#53: Right tool for the job

Posted on November 20, 2024 by ewand

Anyone who has worked in IT for long enough will likely have seen cases where unwitting users are wielding completely the wrong utility or application to get stuff done. Perhaps the entire company finance system is running on an old Access database, or the accountants were using a spreadsheet for holding something other than numbers? It’s one thing having lots of tools, but knowing which one to use when is sometimes a lost art.

Sometimes, organizational culture is to blame – if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail (as how Microsoft leaders once felt about Oracle’s Larry Ellison saying that “database” was the answer to every question). Some companies use email for everything, others have moved all their internal comms to Teams or Slack, and occasionally use email only for customers.

The advent of Electronic Forms

One early measure of effectiveness of newly-installed IT systems, was the inefficiencies it managed to replace – and reducing paper forms was one often paraded benefit. Literally cutting red tape, not only speeding everything up and reducing wasted paper, moving to electronic forms was and is an easy case to make. Nowadays, you’d use a web form onto some kind of cloudy data store without even thinking about it, but it wasn’t always so simple.

In the late 1990s, forms were a key component of “Groupware”, with Lotus Notes being the early market leader (and which spurred Microsoft into competitive action in trying to build an alternative).

Microsoft had a separate E-Forms product as far back as the early 1990s, running on top of the old MSMail system, later being migrated into Exchange. The idea was that companies could easily make forms to send around in email, capturing data fields and making smart routing and workflow decisions along the way. It’s safe to say, they never really took off…

Outlook picked up forms duty (see here, in the cutting edge “Developing a workflow application” Exchange 5.5 whitepaper). There are still vestiges of Forms Designer in Outlook today (if you’re on Outlook (classic) rather than the upstart New Outlook, that is).

Forms in the 2020s

It’s so easy to use forms now – quickly building a web front end to a set of data is par for the course with Google Forms and Microsoft Forms, to name just two examples. Both are available in free versions (using a consumer Gmail/Outlook type login) or are part of corporate packages which bring extra functions and access to other data.

It is easy to create a form with some simple validation, and then collect responses from people – anonymously or (if they’re in your organization) capturing the logged-in username of the person who submitted it. Results are easily summarized and viewed with charts, word clouds~~wordclouds~~ and the like.

Each form is basically a series of questions, with different types used to validate data – like getting a rating, picking a date, choosing from set options or even entering specific types of text or numbers.

There are lots of scenarios where a simple form could take the place of sending an email – like registering for an event and collecting dietary requirements, or asking a group of people for a time and place that works best to meet; instead of trying to juggle lots of responses, a form could be the ideal way to present options and get their selections.

For meeting arranging scenarios there are numerous ways of trying to make this simpler – from websites like Doodle, the various Calendly/Bookings options for 1:1 meetings, or the former add-in utility FindTime for finding group availability in Outlook, which has now been replaced with a built-in Scheduling poll feature.

2020s meet 2000s

There are some things which should be easy, using Microsoft Forms, that are just not. Even though Forms can be run inside a M365 organization’s own tenant, and therefore we know who everyone is as they’ve already signed in, there’s no way of adding a “Person” to a form, such that they could be picked from the directory.

To do that needs to revert to an altogether older form technology – the SharePoint List. Originating from 2001, SharePoint really hit its stride by 2007, offering lots of web-based collaboration functionality that almost equalled what Lotus was doing a decade earlier. Microsoft did have another forms/data toolset, InfoPath, with SharePoint integrations – but that’s gone away now, not replaced with any single thing. We don’t really talk about InfoPath any more.

Using SharePoint and with~~With~~ a bit of nous, you can~~could~~ quickly build a detailed list – think of it like a simple database – and generate a form with data validation, branching logic and so on.

But a much easier way is to look at the newer Lists web app, which combines simple forms stuff with a SharePoint based back-end, meaning there’s more integration with M365, including directory integration …

… which looks a lot better than having to type someone’s name in.

Lists is part of M365 (look in the app grid on the top left if you go to Office.com and sign in, then peek under the More Apps section). )

In true Microsoft fashion, there are many ways to skin this feline – there’s also Loop, which could be used to do all kinds of groovy things in browsers, Teams, Outlook and more. Oh, and PowerApps. Mash all these tools together and you can build a spidery app legacy to keep your successors entertained for years.

#49: Managing Multiple Messaging

Posted on October 18, 2024 (Updated October 17, 2024) by ewand

It used to be easy: you had an inbox (real or electronic) and new mail arrived. You’d check the inbox for anything that needed your attention, otherwise just get on with whatever it is that you were doing otherwise. Now, there are so many messaging apps that it can be a headache to not only keep on top of all the inbound contact, but to recall in which app you were having a conversation you want to go back to.

It might be easy if your professional comms is all done via email, but if you’re an itinerant consultant working with several companies, you might even have numerous professional email addresses too so keeping an eye on them all can be a chore.

There’s always a chance you’ll be dealing with LinkedIn or SMS messages with work connections as well, and with friends and colleagues there might be Facebook, WhatsApp and many more.

Two quick tips this week might help to get on top of things, if only a little.

Finding work-related messages in M365

If you use Teams and Outlook for work, with Microsoft 365, then you might already experience discombobulation when looking for something a colleague sent, or some comment discussed in the context of a project… was it in the status email, or in the chat of a meeting? Or a direct message in Teams?

Fortunately, the “Work” search options might be able to help. If your organization has it enabled, go to either Bing.com/work or look at the search option in Office.com while you’re signed in, and you’ll be able to search documents and other sources of data within your M365 environment.

One such is Messages – and the handy shortcut to jump there is aka.ms/messages. Type a search term in there and it will look across both your Outlook mailbox, but also in any Teams messages you might have been part of. Once you get used to checking it – and using the Work search for documents and other stuff – it’s a game changer.

Another trick, for finding documents in your work context, is to search from Windows Search directly by pressing the WindowsKey and typing work: followed by something you’re looking for.

Search across OneNote

Though it’s not strictly messaging, you might have taken notes during a meeting (or even had your friendly Copilot overlord do it for you), potentially spread across several OneNote notebooks.

The search box in OneNote lets you choose if you want to perform a query across the current page, section, notebook etc – but the results you get back can be a bit clumsy to interpret as it doesn’t give any details on which are really old pages and which might have been written recently.

If you haven’t discovered the obscure ALT+O to pin search results, try it out – it lets you group by section, page title or date, and you can expand and collapse the groupings to help locate the most likely page more quickly.

Now, where did you put your glasses?

#41: New ≠ better

Posted on August 30, 2024 (Updated August 30, 2024) by ewand

Tip o' the Week

Last week’s tip talked about product Roadmaps and the search for new features; this week’s focuses on two evolving applications that readers may have a fondness for or perhaps an aversion to.

As previewed in Tip o’ the Week #678, both Outlook and Teams have been getting some New-ness by having completely re-written applications with the goal of taking the baton from the old one. This model doesn’t always turn out to be successful – see the confusion that was OneNote supposedly transitioning from a classic Windows app to a Store / UWP app, then giving up and moving back. Or the slow-motion car crash that is Sonos’ new app rollout.

As an aside: LinkedIn really doesn’t make it easy to search previous newsletter articles; that’s one reason why these are also published at www.tipoweek.com, providing a nicely tagged way of re-locating stuff that you might have seen before.

Sometimes, the effort that goes into keeping an old application fresh, secure and performing well can be more than just re-writing it from scratch and phasing the old one out. But Better does not always come with New, at least not in the early stages.

One Teams to Rule Them All

Three years before its pandemic-fueled usage explosion, Teams was launched as a kind of amalgam of Skype for Business and the technologically separate and consumer-oriented Skype (which still exists, to some degree). Teams came along with added collaborative stuff that had been brewing for some years, to try to offer an alternative to Slack.

To help the development cycle, and to keep a degree of parity between Windows, Mac and web apps, the original Teams app used a variety of technologies which caused a pretty high memory overhead on Windows. Later acknowledge by Microsoft, the decision was taken to rearchitect completely with the goal of reducing memory usage by half whilst doubling performance.

After releasing “New Teams” in October 2023, that left Microsoft with 3 separate Teams clients – the original, resource hog one, then the New Teams one which did more-or-less the same things, and the inexplicable “Teams for Home” which was a different version that could only use a Microsoft Account to sign in.

Fortunately, Microsoft has updated New Teams (now just “Microsoft Teams”) to fold in the “Teams (free)” / “Teams for Home” functionality, so there’s only really a single version of note. If you still want to make sure all your PC’s memory gets a good workout, the original Teams app is still available as “Teams classic (work or school)”, at least for now. Phew.

The Old Dog and the New Pup

Outlook has a much longer legacy, dating 20 years before Teams and with some of its innards back to the early 1990s and the original Exchange “Capone” client (and Exchange was dubbed “The Big Dog of BackOffice“).

Microsoft has a long-held desire to move away from the old design and architecture, to something more “Modern” and webby. Just as Teams was built using technology that could span different client architectures, the intent is to create a new Outlook family centered around the same Web UX as seen in Outlook Web App.

Having been in preview for a while, the now-released “New Outlook” was being developed to replace Windows’ built-in Mail & Calendar app(s) in the near future, though not to universal approval. Plus ça change and all that.

Some reviewers want to hold on to the Mail & Calendar apps

Building an app which is effectively a web experience but looks like a desktop one, has its own challenges that Microsoft is trying to address before the inevitable full retirement of Old Outlook in favour of the new one.

If you’re an existing Outlook (classic) user, do not be tantalized by the Try the new Outlook option on the top right – press the button only if you’re already prepared for the consequences.

Actually, you can run classic Outlook and New Outlook side by side if you like; selecting the “Try the new…” button just means that trying to start Old Outlook will just bring up the new one instead; if you go through the routine of Trying the new, it will set up your profile and when done, you can switch it off and have both clients set up to connect to the same accounts.

There are some downsides. Web Applications aren’t typically very good at being offline, and email is one of those things that you might like to use when on a plane or even being on a slow network. New Outlook is getting some offline capabilities but don’t expect it to be the same as the old one.

And don’t even think about using local archives, not for a while…

Most users of Teams would see the New version as an improvement, even if it doesn’t match all the functionality of the original. It’s certainly easier when switching around between tenants, such as when you’re working with several different companies. Almost everyone will automatically get the new version in place of the old, with a few diehards holding out before eventually being subsumed.

New Outlook is going to take a bit more time to get used to. There is a feature comparison which gives some idea of the differences; if you don’t get vast amounts of email, then New Outlook is OK. If you have multiple email accounts to deal with, it makes a reasonable fist of showing them in one place rather than needing a separate browser window for each, but then Old Outlook did that too. Somewhat annoyingly, New Outlook can’t combine mailboxes into a single Inbox view, like the mobile Outlook client does, and it won’t let you search across different mailboxes either.

It looks like Old Outlook will still be with us for at least 5 years – maybe it’ll live on while email has not yet been replaced by other messaging apps like WhatsApp and Teams.

#26: Further Outlook Calendar Fun

Posted on May 10, 2024 by ewand

Following on from last week’s tip on New Outlook and its addition of the “In-person” switch to designate a meeting as taking place in actual 3D, here’s a quick look back at another calendary thing that’s been in Exchange and Outlook since the year dot – the meeting status.

When you create an entry in your calendar, you can set whether it shows you as busy or not – the original status choices being free/tentative/busy/OOF. Microsoft added the new “Working elsewhere” more than a decade ago, though it never really took off. It wasn’t helped by the lack of support on some clients, and an initial gnarly bug in Exchange 2013 which meant Working Elsewhere appointments sometimes disappeared. It does work pretty well now, though – Think of it like a soft Out of Office which doesn’t get in the way of people booking time with you, but it does signify that you’re not physically in the office. That’s a lot more likely these days than it was 11 years ago.

Showing your actual availability is a bit more nuanced than it was when Outlook was launched in 1997; you might be technically Out of Office but still able to be contacted in some ways. You could set a status message in Teams to add context to where you are or how available you might be.

Of course, making sure other people can see your calendar (at least sharing the high level view of where you are and what you’re doing) will help, and do tell people to use the scheduling assistant in Outlook when trying to book meetings with you. Maybe also set your Work Hours to make it clear if you habitually work at different times to your colleagues, take Friday afternoons off etc.

If you have a group of people who work closely together, you could try using a variety of other tools to track whereabouts and make it easier to meet – check out TeamLink, a free Power App that runs inside of Teams, or perhaps the supposedly forthcoming feature set formerly introduced as Microsoft Places.

Finally, there are two stages of Out of Office – there’s the automatic message you might set to respond to emails to say you’re away; the best OOF messages might just apologize that you’re gone so will probably never read these emails. Alternatively, you could set the status of your appointment to show OOF and then people who can see your calendar will know you’re just gone for a while, such as away for the afternoon, but you haven’t gone to the extent of setting up an auto-response.

Both of these can also help with voice messaging, either external telephone calls if you’re using Teams Phone or just “calls” directly into Teams from colleagues or other external contacts. Look in Teams settings, and you can set up how you want to handle calls that go unanswered. You can record your own greeting, or just type in a message and have the system say that to the caller.

Note the granularity where you could have a message played only during times when your calendar is showing Out of Office.

#25: Where shall we meet again?

Posted on May 3, 2024 by ewand

If you are of the 400 million or so users of Microsoft 365, you probably use email as one of the key services, provided by Exchange Online. A little more than 28 years ago, Microsoft released Exchange Server, its first proper server product* and a key progenitor of Active Directory, an enabler of pervasive use of email in business and even standardising the means to deliver mail to your mobile.

Though its main usage is email and calendaring, Exchange was designed in an era when “groupware” was the next big thing; the idea was that the server would be a database of loosely structured data that end users would interact with using forms to display and edit those data. As it happens, an email message is just a bunch of data items like the recipients’ names, the subject and a whole load of hidden fields used in routing, storing and managing that message. When you open that message in Outlook, it uses a form which looks like an email to interpret the fields.

Outlook 97 and its numerous successors all feature a form editing capability – right-click on the toolbar, choose Customize then on the resulting dialog, you’ll see a hidden “Developer” tab.

Tick that box to unveil it and you’ll see a new ribbon tab with all kinds of functions, one of which is to choose a form from various libraries, or even design a new one (based on an existing form, such as an email or a contact card).

A relatively simple use of this kind of thing would be to add a custom field or two to an existing form; it might be easier to use categories but if you wanted to include some more structured information to a contact form, for example, you could put additional data fields with validation logic behind them. Essentially what you’d be doing here is adding some custom fields to the database, and you’d also be customizing the form which is used to view and edit that newly extended data structure.

For one practical application of this technique, see ToW 259, which shows you how to track who you sent and received Christmas cards to/from, by modifying your contacts form.

The downside of customizing a form is that you need to distribute the newly extended form otherwise people won’t be able to see the additional fields – that’s essentially an automatic process when using Exchange and Outlook within a single organization (the form is published on the server), but it becomes a whole lot messier when dealing with external parties. And it doesn’t work at all on web, or mobile, or the “New Outlook” (which is basically the web client wrapped up to look like an app). So, it’s super useful these days.

New Outlook, new Meetings

One of the subtle changes that New Outlook introduces to anyone who switches from Old Outlook, is a change in name to a key part of its functionality. In Outlook, you have appointments (which are things you put in your own diary) and meetings (which are appointments to which you invite other people or resources – or have been invited by the organizer – and that changes the form which is used to interact with the calendar entry).

New Outlook simply has “Events”, which essentially combines the previous two concepts in one. As well as a different UI, New Outlook adds some other functions, like the “In-person event” button, which lets you make the point that a meeting is taking place IRL rather than only virtually.

This same functionality is not available in Old Outlook or in mobile versions, only in Web App and New Outlook – but that doesn’t really matter too much, as all the “in-person” switch does is to append “[In-person]” to the end of the Title line.

Clearing the switch removes the text, though it’s just searching for that string and hacking it out (set a Subject line of I like people [In-person] [In-person] [In-person] and then toggle the switch back and forth a couple of times to observe). A more elegant way of building this would have been to make a new field on the Appointment / Meeting object called “in-person” and then had Outlook et al flip that switch, rather than just tagging a bit of text on. Oh well…

If you’d like to explore what lies beneath your favourite Outlook form, try opening the item (Contact, message, Task etc) in Old Outlook, and if you don’t see a Developer tab, repeat the exercise from earlier and right-click / customize / enable Developer. You’ll then see a “Design This Form” option, which flips your current item into developer mode, exposing hidden regions. Look in the “all fields” tab, and you’ll find every property that has been set on the item.

This trick can be useful for finding out when an appointment has really been created in someone else’s calendar (if they share their calendar) – if they are suddenly unavailable to meet, you could see if they had that blocking appointment in there already or just created it after you’d asked…

APPENDIX

Email was first invented in 1971, and by the mid 1990s it was in common use amongst people who worked on terminals or desktop computers as a large part of their job. While standards like X400 and SMTP existed for exchanging email with other entities, you weren’t going to be emailing your bank manager or booking a doctors appointment. For some reason, X400 never really took off as intended – who knows why? Most companies which used email relied on it for internal communications – IBM’s NOSS internal system (a PROFS implementation) had over 350,000 users by the end of the 1980s, with no easy way to send email to external parties.

As dial-up services like AOL and ComuServe started gaining popularity amongst home users, and those walled-garden opened up and allowed exchange of email over the internet, companies began to adopt email more widely and people would start to put their email address on their business cards (alongside their fax number).

*Exchange was arguably Microsoft’s first proper server product, apart from Windows NT Server on which it ran. There were other back-end products which pre-dated Exchange, like SMS (systems management software), SNA server (for communicating with mainframes) and the early NT variants of SQL Server which had been based on Sybase’s SQL Server. These and Exchange had been bundled together as Microsoft BackOffice for a while. Exchange was the first Microsoft server product that most end users would interact with.

#14: Meetings are a drag

Posted on February 16, 2024 by ewand

Last week’s rant on New Outlook’s stupefying licensing enforcement was quickly and neatly responded to by Microsoft Outlook Product Manager, Allen Filush, in a comment and more publicly on a blog post which had neatly been written the week before. Chapeau, Allen… Anyway, a new release of New Outlook also neatly deals with the issue and now allows you to add certain M365 subscriptions that were previously blocked, and should be available now.

The scourge of feature parity

One of the problems inherent in widely used software which has been around a long time, is that of technical debt. Microsoft saddled itself hugely with the effort of backwards compatibility in old versions of Windows; occasionally companies will take the other approach and sacrifice short term user pain for the benefit of moving forward quickly.

It’s never easy building a new application which is intended to take the place of the old, without necessarily replicating all the features of its predecessor. Cutting some obscure shortcut key sequence that application telemetry tells you 0.1% of the userbase ever invokes, will still annoy the 0.02% of those who do it every day. One such deprecation – if you want to call it that – is to be found in New Outlook.

A bit of Drag and Drop history

The metaphors of drag & drop were present at the outset of the Graphical User Interface, as an easy way of moving files around. Other forms of drag & drop have evolved since – like clicking on a tab in your browser, and dragging it off the window to launch a new window with just that tab in, or dragging browser tabs between open windows.

Edge even has an experimental new feature called Super Drag and Drop which lets you open a link in a new tab by dragging it as you click on it.

If you like opening other stuff while reading online articles, but want them to open in a new tab, just hold Control key down as you click on them, or enable Super Drag and do it with a deft flick of the wrist.

To the chagrin of some Windows 10 users, one of the side-effects of the redevelopment / simplification of the taskbar in Windows 11 was the lack of drag & drop support; previously it was possible to drag a file from Explorer and by hovering it over an icon in the taskbar, that app would open up and let you open that file by dropping it in. That was no longer possible in initial versions of Windows 11 but was hurriedly re-implemented.

Outlook Droppings

One handy trick in Old Outlook, was when you wanted to turn an email into a calendar appointment. Some people like to use their calendar as a task list, so if they intend to reserve time for something, they might start from the email they need to work on. In the Outlook Heritage Edition™️ you could simply drag an email from your Inbox to the Calendar icon on the Wunderbar to generate an appointment in your diary with the contents of the email. It might throw away some of the formatting and the attachments etc, but at least it was a start.

Try doing that in New Outlook and you’ll get less success. You’ll get a little “denied” icon if you try to drop your email onto the calendar node, so what to do? Copy all the contents to the clipboard, switch to calendar, create an appointment and paste the contents in… ?

Quick Steps to the Rescue

The old Outlook app had a Quick Steps capability where users could define easily-repeatable tasks, like moving an email to a specific subfolder, categorizing it or creating related tasks.

The New Step wizard lets you select from a list of pre-defined templates, including picking up the content of your email and creating a new meeting or appointment with it.

But that’s old Outlook, the one that might one day be replaced by New Outlook. Though some of the decades’ worth of Outlook functionality has been left behind, Quick Steps are not one of them.

That said, not all of the Quick Steps templates carry over – including that thing with the Appointments seen in Dusty Old Outlook. But there is a workaround.

When you put something in your calendar, that’s an appointment. As soon as you invite other people or resources to it, then it’s now a meeting. They are handled differently even though they’re closely related – you save an appointment, you send a meeting request, for example. New Outlook can has a quick step that could be useful.

Create a new quick step (by going into Manage quick steps) and near the bottom of the list, you’ll see the option to Reply with meeting. You can add other stuff like assigning categories, putting in a description which will show in a tool tip if you hover over the quick step or give it a shortcut key if you want to use it all the time.

When you click on the new quick step, it will add a new draft meeting to your calendar, insert the recipients of that email to the invitation, and copies the body text of the source message into the main part of the new meeting). It does a better job of formatting than the old Outlook version, but still dumps any attachments, sadly. (A useful scenario could be adding an email about an event with attached PDF tickets to your calendar, but you could always put the attachment in manually, later).

If you remove the attendees (and change the “Teams Meeting” toggle if that’s on by default), you can then simply save the appointment in your own calendar.

There are other ways of doing the same thing, though the UI is somewhat inconsistent. In the preview pane, if you click the “…” ellipsis at the top right of a message, you’ll see the option to reply with a meeting or forward as an attachment.

Open the message up in its own window and the ellipsis gives a single-click Respond with meeting option:

#13: New Outlook gets in own way

Posted on February 9, 2024 by ewand

Many people rely on email for their work, and in some cases the inbox and calendar are the primary tools they use. Gen Z’ers might put up a struggle on entering the workforce, preferring to commune via instant messaging or Tik Tok, but for the most part we know that email isn’t going away. Unless you have an alternative product to sell, that is.

The Outlook application that comes with Microsoft 365 and Office suite has been with us since 1997, but can trace some of its roots back some years before that. Students of history may want to delve into the writings of ex-Office supremo (who went on to bring Windows 8 upon the world), Steven Sinofsky, as he revisits some of the tensions between and the decisions being made by the various development teams. There’s a good one on Outlook’s gestation, or the one where BillG gets presented with the idea for the Office Assistant: 042. Clippy, The F*cking Clown.

In a trope briefly discussed last week, we all know how Microsoft has historically loved to use the same name for wildly different things. “Outlook” is one such case – at various times, the core application which has had quite different capabilities during its growth (especially the difficult second album version, Outlook 98) and the name was associated with a whole slew of other products and/or services.

In the Windows 95 / Internet Explorer 3 days, there was a free app called “Microsoft Internet Mail and News” which combined internet email – POP3, IMAP4 – and the long-dead USENET newsgroup infrastructure based on the NNTP protocol. This was rebranded as “Outlook Express” even though it had nothing to do with the main Outlook application; the actual executable file for Outlook Express was still MSIMN.EXE for its whole life…

[Outlook Express … the solution for all your messaging needs…]

The Exchange Server that sat behind much corporate email added a web view of your mailbox back in 1996, called Exchange Web Access, later renamed Outlook Web Access and then Outlook Web App. As the functionality developed, so the old Hotmail.com service was rebranded Outlook.com, and the functionality of Outlook Web App for Exchange users and the free Outlook.com web client converged to a degree, as Outlook.com was moved to the same Exchange-based Microsoft 365 infrastructure.

Then there’s the mobile Outlook apps – Microsoft acquired email and calendaring companies Acompli and Sunrise Calendar, and folded their stuff into the highly-regarded Outlook mobile applications for iOS and Android.

Finally, when Windows 10 released, there were built-in Mail and Calendar applications; in fact, it was the same application under the hood, but it could be started with different criteria which would set how it looked. This app is still available in the Windows Store and came with OG versions of Windows 11. If you delve back to August 2018 and Tip o’ the Week 445 – Finding Modern App names, you’ll see how to find out what “modern apps” are really called within the system; as it happens, under the hood, the Mail and Calendar app was … ms-outlook.

One Outlook to rule them all

There has been a long held dream in Microsoft of having a replacement for the sometimes creaky old PC Outlook application and the Windows 10/11 Mail & Calendar app, to bring them together under a shiny new application. Sometimes known as “Project Monarch” or “One Outlook”, this new version will use web technologies to effectively be running Outlook Web App but with offline capability, on your PC or Mac.

Spot the difference? The New Outlook above has lots of mail accounts added with different inboxes etc pinned to Favourites. Here’s the same primary mailbox in Outlook Web App:

The New Outlook for Windows has been available in preview for a while, and you might be getting nagged to migrate from Windows Mail to try it out, or if your M365 administrator hasn’t switched off the prompt, you could even be getting it in full-fat Outlook.

Having been in Preview for a while, Microsoft announced in September 2023 that this new client is now generally available, and was to be pre-installed on latest versions of Windows 11. By the end of 2024, the old Mail & Calendar apps on Win10/11 will no longer be supported and won’t be available in the Store anymore. It could be a long time coming to migrate desktop Outlook users to the new-fangled version, but the signalling is saying it’s happening someday.

Check those horses

By all means, have a play with the New Outlook – it’s actually pretty good, if you don’t get 10,000 emails every day; in fact, if you have several accounts, it does a better job of keeping on top of them all than old Outlook does (though, arguably, not as well as Mobile Outlook, which lets you see a single Inbox view of all accounts). If you decide to go for it, then you’ll still have access to the Old Outlook app as well (should you need it), and if you’re moving from Windows Mail to New Outlook and don’t like it then the move back should be smooth too.

But currently, there is a gotcha. And it’s the cold hand of license enforcement mistakenly stopping play.

Users of certain M365 subscriptions – Business Basic, or Exchange Online Plan 1 as two examples, are being blocked from using the New Outlook as their license supposedly doesn’t allow it. There is a confusion having a license for a piece of software, and having the rights to use your software against a separately licensed service.

If you look at Compare All Microsoft 365 Plans, you’ll see that Business Basic include “Web and mobile apps only” for Outlook; another way of putting that is “you don’t get the Office applications on your PC or Mac” by buying that subscription. But what if you had the actual software already, through another route? If you have a M365 Family subscription, you can install the Office apps on 6 machines, and there’s nothing stopping you from connecting to a separately-paid-for M365 Business Basic mailbox from your legitimately-licensed Outlook application.

But New Outlook thinks differently. Trying to add a low-cost M365 mailbox gets you an unhelpful error:

Raise a ticket through official support and you’ll be told “you can access your mailbox by upgrading to a premium subscription”. The irony of “Add all your email accounts” is also not lost (especially since free services like Gmail, Outlook.com and Yahoo! seemingly have no problem), but penny-pinching paid-for Microsoft 365 subscriptions do.

Looking at the Exchange Online Service Description…

The service that is being paid for should allow access from “Outlook for Windows”. Regardless of whether that means the full-fat Outlook app that you have to buy, or the freely available “New Outlook”, this document says you can access those mailboxes. But the New Outlook app is now enforcing something different.

Predictably, there are furious users on the internet. The Powers That Be have been made aware and are trying to think up an appropriate way round the issue, apparently. How about, don’t be a Doofus, Rufus? Excellent!

678 – New Old Things again

Posted on April 21, 2023 by ewand

In ToW 632 – New Old Things, the topic of the old version of OneNote getting some spiffy new features was raised. This week carries on the same theme in a different direction – some altogether new versions of old applications, which might be worth taking a look at, even if they’re not quite fully featured yet.

In the beginning there was Skype. Well, actually, before that there was MSN Messenger and its variants. Business environments then got Live Communications Server, Office Communications Server, eventually Lync, and finally the confusingly branded Skype for Business.

Teams came along from the left field around 6 years ago and from a real-time collaboration product point of view, swept all before it (at least in Microsoft), eventually replacing Skype for Business, as the pandemic turbocharged its adoption and appeal. Skype is still with us, with reasonably recent releases and even integration of the new Bing and GPT driven AI.

The thing is, the original Teams client grew up pretty quickly and though it has had lots of improvements, it’s never been especially resource-light, or quick. The Teams team (herein lies one challenge with its name) took the decision to start over and build a new Teams client, shiny and slick and running like greased lightning.

If you feel like giving it a try, you may see a Try new Teams slider on the top left of the main Teams client window; clicking that will restart Teams by closing the old app and starting the new. There are some features not quite there yet, but the list is being updated frequently as functionality improves. If you switch to the new Teams preview and don’t like it, you can quickly switch back – but you’re either/or running one or the other.

Outlook has a longer heritage – it came out first with Office 97 so has its roots in early/mid-90s code, and even if the core of the app has been re-engineered and the UX has had numerous polishes over the years, there are still occasional peeks at a Windows 95 era application lurking beneath.

There has been a push for some time to make the Outlook Web client a more viable alternative for many users, including showing Outlook Web in an Edge sidebar even when clicking a link from the PC desktop client. Functionality differs between the full-fat desktop, the web client and the various mobile apps.

There’s a “new Outlook” on the way, now too – previously codenamed “project Monarch” it’s supposedly been in the works for years, yet looks a lot like the web client that happens to run in a window – it’s available in preview now. It may end up replacing the variety of desktop, web and mobile apps, though that could take a while. In near terms, the new Outlook will likely supplant the default Mail & Calendar apps in Windows 11.

You may see a Try the new Outlook slider on the top right of the main Outlook window; flicking that will restart Outlook in its new guise, however unlike the new Teams, it is possible to run both new and old, side-by-side.

One way would be to make the switch, then on the new “Outlook PRE” icon that appears on the taskbar, choose to Pin it. Then flick back and you’ll now have both old and new Outlooks available together. You could configure the New one to remove your main M365 email account, and just have your Outlook.com / Hotmail or now even a Gmail account, while leaving all your work emails in the old Outlook UX.

If you want to keep old and new Outlook with different account setups – business in the old, private in the new, for example – go straight to the Store and install the New Outlook app, then configure it as you like when it starts.

676 – Calendar spring cleaning

Posted on April 7, 2023 by ewand

As spring continues to emerge from its wintry slumber in the northern hemisphere, it could be worth spending a little time tidying up your Outlook calendar as well as spring cleaning your nest. The following applies to Outlook on the PC, though similar colour-coding concepts exist for Outlook Web App and on other platforms.

You could start by looking for “Ghost meetings” – those are ones where you’re the organizer, but none of the invited attendees have accepted your invitation. A good example is a 1:1 meeting when the other party is on holiday – they might have declined a meeting but you left it in your calendar.

To quickly view Ghost (or maybe Zombie?) meetings in your calendar:

Download this ZIP file and open the downloads folder where it is saved.
Right-click the ZIP and choose Extract All then right-click the resulting file and Unblock it, so Excel will let you run the macro within (don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe).
Now open the file in Excel. If asked, tell it you want to edit the file and allow macros to run, then hit the Scan Calendar button. You’ll now get a list of meetings to go and delete, or possibly to nag the invitees to respond.

Another trick is to colour-code your appointments, either by setting categories on them individually or by using rules. This way you could quickly differentiate an appointment (ie something you put in your calendar to block out time) from a meeting (ie an appointment which you invited others, or to which you have been invited).

Setting a colour category is a quick exercise once you have the categories defined – right-click on an entry in the calendar to pick a category, or you can set it from Categorize option on the Ribbon while creating or editing an appointment or meeting.

Rules are set by creating instructions that apply to the view you’re using; go to the View menu on the ribbon and choose the View Settings menu item.

This presents a somewhat old-fashioned looking dialog box which lets you change the view, including using Conditional Formatting, where you define rules that will mean the select colour applies.

In “My Meetings”, if your name is the organizer, then the meeting shows as green.

Explore the conditions dialog a little and you’ll see all kinds of things you can filter by. It includes a powerful advanced mode that will let you set a condition on any property of the meeting or appointment (so you could have different colours for meetings whose locations were in different buildings etc).

The “External meetings” condition above does require further hoops to be jumped through to get it set up, but it’s a one-and-done exercise. It involves adding a custom form to Outlook, which in turn exposes a new property called “Sender Address Type” – if the value is SMTP, that means the message – or calendar meeting request in this case – came from outside, so you’ve been invited to a meeting organized by a 3^rd party. The same field could be used to colour code your inbox so as to prioritize emails differently too.

To see how you could use the Sender Address Type to alter how your inbox is displayed, and for the instructions on how to install the form so that field becomes visible to Outlook, crank up the time machine and head back to Tip o’ the Week #275 – Prioritising External Email – Ewan Dalton’s Tip o’ the Week (tipoweek.com). Great Scot!

672 – Why your meetings are clashing

Posted on March 10, 2023 (Updated March 10, 2023) by ewand

Look at your work calendar for the next two weeks or so; if you’re a part of a multi-national organization that routinely has meetings with people all over the world, your nicely ordered diary might be a maelstrom of overlapping and clashing appointments. Welcome to the start of the 6-monthly Daylight Saving Time Shuffle! Of course, you might have clashing for other reasons.

Meetings in Outlook – apparently, other PIMs are available – are created in the time zone of the organizer. If you’re in London and have set up a weekly 4pm meeting, most of the time that’s at 8am for the people in San Francisco, but for the next 2 weeks it’d be 9am and therefore possibly conflicting with whatever else they had planned for then.

The topic of time and its zones has been covered ad nauseam on ToW passim, but it’s worth a quick reminder of what is ahead (and other countries / regions still do vary – see a summary of the global daylight saving time dates and regions, here), especially since the US has a habit of doing things differently to the rest of the world:

12 March 2023 – Most of the US, Canada, Carribean enters DST (if observed)
24-26 March – most of the rest of the Northern Hemisphere enters DST (if observed)
2 April – Australia, New Zealand leaves DST

Practically, that means that today, a noon meeting in Seattle would be 8pm in London and 7am (tomorrow) in Sydney, but in a little over 3 weeks that would have moved to noon/7pm/6am and eventually settled back at noon SEA and 8pm LON, but now at a refreshing 5am SYD.

Fortunately, the Clock app on Windows 11 has a “Word Clock” feature that lets you pin cities to the map and you’ll see what the current time is (and what the time zone offset is currently). You can also get a tabular view of what the relative time will be at any given date.

Windows Clock app