Office

My only major gripe about Office 2007 so far is how much the programs hog screen real estate due to the new 'ribbon' feature. If you have a laptop that has a maximum resolution of 1024x768, the ribbon can really cramp your style.

Thankfully, you can enable and disable it with [Ctrl]-F1!

Office Excel 2007 with the ribbon:


Office Excel 2007 without the ribbon:

Consider this scenario, which tends to be very common:

You are a lawyer that sorts e-mail by client into subfolders of your Inbox. You recently migrated from Groupwise and would like to give your secretaries rights to the client folders in your Inbox subfolders.

As an example, let's say there are 50 lawyers in the firm and each lawyer handles around 200 clients. You can probably see where I am going with this - with Outlook currently, if you want to do template-based access rights that apply to subfolders, you need 3rd party products that cost more than Outlook itself. A good example is Symprex's Folder Permission Manager.

Ideally, I'd want a permissions model much like how Windows handles file permissions, where you can have inherited rights from the parent folders. I don't think it would be very easy to implement due to the way Exchange/Outlook stores permission values within the database structure, but those values could always become 'legacy' permissions with a brand new branched off permission structure.

The download size might be as big as an X-Box, but it is worth it due to all the stability and functionality fixes.

Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh download link

My XP laptop no longer crashes when using Outlook 2007 in cached mode. The RSS feeds that I delete from with Outlook and/or IE stay deleted. I only wish that the program suite didn't chew up so much screen real estate. I tend to use programs with 'small' icon settings and 'icons only' so I can cram as many programs on my desktop at once. There is a lot of wasted space in Vista in general too.

I always forget this - so mainly this is a note to self. You can enable/disable password changes in OWA but I tend to not enable that feature unless I'm forced to do it. 

This ultimately didn't fix my Outlook 2007 Beta 2 crashing problems, but it amused me at least.

I like the fact that Outlook 2007 has RSS support built in but right now, at least in Beta 2, it feels like an afterthought. I made the mistake of importing over 100 RSS feeds into Outlook and suffered through quite a bit of problems getting rid of all the feeds once I discovered how slow the interface is.

Even though I've deleted them in Outlook, and deleted them in the IE 7 RSS feed area, I keep getting the ghost of RSS Feed's past on my Exchange 2003 account. I can't seem to purge them completely.

On my laptop running XP Pro, if I have Exchange cache-mode enabled with Outlook 2007, once I have sync'd with the home office, it will get stuck in an infinite loop of crashes and restarts which has resulted in many error reports being sent off to Microsoft. My home computer, which is running an interim release of Vista (post Beta 2 / pre RC1), does not crash with the same settings and build of Outlook 2007. I'm not quite sure what is 'invalid' on my laptop and/or Exchange account that kills Outlook under XP but if I disable cached-mode, Outlook stops crashing.

After one of the crashes, some of my deleted, and what I thought were purged old RSS feeds, ended up attached to the root folder of my Exchange mailbox, which was pretty strange. I've cleaned that up again and I'm halfway tempted to recreate my mailbox the dirty way by moving it from one information store to another, to see if that fixes the problem.

One thing I really would like with the RSS feed is the ability to right click on the 'RSS feed' folder and be able to select 'Mark all as read' and have that apply to all the RSS feeds subscribed. Right now, there is a 'Mark all as read' option but it currently does nothing.

So, for now, I'm back to Mozilla Thunderbird nightly builds as my default RSS feed reader of choice. It might not be pretty and it might not have all the features of the other readers, but it at least seems to scale well with hundreds of RSS feeds. I guess I must confess to being an information junkie.

Everything else about Outlook 2007 is pretty nice I must admit, so this is honestly just a minor gripe.