nektar wrote:

MSN Messenger should have had the same level of usability for consumers like Office Communiatior has for enterprises. The two main issues I have with MSN Messenger are:
1. That unlike Communicator it has no Office integration, which would have been extremely useful even for home users. For exmple, contacts are not synchronized with Outlook and the integration of Outlook with MSN Messenger is poor and at times broken. Outlook Express is not even supported. This is a shame since consumer like enterprise users need a single place for storing contacts and im addresses not a whole set of separate locations.
2. MSN Messenger does not support the same set of features in all countries. Integration with MSN Search, Video conferencing, Photo sharing, Mobile telephony and SMS, only if you are lucky to live in a country like the US.
3. MSN Messenger unlike Communicator does not itegrate with the phone. This is something that not only enterprise users need. Why not consumers?
Overall, Microsoft should improve MSN Messenger for consumers much faster, instead of providing useful features to only enterprise users. Have these points in mind please when talking to the MSN Messenger Team.
And one other thing, how do you manage talking to a big number of contacts in MSN Messenger? There should be a way to block a group of contacts temporarily and unblock them later. If I hvae 50 contacts and I want to sign in just to talk to 5 of them, today it is not possible. It makes signing in to Messegner a pain.



Hi, this is my first post. Anyways, I totally agree about what you're writing here. What really caught my attention about your post the most is that you're asking for the SAME "temporary block group" functionality that I've been thinking about for the past few months myself.

Now and then I come up with ideas of functionality that MSN Messenger is lacking, features that would drastically improve the user experience etc. and I can't for the sake of sanity understand why Microsoft haven't thought of and implemented such featueres yet in their free MSN Messenger client. Lack of creativity perhaps?

I have tried to speculate that they're withholding features and not advancing MSN Messenger because they aim to sell these kinds of "luxury editions" of their software expensively to Enterprises. I mean, MSN Messenger only costs them a whole lot to run because it's free, so it's only logical, but honestly why would MS do such a thing when it has nothing to do with the every day consumer anyways?

The MSN Messenger client should've been (much) better than it is today.

By the way, I don't like it how posting in Opera isn't supported on this forum. Anyone know how to get the Word editor thing show up in Opera? I don't like having to use IE because of this.