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I wish I could say that they had made the new Outlook more complicated, but it seems like it’s actually not complicated enough for business users! The licensing situation has always been a nightmare. I don’t know how that will ever be solved. What I can tell you is that the business version includes SharePoint and email that usually is a domain. so of course they charge more for that. The home product doesn’t include that and certainly it could be used for business use without using a business domain through it. Microsoft documentation has to be inclusive of of wide variety of uses. That’s why it’s so wordy. I don’t think anyone goes back to change it after the fact so they want to get it all down upfront usually done by a program manager on the team or a technical writer.

as to the new office, Outlook, I have never been a great fan of its stability or it’s bugs that seem to happen all over the place, like freezing up at random times for long minutes at a time. If they can ultimately fix this by having a single code, and getting bug fixes out quicker for the entire base and rolling out feature updates like they’re doing with many of the other products like Teams I’m all in favor of it and willing to wait until it gets more stable to throw my hat in the ring on it just yesterday I was  helping a client troubleshoot Outlook freezing up on her machine. Her database isn’t even halfway to the max mark and she has 16 GB of ram and lots of storage. This damn thing freezes up is beyond me and I’ve been working with it since it came out.  I’m not so concerned about additional features. I just want the  product to work. But there are lots of great features in Outlook, and I find it a pretty useful product all in all.

If you use Thunderbird I don’t see why you would be worried about being “forced” to use some version of Outlook. However, as we both know, there is a major rewrite of TB in process, so who knows how that will turn out.  Anyway, I can’t imagine you needing to worry about a product you don’t use. Sort of like me worrying about Linux security. As to the other poster being bent out of shape about Outlook and wanting everyone on it to migrate to a end of life product about to be re-engineered itself, worth keeping in mind the hundreds of millions of users of Outlook around the world for the last 25 years or so. Its current iteration is not a “bad” product. Just has its faults, like all software. And yes, I’ve used Thunderbird, it’s fine product for a 1999 interface. Sort of like the current Outlook interface!

I have been warning my clients about this mess for some time. The naming conventions alone make me wonder “who” in the hell in the Program Management teams decided this was a good idea? Why did senior product management approve this nonsense? Between legacy Outlook, with all its numbering schemes and this new business outlook, desktop, business cloud and consumer cloud and consumer desktop, it’s just a clusterF****. Every so often MSFT really screws up with these naming issues (Hotmail, Live.com, etc.)

I’ve been using the “New” business version of Outlook for a month. It does work fine for me and incorporates consumer Outlook as well. But I’m simple. Gmail, Outlook consumer, and outlook business. But agreed that the various long standing add ins are not there, yet, if they ever are. i.e. Zoom?

But a good friend of mine has had his domain foo.com on a Linux server at an old domain provider/hoster that allowed him, once upon a time, to log in to his email not using his email but using a user name and pw. New Outlook does not support this while “old” outlook did. But here’s the catch, old desktop Outlook (i.e. 2019) did not support it through the normal setup routines. You had to go in via Control Panel and add the account inside CP to be able to login with a username and not email. That appears to be long gone with the “new” desktop or online versions. I don’t know how many people have that kind of email setup, but “old-timers” likely could. Words to the wise, might be time to change that email hosting login if you can.

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roadster1024

Yes, they will need MFA for everything. If you are not using MFA yet, you are a sitting duck. Your end users need to get with it and learn how to use it. They likely are already if they are doing online banking. If you are their GA I’m sort of surprised you are not already using this at least for yourself.

Great article and one I’ve sent around to some of my clients that are on Macs and definitely would agree with you. Managing tens of thousands of photos or hundreds of videos is much harder on the Mac than Windows. (I also use both).  Among my clients File Explorer is the reason they are not using SharePoint online. But it doesn’t matter because the integration of OneDrive with SharePoint makes it trivial (not without issues, to be sure). Microsoft is continuing to add features to Microsoft 365 and more and more clients are finding out why it’s better to be in that world than on the desktop, but it’s still a 10:1 ratio of desktop to cloud. I fear for when OneDrive is our only view to the file structure. It is horrible when moving tens of thousands of files….The only good tools cost thousands and are made for corporate budgets. My favorite way to navigate and move large files for SharePoint from the desktop is FTP using FileZilla Pro which includes FTP access to Google Workspace and SharePoint/OneDrive. It has some features it needs, but is a great fast tool.

But there are alot of good reasons to use the Mac, stability being number 1. I just have vastly fewer problems with the Mac than with Windows. I support a bunch of Windows based companies, and I never get calls from the Mac users. Windows issues are a weekly issue. Getting better? Yes, but still not even close. And don’t get me started on Outlook…

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Josh Hendrickson

Icohen1: The Mac has used multiple buttons forever. You just need a 3rd party mouse to enable it.

 

Yes. In this “preview” version the only icons that it supports are online versions of the Office 365 suite. It sucks and they need to fix this ASAP. I’m totally baffled by why this menu bar is not customizable. Weird.

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MikeAL8

I don’t have any experience with true Nas myself. But I’ve had some experience recently with Nextcloud, which is similar to TrueNAS, but it has cloud capability as well built into it. It seems to be very popular in Europe, and in  use with legal firms and government entities because it keeps the server located on premise not in the cloud.it’s Linux based. Seems to be a pretty good option, though. It does have some oddities.

It does allow for shared services like drives on premise.

 

UPDATE: Checking in with my client’s System Health for O365 it appears that AMD based Surface laptops are experiencing other issues as well, namely with Teams. This may have been the root issue with my 2020 I just sent back (see above post)

Some Surface Laptop 4 users’ video may freeze when enabling their camera during Microsoft Teams meetings

More info: Impact is specific to Surface Laptop 4 devices with AMD Central Processing Units (CPU).

Current status: Our investigation has identified that a recent driver update for the Surface Laptop AMD video output contained a code error resulting in impact. We’re working to determine the underlying cause and develop a fix to prevent further impact.

Scope of impact: Any user with a Surface Laptop 4 with AMD CPU may be impacted.

Next update by: Friday, March 17, 2023, 2:00 PM (9:00 PM UTC)

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wavy

Hi Susan. I’ve had a couple of interesting possible problems with Windows 11 22H2. (I know you don’t recommend it).

• I have a Surface Pro 9 and it is running 11 22 H2 just fine.
• I bought a used 2020 Surface Laptop AMD. It had a 30 day return on it. From Ebay. Very clean. I loaded Windows 11 Pro on it, and then did the slew of updates that were required. All went well until I updated to 11 22 H2. Then the blue screens started happening. At first I thought it might be due to the Duo Dock that I was using. But my SP9 is not having any problems with the dock and it’s been updated to the latest firmware. I removed it from the dock and placed it on the normal power adapter. Blue screens randomly continued. After 4 days of this behavior I sent the unit back for a refund.
• At the same time, a client of mine bought a Surface Studio Laptop, high end from MSFT with i7  1 TB SSD & 32 GBs RAM Windows 11 Pro. My job was to set it up for the executive director and have it ready for her. Out of the box, after the normal updates it failed to update to 11 22 H2. It also began blue screening. I updated ALL the BIOS updates, and all the other updates. I got it to semi-stable and loaded O365, logged her into the Azure domain, and loaded Teamviewer 64 bit. No matter what I did it continued blue screening over and over. I finally broke down and decided I would reinstall the OS. That failed. The machine is currently unuseable (as it cannot reinstall the OS and fails over and over again) and I will be shipping it back to Microsoft on Monday.
• I have no idea of whether the Surface line is defective or whether this is an anomaly or something directly tied to 22H2. As I started out saying, I have a SP 9 and it’s been flawless since I bought it. No bluescreens. However, the laptops in my limited experience have been problematic. MSFT seems very willing to make things right but I must admit, I’ve worked on *hundreds* of machines in the last three years and have *never* experienced this kind of failure rate. I have setup HP laptops, Dell and Lenovo and all have been flawless. Older Surface laptops clients bought a few years ago were fine. But I’m worried that MSFT’s China mfg is failing somehow. The bluescreen situation is so unusual for me that I’m likely to steer buyers away from MSFT in the near term.  We will be getting a replacement for the Surface Studio laptop, so I’ll let you know how that goes.
• Just wanted you and your readers to know.

None that I know of.

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dmt_3904

I would get this into MSFT as a support ticket. My guess is it’s an issue in AD or the hybrid setup.

Well, it launched into a pandemic, and many users who got new machines choose to stick with what they knew given the need to learn video conferencing, etc. Businesses weren’t desparate for new IT projects for upgrades to an OS unless they were upgrading from W7.  Doesn’t surprise me at all. With 40 years of experience in this I learned in the days of Solaris that not every upgrade to an OS was worth it for many months afterwards. OS’s are not the primary thing people use, they use email, slack, teams, word, excel etc. They care little about the OS except when it gets in their way, which both Windows and Apple are doing more and more. I say that as a happy user of both. I have no desire to return to Windows 10, even with all the small annoyances of 11.

Of course it is, but it struck me as odd that there is no “Desktop” choice in the program. IMHO the Desktop folder should be left as is. There is no way to do that, apparently, unless it’s buried under another choice. It’s arguably the most important folder!

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windbg

[8string]

I tried WinSetView yesterday but found that there was a bug that seemed to happen that caused me to remove the program. I have two 27″ monitors attached to my Surface 9, and when using WinSetView the monitor on the left (the primary monitor) set all my icons to be spaced across the screen as if a folder view. I could not easily find a setting in the program for this, so I uninstalled the program and rebooted. Problem fixed. So while I would love this program to work on only folders apparently it assumes my desktop is also a folder. By default that should not be true.

W11 2H 22 16GBs RAM.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 3 months ago by 8string.

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windbg