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Comment by fock

3 days ago

yesterday: I saw the weird CVE for M365 which "exploits" some LLM through messaging embedded in emails.

today: got a very long email, wanted to search for our department in it. Outlook: "Search is a deprecated feature".

Despite all the "but you can't extrapolate to a large org from personal experiences"-FUD around, I think for most orgs (especially governments which are generally far behind on processes) it would be easy to switch from a feature-perspective. The problem is the army of employees and contractors who are very happy to defend Microsoft for keeping their non-automated thiefdoms (such is non-cloud AD administration at most places I extrapolate ....). There is hardly anyone there to implement the necessary processes and rather than to send out their underlings to FOSDEM, leadership is happy to get an invite by Microsoft (or a cloud-provider...) to an "innovation-summit" instead.

I was watching my wife navigate Outlook the other day, I can't believe how bad it's got since I last used it. It was completely unresponsive on brand new hardware. The UI was awful.

  • Outlook used to be one of the best email clients available. Now it’s essentially the worst imaginable.

    We just renewed our 365 licenses at my company for one more year. I’ve been mentally sketching out an exit strategy. I inventoried what we use in 365 and Azure, and there’s not a single thing we can’t replace with an alternative we run or a different provider that’s a bit less hostile to third party ecosystems/standards/etc.

  • I briefly used MS word recently, and the UI is so different. I found it quite hard to find things.

    • Heh, I fired up Libre Office a while back. Built up a home machine that does run Windows 10 (some embedded dev tools I want to run with low hassle), but all software on it is either OSS, or free beer type software.

      No 365, lol and the Win 10 pro license was $5 (electronicsfirst.com)

      Libre Office is GREAT. I have not used it in a while. In a couple hours, I had my styles, fonts and goodies all setup.

      Making docs and a fairly detailed presentation were a pleasure.

      Office is degrading rapidly right now!

Search is a deprecated feature?

  • I think they may have triggered a wrong search. Smart Lookup in Office is indeed deprecated and labeled Search. So right click on a word in a text, select Search and that will no longer work, but that wasn't searching in your text, but rather online.

    • that might indeed be the problem. I however did not find any other suitably marked element and CTRL+F apparently is too simple for outlook. Maybe you can select a single mail in the search bar...