With our recent transition to the MeritMail collaboration suite, we deprecated our campus Meeting Maker service. As a result, I lost the fat client I had grown fond of over the last three years. I am not saying Meeting Maker is a gem, but I had learned to appreciate the ability to manage my calendar without the uncertainty of a typical AJAX interface.
After giving the web client a respectable chance, I was provoked by a colleague to try Outlook 2007. Fast forward a few months, and I’m loving it. The Calendar and Task integration is wonderful. Need to flag a message for follow-up? Click the little flag to the right of the “Subject” line. A list of tasks is then compiled in a To-Do Bar, which contains a handy view of the current month, my upcoming calendar events, and my incomplete tasks.
This entire experience has been chilling for me as I am not a Microsoft fan-boy, and am typically a big proponent of Open Source Software. I would have laughed had told me a few years ago that I would be using Outlook as my primary email / calendar / task management software.
