Well articulated, Don. In our opinion these basic, useful features should be
included in the program, while letting the Administrator or Owner ENABLE or
DISABLE the features they do or don't want! You're 100% correct in pointing
out that many other features could be equally abused, but are not targeted.

And talking about bloat, we think there would actually be a rather healthy
small business market for several additional features now absent from
Outlook. As a small business, we'd love to see additional modules that would
allow Outlook to become a true communications center for small businesses.
In otherwords, allowing it to become a common repository for ALL forms of
communication including email, newsgroup messages, rss feeds, faxes, voice
messages, automated answering and messaging, origination of voice calls
through the computer, and voice call recording! It only seems logical to
manage all these forms of communication from one cental location.

Ironically, today's hardware is powerful enough, we have the disk space, so
why not provide an efficient program to manage ALL our small business
communications needs from one center? Over the years, there have been
several great comm programs that have nearly accomplished this end, so how
can we characterize these useful functions as 'BLOAT' for a Microsoft
product? We for one, would love to see a comprehensive, yet inexpensive,
solution for our ENTIRE small business communications needs.

Thanks again, Don, finally an honest voice that appeals to a good sense of
reason.


************************
"Don Caton" wrote:

"Brian Tillman" wrote in message
:

Don Caton wrote:

And the premise that newsgroups are not useful and have the potential
to be abused in a corporate environment is equally absurd.

While intelligent people may disagree on this, the fact remains that the
guys on the front row do not consider it absurd. Where I work, we have our
own internal NNTP server and it serves strictly local newsgroups. I had to
submit special exemption paperwork making a business case to allow our
firewall to be configured in such a manner as to permit access to the
msnews.microsoft.com NNTP server and it's the only external NNTP server
we're allowed to access. I had to _prove_ that the company would save money
by allowing access to these newsgroups.

Brian:

Sorry, that didn't come out the way I meant it.

Newsgroups have the potential to be abused, no question about it. What
I meant to say was that everything else you can do in Outlook has the
same potential to be abused as well. So why use this argument only
against newsgroups?

There are tons of RSS feeds that an employee could subscribe to that
have nothing to do with that person's work, but I don't see the same
argument being made against RSS feeds in OL 2007.

There is nothing inherently bad about newsgroups that made them
unsuitable for business use; they are an information source, just like
email, RSS, web sites, etc. Like everything else, newsgroups have the
potential to be abused, but access to them can be controlled via
firewalls and other means, just like your company does.

And if newsgroup access were added to OL then policy settings could also
be added to control or disable it.

From a purely selfish standpoint I don't care, as I will be able to
continue to sell my newsgroup add-in for OL2007. But IMO, none of the
reasons thrown about for not including them in OL2007 hold water. MS
might have a very good reason for not doing it, but only they know what
that is.

--
Don Caton