Loving and hating Microsoft

My wife is a serious Outlook user. For her its the nexus of all things organizational. Tasks, calendars, and email all converge in a carefully honed system which keeps our household and generally at least one major educational organization at a time (PTA, etc.) afloat. That said, Outlook 2003 had some issues and failings and I decided to let her try OneNote, an element of Office 2010 as part of a longer-term transition plan.

Mistake #1 - believing the installer works as described. I installed OneNote by first electing to 'install alongside instead of replacing' Office 2003, selecting custom installation, and only picking OneNote, with all other Office apps 'installed on first use'. No errors or warnings! Great.

But Outlook 2003 was simply.... Gone. Nowhere to be found. Word and Excel 2003 were still available, but in fact NO version of Outlook was installed anymore.

Mistake #2 - not doing a full backup of the system directly before Mistake #1. I did have a backup of the Outlook 2003 data file - but it would be some real effort to roll back the system.

Mistake #3 - not verifying feature consistency. Always know ahead of time what the customer values. Some things that look small (like showing start and end time explicitly in appointment details in week-view of calendar) were very important to her and are simply unavailable in Outlook 2010.

After listening to some choice words and tweaking some really hard-to-decipher details (like the way tasks are ordered and displayed), Outlook 2010 is close enough to working like Outlook 2003 had worked to be acceptable. I'm halfway out of the doghouse and some of the new features of Outlook 2010 (like color-based categorizing) are proving helpful. That said, I've been reminded how important it is to verify critical features when rolling a system out to users, and ALWAYS have a rollback plan.

I've also been reminded about the dangers of believing the documentation.

Enjoy the holidays....