Anti-functions in Outlook

At work my team and I are finalising a long and complex document. We are all working on it: reading, commenting, suggesting amendments, you know the deal. Ideally we'd all be working on the one copy of the file, but having different server access, this cannot work. We could use TRIM our quite useful document management system, but that only allows serial sharing: it can't handle concurrent editing of the one document.

So, the author uses Outlook, our corporate groupware product, and e-mails the document to all of us; we comment in Microsoft Word's tracked changes mode and the author compiles the changes.

I started work on the document soon after I received the e-mail, but couldn't complete. To block out the time I needed, I copied the e-mail to the Outlook calendar.

Next day, I opened the calendar entry for the document, opened the now embedded email, then opened the attached document, and got back to work.

After some time I discovered that my work of the day before was not included in the file. Of course, it was a copy, a different file, now! Oh great, an anti-feature of Outlook strikes again.

My constant irritation with Outlook is that, despite its very useful functions, it has a major anti-function. It copies, instead of allowing another instance of a single document.

I guess I've been spoilt by InfoQube and Zoot which replicates items, it doesn't copy them, unless of course you want to copy them. So one can work on any instance of an item, and every other instance of it will show the work done.

In Outlook e-mail has the same problem. I can only put an e-mail in one folder, even if it relates to a number of folders I have. What I'd really find productive would be if I could put the one e-mail in multiple folders, and see it searchably with multiple categories (in Outlook 2003, the one we use at work, you can't search on categories: anti-feature #2), reflect it in Tasks and Notes as well as the Calendar. Then we'd be talkin' computing, and not electronic card filing!