Installing Outlook 2007 at the office

At the office the corporate standard is actually Thunderbird, not Outlook. There is no exchange server. Calendar functionality is from Corptime which is now Oracle Collaboration Server.

To preserve my sanity (and to sync with my i730) I run outlook using oracle's connector for outlook. Its not wonderful, and using it to do any more than viewing my calendar is a horrible (it will create duplicate meetings at the same time as the original meeeting with all the same people invited - randomly - if I try to accept or reject meetings). Email works well, and I just fire up the Corptime calendar tool (standalone application) to create and accept meetings. As a standalone connected calendar, the standalone application has some nice features.


So today I finally got around to installing Outlook 2007, a coworker has been running it for a month or so. I have been using it at home for some time, but since its now in full release it was time to leverage it for some real work (I received over 10,000 email messages at work - not counting spam, mass mailers, or vendor messages).

On installation I hit similar issues to Scott Hanselman . I followed the same debugging process he mentioned, and found the beta software to be "Compatibility Pack for the 2007 Office System (Beta)".


I removed it and the install went fine... until I launched Outlook, where I was greeted with this friendly message:




A hop, skip, and a jump through google had me try to run C:/program files/Microsoft Office/Office12/scanpst.exe against all the *.pst files involved in the upgrade (after backing them up again of course).

This allowed me to successfully launch Outlook, however there was only archive folders - it hadn't brought in my account settings. Before I could go to fix this, a dialog popped up to tell me it had detected a new email account and would I like to import it? I said sure, just for giggles :)

It then created connectivity to the imap server, and set me up with my inbox, sent items, and 60 (yes 60!) RSS Feeds folders (RSS Feeds1 ... RSS Feeds59).

There is no easy way that I am aware of to mass delete folders, so I manually deleted 59 of the RSS Feeds folders.

Note: start at the bottom of the list - it will auto select upwards, then Ctrl-D with the left hand, and a click with the right hand (cursor staying put over the "yes" button) seems to be the fastest I could achieve.

This left me with a pretty good inbox/archive situation, until I clicked calendar. Sweet no meetings! Wait, that can't be right.

Sure enough the import of the new account decided I had access to a standard IMAP server with no calendar component.

I then deleted the IMAP account via Tools->Accounts, and manually entered the oracle outlook connector information.

This seemed to work, however with in 1 minute Outlook stopped responding. Thanks to a well timed phone call, I even gave it more than 5 minutes to figure itself out. I was thinking it was trying to download my calendar - but according to this link I needed to reinstall the outlook connector.

I subsequently reinstalled the connector, to no avail. I then tried an older version, also to no avail. I even tried the Oracle Connector for Windows Mobile to try to pump calendar directly to my phone upon syncing.

At this point Outlook 2007 is working great for email, but no calendar for me. Turns out my coworker doesn't have calendar working either.