2007 Office to Work with Non-Microsoft Email Clients

Microsoft is gearing up to offer customization details that will permit users of Office 2007 to make the productivity suite play nice with non-Microsoft email clients. Office 2007 brings to the table Outlook 2007, but for customers that opt to run an email application other than Windows Live Mail, Outlook express, Outlook etc., the Redmond company is getting ready to publish an article titled “Customize the 2007 Office system to work with a non-Microsoft e-mail application.” The promise is that the documentation will be live by the end of this week, in response to some of the issues reported to the Microsoft Support team.

Catherine Watson, Microsoft technical writer for IT Pros, revealed the scenarios covered by the resources: “You are deploying the 2007 Office system, without Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 or earlier, to work with a non-Microsoft e-mail application. You are deploying the 2007 Office system with Office Outlook 2007 and you want the non-Microsoft e-mail application to be the default e-mail client. You are going to add Office Outlook 2007 to an existing 2007 Office system installation but want your existing non-Microsoft e-mail application to remain as the default e-mail client. Office Outlook 2007 is installed but you need a non-Microsoft e-mail application to be the default e-mail client.”

All the Setup customizations will be enabled via the Office Customization Tool (OCT), the Redmond company stated. Each specific scenario will come with its own individual set of instructions, and the users will have to tweak the registry, as well as add setup properties. However, in the end, users will be able to integrate a third-party email client with outlook 2007 without any issues.

“And by the way, no special Office Setup customizations are needed to enable e-mail functionality with Office if: you are deploying the 2007 Office system without Office Outlook 2007 to work with a non-Microsoft e-mail application and the client computers already have some version of Outlook installed; [or] a non-Microsoft e-mail application is already installed and you then install Office Outlook 2007. Office Outlook 2007 will automatically be set as the default e-mail client after installation,” Watson added.