What can Outlook 2007 do for me?

[MikeH]

I am running Vista and was unable to get my old Office 2000 calendar to work
(Word and Excel are fine). The built-in Windows Mail and Windows calendar
in Vista suck. Calendar regularly fails to alert me to appointments and
Mail intermittently loses email bodies when I move them into folders (the
header looks OK but the body is from a different email). Under XP I was
running Outlook Express.

The office 2000 problems might be solvable but I don't have good
documentation and have questionable right to use the product anyway (no
longer working for the company that provided it). So I've considered buying
Outlook 2007. Reading the colorful descriptions of the product it tells me
wonderful things it can do but finding out exactly how it performs vanilla
tasks like calendar and email gets lost in the glitz. I am assuming I can
interface with my POP3 mail accounts and perhaps web mail accounts and I'm
also assuming its calendar is as good or better than the one in Office 2000.
I'd also like the calendar to be sharable between two or more accounts but
separate accounts have their own email spaces.

Will Outlook 2007 do these things for me?

 

[Diane Poremsky {MVP}]

The calendar is very similar to the Vista Calendar. It can be shared with
other user accounts. Outlook 2007, like 2000, supports POP3 accts but in
most cases does not support "web accounts".

 

[DL]

I upgraded from Office2k > Office2003 > & recently Office2007, in each case
I found OL much improved. The calender/tasks/appointments works fine for me

 

[MikeH]

As far as calendar sharing goes I haven't been able to get different user
accounts on the same machine to do more than get a copy of another Vista
calendar. So the respective calendars don't automatically track with each
other. It would be preferable if everybody was accessing the same calendar
file.

A serious problem with Vista calendar is that it is frequently not alerting
me to appointments/events. Sometimes days will go by and abruptly I'm
presented with a list of past due items. There may be a "good" reason for
this happening but I can't imagine what it is as I log into the account
associated with the calendar at least once a day.

With respect to mail, can different users on a machine have their own
instance of Outlook 2007 running with access to their own mail?

 

[Diane Poremsky {MVP}]

Yes, each user can have their own instance of outlook. To share the same
calendar, you need a pst in a location each user can access.

Do you have vista calendar's reminder service enabled? it runs even if the
calendar is closed to fire reminders, something outlook's does not.