Review by Maxwell Edison

I picked up Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager because I needed a better way to track my customers’ communications (I’m a work-at-home freelancer). I’ve been using it now as my primary e-mail client for about three months. So far, so good.

I had little to no problems installing Outlook 2007. I’m using XP, and my Office suite is 2000. I like the GUI, but not all documents (especially Word and HTML docs) render as they do in their native apps, and I’m assuming this is because my other Office apps are getting way old.

Also, I appreciate that Outlook 2007 lets you add RSS feeds. I subscribe to many newsletter and blog reports and find this feature useful. I’ve had no problems with just the e-mail reading/organizing capabilities; everything there works just fine.

Like many people writing reviews here, I’m disappointed that Outlook 2007 with BCM is so slow. I used to use Outlook Express as my e-mail client, which is pretty fast compared to Outlook 2007, so maybe it’s just a matter of getting used to the new app.

I was hoping this app would allow me to do more with billing and invoicing, but I’ve read a few blogs and discovered to get Business Contact Manager to really do all it can do (which is probably a lot), you’ll need Microsoft Accounting installed, too. I’m considering buying that app, but I wish I didn’t have to.

The full functionality of the app is a bit beyond me at this point (again, I’m upgrading from Outlook Express, so the learning curve is no surprise), but I hope this changes with time. Right now, I find myself using the same three or four functions all the time, which is normal. It’s how I generally use the other apps in the Office group.

I’ve found myself in the past criticizing certain aspects of other Microsoft products (Word in particular), only to find out later these apps had the ability to do what I wanted them to do all along, but I just didn’t know it. In general, I wish Microsoft’s apps were a bit more intuitive.