Outlook/Office 2007 Beta

[Geoffrey]

Does anyone have strengths with the Office 2007 Beta? I am having an issue
specifically with Outlook 2007 Beta. It will not allow me to open an
Exchange 5.5 Server mailbox. It tells me that I am trying to open an
"unsupported mailbox version," which i know that Exchange 5.5 is not
supported anymore. Does anyone know a workaround for this? This is rather
urgent, as my client has many mailboxes still on Exchange 5.5, which is why I
am migrating them, and if I cannot do this with Outlook 2007, then I will
need to uninstall it and re-install Outlook 2003. Thanks for any help that
you can supply. And if this is not the correct forum for this, I apologize
and would greatly appreciated being directed to the proper forum Once again,
thanks so much.

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

That's covered on the known issues list. Outlook 2007 does not and will not support Exchange 5.5 mailboxes.

Here’s a statement from Microsoft regarding the lack of support for Outlook 2007 running against an Exchange 5.5 mailbox:

"Microsoft continuously strives to provide a consistent and predictable end-of-life-cycle experience for all of its products. In accordance with standard Microsoft life-cycle policies Exchange 5.5 ended extended life-cycle support on January 10, 2006. As a result, Outlook 2007 will not support Exchange 5.5. Because neither the Outlook or Exchange team is supporting this combination we will not discover and/or fix issues that crop up as the result of innovations in both products . Rather than subjecting customers to potential serious issues like data loss or frequent server downtime we choose to prevent Outlook from connecting to these older and now unsupported servers. Our research has shown that there is a relatively small set of customers who want to upgrade their desktops to the latest and greatest versions of Office and run server technology as old as Exchange 5.5. There are clearly exceptions but they don't seem to be the norm."

If the server is set up to support POP3 or IMAP4, you could set up an email account with one of those protocols, but that won't get you access to the Calendar and other folders in the mailbox.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003

and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers

 

[Patrick Schmid]

Outlook 2007 does not support Exchange 5.5. The only way to use 2007
with 5.5 is to use IMAP or POP3 for emails.

Patrick Schmid