Update: Low Cal Outlook Regime

It's six months now since I switched the way I file email in Outlook.  Rather than maintain a complex folder structure for my mail I decided to embrace desktop search in Office 2007 and cut down to just three folders.  Six months later and I won't be going back. 

The psychological shift was tougher than I thought it would be.  Many's the time I have paused before filing an item and thought for just a moment about creating a new folder for a certain class of mail.  I succumbed just once, creating a new folder for a trip I was planning.  I wanted to be 100% sure I could find all the flight, parking, hotel details to print out before departure.  Looking back, what I probably should have done is file those items to OneNote.

I still fret sometimes when filing items that I won't be able to find things again.  I wish there was an easy way to tag mail before I file.  Somewhere I can simply add a delimited list of keywords to give me an additional comfort factor.  Yes, I know there are categories, but that's not what I am looking for in this instance.  Maybe we'll see that in O14.

I am happy to report though, I am yet to lose anything or struggle to find an item I need to refer back to.  Instant search hasn't let me down.  In any query I can narrow down the potential matches quickly to less than 20 items by searching on the name of the sender and and a keyword I expect to be in the text of the mail.  This turns out to be a very common search pattern.  It's very rare that I will search for a mail item and be unable to remember the sender of the item I am looking for.

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 28, 2007
  Or you could use a system like ours that searches instantly against all of your email that is completely integrated into our system and allows you to store emails by contact, Project, Support Incident, or of course any folder you wish. By integrating everything with your CRM and project management, you completeyl elminate the need to have folders because the grouping and categorization is implicit in it's functional categorization, and of course you can search for anything anywhere in the entire system. Oh, and it's shared automatically with everyone working on the project based one security, so now email is collaborative by defintion without having to forward emails to everyone involved. The end result is Outlook looks like it's from a different decade functionality-wise.