When I search for "Outlook Ideas" in the quick search:

DESIRED BEHAVIOR: Results should only include emails where the phrase "Change Request" is found.

Example Desired Results:

1. Body: "Did you complete that CHANGE REQUEST I sent to you last week?"

2. Subject Line "Questions regarding CHANGE REQUEST 1234235"

3. Attachment contains: CHANGE REQUEST

CURRENT UNDESIRED BEHAVIOR: Results include items where the word "Change" and "Request" both appear, but not necessarily sequentially or in that order. This is NOT optimal when "quotes" are used around the words.

Example UNDESIRABLE Results:

1. Subject: REQUEST to approve time off. Body "I hate the time CHANGE and want to come in late Monday. Is that okay?"

2. Body: Did you CHANGE your hair? Is that really what you Requested the stylist to do? Whoa!"

3. Etc...

In our Company it is quite common that Assistants and Supervisors share access to one Outlook-Account.
For the time beeing those constellations are dependant on regular folder-structures to organize one Email-Inbox as they tend to have at least the last 14 Days of emails in the inbox. Both people need a organisational guideline of emails and the (at least for us) newly introduced Search-Folders are currently "owner-only" visible.

So the suggestion is simply said that the Search-folders should as well be shared when a supervisor decides to share his inbox with his assistant. Please make this available as the search-folder-infrastructure would be not usable for described constellations.

Also, you cannot currently search a shared folder and it’s sub-folders. I have researched online and found hundreds of people asking the same question over and over, but no solution as yet. Why? It’s a simple feature that should be available. Our shared mailbox is sorted into folders. We want an option to show received: today but the search does not work. Extremely inconvenient and irritating.

• Would like to easily follow up on emails. I imagine my ability to set a reminder on an email I send - a reminder only I see - that keeps me informed and warns me after X days of my choice, whether I received a reply or not. This is some next-step ML similar to checking if the body of an email contained the keyword "attach" and then remind me I've forgotten to add one. I could say "please do this by Friday", and Outlook will remind me on Friday that "this activity should be done by Friday by this recipient". Just to help me with my short attention span, since this is the problem of our generation.


• Please don't let the tool I love (outlook) change my life :) I believe that 30 minutes timeslots by default for calendar items is a mistake. I literally have 6 or 7 back to back 30 minutes calls 3 times per week. my options are to accept or decline. when I accept them all, I miss the opportunity of doing necessary things, like being attentive on the calls, or going for bio breaks. Please consider making the default calendar option 25 minutes in length, not 30. The pomodoro technique is well established and proven to work - I would love outlook to help drive better behavior


• Speaking of driving better behavior, please let others know proactively that I would prefer them to add an Agenda to any call that is longer than 25 minutes. if it's longer than 25 minutes, or if it includes more than 2 people, a meeting invite without an agenda should really not be the default allowed. The title is barely sufficient to uncover what the meeting will take course. If I send an invite for longer than 25 minutes, I would love Outlook to give me a popup that says "youre about to meet with someone but you haven't written an agenda, are you sure? Maybe I could do that a time or two, and Outlook could "learn" which recipients like agendas and which who don't mind calls without agendas, and then show this popup accordingly. Maybe it's a setting I set in Outlook (I like to receive invites that include agendas) and that stuff is published in the GAL/Exchange/AD/whatever.

I want to make sure I am clear in my position: not boiling the ocean, but help make sure the tool helps drive new behavior. Not force it, but maybe suggest it? Maybe help others understand our view of what the Modern Workplace looks like.
- finally: long emails where it's not really clear what the purpose is, and that result in a chain of back and forth chats on Outlook. This is picking up in organizations: https://hbr.org/2016/11/how-to-write-email-with-military-precision - maybe there is something to reuse here? I am not suggesting a flag on each sent email, but at least, if an email is very long and sent in an internal organization (a multinational) and includes recipients that are +2 or +3 in the org, then a little warning might pop up ? wouldn't it be nice if some ML would determine if the email being sent belongs to the 6 categories defined in the article shared? That would be fascinating