Last year (two years maybe? Time flies...) I built a web-based "e-mail" system that provided internal-only e-mail on our web portal. That might seem a bit weird, but we needed a system where we could be sure when an e-mail was sent, to who, when it was read, ability to recall a message, control who can send messages to who, etc. Basically we needed to control the content end-to-end. Unfortunately standard e-mail doesn't give you that level of control, so hence the need for building it.

I wanted the e-mail to function very similar to Outlook to minimize the learning curve and help adoption (the old system another provider was hosting was really clunky). It uses a lot of AJAX technology and had what I thought was a fair amount of the standard e-mail features: You can create custom folders, move messages, forward messages, reply to messages, add attachments, it automatically refreshes the e-mail list periodically, you can view who has read your e-mail (and when), group messages by date or sender, sort messages, resize the windows, double-click on a message to view it in a larger window, plus a lot of other smaller features.

I thought it turned out nicely but an interesting thing happened; Some users were unhappy with the level of functionality provided: you couldn't flag messages, drag and drop a message from the inbox into a folder, the e-mail list didn't have intellisense, etc.

Wow - I totally wasn't expecting that reaction (mind you, it was from a fairly small minority, but it was interesting getting that feedback).

Of course it doesn't compare to the functionality of Outlook, I thought! They had 100+ developers and a few years of development time. I had, well, me and a few months (and not just on this particular module)!

I didn't know what to make of it. I had spent a lot of time adding features, polishing the UI so it wasn't clunky looking, etc. and they weren't happy with the functionality? Where did I go wrong? It didn't occur to me until later that, by mirroring the look and feel of Outlook that I was setting my web-based e-mail client to be compared directly against Outlook. They weren't comparing it to the clunky old system at all. I had inadvertently set their expectations much higher than I could deliver because of this. Ouch.

In retrospect, I might have been better off delivering a system which functioned and looked better than the existing system but didn't attempt to look and/or operate like Outlook at all. For example, if I was able to do this over I'd probably drop the folders option and simplify the e-mail list to just a nice looking grid list w/sorting (removing the grouping altogether) and reduced some of the AJAX functionality (ex. when you click on a message the e-mail icon "opens" and changes from bold text to normal text), among other things. I would have spent less time on it and had less chance for bugs to boot.

I know all about setting a customer's expectations so that there aren't any surprises, but I completely forgot about some of the implicit expectations that can arise in a project (and managing those as well).