One thing that has most certainly improved in the change of jobs, is the email system. In fact from being better than TheOldPlace it improved in just my first week or so here to 'much better' when a new system was implemented across the University. Many of the old bugbears have gone with what might be described as a 'real' email system. LotusNotes may have been great at databases and portalness (not that it got used for that), but it wasn't that brilliant at email. GroupWise apparently has it's faults but I'm not spotting them at present.

Still available, there is the shared diary kind of feature that seems to be used a bit here (or is that just the effect of it being new and people giving it a go?). Tasks, emails and calendars seem to be a bit more integrated now but perhaps that's an artifact of being more windowslike.

But I'm really enjoying being able to do little things like sorting by subject line, export emails to text files tidily, and best of all, the long wanted, automatically sort into folders. This means you can subscribe to quite busy mailing lists but not have to individually read/delete/move each email as it comes in. Once a rule sorting it into the correct folder is created, you can just check the folder (handily marked with the number of unread emails) whenever the mood takes you. So rather than being continually interrupted, you can manage the things to fit in with workload/interest. In much the same way that Bloglines handles Blogs. So basic and yet so life changing (well, in the small world of email that is). I know just about everyone in the world has been able to do this in the likes of Outlook since the year dot, but it's a first for me and one I've long looked forward to knowing I'd like. I do.