Evergreen Technology Corporation

I recently upgraded from Office 2007 to Office 2010 and thought I’d share some of my impressions with you here.  Today I’m going to focus on my experiences with the upgrade as they pertain to Outlook.

Overall, I’m pleased with the upgrades to Outlook in version 2010.  In particular, this version seems to handle IMAP accounts/folders much better than 2007 did.  I’ll address that, as well as other enhancements, in future posts.  Right now I’m just going to deal with the actual upgrade process and some issues I encountered.

The installation of the upgrade was pretty seamless.  My only complaint was that once the installation appeared nearly complete, it seemed the installation had ‘frozen’.  I let it continue and it did finally finish (it took probably 10 minutes after it appeared ‘stuck’).  It would have been nice if there had been some sort of visual indication that the process was proceeding; there is a progress bar, but once it appeared to be near the end, there was no change.

The upgrade process did bring all my accounts and settings into Outlook 2010.  The first time I opened Outlook after the upgrade, I received the message “Upgrade in Progress Your mailbox is currently being optimized. Performance may be affected while this one time optimization is in progress.”  I let this finish, so as not to jinx anything, but it didn’t take too long.

The only immediate issue I had with Outlook 2010 was that the Google Calendar Sync doesn’t work (yet) with Outlook 2010.

After some research, I discovered that 2 possible ‘fixes’ were to either hack the GoogleCalendarSync.exe or Outlook.exe (see this post  for details).  However, I decided not to go that route; instead I installed Sync2 from 4Team Corporation.  I imagine at some point Google will release an updated sync tool for Outlook 2010.

My biggest issue with the upgrade didn’t reveal itself for several days.  It appears that the upgrade corrupted my default PST file.  My primary email account uses IMAP, so wasn’t affected by this issue.  However, I have some POP accounts that use this PST file.  It also contains my Contacts, Calendar and Tasks, which I depend on very heavily.  Everything appeared fine with the PST file until I tried to access my Outlook Today (by selecting the ‘main’ folder).  Everytime I tried, I would receive the message “Microsoft Outlook has stopped working …”.  I did a lot of research and tried many things before I discovered that the PST was corrupt.  I determined this by creating a new Outlook profile; if I set the ‘corrupt’ PST as the default data file in the new profile, the same thing happened (using a different PST for the default data file worked fine).

To resolve the issue, I created a new PST data file in my existing profile and set it as the default data file.  I then had to copy all existing email, contacts, calendar events & tasks from the original PST file to the new one.  This wasn’t difficult, but it was a little time-consuming.  There were a few negative consequences as a result: I had to recreate my Master Category List (categories that existed on actual contacts or tasks were not lost, just not defined); I had to delete and recreate the partnership to my mobile phone in Windows Mobile Device Center; it appears that I lost the ‘reminder’ setting for most of my tasks.  For the most part, it appears that I’m now back on track (except for cleaning up the duplicates in my Google Calendar – apparently caused by syncing with a ‘different’ calendar).

To be honest, I’m not certain that the upgrade corrupted the PST file.  I do know that Outlook Today worked fine when I was using Outlook 2007.  However, since I didn’t try to access Outlook Today for a few days after the upgrade, it is possible that something else corrupted the file.  But if I had to lay odds, I’d say it was the upgrade.

Another strange thing I encountered was in trying to send an email to a distribution list.  When I tried to send the message, I immediately received the error “The operation failed.  The messaging interfaces have returned an unknown error.  If the problem persists, restart Outlook.  Cannot resolve recipient.”  Of course restarting Outlook does not fix the problem.  After discovering this thread, I modified the Display Name for existing contacts (see my post on 5/28 in the thread for more details) and this fixed the problem.

One last final gripe about Outlook 2010.  I use rules extensively to control where my email is ultimately stored once it is delivered to my inbox.  Almost all my rules are ‘stand-alone’; if the email meets the criteria for the rule, Outlook doesn’t need to worry about checking any additional rules.  Therefore, I always check ‘stop processing more rules’.  Now, when I click OK after modifying rules, I receive the following warning dialog:

I can click on Yes and proceed, but it’s annoying to receive this every time I modify rules.

Despite these complaints, so far I am happy with Outlook 2010 and have no intention of switching back to 2007.