Yesterday I downloaded the just released (to WPC & MVP) Microsoft Office 2010. I first installed it on my Vista (32bit) notebook which already had Office 2007. The Office ‘10 install proceeded as an Upgrade. It seemed to take a looong time but eventually finished successfully. After a reboot, I fired up Outlook. The first run of Outlook took again a looong time to do what it needed to do to upgrade the 2007 system to 2010. But eventually it finished. It only seemed so long because it was getting much later than I had planned on staying up since I had class the next morning. Once it came up, I looked for the familiar CRM tool bar and Outlook menu item. Not there. Darn! then I saw the ‘Add-Ins’ item in the new Outlook menu. Clicking on that presented a new ‘ribbon’ which displayed what looks a lot like the old tool bar. The CRM menu was also there. I exercised it a bit and everything seemed to work. Again, this are my VERY first experiences. I haven’t had much stick time so far.
Tonight I decided to try installing the 64 bit of Office 2010 on my Windows 7 RC notebook (same computer, swapped out the hard drive). Wanting to see how Office installed in a clean environment, I uninstalled the existing Office 2007. I had never installed the CRM Outlook client on this implementation. Once Office was installed and activated, I attempted to install the CRM Outlook Client with Offline Access. The preliminary steps install several required services including the SQL 2005 Express database. This went fine. But it failed when trying to install the SQL Reporting Services Report Viewer services. After a couple of tries I decided to scrub the Offline access and go for the ‘desktop’ client. It doesn’t need the SRS Report Viewer. Unfortunately the install aborted when it couldn’t find a supported Outlook version. It only supports Outlook 2003 or 2007. I understand there may be (UNsupported) ways around this and I will blog when I figure that out.
For now, I will exercise the CRM Offline Client on my Vista 32 with Office 2010 32 bit.