Quoted in Computerworld on Outlook slowness
I was quoted again in an article on Computerworld’s website regarding the performance of Outlook 2007. While the spirit of my comments are fairly accurate, there are a few inaccuracies in the article, and some relatively harsh words were used to describe things that I know I used softer language on. I’m sure this falls under the heading of creative license, but it makes me come off as sounding somewhat harsh towards a couple of Outlook add-ins that I love.
Here’s the section I contributed to:
Jason Clarke, who works in the technical sales and marketing department at Wenco International Mining Systems Ltd. in Richmond, British Columbia, receives about 100 e-mails daily. He said that on his PC, Outlook 2007 “hangs completely for three to seven seconds typically, and up to 20 seconds in worst cases when new mail is being downloaded.”
Turning off Outlook add-ins that he has installed, such as ClearContext Corp.’s e-mail management software and Caelo Software Inc.’s Nelson Email Organizer, “does improve matters marginally, but not nearly as much as it should,” Clarke said. “The hesitation is still very noticeable — jarring even.”
Clarke, who oversees Wenco’s e-mail system, has posted information about Outlook’s slow performance on his personal blog. He blames the problems on the new e-mail indexing engine that Outlook 2007 shares with Windows Vista.
The indexing allows searches to be done almost instantly in Outlook 2007, a vast improvement over Outlook 2003. However, the process also appears to be CPU-intensive. Microsoft recommends that users put indexing on a regular schedule instead of letting it run constantly in the background.
Now, I just want to point out that I consider ClearContext and Nelson Email Organizer to be essential Outlook add-ins, and made the point in my email to the author, Eric Lai.
Also, between the first time I spoke with him back in November for an article that came out in December, and now, I have a completely new job, albeit at the same company. I can assume some blame for that, though, since there’s no reason to think that within a few months someone would change positions. But I feel weird about it nonetheless.
For what it’s worth, here is the content of my email to Eric. To preface it, Eric linked to a few complaints about Outlook 2007 performance on the web, and asked me whether I thought the complaints were legitimate. Here is my response:
I’m struggling with how to answer your question; I’ve read the links you provided below to some of the user complaints with Outlook 2007, and while I’m certainly frustrated with the product’s performance, I’m not having the same kind of trouble these users are complaining about.
I actually wrote about my frustration with Outlook 2007 about a week ago on my personal blog in a post called Outlook Slowness. My complaint is weak compared to the others you referenced; I’m basically saying Outlook 2007 is mildly better than Outlook 2003, but that I’m using a faster PC so it’s not really a fair fight.
The specific performance issue that I face is that Outlook hangs completely for 3 to 7 seconds typically, and up to 20 seconds in worst cases when new mail is being downloaded. Turning off the Outlook add-ins that I rely on
(ClearContext and Nelson Email Organizer) does improve matters marginally, but not nearly as much as it should; the hesitation is still very noticeable, jarring even.After testing Microsoft’s desktop search product (the one that Outlook 2007 nags you to install), I came to the conclusion that it is inferior to many of the other similar free products that are available (like those from Google, X1 / Yahoo, and Colibri), and removed it from my system. But it’s worth noting that anyone that is using a desktop search product to index their email for faster searching is likely to see a noticeable performance
hit.I’m still running Outlook 2007 on a Windows XP system. I should note that when I tested it using the exact same PST file (email catalog) on Windows Vista, I found it to be noticeably snappier. Some of the enhancements that
have been made to Vista allow Outlook to load in a few seconds after a reboot, whereas on XP it can take Outlook up to 30 seconds to become usable on the exact same system. Unfortunately, I haven’t used it enough to comment reliably on the actual email download hesitation problem. In fact, I’m dying to do exactly that and see if I can ease my pain.For people that are frustrated with Outlook’s performance, Brad Meador at ClearContext posted a fantastic tutorial for ensuring the health of your Outlook mail (PST) file. At one point I was experiencing a significant overall Outlook slowdown, and following Brad’s advice helped matters greatly.
I hope this helps!
One last point I should make. I’ve put a lot of time and energy into Outlook over the years, so it may come as a surprise to some of my readers, but I finally found the ultimate solution for it. A Mac.
That’s right; I had the opportunity to choose a new laptop at work, and decided to get one that would simply help me get things done, rather that having to muck around with every last little thing. For the moment I’m using separate Gmail accounts to manage both my personal and work related email, and finding the experience very enjoyable. Gmail excels at handling very long email threads, which is something that happens in my work email very frequently.
Beyond that, I may give Apple Mail a try as an offline email client. So far I haven’t felt the need to. And it would be disingenuous of me not to admit that although I’m operating most of the time in Mac’s OS X operating system, Intel-based Macs do run Windows fine, and I have a Windows instance available to me whenever I need it. In fact, that’s where I keep my archive of emails from before the point where I decided to switch to Gmail, and it works just fine.
So, I’ve given up on Outlook for day to day work. But if you want to or have to use it, do check out Clear Context and Nelson Email Organizer. They both have the capability to supercharge the way you deal with your email, and both work fine for me under Outlook 2007. And although I do have affiliate links for both of these software packages, you’ll note that I’m not using them here. I truly think that both of these software packages are worth your time, and I don’t want you thinking that I got paid to say so.
Tags: Computerworld, Eric Lai, Outlook, Outlook 2007, Outlook slowness, Clear Context, ClearContext, NEO, Nelson Email Organizer, Mac, OS X, Gmail
Outlook Slowness
Clearly I’m not the only person in the world that has experienced slowness in Microsoft Outlook; “Outlook slow” is the second most searched-for phrase that leads people to this site, behind “eye twitch”. I have to say that although I’m somewhat happier with Outlook 2007, it’s still not as good as it ought to be. In fact, on a daily use basis, I find Gmail is noticeably snappier.
This includes when I shut off the Outlook add-ons that I have come to rely on; I know that adding things on to an application that I find to be already somewhat slow isn’t all that smart, but there’s no way I’d live without ClearContext or NEO Pro, never mind Anagram.
And in terms of Gmail, it’s not like I don’t add functionality on there too; using greasemonkey, I’m able to add on saved searches, added hotkeys and even conversation previews. But the speed difference is still somewhat astounding.
Although I’m comparing Outlook 2007 to Outlook 2003, I have to keep in mind that I’m using 2007 on a faster computer that has a true dual-core processor. So in fact, it’s probably more than likely that Outlook hasn’t gotten any faster at all between the 2003 and 2007 versions.
The worst slow-down I experience is when Outlook is actually checking my POP mail account, which is the only way that I actually receive email into Outlook. The problem is FAR worse if I’m checking multiple accounts, but it’s really bad even with one, particularly when there are a lot of messages to download. I can’t for the life of me figure out why such a modern application can’t handle the rigors of checking mail, something that email clients have been doing forever.
Colour me frustrated.
Drop me a note if you also have trouble with Outlook slowness, and if you’ve had any success speeding it up I’m all ears!
Tags: Outlook, Microsoft Outlook, Outlook 2007, Outlook slowness, Outlook slow, MS Outlook, email
Quoted in Computerworld
About a month ago I was interviewed by a reporter named Eric Lai for an article about Microsoft’s Office 2007 launch, and Outlook 2007 specifically. The conversation lasted about a half an hour, and covered quite a broad range of topics, within the context of email management.
The article that the reporter was writing was posted today at Computerworld’s website; here’s an excerpt:
December 21, 2006 (Computerworld)
– His real desk may be a mess, but Jason Clarke’s virtual office is as neat as they come due to his assiduous answering, filing or deleting of the 400-plus e-mails he gets each day.“My feeling is that if you have more than a screenful of e-mails in your in-box, you’re being rude,” said Clarke, a technical sales and marketing manager at Wenco International Mining Systems Ltd. in Richmond, British Columbia.
Clarke is an archetypal “filer,” spending hours a day managing his Microsoft Corp. Outlook e-mail program.
While the gist of the article is accurate, it seems a few liberties were taken with a couple of the details. I don’t know if this was for readability purposes (artistic license) or simply the result of having interviewed tons of people about the same topic, but I thought it would be worth clarifying a couple of points in the article.
The first is my current job title; although I am in technical sales and marketing these days, I’m not the manager of the department. The other point is the number of daily emails I receive; at one time in a previous position Project Manager (at a previous company) I was receiving well in excess of 400 emails per day. Mercifully, today that number is down around 100, and often dips to half of that. And although I’d like to say the comment about my desk being messy is untrue, that’s unfortunately completely accurate.
Those details aside, I think Eric has written a nicely put together overview of Outlook 2007 and what makes it interesting in contrast to earlier versions of the product. I also stand by the point that while Outlook 2007 is much better than previous versions, to really super-charge your email management you need the help of ClearContext’s IMS Outlook add-in. Considering how often I pimp that product, you’d think I’d be throwing an affiliate link around - and I probably should. But I’d simply rather that you understand how much ClearContext can positively impact your email management if you use Outlook.
One day I’ll get around to posting my recipe for ultimate Outlook email productivity, using Outlook 2007 (although it works with other versions), ClearContext, and a competing Outlook add-on called Nelson Email Organizer, which I consider to be the best of breed email desktop search client available. I’ve touched on them both before, but I feel I’ve really found the sweet spot with these applications now.
Thanks to Eric Lai for choosing to speak with me for his piece.
Tags: Outlook, Microsoft Outlook, Computerworld, Eric Lai, ClearContext, NEO, email, email productivity
How to mark all posts as read in Google Reader
With the release of Google Calendar, I’m finding myself migrating more and more of my online life into Google apps. Gmail was the first (and still best), Google Personalized Homepage the next, then Google Calendar and now I’m starting to use Google Notebook some. The one that I could never really get into, though, was Google Reader.
Unfortunately, the first thing I did when Google Reader was released was to import my entire 250+ feed OPML file into it. Now, unfortunately the way Google Reader works is that it forces you to look at every single post, so if you have feeds that are very frequently updates, Google Reader is not great at letting you simply skim through them quickly. Almost immediately, my Google Reader account was overwhelmed with thousands of unread posts, and it felt completely out of control. I abandoned it, as I suspect many other people did who went through the same experience.
Since then, the Google Reader team has made a number of improvements, not the least of which was in adding a Google Personalized Homepage module that allows you to read posts from there. Since I use my personalized homepage as my online “home base”, I had to give this a try.
Here’s a big problem: One of the shortcomings in Google Reader is that there is no way to perform bulk actions. So you can’t just mark everything as read, just as you can’t unsubscribe from more than one feed at a time. So I manually unsubscribed from over 250 feeds, then imported a very select few feeds. This did not go without some problems; for example, I’m still receiving new posts for feeds that I removed days ago. But worse still, what remained were hundreds of unread posts that I wanted to but was unable to mark as read en masse.
Greasemonkey to the rescue! I followed a link from the official Google Reader blog that pointed to some Greasemonkey scripts that had been developed for Google Reader. One in particular caught my eye: Google Reader Auto-Read. This Greasemonkey script will allow you to simply click a link, and have it start methodically scrolling through your feeds one post at a time and mark each one as read. You can fire this thing off and work in another tab, or just go to sleep. It’s not fast, and it’s not elegant, but it does the trick. So if you, like me - and Steve Rubel - have the problem of many old and unwanted unread posts in your Google Reader account, give the Google Reader Auto-Read Greasemonkey script a try.
Tags: Google Reader, GReader, Greasemonkey, auto-read, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Personalized Homepage, Google Notepad, Google, Micropersuasion, Steve Rubel
Becoming a Gmail master
While I’m a heavy user of Outlook in a business environment, I’ve migrated to Gmail for my personal email, and I don’t think I’ll ever go back. Gmail is pure email done right; it doesn’t have the productivity functionality of Outlook, but if you’re just looking for a mail client that allows you to deal with your email quickly, Gmail’s the way to go.
Lifehacker has a wonderful post up called Hack Attack: Become a Gmail Master. In it, they describe all of the reasons I love Gmail, as well as some very useful tips on how to make it work even better for you. I highly recommend it.
If you don’t yet have a Gmail account, but are inspired to try it out from this post, drop me a line at jason at jasonclarke dot net. I’ve got many invitations available, and I’m happy to share.
