[wg-c] I've been Micro-shafted!

["Roeland M.J. Meyer" <rmeyer@mhsc.com>]

Hello all,
Some of you might notice that my participation has been radically
reduced. This is directly due to actions of Micosoft. I recently
retained a new large client. They required MS-Office 2000 for their
normal workstation setup. This brings with it, OutLook2000. Be warned,
upgrading from OutLook98 to OutLook 2000 will be painful. Since many of
you are also using this PIM, I feel that it is appropriate to warn you
about the new Microshafting "Feature". Simply, it sux.

In order to sort over 600 messages per day, into organized folder and
storage areas, I use "Rules Wizard" filters extensively. When doing the
upgrade, and using your existing filteres, there is no problem and thing
operate normally. Howevre, if you ever want to maintain your rule set,
you will find that not only can you not modify the rule, but the rules
wizard will corrupt the rule you were trying to fix. There is a files,
with extention RWZ, that contains these rules. Thw new Outlook can read
this file, but when it writes to this file the format is different, thus
making the file useless to both programs (Outlook98 AND Outlook2000) and
the rule get deactivated.

Microshaft has no intention of publishing a date for the fix. Because,
according to their tech support, rules are a seldom-used feature and
they aren't getting a lot of calls on it yet. Their answer, "rename the
RWZ file (Outlook will create a new one) and recreate the rules. There
is NOWAY to load rules with a batch file. (there are times when a GUI is
goo-y). Considering that I am getting over 150 lists (admin
support/news/affiliations/business) this just cost me a Saturday
(rather, it will). In the meanwhile, all of my broken rules are dumping
their content into my Inbox. It's hard to wade through the mess.

There is NO WAY to upgrade, to MS-Office 2000, without running into
this. Retaining Outlook98 is not an option since the problem is in the
new DLLs that Office2000 brings to the table. I just halted the
roll-out, of Office2000, to MHSC, until the impacts are better assesed.

--------------------
Roeland M.J. Meyer, CEO
Morgan Hill Software Company, Inc.
http://www.mhsc.com/
mailto://rmeyer@mhsc.com
--------------------