Radical and confusing
Let us not make photos mandatory for sending mails. And, if the senders don't have their faces available, how funny the upper part would look like.
IBM has revealed a radical new user interface for email at its Connect 2014 conference in the USA. Dubbed Mail Next, the new interface is inspired by social media and billed as a quantum leap beyond the likes of Outlook. There's a lengthy explanation of the approach in this video of a Connect keynote. We've asked IBM for high …
I'm going on the assumption that the downvote to your comment was due to an involuntary muscle spasm.
It hardly seems fair that I can only upvote you once. I hate Notes so much, but it does have one redeeming feature that I don't believe Outlook has: collapsible sections. But that's it. The address book integration is awful, the calendar and scheduling is awful, the ... sorry, I got a bit worked up, I'll leave it there...
Everyone hates Notes (note: it's no longer Lotus Notes, the Lotus brand has been dropped), however iNotes (the web interface as opposed to the fully bloated application) is *significantly* better and more akin to standard webmail (in places better) albeit slightly dated.
Having noted that I wish Notes was taken out back with a shotgun I can only pray for a different fate for Sametime, which is actually a pretty good piece of software and miles better than the Microsoft alternatives (Lync/Messenger/Whatever we're calling it today).
Full disclosure: Anon as I work for Big Blue
I'm not so sure about SameTime. I don't doubt that a significant part of my dislike may be due to the corporate setup (I think there's an overnight PeopleSoft extract that dumps info into Notes?) and there are doubtless others who think Active Directory is a conical pile of poo, but I liked using Lync. It was slow at times (corporate setup again?) but I found it easy to go from IM chat to teleconf to screen sharing / controlling as required. As a technical user (my specialties lie elsewhere) it worked pretty well.
That said, I didn't like the Lync/Outlook logging / tracking feature and I know I'm not alone in finding Outlook's limited space for mail rules a daily course in pure fury.
Honestly, email's been here a while: has anyone done the feature set really well across the board?
Never mind the millennium it wasn't updated for the 90's. It was embarrassing having to mail external people and companies, because from previous experience I knew what they looked like in other email clients.
Even by 2010 it hadn't caught up to Outlook Express from the 90's.
But for the IT masochist out there I can heartily recommend the following combination will ruin your life ...... Domino + BES.
Every time you add pictures, or great swaths of white space, to a page, you've decreased the amount of text that is displayed.
Give me e-mail client that makes text the focus, and which can display a large number of useful things on one screen.
There's a reason why the basic e-mail client presentation hasn't changed since pretty much the inception of e-mail... it works.
I agree, this feels like a massive step back just like comparing the Windows 7 to Windows 8 interface.
I still think previewing part of the message in the email list would benefit both Outlook and Notes (Just in case its been added I use Outlook 2010 and have used Notes up to the Version 8 ntf).
Maybe they think everyone will start communicating with lolcats
No. That team was taken to Antarctica, locked in a vault, which was then sealed in concrete, which was then dropped down a borehole into a subterranean sea. The borehole was then explosively collapsed and the whole Plateau sealed under six metres of superglue filled with landmines and anthrax spores.
Being able to analyse and categorise mail (both sent and received) according to time would be an improvement. e.g. I send an email and want a reply within a week. So I need a reminder in a week to chase it.
This has got to be easier than it is now so no more clicks/presses from me - must be largely automatic as the mail is composed/sent.
Actually PMMail (originally OS/2) still has some tricks that KMail can't do. Moving to Kmail was a bit of a compromise but I still prefer KMail to those nasty HTML interfaces. Used to enjoy Golded on DOS. Used cc:mail at work , it drove me nuts (but not quite as much as Word, which reduced me to a swearing and desk pounding) until we were migrated to Lotus Notes, much to my utter amazement and confusion, since it did NOT play nice with the rest of the email universe and was an exercise in frustration. Here's the graveyard: http://www.pmmail2000.com/
Not aimed at you guys. It's aimed at the chimps in sales and the orangutangs in marketing who might feel better about their company not having outlook like the cool crowd if they have some sprinkles of useless social on their email client.
Same people who got iPhones because all the plebs in IT had a blackberry.
For anything but the smallest of organisations shifting their e-mail from one thing to another is a huge undertaking, and that's why many organisations get stuck on old versions. So for those organisations running Outlook and Exchange, they're not going to stray too far from that. The Lotus brand was toxic, that was why IBM dropped it. Notes also has a stinky name and is disappearing quick. IBM just don't have the mindshare for e-mail now. One of the things that killed off Notes was the lack of 3rd party integration - so many products integrated with Outlook but didn't integrate with Notes (e.g. ERP, HR, workflow, etc). Companies will look at this, ask "does it integrate with X?... no? forget it then".
Certainly Microsoft need to shake things up a bit too, but most people just want what they already have and just a bit better.