Finally adopted Outlook

It is good to have some kind of relationship with the big manufacturers, in this case Microsoft. I tested the beta release of Office 2010 for a few months. It has -obviously- many improvements over the previous versions and I just knew I would upgrade as soon as I could.

Well, I downloaded the latest version (2010) within minutes of it being posted on the Web. I immediately started using Word, Excel and PowerPoint to continue to appreciate the many new features and nicer interface views and more intuitive menus and icons.

The MS-Office department has always been the best at designing, releasing and maintaining their products. It might have something to do with the fact that Office was not designed by MS from the ground up: most of the products were acquired from different companies and integrated in a suite. It might also have to do with the fact the latest versions of Office were architected by Ray Ozzie… independently of the reason, the Office dept. at Microsoft, simply, rocks.

However, I’ve been somehow skeptical regarding Outlook. All the problems of the past related to corrupted files, limitations on the size of data files; sluggishness and duplication of messages… et cetera, et cetera have somehow frightened me away from it.

So, I’ve used for a long time a combination of Eudora (15 years), Lotus Notes (11), Thunderbird (3) and Evolution (2); mainly and interchangeably depending on location, machine being used and intention.
However, Eudora was killed by Qualcomm 4 years ago, and although some enthusiasts decided to take over the task of creating a Thunderbird-based next version (8), it has been a long time waiting for the final release to substitute my old good Eudora v7.1.

Lotus Notes has been my preferred Calendaring, To-do, Tasks and Contacts manager. The email portion of it has left me wishing for a good release soon, to no avail. The interface takes ages to be changed to something more eye-candy-like, and although the functionality of the program is incredibly good, Lotus Notes is still targeting the corporations only. (I won’t mention Domino: a decade ago most of us IT pros knew what it was, now on hearing the word we all think of the game, or relate it to a pizza chain.)

Evolution and Thunderbird are both very good, but only as POP and IMAP based email programs.

All of these are still 32-bit based applications.

So, I took the plunge: decided to simply start using Outlook and that was it. Well… I obviously have been using it from time to time, mainly to help people that use the program on a daily basis. So I knew and know its intricacies and all; just that after the 2007 release I was sure the next version would simply be very good.

So, there you have it: I’ve said it. I’ve done it. It’s official. I adopted Microsoft’s Outlook 2010 64-bit version as of yesterday: April 22nd, 2010.

Next time you receive an email message from me you can check –if not from my Blackberry- it was crafted using Outlook.