January 26, 2007
And since I haven't bagged on Microsoft in awhile...
I have been having to do a lot with Outlook and Exchange at work recently (Ug, I know). Anyways, I had to laugh out loud the other day, when Outlook barfed this error message up at me:
The message reads: "You cannot add a Microsoft Exchange account to this profile while Outlook is running. Please exit Outlook and use the Mail icon in the Control Panel to add a Microsoft Exchange account."
But I got to this dialog box from within Outlook! So, I can add POP and IMAP servers from within Outlook, but not Exchange? Why even give me the option to do so if it doesn't work in the first place? It's not like the Outlook team didn't know about this deficiency -- I mean, they went though all of the trouble to to put in this dialog box telling me exactly what to do.
Amazing!
-Andy.
Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Outlook, Exchange
I think the problem here is that this dialog is not unique to outlook but it's just something that can be brought up for outlook or the control panel. I can't speak for the designers but I think the thinking was that it's easier to just have one configuration tool rather than two and that the instructions to close outlook and start again from the control panel are sufficient. But it might not have been all that hard to write the mail config wizard to detect if outlook was running and disable that radio button. Of course then you're faced with users who want to do what you were doing and lacking the option to do it.
Posted by: Mark at January 26, 2007 6:46 AM