Data Destruction, Microsoft Outlook style

I swear, if it kills me I will find a way to make programmers take an equivalent of the Hippocratic oath – “First, do no harm.”

Outlook, with a meeting scheduled for Thursday. and documents attached to the invite. Microsoft has carefully made it very easy for meeting organizers to publish information to attendees. So, being a digital kind of guy, I made my notes on the document in the meeting request so Outlook would bring them up at that time and I didn’t have to track another document floating around my system that I will only use once. Great!

But…

We had an emergency. No one could make it to the meeting, so the organizer sent out a cancellation. Before I even opened the cancellation, my meeting – and my notes – were gone. An all-too-helpful scheduling agent, a secretary with no brains and no conscience, had destroyed two hours of work and thought. I could not appeal, roll back, or examine previous versions. I just had to walk through the document again, wasting hundreds of dollars to my employer in my wasted time.

How to fix this? Many options, presented in my preferred order (not necessarily exclusive of each other):

  1. Keep a history of all meetings (or shared anythings) so you can look at previous versions.
  2. Have the software recognize when the entry has been changed and keep the changes as an additional note or some other accessory data.
  3. Never, never, never remove or change information until the user says “OK”. It’s not your meeting, it’s mine. You just scheduled it.

This won’t be my last opinion on Outlook, but it is one of the gravest. Destroying data is the worst software offense I know, and this happens regularly in my office as one meeting version tromps on the previous notes.

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