Our helpdesk recently received a number of questions from users requesting assistance with a Microsoft Outlook outage. As our technicians looked into the issue, they found that the issue only appeared to be limited to our users.
After some more digging, we found that the outage was caused by a software update to the desktop version of Outlook, which did not affect web-based Outlook users. This is the reason why we were still able to access our internal Outlook email accounts.
The desktop software update serves as a good reminder of why you should consider using the web version of Outlook. The desktop version is limited to 50GB of storage, and the app begins to fail once you’ve reached approximately 20GB of that storage.
Once you get to that point, you’ll start to see bottlenecks when you have too much data stored on the desktop hard drive, and that starts to bog down the application as a result.
One way to avoid this issue is to turn on caching and shrink the amount of timeline down to between one month and a year that you’re storing data locally. The drawback is that doing this increases search times and does not solve the root of the problem.
Using Outlook for web helps you avoid these and other problems. For example, the web-based version has a standard interface, which works the same whether you’re using it on a PC or Mac. You can have it as a tab in your browser, and easily bounce back and forth between your Outlook account and any other tasks you’re working on.
If you still want that app-like experience without having to worry about storage limitations, Microsoft Edge Chromium has you covered. Simply select Apps from the Menu Bar, and click on Open in Outlook. This will also give you a shortcut that you can place on your desktop or taskbar.
Following this method gives you the ability to interact with Outlook as if it were an app when in fact, it’s actually functioning as a web page. This feature makes interacting with the web-based version of Outlook more user-friendly if you’re more comfortable with the app version.
The web-based version of Outlook has also changed the way calendar invites are sent out. You can still open the .ics files in classic Outlook. You can keep a copy of Outlook on your desktop just to open these invites, and close it again after you accept them.
We hope you found these tips useful. For more information, please give us a call at (505) 365-1975.
