Micrsoft Gives Your Company a Positive Outlook!
February 02, 2018
Micrsoft Gives Your Company a Positive Outlook!
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Exchange
To be clear, I'm reviewing Microsoft's desktop email application "MS Outlook 2016". I find the term "Microsoft Exchange" to be a bit confusing, because it refers to an underlying platform for which there are several clients.
MS Exchange is used for email and scheduling meetings at my company, so it is at the heart of keeping us organized and in touch. If a meeting wasn't scheduled (and accepted) on our Exchange calendar, then it's not a legitimately booked meeting.
MS Exchange is used for email and scheduling meetings at my company, so it is at the heart of keeping us organized and in touch. If a meeting wasn't scheduled (and accepted) on our Exchange calendar, then it's not a legitimately booked meeting.
- Flexibility of user interface: for me, being able to completely customize the commands and layout of the ribbon menu is a huge productivity booster. I surface the functions I need to use often, and hide the rest.
- Setting up meetings and appointments, and color-coding them so I can see at-a-glance what my day is going to look like.
- Pop-up reminders for meetings are absolutely invaluable, and without them I have a hard time making the meetings I've committed to attending.
- I sometimes get confused about availability for appointments. I use my Outlook calendar not only to schedule meetings with others, but also to remind myself to complete tasks on a specific day. Not sure how this could be more intuitive, but it's something I've run into a few times before.
- When the details for a meeting change several times in a short period, as can happen when someone has trouble booking a room, or working within the availability of all the attendees, I get many messages in my inbox and it's a) annoying and b) a bit hard to understand what's going on. Maybe some kind of digest for those cases could help there.
- The setting to strip out formatting when pasting from another application does not actually work, which is annoying since I send HTML-enabled messages. I need to right click and choose the special paste option to get around this.
- Exchange has a huge positive impact, I would imagine, on our business objectives. I don't know how much we pay for it, but it's difficult for me to imagine running our company efficiently and effectively without it.
I haven't used alternatives to Exchange. I use GMail for personal messages, but GMail doesn't seem to have the same appointment-booking chops that Exchange does. Exchange keeps track of the availability of all our employees, and of our meeting rooms, which is very helpful.