Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I'm a longtime user of Office 2003 with Outlook and was eager to try out this upgrade for Outlook as it's the application I use the most (other than Access which I use for my software development projects routinely). I really didn't have any need to upgrade the other applications, so this stand-alone was perfect for me. I actually don't use Outlook for email generally, preferring to use the standalone email open source product Thunderbird which gives me a lot more ability to customize and add other features to (and since I don't have to connect to an Exchange server or anything else that specifically forces me to use Outlook.) So I personally was not put off by the fact that things like spell check will not work if you use Outlook 2007 with the rest of the Office 2003 suite. That's been well documented here by other reviewers, so I won't go into it.
Putting those issues aside, this is a really nice upgrade. A lot of upgrades are sort of "so what", but this one really impressed me. First, the look and feel of it is much more polished. It's more than just a pretty face, I find the items on my calendar for instance much more striking and easier to see what I have coming up at a glance. While the install itself seemed endless, the final product does seem to run plenty fast enough on my machine (it's fairly high end, 8 GHz, 3 gig of RAM) older machines may have more problems. Outlook 2007 uses a different style of toolbar than older versions, I really like the new toolbar, with the tabbed panels and fancier icons, it's just a matter of getting used to it. Here are some highlights from the different sections of Outlook, things that I specifically like or don't like. Please note that in some cases, I may be mentioning things that are possible to do with customization...however, they are not things that are easy for the average user to figure out, particularly since the product comes with basically no documentation at all, other than typical Microsoft Help.
1. Email - as mentioned, I don't really use this much, but it *does* include a really nice RSS reader with a large list of feeds you can add immediately. Ironically, the one for Outlook 2007 is wrong, it adds the Outlook 2003 feed, I went to the Microsoft site to find the link for the correct one. One thing I also noticed is that when you are in Email, or any other area of Outlook other than the Calendar, there is a new "To Do" bar that displays all your upcoming appointments and tasks, and a field to create new tasks. Really great new feature.
2. Calendar - I really like the way appointments look as mentioned. Also there are now very clear Day - Week - Month buttons at the top, these were not as easily found in the previous version. I do find it funny that there is still no Year view. I can do this with calendar apps on my tiny Pocket PC, it seems ridiculous that I can't see a yearly overview, or at least a 3 month overview on my desktop. Also, there doesn't seem to be a way to customize the number of lines for appointments on the monthly calendar. If you don't have large numbers of appointments, it'd be nice to show 2 lines so you can read the whole appointment, as you can on the weekly view. In particular, this would be nice when printing calendars, rather than holidays and birthdays that are all chopped off. I did notice that I have spell check available when creating appointments, so clearly it's available for at least some functions. I also though ran into issues with Outlook not wanting to save my appointment when I was editing it and trying different options...but it didn't give me any really detail as to why, just kind of a random thing.
3. Contacts - In additional to the new interface, you've got all kinds of new stuff you can add and link with contacts. There's some neat new options, such as a link to go to the address on MSN maps, open their webpage in your browser, total customization of the business card for the contact, etc. You can add images to their contact notes, as well as a variety of other things like charts and graphs if you have the rest of Office 2007. I did notice as well that I can now sort my contacts by category. This drove me nuts in the 2003 version, that it would not sort by category, so very glad to have it now!
4. Tasks - Fairly similar to the changes with contacts, lots of additional things you can link to the task, I like being able to paste in the business card of the contact for the task, for instance. You can also link the task over to an account in the Business Contact Manager
5. Notes are still a bit more basic than I care for, but I use OneNote so only use these rarely now. It's definitely easier now to group them into categories, color code them, sort them, etc. but very basic functionality. OneNote is so superior in every way, but unfortunately is still sold as a separate product. Kind of a side note here...but I really wish that with many of these parts of Outlook you could add drawings as you can in OneNote, for those of us that have a tablet.
6. Business Contact Manager - So here's the real jewel in this product. I really didn't use the one that came with Office 2003 and only now see how much I was missing! First, to use this it will install SQL Server Express on your machine. I run standard SQL Server from a separate box, so it would have been nice to be given the option to specify a SQL location to use instead of forcing a new install of the server on me. But at least it only starts up when you try to access this section of Outlook, so that reduces the load at least somewhat on your machine. Overall, I'm pretty impressed with how much this does, the name really doesn't do it justice. I'm really putting some time into getting my current accounts, contacts and projects loaded into this, as it basically does the same sort of things that I was using a different project management program to do. Now, this is hardly going to replace a full-fledged, multi-user project management software application. But for a sole proprietor like myself, it does the basics well enough to be useful. I can create projects, enter tasks for the project, add notes and hours worked, view custom reports on my projects, etc. I don't do much sales and marketing at the moment, but that's all in there as well. I really just wish it did even more. I'd like to be able to link files and documents to my tasks, for instance, or at least, include better integration with OneNote, which is ideal for project documents and notes. I found it particularly strange for instance, that in my regular Contacts, I had a link to OneNote to create custom notes for that contact...but I did not have the same button in the Business Contacts (which is where it is *really* needed.) Better integration with OneNote would really be a huge boon to those of us that are using both of these products.
Just as an additional side note, I was glad to see the upgrade did not break my ActiveSync with my SmartPhone, everything still works fine and syncs properly. I did notice that the contacts in the Business Contact Manager do not sync with the PPC, but that's to be expected (just something to be aware of). There's also still a big problem with Outlook and that is the issue of alarms not going off if the program isn't up and running. I always like to have them synced to my phone so I am less likely to miss them just because the program isn't open.
Overall, this is an excellent upgrade, as long as you have a machine that can handle it and are not effected or bothered by the various issues with using it along with the Office 2003 suite. Some improvements to some functions would make it even better, but it is certainly still worth a look.
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