Configuring for the edge case

Today I set out to do something simple….set up my outlook client software to use my outlook.com account.

Simple right?

Turns out this simple task was really not that simple.

The reason my case was different than many, is because I use a custom domain for my email. What baffled me for several hours was that I needed a custom configuration, and like most consumer based solutions, outlook.com's documentation is quite incomplete.

See the issue with my problem was that what I was doing was a result of an edge case.

Def: Edge case - A condition or parameter not expected, or something that only happens rarely or occasionally.

I'm a consumer, and edge case

All too often you want to use tools in their simplest manner, but edge cases make them either unpredictable, or unusable. Also we want all our tech to be simple to use, but almost everyone has an edge case in their lives that software does a lousy job of addressing. Today, providers need to consider more and more edge cases, and providers need great documentation, not less… the idea that you rely on a technical community to dig up some long drawn out answer from a conversation thread is not a great answer, but becoming standard today.

Franks edge case solved

I found great guidance by Robert Long on his site Omega Web, on a post "How to configure a custom Domain with outlook.com" where Robert goes into details on configuring your domain registrar setting to use outlook.com with the correct mail records, or MX records for outlook.com.

 Turns out that his edge case involves a common problem, getting your domain host to redirect mail correctly with your customer domain name.

Great, however turns out this is not my edge case.  I was looking to set up outlook to plainly work with outlook.com. My root problem that I realized was that I did not know what the mail servername for outlook was supposed to be?

If you're interested in following along, open outlook then select:

Add account (at least that's what it's called in Office 13)

Select Manually setup additional server types

Then select outlook.com or exchange activesync compatible services

Click next, and you will see this add account dialog box.

You will be prompted to provide your username (BTW this should be your Microsoft account login ID), password, and…

The name of a mail server. Hmm. What is the outlook.com mail server name? Maybe some of you can find this quickly but to no avail it took quite a bit of hunting to find that the server name I needed was:

m.hotmail.com

Yes, looks simple. But to me this was a royal pain to find. And brings me back to my original statement.

Making tools simple requires providers and vendors to spend more time in understanding edge cases, and providing documentation that is simple to find, and understand… Maybe consider a help button on configuration pages!..

My scenario is a great cloud readiness case. This requires developers to think and work closer with operations folks who deploy new services, and consider guidance that addresses the move from traditional boxed single application models, to more complex multi-facet service model. Based on the search terms I used, it seems many faced the same edge case I had, and general frustration that Microsoft did not provide clear and simple guidance to make this more user friendly.

In my opinion as users start to adopt more cloud services I see a need for designers to consider how their cloud service, especially PaaS services work together with other tools, companies need to think about the connection points, and link points between solutions. The cracks between services will become the most important issue for customers, and quality guidance and walkthroughs more essential.  I see that users will most times just give up making the new service unusable or undesirable.