Russ,
While your points are well taken, you have not had the opportunity to walk
in my shoes. I can count 8 large businesses in as many days (all Exchange
Users) who have been driving us crazy trying to perfect our NK2 editor for
them. They're not asking for reasons that only a few months ago I would
have thought were obvious reasons like, wrong addresses in my file, or an
employee has left and I want to know who he/she has been in touch with.
The most surprising reasons have come from people worried about security
issues. There are products being developed more mass distribution (in
Europe for instance)that uses Outlook. They qualify each e-mail as
unsecured, encrypted, or digitally signed. Consequently the recipient's
address gets a "special" tag indicating how it was sent. I think you can
see the problem if every time they type the name John, they get 3
autocompletes for each John.
Mostly though, the requests have been to build centralized databases from
the user community. One client is implementing this in the hopes of
stopping employees from sending out personal e-mails as this info. would be
apparent also. I don't know if I mentioned that when you do a traditional
"delete" from MS Outlook, that the actual record remains and is read by our
utility. That means that even deleted entries are still alive and well.
As you point out, the masses don't even know or care about the NK2 file.
However, of the 8 requests mentioned earlier, they represent a couple
thousand seats of Outlook. And, as you can imagine it is almost always some
IT guy who is in a panic because he has to "fix" the CEO, or VP's computer.
One fellow from Texas told me that after paying $35 to M$, and speaking to
four MS techs., the fourth tech. told him about our utility. That was as
much a surprise to me as you can imagine. I guess they DO view these forums
from time to time.
I apologize if I sounded a bit abrupt, but you don't get the panic phone
calls and e-mails like we do. And they almost always start out with
something nasty like, Those bla bla bla SOB's at this place or that told me
that my only alternative was to delete the file and start again. When you
have small businesses whose only source for remembering e-mails are their
NK2 files (admittedly they don't usually know where the info. comes from)
the really depend in that data!
Telling them to delete the file is exactly what they get if they go to MS,
so I don't know that that is constructive.
Regarding the reliance on the data...I agree 100% that NK2 data shouldn't be
relied upon. That's why we're building a synchronize utility that will port
contact data from NK2 into the Contact folder, and conversely the ability to
build a new NK2 file from Contact Folder data.
Of course all of this is complicated by Exchange file structures, but we can
definitely pull from Contacts and put into NK2. For exchange users, we can
only extract "local" data and populate a "local" contact folder. Global
data should and will remain untouched by us.
Randy McNees
(e-mail address removed)
Write me if you ever want to know more about this growning issue.
Russ Valentine said:
Because on the planet where I live I can count on one hand the number of
users who even knew an autocompletion cache exists or who rely upon it
as
if
it were a permanent data repository.
The data people rely upon and need to protect is in their Contacts Folder.
Autocompletion is not a feature that users have come to rely upon
heavily
in
Outlook. Nor should they. That may change, of course, as more OE users
migrate to Outlook.
--
Russ Valentine
[MVP-Outlook]
Randy said:
Mr. Valentine:
While your suggested solution to "Chocs" is accurate, it sounds
exactly
like
what they used to receive from Microsoft. That solution really doesn't
help the folks that need to retrieve the data from the cache. We have
received files from at least a dozen customers who have over a thousand
entries in that cache. We have literally thousands of desktop users waiting
for our Exchange solution to become available so that they can access this
data and either import it into their contact folders or do whatever
with
it.
Even some of the Microsoft Tech Support people are pointing their customers
to our utility.
While you may not wish to direct anyone to our product, you might want to
mention that such a utility exists.
Randy McNees
I'm sure your data is fine. You've just developed a corrupt autocompletion
cache.
Create a new profile . You'll repopulate one in no time.
--
Russ Valentine
[MVP-Outlook]
Hi,
I am using Outlook 2002. Whenever I type the first few
letters of the e-mail ID earlier all the names beginning
with letters used to come up and one fine day I had to re-
type the whole e-mail ID. I am worried as to if I have
lost the e-mail IDs or wot. Can someone please help as I
need the IDs desperately.
Chocs
