> I understand there are some missing features compared to the old one

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.

> People treat email has a permanent data store.

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?

Pretty much any app that's been around a while will have all kinds of advanced features that the average user will never use, and eventually becomes detrimental. Hence there's always a group of users and product managers asking to rewrite the app to focus on "the basics".

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.

>and I came across all manner of horrors of COM Add-ins.

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.

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.

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.

Outlook COM addons + AutoHotKey was one of the ways that I learned programming back in the day. Email arrives > check the sender > if sender is $company > check for keywords and then run excel macros based on that > generate PDF report and automatically generate an outlook email, attach and send the file.

Good times, it feels like we're getting less and less flexible with the hackability of our corporate workflows as time goes on.

Yeah this is pretty much the only thing protecting us from Records Retention Policy(tm). Because the legal office thinks discovery is toooooooo risky, we have to delete all of the information we used to develop long lived business processes.

When I wrote this god and I understood it, now god only knows.

Funny enough, COM is still the fastest way to read calendar data.

A self sorting shield against to much information if you are at the hub of some organization..

More like email became stripped down and no longer what it was. Mailboxes were always a permanent data store, there were mail files on disk.

> People treat email has a permanent data store.

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.