Outlook Rules

After reading the title to this entry I had to laugh. So am I stating an opinion on how I feel about Outlook (it rules!) or something else? When it the electrons from my brain told my finger tips to type this title I was definitely thinking something else. Hey man – words do mean something.

So after reading Hanselman's blog entry (http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheThreeMostImportantOutlookRulesForProcessingMail.aspx) over the Holiday about processing Outlook rules; I was inspired to revisit my own set of rules. When I was working at Microsoft (as Scott now does) I was totally overwhelmed with the amount of internal information flowing around the company; and at the time most of it was through email distribution lists. Between the stuff directed at me as part of my job (Microsoft Consulting) and the internal chatter; I was getting hundreds of emails a day. Without a good set of rules it would have been impossible to get through everything in my inbox.

That practice has stayed with me ever since and has served me well over the years. Two things have happened recently that I wanted to write about with regard to Outlook.

First I wanted to record this (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA103869131033.aspx?pid=CH102499821033) article called "Outlook Meeting Requests: Essential Do's and Don'ts". As a long time Outlook user; I already do many of the things in this article. But there were some other nuggets in there that I found useful; especially around using rules on meeting requests. One thing I have been looking all over for and found on this page was how to turn off the acknowledgement to a meeting invite. There are a few meetings that I invite 20+ people to and I don't need to know who has accepted and who has not. I had a rule just to catch all of these responses and move them off to a folder.

Secondly, I wanted to mention that about 4 months ago I became a Crackberry user for my work email. There were many things happening at work that I just needed to stay apprised of during the time I was not logged in. Well this changed the way that I wrote many of my rules. Suddenly I was not just filtering things so that my Inbox was less cluttered (and relatively prioritized). Now I needed more because the Blackberry (Bb) is synchronizing with my Inbox and my hip was buzzing for every email.

Side note – I cannot tell you how annoying it is that the Bb buzzes about 7 seconds before an email arrives in my Inbox. As if the little bubble pop-up isn't enough of a distraction!!

So now I have two Inboxes. I have a series of rules that move everything EXCEPT the "hey a server is down" type of emails to my secondary inbox. The trick is to do this given the fact that the Bb service (on the Exchange server) sees only the emails that fall off of the server side rules waterfall. So I have been using the "Move" and "Stop Processing More Rules" combination much more. There are also some rules that are order dependent; which I am not happy with.

But the whole thing works relatively well now. It's funny how refactoring my rules for the Bb may have actually made them better. Kind of like my code/designs; sometimes it's not until a new requirement comes along that I realize a better way. As Hannibal Smith used to say (The A-Team) – "I love it when a plan comes together".

What I would really love is for the Blackberry guys to give me a way to interact with the Exchange service running on the server. Let me write some rules separately, just for the device. I would not be at all surprised if such a thing exists and we are just not "with it" enough to have deployed it. It's probably for the same reason that we deploy WindowsXP with the old Start Menu configuration (no MRU etc). Because someone felt that it would be just too hard and confusing to the users to change anything. Now that we have rolled out Office 2007 I better not hear that excuse ever again!!