Over the past few months I’ve been using Microsoft Outlook on the Mac as my main email program for a project I’m working.
It took a while for me to re-familiarize myself with the program as I’ve mainly used Apple Mail for the past few years. It’s worked well for me but I haven’t had to worry too much about calendars and scheduling meetings.
This project changed all that and there I was neck deep back in Outlook, scheduling meetings and making updates.
One thing I noticed. When I updated a meeting invitation to add a new person, or remove someone, every attendee got a meeting update. That wasn’t how I remembered it. There used to be a question asking if you wanted to update all or just changed attendees.
I assumed with Office 365 an the new user interface there was a setting I was missing, and once I found that setting, the question would reappear.
Except I couldn’t find the setting, and my meeting attendees started to grumble about all the emails.
I asked one of my colleagues about it. We went back and forth and scratched our heads, and she asked someone else and we had an answer. That feature doesn’t exist on the Mac version of Outlook, but you get it on the Web version.
What!
I felt like I’d stepped back to the 1990’s.
On one level I kinda get it. As a developer, do I want to work on thirty year old email software or the cool code they’re writing at SpaceX to capture and reuse launch boosters?
I’ve experienced similar situations in the past, and I know it’s a challenge to ask a developer to work on legacy code, but a feature miss like this that’s so disruptive across multiple organizations, is disappointing.
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