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"Side-by-side test indicates "stay with 2003"" on by keithmanning
Pros: Handling RSS feeds
Cons: Speed and HTML rendering
Summary: I have two identical machines on my desk. I have been using Office 2007 on one and 2003 on the other for several months (2007 Beta and now the final version).
Outlook has been the big disappointment in Office 2007. It is very slow and the rendering of HTML messages can only be described as atrocious.
Having the two versions side-by-side as you do real work helps to sharpen the contrast. I have tried to force myself to use the Office 2007 machine for all Office apps so that I can make the transition. This has worked fine for Word and PowerPoint. However, Excel and Outlook have problems. Excel has incompatibilites which means for workbooks I need to share I am sticking with 2003. In the case of Outlook, when I am busy or tired I go back to 2003 because the speed and awful HTML rendering of 2007 is depressing.
I have been doing my side-by-side trial for long enough now. My conclusion? I am going to use Outlook 2003 from now on. I will keep a version of Outlook 2007 on one of the machines so I can take a look at updates and new features. But, at the end of the day, Office tools are supposed to make you more productive - and Outlook 2003 beats 2007 in making me productive.
The article refers to benefits of Outlook 2007 in areas like converting emails to meetings with drag-and-drop. I would strongly recommend the add-in Clear Context. It gives you those features and more with Outlook 2003 or 2007, thus nullifying these small advantages of 2007.
Keith -
"Not Worth Upgrading as a Stand Alone" on by EtoileBrilliant
Pros: Looks better than Outlook 2003
Cons: Migrating normal.doc template from 2003 is anything but easy
Summary: Having purchased Office 2007 for the purpose of getting Excel 2007, I decided to give my Outlook the "2007" treatment as it was part of the Small Business Edition. There's definitely a nicer feel and as many other's have said, you can't help thinking that Steve Bulmer threw a copy of Apple's OS at the MS developer and said "copy this" - right down to the choice of default typeface.
My feeling is that Outlook 2003 probably wasn't due for an upgrade but they added one in since it was part of the Office suite. Having said that, out of all the Office 2007 products I have used, it's the one that has changed least. There are no "Ribbons", menus seems to be a la 2003.
I'm a big user of styles and autotext in Word and liked the idea of using Word 2003 as my email editor. I maybe wrong but this option seems to have been dropped. Whilst this is no bad thing in itself, it appears that both Outlook 2007 and Word 2007 use two separate normal templates (Normal.docm and NormalEmail.docm) which makes it impossible to synchronise styles.
My advice, don't buy the upgrade as a stand alone but use it if you get it as part of the Office 2007 -
"Don't upgrade if you write letters to contacts" on by Von Hug
Pros: Business Card window is the only plus
Cons: Can't write new letter to contact directly from Outlook 2007
Summary: I thought that Outlook 2007 was going to add improvements and new features to Outlook 2003. Apparently it looks like repackaging with some things left out of the box. Does Microsoft think that snail mail is dead? I am used to writing letters (hard copy) to my contacts directly from Outlook. With Outlook 2007 you can no longer write "new letter to contact"; you need to go to Word first and then choose your contact -- how much time does that save! I would have liked to see a label and envelope feature added to Outlook 2007 but I guess Avery and Aladdin will have to be the third party add-ons for that function. Outlook 2007 is a big disappointment. I went to the Microsoft launch and had asked about printing a label from Outlook but I never got an answer. Now I know why. They also talked about the workspace window and how it has shrunk over time. With the new ribbon the space is smaller than with the 2003 version. Maybe if you had a 25 inch monitor then the workspace would appear bigger. I don't recommend using Outlook 2007 -- stay with 2003, it has the right features and doesn't drag along like 2007.
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"Ridiculous, not worth a cent" on by Johannes Franke
Pros: Slight improvements in the object model
Cons: Ugly GUI, slowest Outlook ever, unstable, lossy
Summary: This is from a developer's point of view. I've recently read that PC Resellers can now offer downgrading from Vista to XP for free, with good reason. Maybe one should consider to request such a downgrade model for Office as well. I have developed for Outlook since 2000, and must say that Outlook 2007 is the worst version ever. Much of my time has gone into finding ways to avoid built-in bugs but it was never as bad as now. Once I thought Outlook is great, now I'd change to Thunderbird a.s.a.p. if only I wouldn't work at a business concentrating on extensions for Outlook and Exchange. Maybe Microsoft's strategy will force me to change my job as this is getting more and more frustrating.
Let me give you some details:
* the performance is just ridiculous. It starts up as if I had a USB 1.1 device as my main hard drive. Opening dialogs on my 3,4GHz / 2GB machine happens in multiple layers, one can almost see the window frame being painted line by line. There is actually nothing that happens about fast.
* what comes out is plain ugly. I hate the new GUIs from Microsoft. The main window hasn't changed much in its contents, but what about sub-windows such as e-mails, contacts, etc.? A maximum waste of space on top of the window, changing all the time so one never gets used to it, hiding options that were earlier easily found in the menu bar... oh by the way, the menu bar is now hidden for some reason, and appears only if one of the shortcuts of the main menu entries is pressed on the keyboard. A great innovation, Microsoft! So, before using a menu, better learn by heart all of its shortcuts. By the way, some things were just removed, e.g. contacts and categories on task items (they were positioned at the bottom of the window in OL2003). And no hint on how to get that information back on the screen. Thanks!
* working with group calendars was slow on OL2003 already. Now, it's all hourglass! Watch other's appointments pop up one by one on the month sheet. In one second, five items appear, five more the next second, and so on. You never know when the horror's over... probably if nothing has happened for a minute or so. And with all this new slowness, Microsoft didn't even take the time to fade items in softly, that way there would at least be some eye candy for the waiting period.
* the migration of larger PST files from pre-OL2007 to OL2007 either fails completely, or causes Outlook to slow down even more due to the chaos produced in the migration process. Instead of starting with a clean PST file and moving all previous entries there orderly, the PST appears to be patched to death, or something close to it. So there's nothing else than recommending users to move their PST away, start with a clean new one, and dragging items folder by folder to the new PST. That's just sickening. Why didn't they at least offer a tool to do this, or allow folder hierarchies to be copied along with all their items?
* a "feature" that existed for as long as 7 years now, and still no improvement: Outlook won't quit properly in the presence of add-ins. This is what most of my support calls are about. People wonder why they need to restart their computer to change their Outlook profile, or see add-ins after Outlook was shut down once? How can I explain to users what is happening and what they can do about it? Why, after seven years, can Outlook still not clean up properly and stop caring about resources allocated to add-ins? When the user tells the application to quit, the app should give a f**k about open allocations, and simply quit, or at least give a warning or something. What it does instead is either stay open/invisible, or crash with an error report. This is Murphy style, it does the worst one might assume in that situation, irritating users, and they sure pass it on to me.
* if the add-in is doing background activity such as evaluating callback messages from TAPI (as in my case), Outlook 2007 will simply lock up on slow machines if in that moment the user is editing a body text of any type of item (contact / journal / whatever). Outlook will eat all CPU time, and never return. Hello, task manager! I've not found out yet when a machine is too slow so this problem occurs, but there's a lot of candidates out there and enough users who won't listen and install OL2007, finally ending up calling me and raising a "new" issue about Outlook lockups.
* Microsoft removed CDO from the setup and put it into a separate download that users must now acquire instead of just choosing the option during the setup. Most Exchange-related apps need CDO. They just don't care for developers any longer. Rather spend the money in marketing campaigns instead of using their brains and stop changing everything.
Not this way, folks. In my opinion, Microsoft is now far beyond making good software, as they prove with Vista and Office 2007. This cannot be the result of giving credit to what users want. Maybe everything is "secure" now because nothing is trusted any longer (not even the user), unfortunately they have somehow forgotten about usability. Sickening! -
"worst software I have ever used" on by whkrause
Pros: none at all
Cons: crashes constantly, useless
Summary: Just Google on this p.o.s. and you'll see. Why would I want an email client that can't be opened 2 time out of 3, and will crash in short order the other time?
Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 user reviews
