The first shot features William Kennedy, VP of Office and Jeanne Sheldon, VP of Word (nice shirt Jeanne) hanging out next to the mosaic’s new home in the Office team’s hallway.

This second photo was taken at the entrance to the Microsoft campus and includes a number of Word and Outlook team members who have worked on HTML rendering in Office over the years.

I’ve got to give Microsoft an enormous amount of credit for this. They could have ignored our feedback completely, but instead proved they are genuinely listening to our feedback and are prepared to have a bit of fun doing it. Add to this the recent launch of MakeOfficeBetter.com by two Microsoft employees, and it becomes clear that these guys really do care about giving their customers the best experience possible.

While there is still no confirmation about what impact this will have on the rendering in Outlook, this is a big step for the Office team to take publicly. William and the rest of the Office team have assured me they will keep in touch as they plan their next release. You guys will be the first to hear if we have any news to share. In the mean time, let’s keep the feedback going by adding your vote for better HTML support.

Bravo Microsoft.

We were unsure if we would hear back from the Office team, but were pleasantly surprised today when a large package straight from Redmond arrived on our doorstep. William Kennedy, the Corporate VP of Office was kind enough to send a personal letter to us thanking us for our efforts. William even explained that the Fix Outlook mosaic was now on display in their hallway so the entire Office team can check it out.

William also mentioned that “improvements and changes in this area are something that the team is definitely considering for the future”. Only time will tell if Outlook will move towards better standards support, but this is certainly the strongest message on the subject we’ve had to date.

This is a brilliant result. Here’s the complete letter (emphasis ours).

I can’t thank William enough for not only ensuring our message is seen by the entire team, but for taking the time to let us know how much they appreciated our feedback.

To bring this great project to a close, we wanted to make sure the Outlook team had a constant reminder of just how strongly we all feel about their lack of standards support. Trending topics on Twitter come and go, we wanted something a little more permanent we could send their way.

The fixoutlook.org Mosaic

In his reply to the fixoutlook campaign, Microsoft’s William Kennedy told us that there “is no consensus” about what standards apply to email and that he’d work with the industry if a consensus arises. Luckily for us, these standards already exist. They’re called web standards.

To make sure William got the point, we figured we’d send him a “consensus” from 25,000 of us, many of who (myself included) are Outlook customers. From this idea, the fixoutlook.org mosaic was born. In a single image, it includes almost all of the 25,000 people who joined us in asking Microsoft to fix standards support in Outlook 2010.

Here’s a preview of the mosaic. You can click it for the full sized version, which is a rather large 20MB and might take a while to download.

We’ve used the different colored avatars from everyone who contributed to spell out a final message to Microsoft. We figured saying please this time couldn’t hurt our chances.

As I write this, the 2m x 1m mosaic is just boarding a plane on it’s way to Redmond, personally addressed to Mr Kennedy on behalf of everyone who contributed.

To give you an idea of scale, here’s a shot of us holding the mosaic.

A big final thanks to everyone who helped spread the word about the importance of the fixoutlook campaign. On a more personal note, it was a pleasure to be involved from start to finish, and hopefully it will contribute to making life easier for email designers and Outlook users alike.