We’ve had our new e-mail in place for about two months now, and we’ve all had time to both receive and send a variety of different types of e-mail: to individuals, to groups, while at work, while at home, etc. What does everyone think of it?
In the first days, I was quite happy. I did not like Novell. I felt it was a slow, cumbersome system. Compared to Novell, Google mail was a pleasure. Novell would never update my incoming e-mail list unless I hit refresh, and would automatically log me out every ten minutes. The result is that it made responding quickly to e-mails a tedious chore, either refreshing every five minutes or logging back in multiple times per hour. The only way to avoid this was to simply not check my e-mail. Google, on the contrary, could stay open for literally days at a time. And when a new e-mail came, not only was my incoming e-mail list updated immediately, but a little number on a closed tab would indicate how many new e-mails I had.
So when I heard that first “ba-DUMP,” I was unsure where it came from. It took a couple days for me to realize that this marvelous sound indicated I’d received a new e-mail in Outlook. That, I thought, was pretty cool.
Alas, my euphoria would not last long. The first problem came a couple weeks ago, when a colleague sent me two consecutive e-mails in the same thread. Because of the way Outlook folds preceding thread messages, I was completely unaware that I’d received the first in the series. Outlook considers any and all new messages in a single thread as a “new” message, and only tells you you have one new message. So regardless if you’ve received one or twenty new messages in a thread, Outlook reports you have one new message.
Then there’s the address book. God help me. The tedious clicking acrobatics I need to perform to get the right name in the right box. Sure, maybe I’m not doing it right. But I’m not a computer illiterate, and I shouldn’t need to spend twenty minutes tinkering around with the e-mail to figure out something that Google has accomplished so splendidly.
And why is it that the link on the ccc.edu home page directs us to a log-in screen that isn’t compatible for the ccc.edu address? I had to ‘favorite’ the proper link so I could be directed to the site I need. Why can’t the ccc.edu link do the same thing? Why has the website manager not noticed this blatantly obvious flaw?
As of yesterday, I can’t even log in to Outlook from my home computer. I get some weird error message with no explanation or alternative, and neither switching browsers or working from the original ccc.edu link have any effect.
Now, I’m craving for Novell again.
The Harold Lounge 
Me too, those threads drive me crazy.
I haven’t been able to get into my email for 2 days. It’s deplorable.
Someone must be watching. For the first time since Thursday morning, I can log back into Outlook again.
Still out over here in Lincoln Square.
It only lasted a short time.
There was a special announce a couple of days ago saying they would be doing email maintenance (already?!) this weekend, but, yeah, the next day and for about two days I was getting the same error message.
Over the past week, I saw two messages regarding network maintenance, but neither concerning e-mail. The first was that OIT would no longer support CCCair722, but that isn’t supposed to go into affect until June 30. The second…hmm, my e-mail just broke down again. But it said that the network would be unavailable on *Sunday,* June 23, between 4pm and 6pm to do maintenance on the firewall. If there was an e-mail announcing e-mail would be out for Friday and Saturday, I definitely missed it. (I’ve been having trouble with my e-mail.)
I have been told by students that they have emailed me but I never received those emails. Now, I know students sometimes mean to email and think they do when they haven’t, but they showed me their emails to me….plus, still can’t search my archived emails before mid 2011.
I hope the maintenance they are doing takes care of these problems.
Outlook is cluttered – and I agree that the address/contact search is really bad – good lord, what a pain. Not efficient at all….and we changed to this system why?
I believe it is free.
No… I think if someone files a FOIA request they’ll see that the money transferred isn’t quite zero.