Accessing 2003 Notes

[srd]

Usually beta versions nag at you _not_ to uninstall your commercial
version, advising that you cannot rely on a beta. Only for testing--
Microsoft seems to be doing all it can to get you to abandon ON 2003 for
2007 on the spot, from the more attractive Upgrade button in comparison to
Customize to the failure to define how they are using these words before
presenting a choice.

That's fine with me. If the installer ditches your 2003 ON, you can always
reinstall it. Nice to see MS has confidence in the upgrade. But it's
something else when they start playing games with your data. The user
should not be given the choice to convert data during the installation
process, when he hasn't had the opportunity to weigh the options.

Most importantly, the user must be presented an option to convert the old
data while retaining a copy of it. New data created in ON 2007 will remain
potentially subject to forfeit. That's not reason to gamble the whole data
set. I don't even know whether Office allows you to convert a copy of the
old data, unless the user goes to the trouble of duplicating his data set.

Presumably the user has a backup. For many and perhaps most users, that
backup is not 100% up to date. (I'm not in that group myself, of course.)

 

[Erik Sojka (MVP)]

I know what you're saying, and your concerns are covered in the Release
Notes which you also should have downloaded and read.

The "confidence" of the stability in this case is warranted, but keep in
mind that the installation experience itself is also part of the beta
testing process. It would be meaningless from a testing POV to have
beta-specific dialog boxes in the product. When would people be able to
beta-test the production dialog boxes?

When the product is released, MS indeed wants you to UPGRADE!!! and not
customize - hence the UI choices in the installer program. The
UPGRADE!!!! suggestion is for the production user, not for the beta user.

 

[Patrick Schmid]

OneNote should have made an automatic backup of your 2003 notes before
upgrading them. The backup should be in Documents and
Settings\username\Local Settings\Application
Data\Microsoft\OneNote\Backup
If you don't have a backup of your 2003 notebooks there, go on
connect.microsoft.com and file feedback on this. It's then something
that is broken in the upgrading process that needs to be fixed before ON
2007 is released.

Patrick Schmid