As an employee I am forced to use the tools, such as MS Outlook, my employer provides. For my work I have to send a couple of e-mails per day. And I can not get used to the first fact, that the autocompletion function in the e-mail’s TO field is not very smart. Furthermore, I can not get used to the second fact that when using the search function for contacts in the contacts database, no matter if my personal or the corporate one, I will never find the contact I am searching for on my first try since some people I know by first name while others I know by last name, not speaking of the names I am constantly spelling the wrong.
Autocompletion: Why is it that MS Outlook can not search through the global contacts database in order to make meaningful suggestions?
Search: Why is it that MS Outlook can not find an entry in its contacts database if I am not typing the name in the same order as the contact name is saved in the contacts database? In addition, why is it not possible to perform the search globally through the local and through the corporate database at the same time?
There are plenty of examples where both of the problems are solved. Even in other applications by the same vendor. Where the software does a good job in facilitating user interaction.
How to improve the situation of my daily struggle? - Here, some solutions to get around.
- Define a rule in MS Outlook which forwards each and every e-mail to your google mail account where you have large scale archiving and extended search functionality for free. However, I did not yet find a solution to easily import the entire corporate MS Outlook contacts database to my google mail account. Only drawback is that your employer might not like it.
- Connect your iPhone or Mac running OS X snow leopard - both will perfectly do the job - to the corporate MS Exchange server. Then use apple mail and contacts which provides you with all of the above missing functionality in order to do the job efficiently. It comes as a handy frontend.
- Define a set of rules describing how you enter contacts to your MS Outlook contacts database and get used to the correct and only way of searching through them. Important caveat: define the rules the same way your employer does it. Follow strictly the rules and hope they are complete and that your intuition does not try to overrule them.
- Learn the e-mail addresses by heart and do not rely on supporting software functionality.
- Are there more?
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