At work I spent a reasonably large amount of time dealing with email or instant messaging with co-workers, all of which is accomplished through Microsoft products – Outlook for email and Office Communicator for IM.
By default both of these are the 2003 versions, and there’s always been a number of things that have annoyed me. So when a co-worker recently pointed me in the direction of the internal pilots for newer versions of both of these, I set about installing them.
The first, and most noticeable difference, is obviously the appearance. Office 2007 has famously done away with conventional menus and toolbars in favour of the ribbons, although seemingly not across all applications in all circumstances as Outlook only uses them when editing individual items (be they emails, calendar entries or tasks). Office Communicator 2007 also has a UI change, heading towards the Microsoft Live Messenger style, which is probably better than ribbons as there’s not really much scope for them in an IM application. Aside from the obvious niggle that neither of these applications now fit with the rest of the look and feel of my operating systems, the interfaces are actually usable and the ribbon makes a lot of sense.
Moving on from the initial visual impressions and onto the new features, a number of the things that annoyed me appear to have been fixed (such as only being able to search for contacts in communicator in ‘Surname, Firstname’ form – although it doesn’t yet go as far as working by mailid) and there are a number of new features that I like (such as being able to view other people’s calendars in overlay mode with your own).
Communicator 2007 also now stores the conversation logs in a folder in Outlook, making it much easier to find the conversation you had with someone last week compared to the previous implementation we had involving a (often broken) web interface, and also offers an easy way to view previous logs when a conversation has been resumed.
The addition of document previews and image resizing in emails within Outlook is good too, allowing for a quicker look at the contents of attachments without having to load other applications – although it appears we are yet to acquire previewers for PDF files.
I’ve yet to use the other applications properly – having only viewed a couple of Word documents briefly, but if my experience with the editor in Outlook is anything to go by they’re certainly quite usable. The popup formatting element when you select text, for example, is very useful for quickly editing documents.
So far the only downside I’ve discovered, is that they might use slightly more RAM, which can be somewhat of an issue given my machine needs more memory at the best of times when running the variety of other applications that I need to do my job at times.
All in all, Office 2007 and Office Communicator 2007 are a good improvement over their predecessors and I’m happy with them so far.