Monday, April 27, 2009

Enabling Reply To All in Microsoft Outlook

Some companies disable the "Reply to All" feature in Microsoft Outlook. Now why they choose to do that is beyond me.

I know that a few users do abuse this feature - I think all of us have gotten annoying mails from someone or the other who chose to do a "Reply All" instead of using his/her common sense.
But having such a drastic solution for this problem creates more problems than it solves. It handicaps users who have to do a legitimate "Reply All" for work related mails. (Or even when you have to reply to say 5 out of the 7 people on the mail thread - doing a Reply to All and then removing the extra 2 folks is much easier than pasting everyone's email ID again).

But, fortunately, there is a workaround. You can't enable the "Reply To All" button. But you can create a new button that does exactly the same thing as that one.

Read the post below. I have tried it myself, and it works!!

Link: Neil Mitchell's Haskell Blog: Enabling Reply To All in Outlook

Monday, April 13, 2009

And the usability award goes to .... Microsoft Outlook Address book!!




Just thought of letting you know that Microsoft Outlook’s address book is the clear winner in the Usability awards section!!



Sample 1: --> If you want to remove a person from a list/group that you have created, then you have to double-click the list. Then the following UI shows up.

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E.g. if I select “User 1” and then press the cross (X) or delete button, "User 1" should get deleted from the “List-Sample” list. Correct?



Wrong!! Guess what happens?



The list “List-Sample” itself gets deleted!! And that too without a confirmation dialog. So you have no way of knowing that you are about to delete a list. There is no Undo function here as well.




Sample 2: --> You can’t copy a list. You have to add the same members all over again in the new one.




Hats off to great innovation at Microsoft!! I guess the user group that they tested the address book with didn’t know any people and hence their address book must have been empty :-).

Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Earth Hour 2009

More than 1,000 cities in over 80 countries observed Earth Hour 2009 on Saturday March 28th. See the effect it had - just fantastic!! If we make this a regular event, it will go a long way in conserving resources on our planet ...

Link:
Earth Hour 2009 - The Big Picture - Boston.com