As you may well know, Office 2007 and Vista will shortly be available to businesses. Thanks to the Microsoft Developers Network, at work we’ve had copies since last week.

Whilst I was away in the USA, two of the other developers on my team parallel installed Office 2007 – although Vista is still limited to non-production machines. Feeling slightly left out, I thought I’d take a look at the new version of Office.

Having said that, I didn’t get far before I hit a snag, my version of ActiveSync. Until now I’ve been quite happily working with version 3.8. Although it was updated to version 4 – indeed I have a copy of version 4 on a machine here, it didn’t give any particular benefit going through the hassle of upgrading. However, looking through the requirements for Office 2007, it needed ActiveSync version 4.

So I went and grabbed the install of the latest version, and set it going. Aside from changing ActiveSync, nothing else was being changed at this point – same version of Outlook on the desktop, same PocketPC with Windows Mobile 2003 SE. The install detected that I was upgrading, no problem I thought…

Seems that it isn’t only MarkSpace that has trouble with synchronising. By the end of the process it had managed to duplicate over 400 entries in my diary, and created a stack of duplicate phone numbers in the contacts. If a system using Microsoft software throughout the process doesn’t work with just upgrading one element, I’m not surprised that third-party solutions struggle. Really, how difficult can it be to get a PDA/Desktop combination that works?

Anyway, based on that experience, plus the somewhat negative feedback from my colleagues about how the new Office interface, whilst being faster with a mouse is a pain to drive with the keyboard, I suspect I’ll be sticking with Office 2003 for the moment, despite some tempting new features. Thankfully using the compatibility tools I can read documents from the new suite as needed.