From: Denns Foster
To: Dave Wilkes; John Galley; John Robertson
Date: Tue, Jun 9, 1998 3:46 PM
Subject: GroupWise vs. Outlook 98
On 05-21-98, I called our Microsoft Premiere Support number to request
help with the conflict between GW and Outlook 98. I spoke to Barbara
Thomas who generated case SRX9805216011611.
My initial request was that MS consider it a bug that Outlook 98 by
default installs using the "Internet Only" option for e-mail services. I
told her that it was our opinion that the Outlook 98’s setup program
should inspect the system it’s being installed on and choose the
"Corporate or Workgroup E-mail" option by default if the Windows
Messaging System (WMS i.e., MAPI) was installed and profiles have been
defined and choose the "lnternet Only" option by default otherwise. This
would probably eliminate 90% of the complaints we get as I’m sure most
people when reading the screen containing these options don’t realize
what’s being said and simply go with the default as being "safe".
On 05-28-98 I received a call and e-mail from Barbara telling me that my
request had been investigated and Adam (I don’t recall having heard his
last name) from Microsoft would be contacting me. On either the 28th or
29th, I got a call from Adam. He told me that MS views the way Outlook
98 was operating as a "Feature", not a bug. They would take my request
and submit it as an "Enhancement" for future development. I
discussed/argued the issue with Adam for several minutes, explaining how
by defaulting to "lnternet Only", Outlook 98 ends up breaking a
GroupWise installation that had up to the point Outlook 98 was
installed, worked fine. I explained to him that the setup screen made no
mention of MAPI services being changed and/or broken for applications
that need them. His response was that the user is given an ample
description of what was going to happen and that we should "educate" our
users to make the correct selection during Outlook 98’s setup. All in
all, I’d describe my conversation with Adam as equivalent to talking to
a rock.
I believe that the changes I made to the address book’s initialization
flow last week is probably the best that we can hope for without Outlook
98 changing. We may want to add something to our README about this. The
check/change I put into Surge for Outlook 98 could easily be retrofitted
into a Jolt CPR build as well, assuming we don’t mind the resource the
changes.
FYI: Before I made the changes mentioned above, when installing Outlook
98 using the "lnternet Only" default option, the following problems were
encountered:
- No Novell address book service providers are available;
- There is no way to add them to your profile (the old MAPI profile
dialog has been replaced by something Outlook 98 specific).
- Sometimes (usually?), our call tologin to MAPl fails (I don’t fully
understand why this
happens).
- When we can login. Outlook 98’s LDAP service provider causes us grief
because of its problems implementing the MAPI APIs we use. The problems
here include:
Calls to IMAPlTable::Restrict GPF when passed NULL for the restriction.
This is the only documented way in MAPI to delete a restriction.
The way we use MAPI for LDAP services for Boldon James and Nexor
doesn’t work with the Outlook 98 provider. I’ve found two areas that we
could/should change that should be compatible with the Boldon James
and/or Nexor providers.
Dennis.
http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/2000/PX02921.pdf
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court documents in the case of Comes v. Microsoft.
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