Outlook 2003 profile incompatible with Outlook 2000

[tjgollih]

My company is going to be upgrading from Win2k/Office2k up to
WinXP/Office2k3, but we ran into a snag with Outlook. There seems to
be an incompatibility between the Outlook 2003 profile and the Outlook
2000 profile.

Our deployment isn't going to happen overnight due to lack of resources
so this means we will be in a mixed environment for quite some time.
So we'll have users roaming between Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2000.

When an Outlook 2003 user goes to a Win2k/Office2k computer and opens
up Outlook they get connected to the Exchange mailbox, but don't get
much else. If you look into Tools>Services, they all show up in the
list with "??????" and you are not able to add or remove any services.

As a temporary workaround I've created an Outlook 2000 profile and an
Outlook 2003 profile and set Outlook to prompt which profile to use on
startup. While that does resolve the issues, it's rather troublesome
to add another step to the process. You all know how end users get
when they have an extra step.

This problem seems to have been overlooked by most of the IT community.
I can't find any articles regarding this issue, though I do see a few
random posts on the newsgroups that go unanswered.

Any ideas???

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

Very bad idea. You should never use roaming Windows profiles when the desktop versions of Outlook are different. Your solution is probably as good as you're going to get. You might also consider using OWA, especially if you have Exchange 2003.

 

[tjgollih]

Very bad idea. You should never use roaming Windows profiles when the

desktop versions of Outlook are different. Your solution is probably as
good as you're going to get. You might also consider using OWA,
especially if you have Exchange 2003.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of
Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers

Never use roaming profiles with different versions of Outlook??? Show
me where it says that in any Microsoft documentation. That's
ridiculous. It doesn't have anything to do with the roaming profile.
The problem is related to the Outlook 2000/2003 profiles
incompatibilities not the roaming.

As for OWA, were still running an older version of Exchange. The
Exchange 2003 upgrade is also one that is taking time.