There are some people that use Outlook for...well I'm not sure what but things that go way beyond email and calendar. I've been using the web app for several years now, it's fine. When I was new in IT, I always struggled to see what the big deal was with Outlook desktop. The web mail has folders, rules, shared mailbox support, integrated calendar, etc.
What more do you need out of email?
Well, turns out a lot. People treat email has a permanent data store. I've encountered folks with multiple PST files archiving 10+ years of email. I ran into people that needed to queue up a bunch of offline emails in their outbox to send when they're on network again (ok, I kind of get this use case), and I came across all manner of horrors of COM Add-ins.
Anyway, the root of the problem is people using email for everything it was never intended to do or be. If "new" Outlook can break some of those habits, we'll all be better off for it.
Is this strange?
I'll be trying to solve some problem, half-remember an email conversation from several years ago on something relevant, and want to look it up.
This feels like the most natural thing in the world to me, and it's not like the ability to save emails is new. Why, exactly, would a forced change of habits be for my own good?
At the personal level, it wouldn't be. It makes a lot of sense, and I do the same with Fastmail.
At the corp level where it's often in M365 cloud, you've got hard limits from Microsoft on one hand (100GB primary mailbox - period), and corporate data retention limits on the other. Legal often has strong opinions on how long you are allowed to retain emails which you may or may not be able to personally override. Could be just a few years, which forces a different strategy.
I'm not sure on the details of Google, but one imagines corp workspaces have equivalent interests.
But I've seen enough corrupted PST files in my days to never trust Outlook/Exchange as permanent file storage.
Now with "New" Outlook you don't even get that, you get an ODT cache file, everything else is permanently server side in Microsoft land.
Enterprise "productivity" software is fundamentally broken.
It works both ways, I ran into a situation where a random Add-in was enabled on the web client and affecting the desktop client behavior despite not being in the list of Add-ins, and could only be disabled from the web client.
There's all flavors of "lite" apps and Firefox started as a stripped down version of Netscape.
A lot of older email apps have a prominent "offline" mode that if you accidentally activate it, basically stops the app from sending or receiving any email. I guess a lot of executives demanded the feature because they were handling all their email while on a plane without connectivity.
Good times, it feels like we're getting less and less flexible with the hackability of our corporate workflows as time goes on.
When I wrote this god and I understood it, now god only knows.
Email the protocol has this built in.
> If "new" Outlook can break some of those habits, we'll all be better off for it.
It won't, since email is in fact the best data store available to most people in enterprises (especially compared to things like Sharepoint). It might finally accelerate the move away from Exchange though. Here's hoping.
If ever there was a recipe for doing a terrible job at building software, that's as good a way to put it as I think we will ever see.
I exclusively used the web UI because it always ran faster for me, except for a small number of things it couldn't do.