Review by Lynellen Perry

I installed Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager on a Windows XP machine with a 1.6GHz processor and probably the minimum RAM recommended. The rest of my Windows Office suite is Office 2000. We used Outlook Express before installing this upgrade. I’ve only just begun to work with the contact manager aspect of the software since I’m wary of it. In the past I’ve hated ACT and QuickBooks Customer Manager, so I’m feeling very hesitant to invest time and effort importing data.

Pluses: I found the installation to be straight-forward and reasonable in time length. I was very impressed that Outlook imported not only our Outlook Express address book directly (didn’t have to export from Express and then import), but also flawlessly imported the mail messages and the folders that were existing in Express. This had been a major concern, and there was no problem whatsoever.

Minuses: Outlook 2007 is a resource hog. Not only does it run slowly, but other programs chug or crash. I’ve had quite a few Word 2000 crashes when Outlook 2007 was closing or loading. Learning curve for the new interface is pretty steep when moving from an Office 2000 Outlook Express to 2007 Outlook. This is to be expected, but should still be a consideration when deciding whether to install this on your computer. For example, the other person who shares this computer is a senior citizen and has been very frusted that she can’t find things like saving attachments because the interface is different. We’ve also had quite a bit of trouble with the account setup process. On the day I installed Outlook, I successfully created the two email accounts (ISP plus web domain email at a different company) and successfully sent and received mail. The next day, we could receive find but not send and the software refused to store the correct password…kept asking for the password every few seconds as it tried over and over to send an outgoing email. It took me about 45 mintues to find a work around, but we’ll see if it still works tomorrow.