I have only ever used Outlook on a consistent basis twice. The first was during my internship at Amgen, and the second is now here at Children’s National Medical Center.

I tried to use Thunderbird in college, and it worked well in the beginning. Once I started to use Gmail, however, it was clearly less efficient, and since Gmail introduced themes, the AJAX-based webmail interface of Gmail is too good not to use.

I do appreciate Outlook, though, so long as people know how to use it properly.  One very useful feature comes from its integration with a calendar, and the ability to invite attendees to meetings, events, etc.  This was done very effectively at Amgen, and not so much at CNMC.  My PI only just learned how to do that, which is good, but to be honest, the meetings I forget about are not the ones with her.

The things that both Outlook and Gmail do well seem to be related to the fact that while people want tools that will do everything, each specific function still needs to be segregated.  I don’t want to look at my calendar, my documents, and my e-mail all at once — but I do want to be able to if I need, and I want edot be able to switch between them quickly.  I also want to move something from my e-mail to my calendar or my documents easily, with as few dialog boxes as possible.

One annoyance I have with Outlook is is someone send me a meeting reminder as a normal e-mail and not an Outlook invitation, I haven’t figured out a way to easily add that to my calendar without switching between my Inbox view and my Calendar repeatedly.  Of course, as I’m writing this, I just noticed I need to hit Ctrl+Shift+A.  Yup, that will work.  Nevermind.