With the popularity of Microsoft Office 365 and the myriad of benefits that come with working in the cloud, many organizations have made the leap from GroupWise to Outlook. For end users, that means some changes to email, calendars and tasks. Understanding some key GroupWise vs Outlook differences will help to ease the transition.
Essential Email Differences, GroupWise vs Outlook
In general, Outlook brings improved speed and stability to email. Many users also prefer the Outlook user interface over GroupWise. Some differences to keep in mind include the following:
- Retracting messages – Outlook includes limited abilities to retract sent messages. You can recall an email only if you and the recipient both use Outlook within the same organization, and if the recipient has not read the email. In addition, if you enable the Undo Send option, Outlook allows you to cancel a sent message for up to ten seconds. This helps in potentially avoiding an embarrassing email faux pas.
- Delivery confirmation and read receipts – In Outlook, you can request delivery confirmation and/or read receipts for a single email or for all emails. This is particularly useful when sending time-sensitive information to coworkers. The recipient’s system may or may not honor that request.
- Viewing attachments – In Outlook, you can quickly preview attachments for most Office documents, image files and text files. For other documents, you must open or save the attached document in order to view it.
- Discussion threads – GroupWise and Outlook both offer the option to display related messages as a discussion thread (GroupWise) or conversation (Outlook), simplifying email organization. However, when discussion threads migrate over from GroupWise to Outlook, the process breaks the connection between the emails.
- Adding contacts to an email – GroupWise allows you to drag a contact from the Contacts folder over to email to start a new message. Outlook does not provide this ability. However, Outlook does build an auto-complete list to help you quickly add email addresses to a message.
Email Management
- Changing an email with attachments to an appointment – Both GroupWise and Outlook allow you to create an appointment from an email. Simply click the email and drag it to the calendar. While GroupWise converts the email, Outlook copies it, leaving the email intact. Only the contents of the email copy over, not the attachments.
- Proxy rights vs. delegates – GroupWise offers a Proxy feature that allows one user to send emails or manage a calendar for another. In Outlook, you can use the handy Delegate feature to grant another user various levels of permissions to your calendar, tasks, inbox, contacts and notes.
Calendar Appointments in Outlook
- Appointments that recur with no regular pattern – Outlook makes it easy to create recurring appointments with a regular pattern. For example, you can quickly add multiple instances of a regular Tuesday meeting. However, unlike GroupWise, Outlook will not allow users to create recurring appointments without a pattern.
- Deleting recurring appointments – When you delete a recurring appointment from your Outlook calendar, the appointment disappears. You cannot recover it from the trash.
Tasks and Notes in Outlook
- Tasks sent to multiple people – In Outlook, when you assign a task to one other person. The system will give you updates from the user who accepts the task, thus allowing you to track progress. But if you assign a task to more than one person, Outlook cannot track the task and update its status.
- Future tasks – Your Day of the Week view in Outlook includes a view-at-a-glance of all tasks and events for that day. However, future tasks do not appear in your calendar, just in your task list.
- Reminder notes – Outlook includes dated notes. Unlike GroupWise reminder notes, Outlook notes do not connect to the calendar. Instead, users can create an All-Day event, which will appear prominently in the calendar. It will appear at the top of the other events for the day.
Tap into Email Expertise
The email experts at Messaging Architects can help prepare any size organization to navigate the GroupWise vs Outlook differences they should know before migrating. With deep experience in both GroupWise and Office 365, we provide the resources you need for a smooth and on-time Office 365 email migration.
