Actually, from time to time, it sucks big time. Recent example: The webdav client. First of all, it takes 5 (!) clicks before you can enter the address. Then, if you want to authenticate, you will be presented a dialog where you can enter username and password. So far, so good, but if you expect that the client will use this credentials to authenthicate at the server, you are plain wrong. Instead, it starts to append it to your domain and use the string domain|username or username@domain, and no matter what you type into the dialog, you won’t be able to authenticate with an apache server. Maybe you should use a windows server. There are modules for apache2 and apache 1.3+ that can be used to filter the username on the server, but somehow I refuse to hack my server to support such a braindead client.

This is just the beginning: even if you overcome this problem somehow, you are not going to have much fun. The window will sometimes take 10 to 20 seconds before it displays the content, and while it looks almost like an explorer window, it will behave less or more different: Double-clicking on a file might launch Frontpage instead of you favourite editor.

If you have never launched Frontpage before as I did, Office will prompt for the installation disk you placed somewhere a year ago, and if you don not have it at hand, it will send you into an endless loop of obtrusive dialogs that will reapear after some seconds when you press the cancel-button. This is the moment when even a peace-minded person might start to develop a desire to hunt down someone responsible and make him (or her) burn in hell, maybe on a fire with a cancel button that will automatically reignite itself after a few seonds, forever.

Ok, if you managed to calm down again, you realize that double-clicking files in an explorer webdav window is not a good idea. So what about drag & drop? Sorry, you can’t do that, Dave. Ok, you can, but you can not drop it on any program icon, just in another folder or on the desktop. Last try: copy-paste. Yeah, after an absence a dialog with an animation shows dozen of documents beeing transfered from one machine to another (even if i am am just copying one), but the progress bar does not show any, hmm, progress. You know what comes next: rapid progress.

Microsoft has got some things right, but the webdav-client is a category 5 usability-disaster. Almost unusable. But only almost. I will adapt.