Outlook 12 to have a great Entourage 2004 feature

Back when I was working on Entourage 2004, one of the things that we did frequently was look through the most frequent tech support call issues. Email account configuration was really high up there – not surprising given all the jargon: IMAP, SMTP, POP, SSL! All the user wanted to do was read and send email… how frustrating that must be.

As a result, I came up with the Auto Account Configure feature in Entourage 2004. And with the dev handy work of Mike, and verification by Rich, this feature became reality.

And now, it looks like Outlook 12 will have this feature as well:

Outlook 12 : Let’s Start Again: Account Configuration

In Outlook 12, we’ve added a feature that will make this easy for the majority of our customers. We’re calling it Auto Account Setup. It comes in a couple of parts:

From what this entry reads, it sounds like what Outlook 12 is doing will be slightly better and worse than Entourage.

You see, one of the problems I found was that people would often sign up for an ISP – and then either forget or not be told what their settings information was. So, with the help of others at Microsoft, I simply hard coded a giant lookup table in Entourage. All you had to do was type in your email address and we would look up what the right settings were for your domain.

It wasn’t pretty, but it worked for the 80% case. The big problem worry was always that some ISP would change its server settings, and our list would fall out of date. It looks like Outlook won’t be doing this, which isn’t as good as Entourage. But it will be trying combinations of well known words with the domain, as well as being able to look for a certain xml file at the domain, which is better than Entourage. Though Entourage does try SSL first as well so as to make your communication more secure.

The “Test Your Account” settings before you leave account configuration is also something that it looks like both products have.

I’m glad to see Outlook 12 have this feature. This will make the lives of many many many many many customers much much much much more happy.