Reliance on Outlook (been a looong time, I know)
- by AndyScott
Do you feel that your development group too reliant on Outlook? Have you reached a point that you have to search your email for pertinent information when asked? What are you using?
I realized things had gotten out of hand a couple weeks ago over a weekend. I was at my in-laws house (in the country, no PC/laptop, no internet connection; and I get an email on my phone that I needed to reply to, but I couldn't send without deleting items from my inbox/sent items/etc. Now mind you, I have rules set up to move stuff into folders, and files more than a month old are automatically moved to the PST; but generally don't manually move items to a PST until I have had a chance to 'work' the item. Please don't bother mocking my process, it's just the way I work. That being said, it was a frustrating process of 'I need all this information, what can I afford to lose'.
I work on an International project (think lots of customers), and conversations in 9 or 10 different directions about 10-20 different things are not abnormal for a given day. I have found myself looking data up in Outlook because that's where it is. I think that I have reached the point now, where I don't feel that Outlook is up to the task of organizing the data that it contains.
When you have that many emails (200 or so a day), information seems to get lost at times, and I find that Outlook's search capabilities are lacking. Additionally, I find that any sort of organizational 'system' of sorting emails that can cover multiple topics is a lost cause. But at the same time, the old process of taking the information that I got from emails and moving it into another 'notes' type of program has proved to be too time consuming. Anyone out there have some better type of system? (Comments about the capacity of my brain, and it's ability to recall information not needed.)
