Outlook 2007 good but not great

As a beta tester for Office 2007 I am up to date with the latest betas so I can say I really enjoy working with the new versions of Word and Excel.

However Outlook 2007 is surely cool with some new interesting features but still has some annoying things I would like to see fixed before the official launch.

I was quite excited when Microsoft finally included a RSS reader in Outlook. Until now I was unsing Newsgator, the only way I know to integrate RSS in Outlook 2003. One thing I missed from Newsgator now is the lack of clean information from Outlook when you read feeds. Outlook 2007 don't separate the RSS reader from the other tasks.

So it means that you have to use the only Send/Receive button and you have absolutly no feedback about the number of new posts by channel or any status at all on the channels.

The reader doesn't seems also to get the latest posts from the feeds. It looks like you have a gap of two to three posts between each time you refresh your aggregate list. So because you have no real status you can't really know if the post you read is really the last one to check.

One thing I noticed (and this is maybe because of the Beta status) is Outlook slowing down dramatically (almopst stop to work in some rare case) if you try to install or use an heavy application in the background.

Thankfully Newsgator seems to work with Outlook 2007 so I suppose I will stick to it until Microsoft really improve their RSS reader ...or just buy Newsgator!