Re: [Evolution] Advice

[troy hakala <troy recipezaar com>]

because it's slow, not clear what it is for and
on by default (in Outlook 97). and bear in mind that the Outlook store (the
PST) gets incredibly slower as it grows, so every single time you edited
any office doc it added an entry to your journal folder and Outlook just
mysteriously got slower and slower and slower the longer you used it. And
any user who poked around after many months of using Office and actually
opened the Journal folder got a nasty surprise: Outlook just hung (not being
multithreaded) and looked crashed and that user was sure to never go near
the Journal folder again.

Outlook 98 turned it off by default which helped immensely. But the implementation
was still flawed: no one knew what it was for! we'd go talk to customers
and reviewers and explain the concept of the journal (it records the work
you've done -- it's great for people who bill clients on an hourly basis)
and almost unanimously people said "wow! that would be SO cool!!!"  But the
views on the folder were terrible so it was not at all obvious they were
date-related and there was no way to generate reports based on the data in
it. 

The Journal got such a bad rap that if anyone even suggests improving it,
Outlookers bust out in laughter. So it's one of the features in Outlook that
will exist forever but will never be used or improved. And if any user ever
thinks to turn it on, they'll be back to the '97 days of a mysteriously slowing
mail client (since Outlook will have the PST forever).

Having said all that, I went to Comdex one year and talked to customers and
there were some die-hard Journal fans all asking when it would become useful.
So, there's desire for such a feature. ;)

Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> > why the Journal feature in Outlook is despised, etc.
>
> Why is it despised? ;-)
>