Yesterday Microsoft released an update to Outlook 2007 to help speed up the downloading of messages and reduce the annoying and highly criticized freezing associated with moving or deleting messages.Microsoft indicated that the problem stemmed from RSS feeds, email, and calendar files all being stored in the same .PST file which as one might imagine could grow in size rather quickly depending on the user. The problem lies not with the software, but how users are using the software. Jessica Arnold Outlooks Program Manager told ComputerWorld "Outlook wasn't designed to be a file dump, it was meant to be a communications tool...There is that fine line, but we don't necessarily want to optimize the software for people that store their e-mail in the same .PST file for ten years."
Along with the patch Microsoft released an updated set of recommendations to enhance Outlook's performance including moving older emails and files to a separate archived .PST file or splitting a larger .PST file into several smaller ones.
[Via ComputerWorld]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
4-14-2007 @ 7:50PM
Ryan Taylor said...
Microsoft will never stop! Now they are taking over Photoshop's file extenstion. What was wrong with the PST file that they needed to change it to the PSD file. Geez.
Kidding but the article is slightly incorrect by one letter here and there.
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4-14-2007 @ 11:38PM
Woz said...
"The problem lies not with the software, but how users are using the software".
Gotta love that MS attitude.
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4-15-2007 @ 11:46AM
Franklin said...
Ugh. Just move your email archives to Thunderbird 2.0, use Gmail for your Webmail, and Google Calendar to sync. Don't risk locking up your email in Microsoft's proprietary formats!
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4-15-2007 @ 7:19PM
Dan Warne said...
"We don't necessarily want to optimize the software for people that store their e-mail in the same .PST file for ten years."
Phew, lucky we've got Google to come up with mail solutions for the small number of us that don't want to have to slim down our email archives just because Microsoft's too incompetent to engineer a scalable product.
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4-16-2007 @ 12:03AM
Pasco said...
In the interest of accuracy I would point out that outlook does archive and has for ages. It is a feature I missed until gmail finally added it - what she is talking about is people who never use it.
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4-16-2007 @ 5:44AM
epobirs said...
Archiving has been around in Outlook for a decade now but damned few users will ever set it up for themselves. They grow their PST into several gigabytes, mostly from data they've had no need to access immediately in years, and wonder why the system is getting slow.
There are plenty of good reasons to archive. Hard drive space is plentiful but RAM and processor time never is. We always find more stuff to add on top of what we were already running. The small delay to access and archive file is nothing compared to the gain from reduce system load.
It also makes backups much faster. Why backup data from 2004 every time you run a backup because you've got a single mammoth PST? Make a separate archive for that year and it need only be backed up once in a full system backup and the much smaller current year PST made part of the much more frequent backups for new data.
More than a few IT operations discovered that mammoth PSTs residing locally on desktops were the major bottleneck in backup regimes. Using archiving to get those PST sizes under control does the trick.
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4-16-2007 @ 3:00PM
Mysterius said...
Why doesn't Microsoft set up archiving by default, then?
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