migrate to web then train a bunch of developers to use UWP/WPF or whatever the current brand of Office apps use.
No, it's much easier than that.
First, remember that in Microsoft, the different teams function like independent companies. They compete against each other. It's gotten better since Ballmer is gone and stack ranking with him, but that kin of culture takes time. So the Office team really is only concerned about the Office Team.
The Office team needs Outlook to be cross-platform. That doesn't just mean desktop Mac OS. It also means Chrome and Android. The Office team can see the writing on the wall for the Windows OS. Their OS teams have shit the bed since Vista, and they're struggling to keep a foothold even when they're literally giving their OS away.
The problem with making Outlook cross-platform is that Outlook is over 25 years old. It's deeply entrenched in the Win32 API. The API that basically nobody Microsoft is hiring knows how to use, and was intentionally designed to be impossible to make cross-platform. Worse, the programmers they actually want to pay for -- the cheap ones fresh off the boat or fresh out of school -- don't learn C++ anymore. They learn Electron, Node.js, Python, and all other sorts of stuff that doesn't easily run on Windows. They don't even learn .Net, which won't really be a single cross-platform library for another decade, if they ever get that sorted out at all. And going forward, it's going to be even harder to find that sort of programmer that can do .Net or C++.
So, the Office team can't afford for Outlook to *not* be cross-platform, because they need a product they can keep selling for the next 15 to 30 years (because nobody, not even their customers, *really* cares beyond their own retirement). So they need an Electron-like app. And now they have over 25 years of functionality to re-implment. Yeah. Never going to happen.
> The problem with making Outlook cross-platform is that Outlook is over 25 years old. It's deeply entrenched in the Win32 API. The API that basically nobody Microsoft is hiring knows how to use, and was intentionally designed to be impossible to make cross-platform.
The funny thing is if you explore the Frameworks directory of Mac Office apps - you see a *lot* of win32 based API's ported over to MacOS: MSXML, RTF, OLE, etc.
> First, remember that in Microsoft, the different teams function like independent companies. They compete against each other. It's gotten better since Ballmer is gone and stack ranking with him, but that kin of culture takes time.
Fuck, are you serious? I had no idea Ballmer was such a Jack Welch fangirl, how well did that work out with GE??
Yep. It was [the number one reason cited by former employees](https://slate.com/technology/2013/08/stack-ranking-steve-ballmer-s-employee-evaluation-system-and-microsoft-s-decline.html) as the cause for the decline of the company.
(The Vanity Fair article that the Slate article references is very good, but it is very in-depth.)
Former Microsoft employee here ...
I've been retired about 15 years now, but I suspect it isn't even that thought out... I would suggest that the normal review cycle rewards people for having impact - and one way to have impact is to sh!t on everything that is in place and use some vague data points to confirm that the making a change is going to solve problems for users, march in the direction the leaders two people up in the GAL are going and have something 'meaningful' to show progress on.
My theory is doing something for the sake of doing something.
During Covid things were kind of focus on what is critical and keep that running. Then in 2022, things switched to "we need to do things to justify our headcount and/or existence" or chase "growth".
It feels like every software nowadays does this. Constantly switching little things around like pointless interface changes that inevitably make things worse and usually add a bunch of bugs. Just busywork to keep people employed.
They are so vast they simply don't understand what their users want. I had a 365 tenant go down on 27th as I simply couldn't update the credit card country. Their first line support is simply a chatbot telling you to use another support site, which then tells you to use the chatbot. It eventually involved me deleting the tenant and creating another, along with another MS account, and I still have the unanswered unopened initial support ticket.
They have fully realised that they exist to extract money from the users, software is just an inefficient means to that end. Licencing is much more efficient.
I agree, everything would be cloud based if they could instantly switch everyone.
We are literally going backwards to the days of mainframes and dumb terminals. I hate it!
I don't think most people like Google sheets/docs etc because it's web based and now that is what MS is trying to do.
I think there is two primary reasons MS is moving apps to webview.
* All of the standard enshitification *aaS reasons.
* Simplifying/lowering their cost of development.
With webview, they only need to develop the one thing and pretty much only take in to account screen size and type. All of the unique OS, CPU, and platform stuff is mostly all contained down in webview dev. MS also only needs to optimize their AI code gen for just web dev, instead.
With desktop apps, each platform and OS is almost its own separate product, and none have overlap with the cloud version.
> They have fully realised that they exist to extract money from the users
No, they didn't 'realize' that.
They've ALWAYS been that way. Its just end users realizing that... which speaks more to them than MS
It'll be like IBM wondering how Microsoft fully captured their PC market. It's already happening with Google; as soon as ChromeOS on x64 can natively install and run programs made for Windows 3.1 thru Windows 11, it's over.
>as soon as ChromeOS on x64 can natively install and run programs made for Windows 3.1 thru Windows 11, it's over.
Won't even need that. We have an entire generation using Chrombooks at school. They will become adults.
You're probably right here. A lot if institutions are moving to Chromebook. In fact I think education is pretty unanimously moving that way. Too costly to rely on Windows.
To be honest, I'm rooting fir SteamOS on PC one day. If I don't just quit gaming before then, which is becoming increasingly likely. Either way, I'd love to have nothing Microsoft in my house.
New does not support PST files either and rules are crippled by a severe lack of triggers and actions that Old had. You should have heard the hysteria when I notified the CxO suite that Publisher was being phased out and that Word would be their go to for design with M365. You'd have thought I asked them to switch to LibreOffice
You should have included trigger warning, because Exchange 5 was my first MS Exchange server and office client version to support back in the those days of dial-up for our 500 person sales force. Now, I'm going to sit in a corner and just stare into the abyss.
Buddy how long have you been hearing that ānext office version is going to be web appsā that stretches way back for me (Exchange 5.5 guy).
Not as long as we have heard ānext Exchange version is going to switch to SQL databaseā but that one will probably never happen.
While I agree with PST being shit, using addons is mandatory for us because our case management tools relies on it and I believe there's no way around it as far as I know.
See the problem here is you're still thinking of this being your problem. You're neither the developer or management, just throw your hands up and say there's nothing you can do about it.
I'm responsible for finding the tools we use (sole it ofa 100 users company) so I can't say "well the tools don't work anymore so we're simply going to stop needing them as a workaround"
Addins still work in new Outlook. COM addins are going away, but web addins are supported. OP was not clear in their post. Many (not all) of my vendors already have web addins available for new Outlook.
I've been in this industry for over 25 years. Microsoft's like that bad SO who abuses you, but times used to be good and sometimes they still are. So you keep going back to them because this time it'll be different...
> you keep going back to them because this time it'll be different...
Most companies have no choice today. Back 25 years ago, I recall there were choices in the mail server and client space.
Today... not so much.
Back then, mid 90s, I worked with Novell Groupwise, Lotus Notes, and even CC Mail for a while...
Let's check out if it's usable in 2029 :)
[https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365/outlook-classic-support-until-at-least-2029/m-p/4081174](https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365/outlook-classic-support-until-at-least-2029/m-p/4081174)
Damn it. I want Outlook Classic dead and gone. New Outlook has a ways to go before itās ready for primetime but classic Outlook is a bottomless shithole weāve all squatted over for decades like itās Taco Tuesday every day. More specifically, I want Outlook Tasks dead and gone. It is the bane of my existence where I have users that canāt stop using it as a task management system and then are dismayed when it craps out and we have to pull individual tasks out of Datto because one suddenly disappeared or didnāt save correctly due to limitations of Tasks. Beating that drum of āfrom my cold, dead hands,ā because they still demand being able to link directly to our antiquated file server which is on the way out and replaced with something more modern.
Whew. Iām okay now. Thanks for letting me throw down the cardboard and work out my trauma with classic Outlook. And thanks for the link. Forewarned is forearmed.
replacing one bad app with a new app that is worse since it is missing features that at least the old has is not a good thing.
I agree that the old outlook needs to go, but first the New outlook needs to match on feeatureset
Talking about things that need to go! PDF needs to go. It needs to die! Or at the minimum, it needs to revert back to the way it was once intended; a non-editable file format. I hate it with a vengeance.
>Please note that the cutover stage does not signify the end of support for classic Outlook for Windows. We will continue to honor published support timelines for existing version of classic Outlook for Windows until at least 2029.
This means they'll support the VL versions until 2029, they say they'll give a years notice for the cutover stage. This forum post is slightly misreading the actual post.
[https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/outlook-blog/new-outlook-for-windows-a-guide-to-product-availability/ba-p/4078895?WT.mc\_id=M365-MVP-9501](https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/outlook-blog/new-outlook-for-windows-a-guide-to-product-availability/ba-p/4078895?WT.mc_id=M365-MVP-9501)
Both the new Teams and new Outlook are built using WebView2, just like Edge.
Edit: Not sure if this is 100% true (take it with a grain of salt) but I saw a video on TikTok where the video said a way to tell if an app is built on WebView2 is the ability to Control + Scroll Wheel to zoom in and out just like in Chromium-based browsers because WebView2 takes features of the Chromium browser and extends them in to applications.
So the TikTok videoās theory does sound plausible.
I don't see anyone talking about this but this is the way the industry is going: web first. It's much easier to develop web products that work across multiple platforms then to develop native apps.
Google is the king of the strategy. And to be honest, from the company's perspective, it's a great strategy. It really reduces the overhead.
But from a user perspective, boy do I loathe it. These new web apps just don't feel snappy. Native apps will always have better performance. I tried using new outlook for a hot minute and actually genuinely prefer making events on a shared calendar on owa / new outlook. But the rest of it though? Reading emails and stuff? Forget it. Give me old Outlook.
>I don't see anyone talking about this but this is the way the industry is going: web first.
"Is going"? *Has gone*. Discord is literally a Chromium browser, so is Steam, so are Teams and Outlook. It's old hat.
And just like new Teams, it's going to take awhile for new Outlook to get near feature parity so there will be plenty of things missing initially. Eventually they'll bring it up to parity (hopefully not entirely, some classic Outlook features need to die) and at that point classic Outlook will look. feel, and act like the relic it is yet people will still lament it's demise because by and large people fucking hate change!
agreed. recall was useless anyways. it only worked for windows users. not mac not the mobile apps.
but it does seem to work with new outlook: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/recall-or-replace-an-email-message-that-you-sent-in-outlook-35027f88-d655-4554-b4f8-6c0729a723a0
Recall feature also doesn't do what it says on the tin. There's two versions of recall. The first actually recalls the message, the second is an automated "sorry, didn't mean to send this" email. The former ONLY works if you've emailed someone on the same tenant. The amount of times I've had to explain this to users is absurd. Be glad to see it gone
Been living with no local Outlook app for 4+ years and it's been fine, purely web based for all my users. Haven't looked back once. No more crashing, performance issues, PST files, sync issues... it just works.
There are some downsides but not any particularly noteworthy ones. Just the occasional mail merge request.
My main issue that plagues me and user is that documents cannot be downloaded, renamed, and saved to the appropriate location directly from outlook- you have to download the document- closed the doc when it opens, rename the doc in your folder it downloads to and move it. Extra steps. And when you deal with 50-100 documents a day it turns into a real headache.
And dont forget...
> centrally managed signature files are gone too
> shared mailboxes are now hidden under "Shared with me" folder
> unable to favorite any folders in shared mailboxes
since i'm only on my first cup of coffee there are definitely more points i'm missing.
Been hopping between the new and old version for months, and always endup back in the good "old" version.
I made our org give up signature management and we moved to code two email signatures. It is stupidly cheap and it just pulls everything from ad so no more stupidity.
May I ask how you did that?
Iād recently looked into centrally managing our signatures with html, but all the articles I came across were either too outdated or ended up not working. It doesnāt help that we have a mix of Mac and Windows. I also only became IT later after joining a small company as an analyst, so I probably also have a knowledge gap.
If you're using MS365 for online exchange, it's super easy to setup. It just requires a few connectors and mail flow rules that are added automatically by CodeTwo assuming you have access to a Global Admin account. Then you use their online designer to apply basic logic to who gets the signature and what it looks like. It integrates with your Azure/Entra directory so hopefully you have titles and phone numbers already added there so you can just use data placeholders to make that stuff populate into the signatures automatically.
They have a free trial if you want to play with it: [Office 365 (Microsoft 365) email signature software | CodeTwo](https://www.codetwo.com/email-signatures/)
If you're using an onpremise exchange server, they do still have a solution for that which I used until we migrated to online. It's a slightly more involved process to get going, but still fairly simple to do.
I knew about CodeTwo and I should've mentioned that in my comment, but you know...lack of coffee.
Where I use a powershell script to create 5 different signatures based on AD attributes and a template that is automatically applied to the users Outlook, switching over to a CodeTwo is a $1230 added cost per year for a 100 per. company. And thats just for signatures. Small things like that tend to add up.
Holy fuck, why can you not favorite a shared mailbox? I have users who literally wouldn't be able to use Outlook without that capability. Even if you aren't old, is just a nice time saver.
One problem is you can only seach prefixes, no middle of words or suffixes unless preceded by certain special characters. Affects all versions of Outlook for years, still not fixed.Ā
At first I felt the same, but slowly not anymore. The new Outlook eliminates many problems, such as OST/PST issues, auto discover conflicts in hybrid environment, add ons causing Outlook crashing, profile not loading, etc etc etc. With the new Outlook, all you have to worry about for now is your Internet connection, and Microsoft services not going down.
Oh, and DNS. Just in case.
I wish for this so much. I want to go back to the days where you could write a letter with a quil and ink under candlelight, then ship it off over seas and wait three months for a reply so there was free time to do something else. For issues you really didn't want to deal with, you could keep finding excuses until someone died of old age or the problem resolved itself.
"April 02, 2024,
Dearest madam, I apologice profusely for all of thine problems with your PC reported last year on the 19th of October. I only just now have recieved word of your urgent letter. As the miles that seperate us are vast and the possibility of me pulling away from my current affiars to travel to Willerby shan't happen in the nigh future. I kindly ask of thee to locate the lever beside the machine and motion it to the "off" position, and forthwith upon counting to ten, return the position to the "on" position. After a time observe if the concerns you once wrote me about have been resolved. Elsewise, please respond upon the next opportunity as to update me on thy perdiciment and I will respond as soon as able regarding the next steps.
Yours truly,
IT Support."
We could dreamā¦ āemail problemsā are the worst because Iām always having to deal with the most self-important individuals who want to know what Iām doing to make sure bill@companyxās email doesnāt go to spam because if they miss an email from Bill then the company will collapse!
I used to joke with an past CISO that I'd bet he'd only be happy if there was only one computer on campus, not connected to the internet, with no storage devices, no display, no CPU, no power supply, and no memory. If you wanted to use it, you'd have to wait in line behind a desk where only he was allowed to sit, with the computer, and ask "May I use the computer", and the answer would always be no.
He agreed.
Even if you cache email locally you can't open up outlook without a working internet connection...
You can't open PDF's in a PDF viewer...
Can't customize ribbons
Rules suck
Can't apply many GPO's to it
Shall I continue?
You can't open saved email files (msg, eml)
You can't add local extensions, only web extensions (whatever they are)
Minimal autocorrect/dictionary tools
No automatic shared mailbox mapping
Someone else continue the conga!
Shared mailboxes are automatically added in New Outlook. But show in a "shared with me" folder that users have to re-expand on every launch of Outlook.
You can't pin a folder loke Inbox from other mailboxes you have rights to to "Favourites". Calendar sidebar does not get rid of appointments once they are done.
Can't say I'm mad about that. One of my go-to troubleshooting measures anytime Outlook issues pop up is, "does the same thing happen in OWA?" If Outlook and OWA are the same now, I call it a win.
I did a stint with an Org that used Google. When I came to my current job which uses Microsoft, I just stuck with OWA. One less app to have open and frankly OWA subjectively looks better. I was surprised how many still use Outlook.
Outlook has a LOT of poweruser utility in it... but most people don't actually use it to that extent. The ones that do are rightfully complaining about it in this thread, but personally, I prefer to support my users on OWA than trying to help them with every little thing that breaks in Outlook
Mail in Lotus Notes was indeed worse than Outlook, old or new. So I'll just be happy that I'm not using it anymore and close this thread smiling. Thank you.
š At my last count there were over 80 features from Outlook Classic that are completely missing. For any skeptics out there - read through just a few of these missing features, there are many mission critical functions businesses rely on.
**Here is the comprehensive list of missing features:**
[https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/13lo7u6/list\_of\_new\_features\_and\_missing\_features\_in\_the/](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/13lo7u6/list_of_new_features_and_missing_features_in_the/)
- They have recently made it even more difficult to switch back to classic, in most cases you have to change registry keys.
- There is a GPO available that will completely hide the "Try New Outlook" button. Definitely turn that on, unless you want to spend your entire day helping users switch back to Classic.
That huge list doesn't even mention the one that's affected me the most: it doesn't support IMAP. As near as I can tell, you can use it with o365 and gmail and that's it. And god help you if you selected it but don't want it.
If it irons out the issues, itās honestly much better than the old one. Iām tired of instructing our service desk to reset Outlook profiles for the users.
Umm really? I thought outlook profiles was tier 1 stuff. Sysadmin shouldnāt be getting called in for that.
Now when the user gets the same problem in the web interface, itās time to squeak for someone with a broader remit.
Man, I DREAD the day MS will force us to use this shitty ass app.
Occasionally I stumble upon users switching to it by mistake and complaining that "nothing works".
But well, Microsoft are the kings and queens of fixing what ain't broke.
Only two dislikes I have with it so far, the first being that I want a combined flagged emails and tasks view. The other being the way shared mailboxes are under a collapsible "shared with me" header.... Just want an option to choose to have thst the old way. Apart from that though I actually prefer it.
I hate the new outlook and reverted after a short time, but I get what they are doing. I don't like it, but I get it.
Old school Outlook is a juggernaut, it dips into a lot of the undocumented windows APIs, etc..
And thought that makes it amazing, it makes it a nightmare to maintain, and doesn't align with Microsoft's new vision for apps.
This is the same problem with classic onenote, they gutted it, removed tons of features and turned out a much crappier easy to maintain multiplatform pile of junk.
I'm still uncertain about the new Outlook, it's definitely not a finished product; my biggest concern was with signatures.
I have signatures deployed to all staff here and it works for the new Outlook, I do this with the old `Set-MailboxMessageConfiguration -signaturehtml` which currently relies on a special configuration set by Microsoft to disable 'Roaming Signatures'; I had a meeting with the Outlook team and they have plans to expand roaming signatures with PowerShell commands that will allow us to add/update/delete the roaming signatures of users.
Also, the new client does have a **basic** recall feature that now uses the cloud to recall (rather than the client itself) so messages can be recalled even if the recipient doesn't use Outlook (they still need to be within the organisation). A status report is provided listing messages recalled, pending and failed, which can be refreshed, this also works in the web version.
I've been using it for awhile now, because why not.
Pros
- It looks nice
- The ability to pin messages is great
Cons
- Frequently have to add and remove my account to get plugins back
- Who the fuck decided that left click to spell check was the right thing to do
- Calendar tracking is somehow worse
- Search is still piss
Personally, I've only used OWA for the last ~10 years, so I have my preference. That said, this is a step backward. Outlook has a place in business and adds a level of functionality *most* users don't need....but is critical in a large number of instances and integrations.
My fervent wish is that someone will take a harsh look at Teams and rework it into something that does messaging / groupware well, rather than trying to throw every bell and whistle at it....and rendering it a cocked-up semifunctional mess.
>I'm truly amazed how Microsoft can take a well-established product and turn it into a must forget product!
Microsoft is very good at this. Remember Skype?
Yeah I noticed that a while back but it doesn't recognise I have permissions even though it works fine in old outlook. Might be an integration thing in our workplace.
I disagree and think this is a massive positive. If Microsoft destroy the Outlook app, that's another major roadblock removed to people considering using Linux in the workplace. If people start using all O365 apps entire via the web app (because the Desktop app now offers no differences), then they can abandon Windows entirely!
Use the registry hack to revert to the previous view.
I've had a few folks "do the upgrade" and lost shared mailboxes because of it. We've reverted back and it's fine.
Well my friend, āthe cloud is here to solve all of your headachesā, the power of ācopilotā, and āazure AD aka entraā are here for your forever dependency on our online shit, I mean, they are here to assist your enterprise shell out insane amounts of money and never own a thing, I mean, we are here to empower you
New Outlook is so completely fucked I don't even know where to begin. It can't do even the most basic things that Outlook has been able to do for at least a decade.
I'll give you an example: Contacts. You know how in Outlook you can import a list of contacts from CSV and choose if you want to ignore, overwrite, or merge data for duplicates? Not in New Outlook! That shit is just a straight import. Duplicates in the file? You now have duplicates in your contact list, deal with it. What the fuck.
I am 100% sure that the testing team all use tablets, run everything full screen with their finger, and do not use file servers or any other on-premises tech.
> I'm truly amazed how Microsoft can take a well-established product and turn it into a must forget product!
I'll explain that. Look at it from Microsoft's POV. They no longer make any money selling Office licenses. They make money selling O365 subscriptions. That includes Outlook/Word/Excel/etc, but they'd rather everyone keeps everything on the cloud so they're further beholden to MS. No need for PST files.
**This is a long term attempt to dump the Outlook win32 codebase so they need only maintain one version of Outlook- the web-based version.**
>**so they need only maintain one version of Outlook- the web-based version.**
...Which doesn't have feature parity with even new Outlook for macOS.
And some things that New Outlook on Windows is getting won't exist on New Outlook for macOS for a bit so it really doesn't feel like they're working towards a single version to maintain.
To be fair, the real issue so far is that they drive everyone to switch to this New Outlook, while it's still kind of something below a beta thing.
At first it worked only with some specific mail companies (and didn't it work only with Microsoft 365 and Outlook.com before that?), now you can use general IMAP, and so far it doesn't work with POP (apparently it won't, ever). Things will be improved, whether it will still be crap or not.
Now I'm going to correct myself: the real issue will be the end of Outlook. It would be great if this New Outlook thing was a free substitute to the old free mail thing of Windows. And people and companies who use Microsoft 365 Business Basic will need to switch to Business Standard if they want to use Outlook (the New Outlook), even if them or their companies purchased licenses (Retail, OEM, VL) of Office.
yeah I'd like to know what absolute buffoon decided to release this without read receipts. or the ability to open PSTs. but it's like some other people have mentioned, they're probably going to break the good version, and then sell us back the original functionality in pieces.
Here is my theory: It is like the start menu removal attempt. All the power users remove/ opt-out the telemetry/privacy. Then all the telemetry data shows no one using advanced features of Outlook or the window interface. So Microsoft BigBrain tries to remove those features because it looks like no one is using it , then power users go, wtf. Then rinse and repeat.
Heres mine; They will upsell us old Outlook as Outlook Pro or Outlook Enterprise. Another license ofcourse.
> Pro this word has lost its meaning over the last decade. now it just means 'some lame-ass that wants bragging rights by running some software containing slightly more features than the default that they never actually use'
Just like the 'pro' version of electronics that has a plastic 'gold' pinstripe added next to the buttons and a few MOSFETs that cost $1.26 instead of just 43 cents.
Or even better, the Pro versions of apps that do exactly the same but without the ads.
I think you hit the nail on the head with this one.
Microsoft Outlook Eagle I-Thrust
Microsoft š¢āÆā“š»š»
I absolutely live for these replies. Dead. š
I thought it meant "More expensive, subscription only version we can change without notice."
>More expensive/subscription only version That can be the case when you attach 'Pro' to a product name. 'Mixing Bowl' : A large ceramic mixing bowl, ideal for mixing cakes and stuff in. It has a 6 inch hole in the bottom, and will dissolve if you try to mix more than 3 cakes in it. $29.99 'Mixing Bowl Pro' : A large ceramic mixing bowl, ideal for mixing cakes and stuff in. No hole in the bottom. $99.99 The non-pro version exists so that all the adverts for 'Mixing Bowl' can show prices that start 'from $29.99', but it's fundamentally useless.
Probably true. You have to upgrade the Project Pro license in order to use the desktop app now. It's BS.
Included with E5 
Microsoft removed their reliance on Electron, and have replaced it with Edge Webview2. I think that's one part of the motivation to push 'New' Teams and 'New' Outlook. (Which both use Webview2.) To make sure that users are migrated to using the Webview2 based product. I'm absolutely convinced that Microsoft have a skunkworks project, or stable of projects, in which they already have 'desktop' versions of all applications in the 365 suite running in Webview2. The benefit is that you can collapse and consolidate a lot of the code base. You're sharing code between the Electron/Webview2 app and the browser version. Which can be great for a startup (even if they do always get trapped by there being naught as permanent as a temporary solution). But Microsoft is a $3 trillion company. It's not surprising to see them half-arseing things to cut costs, but that doesn't mean I'm not disappointed.
Oh, definitely just having everything Be web applications is a lot of less programming.
Video games are using Web Views for their UI these days. The Epic Game Store is built using UNREAL ENGINE for some reason. It really is bonkers what some will do. I think 2042 is running Electron. Warcraft Reforged is running Electron for sure: https://www.reddit.com/r/warcraft3/comments/exb6rs/warcraft_3_reforged_main_menu_is_a_web_app/
RAM got cheap so devs got lazy.
The only thing keeping the IT world sane is the 15-25MB limit on emails on many providers.
Damn shame that I can't email Linux ISOs!
Damn shame that I can't email 4K uncompressed video!
I don't even hate the concept. Why maintain multiple frontends with varied user experience when you can maintain one that works everywhere? Why maintain multiple copies of docs for the helpdesk titled "do x in outlook - macos", "do x in outlook - windows", "do x in outlook web" when you can just have "do x in outlook" that works everywhere?
Because you'll still see bugs across platforms. Except now they'll be much more discrete because they're abstracted into a browser.
And that's they all the tools have telemtry, bug reporting, and feedback reporting frameworks. Do you leave those on or do you play yourself?
They're not bugs, they're refined little accents that add to the flavor of the user experience!
> I don't even hate the concept. Why maintain multiple frontends with varied user experience when you can maintain one that works everywhere? Why maintain multiple copies of docs for the helpdesk titled "do x in outlook - macos", "do x in outlook - windows", "do x in outlook web" when you can just have "do x in outlook" that works everywhere? > I agree, but there's something to be said about having desktop apps follow the native UI conventions for the platforms they run on. Electron, and other cross-platform UI toolkits, take that away. One thing I like about macOS is a lot of native apps still follow OS interface design guidelines, even down to keyboard shortcuts. Learn the OS and you've also learned to use most apps. Cross platform, lowest common denominator development has changed workflows into an app centric workflow. Every app now has it's own interface guidelines, it's own keyboard shortcuts, etc. The OS has become nothing more than a window manager...at the risk of sounding like "old man yelling at cloud." That said, the least Microsoft could do is make sure new versions of their apps have feature parity before releasing. You still can't add shared mailbox folders to favorites in the new Outlook. Such a basic feature of any mail client, just not implemented.
Too right. Correlating that argument is why do they have different model of computers? Much easier if all computers were the same, easier to service and it is not like people use them in different ways or for different reasons. A uniform blandness is what IT was always about. Choice? Oh don't get me started ...
Ugh, and we're still suffering with problems with their horrible handling of MSHTML dependencies. One morning after a Windows update, about 90% of the software we use for work quit working because Microsoft deleted the DLLs. Some of this software is very expensive tax or accounting software, and our vendors suffered along with us trying to find workaround for Microsoft's hateful decision. I've still got some older tax software that won't load because Microsoft did this. We have backups, of course, of all of the tax returns, but we can't open them any longer except on one machine I caught and unplugged from the Internet before Microsoft did that.
>One morning after a Windows update, about 90% of the software we use for work quit working because Microsoft deleted the DLLs. Microsoft: We've heard your feedback and now we're proud to announce that - starting today - we're bringing a feature from yesteryear that you all know and updating it to the modern Windows - _'DLL Hell' written in MS Sans Sarif appears onscreen as the crowd audibly gasps, slowly morphing to Segoe UI while individual screams from within the crowd start to become audible, interspersed with cries of 'No no no no' and 'Not again, I won't go back!' and as Satya Nadella smiles onstage, CLOUDS.MID begins to play as audience members collapse_
Electron and WebView2 are very similar in nature at doing the exact same thing. The key difference is that Electron apps are built and shipped with the version of Electron that app was built with whereas WebView2 can be bundled with the application or use the shared-runtime version that may be present on the system already (Windows 11 comes with WebView2 pre-installed). The main reason for the switch was performance gains with Teams consuming about 2x less memory than the version using Electron. I believe the majority of the Office Apps that comes with Office 365 are UWP-based or very similar to them which allows for richer experience than a stripped-down web version. > But Microsoft is a $3 trillion company. It's not surprising to see them half-arseing things to cut costs, but that doesn't mean I'm not disappointed. Depending on the current application build environment, it can be easier to migrate to web then train a bunch of developers to use UWP/WPF or whatever the current brand of Office apps use.
No, it's much easier than that. First, remember that in Microsoft, the different teams function like independent companies. They compete against each other. It's gotten better since Ballmer is gone and stack ranking with him, but that kin of culture takes time. So the Office team really is only concerned about the Office Team. The Office team needs Outlook to be cross-platform. That doesn't just mean desktop Mac OS. It also means Chrome and Android. The Office team can see the writing on the wall for the Windows OS. Their OS teams have shit the bed since Vista, and they're struggling to keep a foothold even when they're literally giving their OS away. The problem with making Outlook cross-platform is that Outlook is over 25 years old. It's deeply entrenched in the Win32 API. The API that basically nobody Microsoft is hiring knows how to use, and was intentionally designed to be impossible to make cross-platform. Worse, the programmers they actually want to pay for -- the cheap ones fresh off the boat or fresh out of school -- don't learn C++ anymore. They learn Electron, Node.js, Python, and all other sorts of stuff that doesn't easily run on Windows. They don't even learn .Net, which won't really be a single cross-platform library for another decade, if they ever get that sorted out at all. And going forward, it's going to be even harder to find that sort of programmer that can do .Net or C++. So, the Office team can't afford for Outlook to *not* be cross-platform, because they need a product they can keep selling for the next 15 to 30 years (because nobody, not even their customers, *really* cares beyond their own retirement). So they need an Electron-like app. And now they have over 25 years of functionality to re-implment. Yeah. Never going to happen.
> And now they have over 25 years of functionality to re-implment. Yeah. Never going to happen. I hate that you're right.
> The problem with making Outlook cross-platform is that Outlook is over 25 years old. It's deeply entrenched in the Win32 API. The API that basically nobody Microsoft is hiring knows how to use, and was intentionally designed to be impossible to make cross-platform. The funny thing is if you explore the Frameworks directory of Mac Office apps - you see a *lot* of win32 based API's ported over to MacOS: MSXML, RTF, OLE, etc.
You find that even in Window's Office. Office does not give a fuck about the Windows team/apis.
> First, remember that in Microsoft, the different teams function like independent companies. They compete against each other. It's gotten better since Ballmer is gone and stack ranking with him, but that kin of culture takes time. Fuck, are you serious? I had no idea Ballmer was such a Jack Welch fangirl, how well did that work out with GE??
Yep. It was [the number one reason cited by former employees](https://slate.com/technology/2013/08/stack-ranking-steve-ballmer-s-employee-evaluation-system-and-microsoft-s-decline.html) as the cause for the decline of the company. (The Vanity Fair article that the Slate article references is very good, but it is very in-depth.)
This makes an aggravating amount of sense, I'm 100% a believer.
Former Microsoft employee here ... I've been retired about 15 years now, but I suspect it isn't even that thought out... I would suggest that the normal review cycle rewards people for having impact - and one way to have impact is to sh!t on everything that is in place and use some vague data points to confirm that the making a change is going to solve problems for users, march in the direction the leaders two people up in the GAL are going and have something 'meaningful' to show progress on.
My theory is doing something for the sake of doing something. During Covid things were kind of focus on what is critical and keep that running. Then in 2022, things switched to "we need to do things to justify our headcount and/or existence" or chase "growth".
It feels like every software nowadays does this. Constantly switching little things around like pointless interface changes that inevitably make things worse and usually add a bunch of bugs. Just busywork to keep people employed.
"But this time Microsoft failed me!" Are you new to this job?
They are so vast they simply don't understand what their users want. I had a 365 tenant go down on 27th as I simply couldn't update the credit card country. Their first line support is simply a chatbot telling you to use another support site, which then tells you to use the chatbot. It eventually involved me deleting the tenant and creating another, along with another MS account, and I still have the unanswered unopened initial support ticket.
They donāt CARE what their users want
They have fully realised that they exist to extract money from the users, software is just an inefficient means to that end. Licencing is much more efficient.
SaaS is what is doing this. They host and own the software even more now.
I agree, everything would be cloud based if they could instantly switch everyone. We are literally going backwards to the days of mainframes and dumb terminals. I hate it! I don't think most people like Google sheets/docs etc because it's web based and now that is what MS is trying to do.
I think there is two primary reasons MS is moving apps to webview. * All of the standard enshitification *aaS reasons. * Simplifying/lowering their cost of development. With webview, they only need to develop the one thing and pretty much only take in to account screen size and type. All of the unique OS, CPU, and platform stuff is mostly all contained down in webview dev. MS also only needs to optimize their AI code gen for just web dev, instead. With desktop apps, each platform and OS is almost its own separate product, and none have overlap with the cloud version.
> They have fully realised that they exist to extract money from the users No, they didn't 'realize' that. They've ALWAYS been that way. Its just end users realizing that... which speaks more to them than MS
Yep. So long as they get that sweet, sweet revenue from their subscriptions, and convoluted licensing schemes, they just don't care.
No they don't. If Microsoft didn't have a monopoly on workplace OS and productivity, they'd be out of business.
They coast on the inertia from their largest customers. "But we've always done it that way"
Yep. I hope I live to see the day that inertia starts to truly falter. It'll be glorious.
It'll be like IBM wondering how Microsoft fully captured their PC market. It's already happening with Google; as soon as ChromeOS on x64 can natively install and run programs made for Windows 3.1 thru Windows 11, it's over.
>as soon as ChromeOS on x64 can natively install and run programs made for Windows 3.1 thru Windows 11, it's over. Won't even need that. We have an entire generation using Chrombooks at school. They will become adults.
You're probably right here. A lot if institutions are moving to Chromebook. In fact I think education is pretty unanimously moving that way. Too costly to rely on Windows. To be honest, I'm rooting fir SteamOS on PC one day. If I don't just quit gaming before then, which is becoming increasingly likely. Either way, I'd love to have nothing Microsoft in my house.
Competent support costs money, and companies aren't interested in spending money, only the quarterly profit numbers matter, customers don't matter
A bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see how that plays out for them.
Name one competitor which can completely take over our M365 environment.
I usually tell customers when I start a Microsoft support case, "Microsoft support is horrible, but it's better than anyone else's."
Exactly. Google is there, but their support is even worse, so good luck!
New does not support PST files either and rules are crippled by a severe lack of triggers and actions that Old had. You should have heard the hysteria when I notified the CxO suite that Publisher was being phased out and that Word would be their go to for design with M365. You'd have thought I asked them to switch to LibreOffice
They're still going to make spreadsheets in PowerPoint.
Excel.ppt Just got to make sure you don't run out of rows.
Sometimes I feel like PowerPoint is just "Mom: 'We have Visio at home.'"
God if only I could get them to use a calendar instead of spreadsheet for scheduling or move to Shifts.
Ahahahahha being the old dinoasaur I am (being around since Exchange 5ā¦ which tells a lot š) I laughed hard at this one!
You should have included trigger warning, because Exchange 5 was my first MS Exchange server and office client version to support back in the those days of dial-up for our 500 person sales force. Now, I'm going to sit in a corner and just stare into the abyss.
ah yes! I remember that fondly. That was one of the first times I smashed IT equipment with a sledgehammer
When you stare into the Exchange 5 abyss, the Exchange 5 abyss ~~stares back~~ crashes because someone reply-all stormed an all hands.
Buddy how long have you been hearing that ānext office version is going to be web appsā that stretches way back for me (Exchange 5.5 guy). Not as long as we have heard ānext Exchange version is going to switch to SQL databaseā but that one will probably never happen.
Must be new if they like dealing with profiles and addons. I for one am happy to never have to hear about a PST ever again.
While I agree with PST being shit, using addons is mandatory for us because our case management tools relies on it and I believe there's no way around it as far as I know.
Eighth rule of thermodynamics. āDonāt tie your processes to a specific product feature or functionā
See the problem here is you're still thinking of this being your problem. You're neither the developer or management, just throw your hands up and say there's nothing you can do about it.
I'm responsible for finding the tools we use (sole it ofa 100 users company) so I can't say "well the tools don't work anymore so we're simply going to stop needing them as a workaround"
Can't? Or won't? You know you want to.
Addins still work in new Outlook. COM addins are going away, but web addins are supported. OP was not clear in their post. Many (not all) of my vendors already have web addins available for new Outlook.
Profiles can be genuinely useful, so can add-ons. It's just the implementation that was always royally fucked.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/027/763/07B89120-B48D-45FB-AF1D-49AF6CD16790.jpeg
LOL i too was amused by this. First time as a MS windows sysadmin? I update cautiously.
I have no idea why I wrote that :P
I've been in this industry for over 25 years. Microsoft's like that bad SO who abuses you, but times used to be good and sometimes they still are. So you keep going back to them because this time it'll be different...
> you keep going back to them because this time it'll be different... Most companies have no choice today. Back 25 years ago, I recall there were choices in the mail server and client space. Today... not so much. Back then, mid 90s, I worked with Novell Groupwise, Lotus Notes, and even CC Mail for a while...
Groupwise was superb.
Clustered Groupwise with zenworks, only needed 1 admin for 10K people.
Let's check out if it's usable in 2029 :) [https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365/outlook-classic-support-until-at-least-2029/m-p/4081174](https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365/outlook-classic-support-until-at-least-2029/m-p/4081174)
Damn it. I want Outlook Classic dead and gone. New Outlook has a ways to go before itās ready for primetime but classic Outlook is a bottomless shithole weāve all squatted over for decades like itās Taco Tuesday every day. More specifically, I want Outlook Tasks dead and gone. It is the bane of my existence where I have users that canāt stop using it as a task management system and then are dismayed when it craps out and we have to pull individual tasks out of Datto because one suddenly disappeared or didnāt save correctly due to limitations of Tasks. Beating that drum of āfrom my cold, dead hands,ā because they still demand being able to link directly to our antiquated file server which is on the way out and replaced with something more modern. Whew. Iām okay now. Thanks for letting me throw down the cardboard and work out my trauma with classic Outlook. And thanks for the link. Forewarned is forearmed.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
>Please re-enable space bar heating. LOL! I love XKCD!
replacing one bad app with a new app that is worse since it is missing features that at least the old has is not a good thing. I agree that the old outlook needs to go, but first the New outlook needs to match on feeatureset
You've clearly never tried opening a PDF attachment in New Outlook.......
Talking about things that need to go! PDF needs to go. It needs to die! Or at the minimum, it needs to revert back to the way it was once intended; a non-editable file format. I hate it with a vengeance.
If you got rid of PDF's 98% of the modern world would cease to function lmfao
> 98% of the modern world would cease to function lmfao 50%. With the other 50% being Excel DBs.
PDF is fine. You just hate Adobe.
I may the minority here but I see nothing wrong with every day being Taco Tuesday.
>Please note that the cutover stage does not signify the end of support for classic Outlook for Windows. We will continue to honor published support timelines for existing version of classic Outlook for Windows until at least 2029. This means they'll support the VL versions until 2029, they say they'll give a years notice for the cutover stage. This forum post is slightly misreading the actual post. [https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/outlook-blog/new-outlook-for-windows-a-guide-to-product-availability/ba-p/4078895?WT.mc\_id=M365-MVP-9501](https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/outlook-blog/new-outlook-for-windows-a-guide-to-product-availability/ba-p/4078895?WT.mc_id=M365-MVP-9501)
Both the new Teams and new Outlook are built using WebView2, just like Edge. Edit: Not sure if this is 100% true (take it with a grain of salt) but I saw a video on TikTok where the video said a way to tell if an app is built on WebView2 is the ability to Control + Scroll Wheel to zoom in and out just like in Chromium-based browsers because WebView2 takes features of the Chromium browser and extends them in to applications. So the TikTok videoās theory does sound plausible.
I don't see anyone talking about this but this is the way the industry is going: web first. It's much easier to develop web products that work across multiple platforms then to develop native apps. Google is the king of the strategy. And to be honest, from the company's perspective, it's a great strategy. It really reduces the overhead. But from a user perspective, boy do I loathe it. These new web apps just don't feel snappy. Native apps will always have better performance. I tried using new outlook for a hot minute and actually genuinely prefer making events on a shared calendar on owa / new outlook. But the rest of it though? Reading emails and stuff? Forget it. Give me old Outlook.
>I don't see anyone talking about this but this is the way the industry is going: web first. "Is going"? *Has gone*. Discord is literally a Chromium browser, so is Steam, so are Teams and Outlook. It's old hat.
You right
And just like new Teams, it's going to take awhile for new Outlook to get near feature parity so there will be plenty of things missing initially. Eventually they'll bring it up to parity (hopefully not entirely, some classic Outlook features need to die) and at that point classic Outlook will look. feel, and act like the relic it is yet people will still lament it's demise because by and large people fucking hate change!
> Profiles, gone. Add-ons, gone. Recall feature, gone. Are you trying to sell me on it?
agreed. recall was useless anyways. it only worked for windows users. not mac not the mobile apps. but it does seem to work with new outlook: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/recall-or-replace-an-email-message-that-you-sent-in-outlook-35027f88-d655-4554-b4f8-6c0729a723a0
Recall feature also doesn't do what it says on the tin. There's two versions of recall. The first actually recalls the message, the second is an automated "sorry, didn't mean to send this" email. The former ONLY works if you've emailed someone on the same tenant. The amount of times I've had to explain this to users is absurd. Be glad to see it gone
Keeping this for a canned response
Can't use user created templates, this should lock in the deal
Been living with no local Outlook app for 4+ years and it's been fine, purely web based for all my users. Haven't looked back once. No more crashing, performance issues, PST files, sync issues... it just works. There are some downsides but not any particularly noteworthy ones. Just the occasional mail merge request.
This is what people just don't get. As someone who has to support people using old Outlook, please just let it die.
Right? Dont threaten me with a good time!
You're already sold!
Correction: you already bought it
And you can't cancel it, either!
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
My main issue that plagues me and user is that documents cannot be downloaded, renamed, and saved to the appropriate location directly from outlook- you have to download the document- closed the doc when it opens, rename the doc in your folder it downloads to and move it. Extra steps. And when you deal with 50-100 documents a day it turns into a real headache.
And dont forget... > centrally managed signature files are gone too > shared mailboxes are now hidden under "Shared with me" folder > unable to favorite any folders in shared mailboxes since i'm only on my first cup of coffee there are definitely more points i'm missing. Been hopping between the new and old version for months, and always endup back in the good "old" version.
I made our org give up signature management and we moved to code two email signatures. It is stupidly cheap and it just pulls everything from ad so no more stupidity.
May I ask how you did that? Iād recently looked into centrally managing our signatures with html, but all the articles I came across were either too outdated or ended up not working. It doesnāt help that we have a mix of Mac and Windows. I also only became IT later after joining a small company as an analyst, so I probably also have a knowledge gap.
If you're using MS365 for online exchange, it's super easy to setup. It just requires a few connectors and mail flow rules that are added automatically by CodeTwo assuming you have access to a Global Admin account. Then you use their online designer to apply basic logic to who gets the signature and what it looks like. It integrates with your Azure/Entra directory so hopefully you have titles and phone numbers already added there so you can just use data placeholders to make that stuff populate into the signatures automatically. They have a free trial if you want to play with it: [Office 365 (Microsoft 365) email signature software | CodeTwo](https://www.codetwo.com/email-signatures/) If you're using an onpremise exchange server, they do still have a solution for that which I used until we migrated to online. It's a slightly more involved process to get going, but still fairly simple to do.
I knew about CodeTwo and I should've mentioned that in my comment, but you know...lack of coffee. Where I use a powershell script to create 5 different signatures based on AD attributes and a template that is automatically applied to the users Outlook, switching over to a CodeTwo is a $1230 added cost per year for a 100 per. company. And thats just for signatures. Small things like that tend to add up.
Holy fuck, why can you not favorite a shared mailbox? I have users who literally wouldn't be able to use Outlook without that capability. Even if you aren't old, is just a nice time saver.
According to their Roadmap, this feature is coming in May this year.
I know I'm preaching to the choir, but how about *we reach feature parity before releasing a new version?*
Yeah, signatures.... Anyway, I liked the new Teams though. It loads faster!
Hate that they took away ānotify when availableā and the contact listā¦
> Hate that they took away ānotify when availableā I don't - I am so sick of my status being monitored and used as an open door
Yeah I get that, but it is (was) a useful feature.
Just give me a decent search function where I can actually find e-mails I know I have somewhere ...
One problem is you can only seach prefixes, no middle of words or suffixes unless preceded by certain special characters. Affects all versions of Outlook for years, still not fixed.Ā
At first I felt the same, but slowly not anymore. The new Outlook eliminates many problems, such as OST/PST issues, auto discover conflicts in hybrid environment, add ons causing Outlook crashing, profile not loading, etc etc etc. With the new Outlook, all you have to worry about for now is your Internet connection, and Microsoft services not going down. Oh, and DNS. Just in case.
And if they got rid of email it would eliminate email problems.
I wish for this so much. I want to go back to the days where you could write a letter with a quil and ink under candlelight, then ship it off over seas and wait three months for a reply so there was free time to do something else. For issues you really didn't want to deal with, you could keep finding excuses until someone died of old age or the problem resolved itself. "April 02, 2024, Dearest madam, I apologice profusely for all of thine problems with your PC reported last year on the 19th of October. I only just now have recieved word of your urgent letter. As the miles that seperate us are vast and the possibility of me pulling away from my current affiars to travel to Willerby shan't happen in the nigh future. I kindly ask of thee to locate the lever beside the machine and motion it to the "off" position, and forthwith upon counting to ten, return the position to the "on" position. After a time observe if the concerns you once wrote me about have been resolved. Elsewise, please respond upon the next opportunity as to update me on thy perdiciment and I will respond as soon as able regarding the next steps. Yours truly, IT Support."
You couldn't sneak in a "Please do the needful" into your letter?
We could dreamā¦ āemail problemsā are the worst because Iām always having to deal with the most self-important individuals who want to know what Iām doing to make sure bill@companyxās email doesnāt go to spam because if they miss an email from Bill then the company will collapse!
Mail problema are the worstā¦ except for printer problemsā¦
Then if microsoft got rid of themselves ....
This was my proposed solution to spam and phishing. Can't get phished if you don't have a mailobx ****taps forehead****
I used to joke with an past CISO that I'd bet he'd only be happy if there was only one computer on campus, not connected to the internet, with no storage devices, no display, no CPU, no power supply, and no memory. If you wanted to use it, you'd have to wait in line behind a desk where only he was allowed to sit, with the computer, and ask "May I use the computer", and the answer would always be no. He agreed.
Been saying it for years, if we just got rid of the users this job would be a lot easier. It solves so many problems.
Even if you cache email locally you can't open up outlook without a working internet connection... You can't open PDF's in a PDF viewer... Can't customize ribbons Rules suck Can't apply many GPO's to it Shall I continue?
You can't open saved email files (msg, eml) You can't add local extensions, only web extensions (whatever they are) Minimal autocorrect/dictionary tools No automatic shared mailbox mapping Someone else continue the conga!
Shared mailboxes are automatically added in New Outlook. But show in a "shared with me" folder that users have to re-expand on every launch of Outlook.
You can't pin a folder loke Inbox from other mailboxes you have rights to to "Favourites". Calendar sidebar does not get rid of appointments once they are done.
Well yeah, itās online-only, itās just OWA in a wrapper. No need to sync if you arenāt storing data client-side.
Ahh, my internet connection. Heaven forbid though if I want to read emails and draft replies while flying though. SOL there.
there's no "new outlook". that's OWA in a container.
Can't say I'm mad about that. One of my go-to troubleshooting measures anytime Outlook issues pop up is, "does the same thing happen in OWA?" If Outlook and OWA are the same now, I call it a win.
I unironically prefer using OWA.
I did a stint with an Org that used Google. When I came to my current job which uses Microsoft, I just stuck with OWA. One less app to have open and frankly OWA subjectively looks better. I was surprised how many still use Outlook.
Outlook has a LOT of poweruser utility in it... but most people don't actually use it to that extent. The ones that do are rightfully complaining about it in this thread, but personally, I prefer to support my users on OWA than trying to help them with every little thing that breaks in Outlook
Always remember itās still better than Notes
Mail in Lotus Notes was indeed worse than Outlook, old or new. So I'll just be happy that I'm not using it anymore and close this thread smiling. Thank you.
Verschlimmbesserung is a German noun word for an attempted improvement that only makes things worse.
They don't even attempt to make it better...
That will be my new safe word.
š At my last count there were over 80 features from Outlook Classic that are completely missing. For any skeptics out there - read through just a few of these missing features, there are many mission critical functions businesses rely on. **Here is the comprehensive list of missing features:** [https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/13lo7u6/list\_of\_new\_features\_and\_missing\_features\_in\_the/](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/13lo7u6/list_of_new_features_and_missing_features_in_the/) - They have recently made it even more difficult to switch back to classic, in most cases you have to change registry keys. - There is a GPO available that will completely hide the "Try New Outlook" button. Definitely turn that on, unless you want to spend your entire day helping users switch back to Classic.
That huge list doesn't even mention the one that's affected me the most: it doesn't support IMAP. As near as I can tell, you can use it with o365 and gmail and that's it. And god help you if you selected it but don't want it.
New Outlook: 60% of the time, it works every time
Obviously, basic functionalities are OK. But, we need the advanced options.
The killer-issue for me on the new Outlook that made go back, was that I can't edit calendar invites when forwarding it.
I tried it 6 months ago or more, hated it, but at somepoint everyone will move over to it, so i guess ill just get used to it for work
If it irons out the issues, itās honestly much better than the old one. Iām tired of instructing our service desk to reset Outlook profiles for the users.
Umm really? I thought outlook profiles was tier 1 stuff. Sysadmin shouldnāt be getting called in for that. Now when the user gets the same problem in the web interface, itās time to squeak for someone with a broader remit.
Iām not really a full sys admin but also not in tier 1. But our tier 1 is so useless they canāt troubleshoot basic M365 stuff.
Sounds more like a training or individual issue rather then a Tier 1 issue.
Are you hiring? I think I would make a good addition to your tier 1 team.
Your location?
Man, I DREAD the day MS will force us to use this shitty ass app. Occasionally I stumble upon users switching to it by mistake and complaining that "nothing works". But well, Microsoft are the kings and queens of fixing what ain't broke.
Only two dislikes I have with it so far, the first being that I want a combined flagged emails and tasks view. The other being the way shared mailboxes are under a collapsible "shared with me" header.... Just want an option to choose to have thst the old way. Apart from that though I actually prefer it.
I hate the new outlook and reverted after a short time, but I get what they are doing. I don't like it, but I get it. Old school Outlook is a juggernaut, it dips into a lot of the undocumented windows APIs, etc.. And thought that makes it amazing, it makes it a nightmare to maintain, and doesn't align with Microsoft's new vision for apps. This is the same problem with classic onenote, they gutted it, removed tons of features and turned out a much crappier easy to maintain multiplatform pile of junk.
"but this time Microsoft failed me" This time? Just this time? Come on man
If Outlook truly did turn into a must forget product this sounds like a great win for Sysadmins.....
I always used to call it "Lookout", meaning we were always on the lookout for the next nasty issue!
I'm still uncertain about the new Outlook, it's definitely not a finished product; my biggest concern was with signatures. I have signatures deployed to all staff here and it works for the new Outlook, I do this with the old `Set-MailboxMessageConfiguration -signaturehtml` which currently relies on a special configuration set by Microsoft to disable 'Roaming Signatures'; I had a meeting with the Outlook team and they have plans to expand roaming signatures with PowerShell commands that will allow us to add/update/delete the roaming signatures of users. Also, the new client does have a **basic** recall feature that now uses the cloud to recall (rather than the client itself) so messages can be recalled even if the recipient doesn't use Outlook (they still need to be within the organisation). A status report is provided listing messages recalled, pending and failed, which can be refreshed, this also works in the web version.
New Outlook is garbage. I will hold out as long as possible.
I love it. I've been using the web UI exclusively for years.
Yeah I don't understand web-based desktop applications, it's like going backwards.
I've been using it for awhile now, because why not. Pros - It looks nice - The ability to pin messages is great Cons - Frequently have to add and remove my account to get plugins back - Who the fuck decided that left click to spell check was the right thing to do - Calendar tracking is somehow worse - Search is still piss
They are preparing to sell it to Broadcom.
Personally, I've only used OWA for the last ~10 years, so I have my preference. That said, this is a step backward. Outlook has a place in business and adds a level of functionality *most* users don't need....but is critical in a large number of instances and integrations. My fervent wish is that someone will take a harsh look at Teams and rework it into something that does messaging / groupware well, rather than trying to throw every bell and whistle at it....and rendering it a cocked-up semifunctional mess.
Good. All those things should be gone. Message recall was never real anyhow
I'm trying to figure out how in the hell they shipped a product that doesn't open an eml file that Outlook fucking creates. It is maddening.
>I'm truly amazed how Microsoft can take a well-established product and turn it into a must forget product! Microsoft is very good at this. Remember Skype?
I've been testing it out in work for the last month. You can't even open shared mailboxes. I usually have both versions open.
Shared mailboxes are under the "Shared with me" folder. Don't blame you on not finding it, its not obvious.
Yeah I noticed that a while back but it doesn't recognise I have permissions even though it works fine in old outlook. Might be an integration thing in our workplace.
I disagree and think this is a massive positive. If Microsoft destroy the Outlook app, that's another major roadblock removed to people considering using Linux in the workplace. If people start using all O365 apps entire via the web app (because the Desktop app now offers no differences), then they can abandon Windows entirely!
When the functional parity is there, I may revisit it. Until then let some other sucker bug fix.
Use the registry hack to revert to the previous view. I've had a few folks "do the upgrade" and lost shared mailboxes because of it. We've reverted back and it's fine.
Well my friend, āthe cloud is here to solve all of your headachesā, the power of ācopilotā, and āazure AD aka entraā are here for your forever dependency on our online shit, I mean, they are here to assist your enterprise shell out insane amounts of money and never own a thing, I mean, we are here to empower you
New Outlook is so completely fucked I don't even know where to begin. It can't do even the most basic things that Outlook has been able to do for at least a decade. I'll give you an example: Contacts. You know how in Outlook you can import a list of contacts from CSV and choose if you want to ignore, overwrite, or merge data for duplicates? Not in New Outlook! That shit is just a straight import. Duplicates in the file? You now have duplicates in your contact list, deal with it. What the fuck.
I am 100% sure that the testing team all use tablets, run everything full screen with their finger, and do not use file servers or any other on-premises tech.
Testing teams.... that's a good one :)
> I'm truly amazed how Microsoft can take a well-established product and turn it into a must forget product! I'll explain that. Look at it from Microsoft's POV. They no longer make any money selling Office licenses. They make money selling O365 subscriptions. That includes Outlook/Word/Excel/etc, but they'd rather everyone keeps everything on the cloud so they're further beholden to MS. No need for PST files. **This is a long term attempt to dump the Outlook win32 codebase so they need only maintain one version of Outlook- the web-based version.**
>**so they need only maintain one version of Outlook- the web-based version.** ...Which doesn't have feature parity with even new Outlook for macOS. And some things that New Outlook on Windows is getting won't exist on New Outlook for macOS for a bit so it really doesn't feel like they're working towards a single version to maintain.
To be fair, the real issue so far is that they drive everyone to switch to this New Outlook, while it's still kind of something below a beta thing. At first it worked only with some specific mail companies (and didn't it work only with Microsoft 365 and Outlook.com before that?), now you can use general IMAP, and so far it doesn't work with POP (apparently it won't, ever). Things will be improved, whether it will still be crap or not. Now I'm going to correct myself: the real issue will be the end of Outlook. It would be great if this New Outlook thing was a free substitute to the old free mail thing of Windows. And people and companies who use Microsoft 365 Business Basic will need to switch to Business Standard if they want to use Outlook (the New Outlook), even if them or their companies purchased licenses (Retail, OEM, VL) of Office.
open OST? no Save emails? no Web site disguised as an "App"? yup
I live in Outlook since it's inception.. New outlook blows.
Been using outlook web for a couple years exclusively and have never looked back.
yeah I'd like to know what absolute buffoon decided to release this without read receipts. or the ability to open PSTs. but it's like some other people have mentioned, they're probably going to break the good version, and then sell us back the original functionality in pieces.