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 - Better Off Staying with Older VersionI've had the new version of Outlook for a few months now and have been quite disappointed in it's entire performance. I purchased the version with the business contact manager in order to sync with my Quickbooks information. It turns out it only works with Microsoft's "Money" application. So I decided to keep using it and take advantage of the few usable features I found in it. To my further disappointment my Word 2002 began freezing if I had Outlook open. I finally had to upgrade to the Office Suite that included the Outlook 2007 as well. But my problems did not stop there I tried using the program to receive my Gmail and after downloading my messages and attempting to answer the program freezes. This is using the IMAP format. I've gone over my settings a number of times and checked out my online Gmail settings as well. It turned out that the bug was improved by eliminating my online Gmail folders then sorting the mail into Outlook folders once I received it in Outlook. I run an Home XP OS on my laptop. In a nutshell, not enough bang for the buck. Best to maintain older 2002 version or buy the entire suite. It may be pretty, but so was my last useless secretary! Rating:  - It's OKIf you don't have IT support, this is a hard product to use. For families or small offices, there are easier-to-use and cheaper options. But this is the industry standard. It's a fine product. Good news, it's Office. Bad news, it's Office. Rating:  - Great Features But Web 2.0 Wins The Day for My NeedsI have been a Microsoft Office (small company) user for years but have never familiarized myself with the Outlook software. I know many satisfied Outlook users so I decided this year to take a investigate what, if anything, I was missing. I loaded Outlook 2007 and then played with it. Outlook is all that it is advertised to be "you can effectively manage your sales activities and provide better customer service with contact history, source, status, sales amount, closing potential, e-mail messages, phone calls, tasks, appointments, documents and notes, all referenced in one place." It also has what most previous users may find to be a significant improvement - a new Project Tasks feature which allows the user to assign tasks to others and automatically transfer the task information to their task lists, a To-Do Bar and Outlook reminders. And there are many other touted improvements according to the manufacturers description. Many of Outlook's tools would have been useful to me in the past but, since I have not used this data management tool, I have little invested and am not wedded to it. I am glad. As a mobile executive, I am committed to Web 2.0 and only want to add those data management tools that are hosted. Desktop based software is obsolete. If Outlook were an Internet hosted application, I would be an enthusiastic user. My rating is based Outlook's features which are exceptional. But, I do not intend to become a user. Rating:  - Slow and doesn't solve the real sales issuesThis product is Outlook with an add-on of "Business Contacts". They are not well integrated, but more importantly they don't really let you track sales opportunities, contacts, and the usual array of sales relationships in anything like an intuitive way. Do it the MS way or forget it. On my computer it runs SLOW- I have an IBM x60S, a solid XP machine, but it is such bloatware that it slows the whole machine to a crawl. Overall, best to try something else. I certainly will. Rating:  - No different than Outlook 2003I really didn't see a difference with 2007 than 2003. The only thing MS has seemed to add was the use of RSS feeds - which is a cool addition if you like to have all your feeds in one place to read. I didn't have any issues with upgrading from 2003.
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