Outlook 2007 and Office 2003

[forum.query]

Greetings -

I work at a large educational institution with a very large installed
base of MS Office - generally 2003 (probably 20-30K licenses). There
is a plan to move messaging and related services to Exchange, and the
preferred client is Outlook 2007. However, some folks are concerned
that intalling Outlook 2007 will cause issues with Office 2003 -
requiring an upgrade from Office 2003 -> 2007.

There have been a number of posts about 'some problems' with trying to
run a newer version of Outlook with older versions of Office (things
like - when you are editing an email in Outlook, it actually uses
Microsoft word to do the work, the reason for this is MS Word has a
much larger tool set then the one built into outlook (outlook does
have its own for those that don't have word, but its not so good).
Unfortunately, Outlook 2007 cannot use word 2003 for this. So what
happens is you get stuck either with Outlooks word processing engine,
or with Outlook trying to use word 2003 which it
can't....apparently).

So, what is the consensus opinion on this? IT folks often love to
simply tell all their user base that everyone needs to upgrade, but
this is not always practical, and is invariably not received 'warmly'
by the user base.

 

[Brian Tillman [MVP - Outlook]]

However, some folks are concerned
that intalling Outlook 2007 will cause issues with Office 2003 -
requiring an upgrade from Office 2003 -> 2007.

While you do lose the integration features of Office, the combination you
describe should work.

There have been a number of posts about 'some problems' with trying to
run a newer version of Outlook with older versions of Office (things
like - when you are editing an email in Outlook, it actually uses
Microsoft word to do the work, the reason for this is MS Word has a
much larger tool set then the one built into outlook (outlook does
have its own for those that don't have word, but its not so good).
Unfortunately, Outlook 2007 cannot use word 2003 for this. So what
happens is you get stuck either with Outlooks word processing engine,
or with Outlook trying to use word 2003 which it
can't....apparently).

Outlook 2007 has only one editor - Word. It uses a cut-down version of it,
though. Mail merge and on-the-fly spell checking will be gone with the
mixed Office installation. Other features may also not work.