About this article Over the years, we at ZATZ have had the opportunity to publish articles by some well known authors and true experts in the field. As we move into our active coverage of Outlook 2007, we're fortunate to be joined by Bill Mann, one of the true experts with this product. Bill has been a ZATZ Contributing Editor since 2002, and he's also the author of How to Do Everything with Microsoft Office Outlook 2007. Bill will be providing monthly, exclusive coverage of Outlook 2007 in OutlookPower and we (and you) couldn't be luckier. After you read this article, jump to the end and click on over to order his book. If you're planning to upgrade to Outlook 2007, it'll be a big help.

With Outlook 2007 due to become available to the general public any time now, we thought you might be interested in hearing what it is like to upgrade from Outlook 2003 to Outlook 2007. Most people will find the upgrade to go smoothly, but if you use add-in programs to enhance Outlook, or if you are upgrading from a beta version of Office 2007, things can get difficult.

We did two upgrades. In the first case, we upgraded Outlook 2003 to Outlook 2007 on a computer running Windows XP. This copy of Outlook 2003 had been in heavy use for a year, with thousands of Outlook items stored in multiple .PST files, and several third-party add-in programs.

In the second case, we upgraded a beta copy of Outlook 2007 to the production version, again on a computer running Windows XP.

The rest of this article tells you what we found in each case...

Upgrading from Outlook 2003 on a Windows XP machine
We found the basic upgrade from Outlook 2003 to Outlook 2007 very smooth. For this project, we used a 2007 Microsoft Office System Professional Edition CD, but installed only Outlook 2007. This allowed us to focus only on Outlook-related issues.

The upgrade itself went very smoothly. The installation wizard walked us through the steps, and picked up the existing email accounts and .PST files with no problem. Once the installation process was complete, we started Outlook 2007 and it worked perfectly.