Microsoft to release Outlook Internet Enhancement Patch

"The first step toward changing anything is saying what the heck is wrong with the thing you've got."
--Scott Adams
Dilbert cartoonist

Just when I was starting to think they had forgotten about it, Microsoft responded again this week to complaints in the Outlook newsgroup. As many of you know, I recently spearheaded a campaign to fix Outlook's dismal support for Internet E-mail. Here are some interesting comments from David Goodhand, the Microsoft Outlook group product planning manager:

"I agree with Paul T's earlier post on this thread that we did not seek input from a broad enough community of users. Many of [the] active users here are being contacted now for inclusion in various upcoming betas and releases, so we can avoid this in the future...The simple truth (which has been discussed in this group before) is that the beta sites were very heavily weighted toward large organizations running Exchange Server. Almost all of the serious issues posted here can be traced to that error. We underestimated the desire of home office/small office users to upgrade their simple e-mail clients, and we focused too heavily on our comfort zone of large organizations."

David then described a patch, which will be posted next week, called the "Outlook Internet Enhancement Patch": its feature set is the direct result of user complaints and requests in the newsgroups. This is an impressive concession from Microsoft and an exciting development for users frustrated by Outlook