Why Outlook is preferred by Business Professionals?

On the afternoon of 15th March, 2005, I was at the Mumbai Domestic Airport to leave for Bangalore, I had about half an hour before I finally boarded the craft, so I flipped open my Notebook to do a last minute mail-check, things to do, task at hand and appointments for the next 24-48 hrs.

A rather shameful thing about Mumbai is it’s lack of Information Technology Infrastructures. There was not a single Wi-Fi hotspot at the Domestic Airport. Bangalore Airport had about five of them of which I found two to be free to use but with a rather low connectivity range. The not-so-free ones have to be used after buying usage hours from the particular ISPs. Not just the airport, Mumbai have the least number of wi-fi spots at public places, even some of the best hotels lack the same. I am pretty sure visitors visiting here are having a hard time. Bangalore is flooded with Wi-Fi hotspots, even Barista cafe at M.G. Road have two spots, one of the Ivory Tower Hotel in top and another one which I was never able to connect. Most of the Wi-Fi spots, if you are at a favorable distance, have good enough bandwidth.

Why most Business Professional prefer Microsoft Outlook?

Well, I saw that most people who flip opened their Notebook at public places, the airport etc. all had Outlook opened and it let them do many things, synchronize to their PDAs, or PDA-ed Phones. I am a Thunderbird convert from Outlook Express (I chose OE because it came with Windows Installation and is lightweight). Thunderbird is very good in its own right and I love it. But I think I have to shift to Oulook because of many reasons.

I have lately been using lotta other features, applications and not just mails, like taking quick notes, listing out tasks. I have been using many different small nifty software for each of them. I had been testing out Oulook with coupla not-so-used mails and I realize that I can do all of my nifty tasks in just one place. But the catch here is that it takes about twice of CPU memory than that of Thunderbird.

One more reason is that I could not find myself a good PIM for my new Sony Ericsson P910i. Outlook came to the rescue and I can now sync all my details including mails (I won’t use this though for the sheer volume of mails that I receive in a day) with the P910i. I will have to learn a bit more about using Outlook. As for the security aspects, I am not really concerned as usually update patches as soon as they are release, I have my firewalls on and am conscious enough of any suspicious things happening in and around my computer(s).

Breeze Add-in for Outlook

Macromedia have a Breeze Add-in for Outlook and it offers a convenient way to schedule, start, or join Breeze Live Meetings using Microsoft Outlook 2000, XP or 2003.

Thunderbird

I think, Thunderbird is best kept for the Geeks in you, Outlook for the Business Professionals and yes, for your browser, Firefox is the de-facto till now and will be for quite sometime.