In our office, we use both MSN and Outlook for communicationg. I have some major problems with both tools.

MSN is good for quick chats with a single person, but a multiple participant thread that possibly spans several days is not ideal. I have history logging on, so i can search previous conversations, which is a great feature but still not ideal. I dont like the maximum character limit, and file sharing seems flaky. It has its uses but overall its not a very robust way to communicate about important stuff.

Outlook solves some of the problems of MSN but brings new ones. Searching through mail is extremely slow. I have a few thousand emails in my inbox and subfolders. Sounds like a lot, but really its probably only about a megabyte of text. Searching for a string should take less than a second. Yet somehow it takes forever, sometimes a few minutes. I dont want to turn on the indexing service for faster searches because that affects other things on my computer. Why cant searches just not suck by default? Also I hate the way that conversations work, where everytime you reply to an email it copies the entire conversation up to that point. You end up sending a 2000 word email to someone, when only 20 words are new, the rest is just copying old baggage over and over. It makes important things from 2 weeks ago very hard to find.

I'm seriously considering creating my own web based office communication tool, that will solve all the problems of MSN and Outlook and not introduce new ones. Not that my office would immediately jump over to some home-made jobbie that I built, but it just makes me feel better to build something useful.

However step 1 is to find out what else is out there besides MSN and Outlook. Im sure there must be many other tools that have improved things. Does your office use something better than MSN or Outlook? What are some good FREE ones and whats good about them?

We use Skype instead of MSN for chat at work, which I like. It doesn't really solve your problems though. What you're asking for sounds a lot like Google Wave.

We use Skype instead of MSN for chat at work, which I like. It doesn't really solve your problems though. What you're asking for sounds a lot like Google Wave.

yeah I used google wave for a few weeks but it wasnt what I'm looking for. I cant put my finger exactly on what I didnt like about it, but I still think there must be something better out there.

[quote name='AndreTheGiant' timestamp='1297700075' post='4774133']
I'm seriously considering creating my own web based office communication tool, that will solve all the problems of MSN and Outlook and not introduce new ones.

What a great idea. It's amazing nobody thought of that before.

If only there were a company that specializes into searching. Then they could build an web-based email client. And they could add chat to it.

I smell a business opportunity.
[/quote]

Uh, no, I dont think gmail and the goofy little chat window is quite going to cut it either.

http://www.xobni.com/ is a decent plugin for Outlook and speeds up searches the last time I used it.

To be clear:

Your only complaint about Outlook is that it is slow to search, otherwise it meets your needs.

And your complaints about your MSN chat are the character limit that prevents massive cut/pastes and you don't like the way it shares files.

Is that it?

No those were just examples, there are many more problems. I was hoping that people who used both of these tools would see my point without me having to list every thing that sucks about them. Another thing I dont like about outlook is the way threads are stringed along. If you have a conversation back and forth with one or more people, you end up with a ton of emails all about the same subject. All emails are useless except for the latest one, which contains all the conversations anyway. If someone attaches a file, it somehow belongs to a single email and not the entire conversation. Theres more issues but I'm not going to list them. MSN is also bad because it has a very non-permanent feel to it. Sure you can log history but it basically gets archived in a separate file and doesnt really feel like part of the application. And the simple fact that I'm using both Outlook and MSN means I have to check in 2 places when I'm searching for a specific conversation because I dont recall which medium it happened in.

As mentioned you can easily make Outlook search faster, either through plugins or through indexing. It's generally a non-issue, as evidenced by the huge install base.

I tried enabling indexing and I really didnt like it. I dont like having the indexing service running, I find it makes my HDD chunk away noisliy, non-stop. I'll check out the plugin however, thanks.

We use Skype instead of MSN for chat at work, which I like. It doesn't really solve your problems though. What you're asking for sounds a lot like Google Wave.

Agree. Unfortunately, that's been shelved.