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2006-05-28

Office 2007 Beta 2 Test

I downloaded Office 2007 Beta 2 from MSDN and testitto see if I could use it for my day-to-day needs... I did not really use everything but Word, Excel & Outlook. I installed on top of my Office 2003 and installation was without a hitch. I liked the new interface in on all of the Office products I tested. I think MS did a very good job!

I will mostly talk about Outlook as I used it extensively for two days. I was very impressed when I started to use Outlook. It asked me for my e-mail address & password. I enetered them and waited for the screen to ask me for pop3, smtp addresses etc. It did not happen. In fact, it did not ask me anything else and just informed me that my e-mail configurion was complete! See below


What else I liked? RSS support! It worked very well. I was able to import my OPML file of feeds and in a few seconds all of them were downloaded to Outlook. It also gave me an option to download the complete feed as a html attachment.

Search was considerably faster compared to Office 2003, however, it asked me to download MS Search companion which did not install on Windows 2003 Server.

Now, the worst part. I could not keep Outlook on. It would just keep on crashing. I would click "Forward" and it would crash, I would click Reply All and it would crash. Guess what? I would leave it on by itself and it would crash after sometime. I really tried but after two days of constant crashes, I had to give up and remove it. I am not sure how something can be crashed so frequently in beta 2 stage, I would expect a little bit more stability. Oh, well...

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