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Outlook 2003 rant

OL2003 is the latest evolution of a very sophisticated application, there are many improvements, including excellent junk mail handling, and the space saving two-line view.

There are many little nits however.  Today’s nit is that OL2003 hides public folders from view.  The new navigation bar replaces the older “Outlook Bar” and “Folder List” window panes by combining the functionality of both.  When you select Calendar, the various calendar folders are listed as “My Calendars”.  Similarly with Contacts, only those contact folders you select are shown.

However, when the Mail navbar button is chosen, a tree view is shown in the middle pane, while a flat list of “Favorite Folders” is shown at the top.  This tree view resembles the “Folder List” pane from previous versions, with a difference – non-mail folders are not shown.  This is a huge improvement, because Contact, Task, Calendar folders aren’t cluttering the overall list.  This is especially useful if you have multiple personal storage (PST) locations.

One downside however is that Public Folders are not shown in this list.  Public Folders appear when you are connected to a Microsoft Exchange server.  At Microsoft, for example, there are thousands of public folders, ranging from shared contacts for a particular team to mailing list archives.  Some corporations use Public Folders as a NNTP gateway to Newsgroups.

In order to see Public Folders, you have to choose the Folder List navigation button, which then shows all the folder items, just like the older “Folder List” pane.

My suggestion to the Outlook dev team would be to consider implementing one of the following:

1.       Have a “Public Folders” navigation button.  When selected, it shows an expanded tree view starting at the root Public Folders node.  Use the top pane for “Favorite Public Folders” showing the selected favorites.  This navigation button can be deselected by default (just like the Journal button) and if not connected to a Exchange account, the UI could be hidden.

2.       Simply include the Public Folder nodes in the All Mail Folders tree view.

Later I’ll rant on two-line view quirks.

4 Comments

  • An undocumented "feature" is that if you add a public folder to your favourites list it doesn't appear there - oh joy!

  • when you add it from public folders it is added as a public folder favorite (a subsection of public folders) you then need to go into that favorites folder and right click and 'add to favorite folders' this will then add the mail folder to your favorites list in the mail view.

  • Re Bill's tip above, it works to start off but then they disapear. At the moment I can't get one of my public folders to even appear in the favorites list, let alone have it appear in the favorite folders for mail or contacts etc. Is anyone else having any problems with disapearing favorite folders.

  • I have a problem that is now being reported by several people in our organisation and
    I'd really appreciate your expertise on this.

    Basically, in the Other Calendars section users have added some of the
    public folder calendars. Very recently the calendar names automatically
    changed (presumably due to a Microsoft update) so each are appended with the
    words "in public folders". So for example, the calendar called "Meeting Room
    1" now says "Meeting Room 1 in Public Folders". They cannot be renamed to
    exclude the "in public folders" text. This is very frustrating for several
    receptionists who may have several calendars open at any one time. In the
    split calendar view, each calendar name is centre aligned, and if there are
    several calendars opened, the text appears truncated so the user cannot view
    the full name of the calendar.

    Do you know of anything that can put it back to the way it was originally,
    to stop "in public folders" to be appended to the end of each calendar name? I'd appreciate any feedback on
    this one.

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