Currently it is not possible to manage multiple Exchange Accounts with a single profile and it looks like it won’t be possible in Outlook 12 either. Looks like i’ll have to keep on tapping my fingers on the desk while outlook shuts down and restarts another profile. The main problem with this is that Exchange hi-jack your rules and alerts (Which often has limits), so you have to have Exchange on its own profile. Anyway it’s always good to receive fairly prompt response. Thanks.

My Question

I have a very quick question with regard to Outlook 12’s implementation of multiple profiles and accounts. Currently I have numerous accounts that I have from previous companies that i’ve worked for that have simple POP3/IMAP accounts, Hotmail, and numerous other accounts I have on my own dedicated servers. All of which I find very frustrating to have to shutdown Outlook to switch profiles just because I have a few exchange accounts that have a seperate profile.

Will there in current/later versions be a more managable solution to this type of scenario? I find it rather tedious and expensive to shut Outlook down for such a trivial task.

Microsoft:

Thanks so much for getting in touch with me on this. It’s always good to hear feedback from our customers.

I understand the frustration around some of the limitations of our profile system. Originally, profiles were invented at a time when people only had one email account, but multiple people wanted to use the same computer. Since people didn’t need to “log on” to Windows at that point, we used profiles to let multiple people run Outlook at different times when they all use the same computer.

At this point, lots of people have multiple email accounts, and everyone logs on to his or her own account with Windows. So now people use profiles to manage different email accounts. As you point out, you can only have one Exchange account per profile.

We are certainly looking at ways to solve these problems in future versions of Outlook. There are a number of solutions we’re investigating. Unfortunately, Outlook12 doesn’t solve any of these problems in a way that will make things easier for you. I do hope that you’ll find lots of other features in Outlook12 that make you happy, though. I’d love to hear your impressions when you get the product.

Thanks again for the feedback. Staying in touch with our customers really helps us make the right decisions for our customers.

– William Kennedy
General Manager, Microsoft Outlook