I don't know your pet peeves with Outlook, but I've used Outlook 2007 and 2010 for 5 years now. Outside of an annoying "I've changed my AD password 2 weeks ago and you keep asking me for it" bug, Outlook is pretty solid.
And as one of the comments below said, try Lotus Notes for a while :o)
In my experience Outlook Web Access is so good by comparison that once my former employer upgraded to a recent version, I never used the desktop version of Outlook ever again. For one thing, OWA never had this ridiculous problem of corrupting its OST and PST files every few weeks.
What are your issues with Exchange? Actually, it was Exchange (at least since 2007SP1) that made me start thinking that it was actually possible for Microsoft to produce extremely reliable software.
- it's an overblown, over-engineered piece of shit designed to give "IT managers" and their secretaties a boner and suck them into Microsoft's vendor lock-in hellish groupware who still thinks we're in the 90s (fuck sharepoint, too while we're at it!)
- requires big resources to work faster than a snail (fuck sharepoint again!)
- to deploy it you need to also deploy more microsoft dinosaurs such as AD 2020 with CRAPFIX 9887622 running on Windows NonStandard Edition SP4 (no less!)
- to use more than 10 mailboxes you need a cluster of 10 microsoft certified hardware servers, double it if you want it in 64bit
- the webmail interface (which I had been forced to use in the past because I was using Linux) is ridiculous usability wise, sluggish, multi-message operations are very slow, the filters are a joke compared to procmail or maildrop; .forward does not exist
- some poor bastards confuse it with a proper MTA and leave it facing the internetz directly, most serious deployments I've seen run a nix based installation (qmail, postfix) in front of it and firewall the hell out of it because you can't have it exposed to a network
- sometimes when it breaks not even highly microsoft trained monkeys can fix it unless they sacrifice a couple of chickens to the voodoo gods
- if you want to count on certain mail standards (other than Microsoft's that is) you're pretty much on your own: imap support is shit, exporting to anything other that random m$ tech is not supported
The list could go on and on. That's what I think of Microsoft's "reliable software".
Needless to say, I'll pick e.g. Thunderbird any day over it, although I'm using more and more console based clients nowadays (such as cone or lumail).
Outlook Web Access has a UI just like the actual program, provided you're using a compatible browser. What you're seeing is the fallback presented to incompatible browsers. Upgrade to the latest Internet Explorer. :)
It's really difficult to say whether the replacement for outlook will be a piece of software for the desktop, a web-based solution a la gmail/google calendar, or a powerful iPhone/android/bb app
Big Corp doesn't want its trade secrets on Google's servers, and phones don't have enough interface real estate to contain the full functionality. They work best as satellite devices, in my experience.
As a user in a mixed MS Office + Google Apps + LibreOffice environment, Google's recent work with QuickOffice has been EXTREMELY helpful. My big gripe isn't Excel so much, either, but people who refuse to abandon PowerPoint when all they need to do is create a bullet list.
