Microsoft IMF... not for me I guess (for now) - but Outlook 2003 looks great

After going on vacation and coming back to a surprise rebuilding of our network, I am now faced with a fresh new Exchange 2003 machine with none of our previous anti-spam software on it.

I took this opportunity to see if I could install Microsoft's new "Intelligent Message Filter". I downloaded the file, and then also downloaded the documentation for it since they warn you that installing it without having first read the documentation can lead to bad things happening.

I read through the documentation and it was clear immediately (even on the regular page) that this would only work on Exchange 2003. But they don't tell you until you get into the documentation that the last steps of filtering won't work unless you are also running Outlook 2003.
The parts that require that are when the last check to see if spam is on the allowed list and should be let through, or if the other side of that coin is the case and it is non-spam that is on the blocked list.
The "failure" is perfectly fine for clients that are not Outlook 2003 - it just lets mail through spam or not.

My office is full of desktop systems that are currently running Outlook 2000, so we are out of luck there.
Theoretically the system could still work for us since IMF allows server actions to be taken - so if things are particularly bad spam, it can just delete them and they don't get delivered to the mailbox (or probably the more intelligent "archive" option so that potentially important e-mail isn't deleted accidentally due to it being overly spam-like in look to the server).

We do have access to Outlook 2003, so I installed it on my machine to see what it is all about. My first impression was that it is pretty cool, and it remains my impression even after several hours of use. The visual look and feel of it is noticeably different - I'm not one that likes change just for the sake of change.
But in this case I think it is well served changes.
One example is that your inbox gets subdivided by messages that are from last week, then from two weeks ago, then from three weeks ago, etc. This is very helpful when you want to narrow down a folder full of messages and not be as distracted.
If you then sort by subject, it groups things so that you get all of the messages together in expandable lists that have the same subject.
And then likewise if you do so by the from field as well.
Essentially that is no different than the previous sorting - but the visual separation of it into expandable/collapsable blocks makes it easier to sift through a large volume of data.

There are a few other features, such as consolidating the mail folders into a way that takes up less space and makes more sense, and they have more months on screen at a time in the calendar view.

But the reason to use Outlook 2003 in this particular case would be for the junk mail tools that pair up with IMF.

And this is where I decided that we weren't going to go with this solution for our office.

It took months to get them used to the anti-spam solution that we had in place before. We know that it works extremely well and they are finally used to it now.
I have no idea how well this IMF system works at all - and in order to use it, I have to install it (always a scary thought to add/change software on a server), configure it, and then deploy Outlook 2003 to all of our workstations.
I then have to deal with any potential upgrade issues there - it went perfectly smoothly on my own machine (although it took about 5-10 minutes), but I don't know that it would for all of our machines/users and their own setups which are... incredibly prone to be outside of the norm and break on system changes. (people get so that they do things one way and they then feel that is the "right way" - Microsoft exacerbates this issue by giving people so many ways to solve a problem - in many cases people don't want that - they just want one way to do it, and once they find a way... any way at all - they don't ever want to have to do it differently)

While I wasn't terribly against installing the client on all of the machines - I have no desire to then have to field calls for months asking how to do something that worked in "the old Outlook" but they can't figure out how to do it in this new version.
I also don't want to have to show every person how to use the new Junk Mail features.

So this is a frustrating case in that there might be a reason to switch - but due to training issues - I am going to just put our previous solution back into place and leave it as it is until we hit a point where we must change it.

So I guess I can't be of much help as to how good/bad IMF is at this point since I won't be installing it on this system.
I would bet that there are many other offices out there in the same boat that have an existing platform at work for them and they are not about to try something new which would make their already overworked job that much worse if it isn't 100% perfectly transparent to the end users (and it isn't).

Posted by Eric at June 7, 2004 02:18 PM | TrackBack