[OSX-Users] Re: Outlook 11 Problems

[Hugh Glaser]

On 14 Dec 2011, at 08:37, Hugh C Davis wrote:

> Dear Mac folks.
> 
> I use Outlook 11 as my email/calendar client.
> 
> Please do not give me grief about this. I HATE the package, and it does seem daft to own a range of excellent Apple hardware and then run Microsoft software on them!  
Au contraire, mon ami.
It seems very sensible to have a Unix machine that you can run M$ Office on.
> But I find there are a number of things that simply are not implemented in the Mac  offerings mainly that I have to use often as the result of lots of work with people in the Uni centre.
Yup.

Not sure I can help much, but here is a report.
I use both Outlook and Mail (and iCal and …)
I usually only use Mail though.
> 
> So – I have some real issues and I cannot find anything on-line to help…
> 
> 
>  1.  I spend my entire time looking at the beach ball. If I look at next email or try to switch to calendar view I get enough time to load up Activity Monitor and see that Outlook is not responding while using 100% of one of my processors. Mayve 10 seconds per change. This is impossible – any suggestions? E.g. I do have a very large mailbox – but I do not dare archive them – I often have to search to find old stuff.
A real bummer.
Outlook is working fine for me - actually better than Mail - there is plenty on the forums about the bug in the Flag interaction between Exchange and Mail, which was introduced in Lion and Apple have STILL not sorted.
It would be strange if there was a connection, but I mention it, and also as a warning that this would be a bad time to bite the bullet and move to Mail, as you might get hit by it.
How large is very large?
In the past I have found that folders over about 10000 were rather dodgy, and so tend to keep below around 8000.
But I never bother with search in Outlook or Mail - I always use Spotlight (in the finder window, not the top right), which is very fast.
Actually, I think I have excluded Outlook from Spotlight, and just rely on its Mail search to find messages.
So before I moved over more to Mail I used to leave both connected all the time, using Outlook for the functions and Mail via Spotlight for search.
Not ideal, but it worked!
> 

>  2.  Things I put in using iCal or on my iPhone simply do not appear in Outlook. I look at OWA, and they are there, and they appear in all my Apple calendars – but not in Outlook. There is no way make outlook see these entries other than to delete the calendar on outlook and then re-load it (takes an hour or so).   Surely this must just be me – if this was happening to everyone else the forums would be full of it and they are not….???
There is currently at least one bug in iCal that I think has only been mentioned on our iOS list (for reasons I won't go into), that means that the sync of the name of an item gets lost.
Again, maybe not connected, but worth mentioning, as it suggests fragility in the syncing.

My overall conclusion is that Apple has screwed up a few things on the Lion upgrade.
In particular Safari crashes on me (and I can now even make it happen). Mail hangs to Exchange.

In general, I find that the memory management is still dodgy - VM goes up and rarely goes down, even when closing things.
fseventsd, for example, just carries on going up.
And network activity seems to make heavy loads on the CPU, which is annoying (not least because it switches the fan on because of the heat).

I have a sense that a problem for me is around the file system - something is just not quite right.
I also suspect that if I hosed the disk and did a re-install things would be better, but that is quite a business to do in particular because Apple decided not to facilitate that. So any problems I had with a bit of corruption (oooh Betty!) have just carried on.
I keep living in hope that the next Lion upgrade will improve things.

So nothing concrete, sorry, but hopefully some food for thought.

> 
> 
> ========
> Hugh Davis
> Room 3045, Building 32, ECS, The University of Southampton, S017 1BJ, UK
> Tel:    +44 (0)23 8059
> 3669    Skype: skype.hcd
> http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/hcd/
> 
> 

-- 
Hugh Glaser,  
              Web and Internet Science
              Electronics and Computer Science,
              University of Southampton,
              Southampton SO17 1BJ
Work: +44 23 8059 3670, Fax: +44 23 8059 3045
Mobile: +44 75 9533 4155 , Home: +44 23 8061 5652
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~hg/