Reason I hate Outlook number 3241

As I may have mentioned here before, I work from home four days out of five. Recently, everyone in the office was forced to switch email programs to Outlook because we're now using the corporate Outlook server.

Now, this morning at around 9:15, the office network went down, which naturally meant I was kicked off VPN. Because I'm using Outlook and was composing a message when the network went down:

1. I can't finish and send my message, and have it just sitting in the outbox until the network comes back up.
   
2. I can't access any email that was stored on the server, though I can still see all the subject lines and who sent stuff to me.
   
3. Every now and then while I was typing the rest of my message Outlook would freeze for a couple of seconds as it desperately tried to communicate with home base.

Now, if I am disconnected from the network when I start Outlook, I can choose to work offline. However, when I do that (stopping and restarting Outlook), I no longer have any email sent after about 2pm yesterday. Specifically, I don't have the message I was replying to when the network went down nor do I have my partially typed response. (Oh, I still have the text, cut and pasted into Notepad, but it's pointless without what I was responding too) This despite the fact that Outlook supposedly did a synchronization this morning at 8, unless the "Send/Receive" button and messages in the status bar about "Synchronizing..." mean something different from what they should.

Life was much better when all email was on the local IMAP server and those of us who wanted to used Mozilla. Disconnected operation just plain worked. Why oh why are "enterprise" solutions so fragile?