A knowledgebase article published last week acknowledges performance problems with Outlook 2007, though it says these only occur with mailboxes larger than 2GB:

You may experience one or more of the following performance problems when you are working with items in a large Personal Folder file (.pst) or in a large Offline Folder file (.ost) in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 … Note When you perform the same operations on the large .pst or .ost file in earlier versions of Outlook, the same performance problems do not occur. These problems may occur if the .pst or .ost file is larger than 2 GB. Additionally, the performance problems are more pronounced when the .pst or .ost file is larger than 4 GB.

I think this is optimistic and that smaller mailboxes are slower too; nevertheless, it does confirm that that the size of the local store is the key issue.

If you use Exchange, the local store is the .PST or .OST file on your workstation or laptop. If you do not use Exchange, a local .PST store is all you have.

Here’s what Microsoft says is the reason:

To accommodate new features, Outlook 2007 introduced a new data structure for .pst and .ost files. In this new data structure, the frequency of writing data to the hard disk increases as the number of items in the .pst or .ost files increases.

Intriguing, especially as I had thought the .pst format was the same in Outlook 2003 and 2007. The big change was from Outlook 2000 to Outlook 2003, when Unicode was introduced and the maximum size increased to 20GB.

I’d also like to know whether Microsoft is just stating the obvious here (bigger file, more disk access); or whether there is some exponential increase in disk writes, suggesting a design fault in the software. I have already noticed that if you show the I/O columns in Task Manager’s performance tab, Outlook 2007 shows some extraordinarily large numbers.

So what’s the fix? The news is not too good. In essence, you have to reduce the size of the local store. You can archive or move items to separate .pst files, or switch off cached mode so you always work online to Exchange.

The article doesn’t say it, but there are significant problems with switching off cached mode. These include hugely increased network traffic, problems with junk mail filtering, and loss of all your mail when using a laptop disconnected from the network.

The most imaginative suggestion is to filter the sychronization. For example, you could filter out messagse with large attachments, or all messages from last year or earlier. These messages will still exist in Exchange, but not in the local store.

Worth a try, but none of the workarounds is really satisfactory. Outlook 2003 worked fine with large mailboxes, Outlook 2007 does not. That’s a blunder.

Now that Vista is on the shelves, people are asking: is it worth having?

I’ve been testing it for a while now, using it for most of my work and as a media center.

If there is a “Wow” in Vista, it is in the Windows Presentation Foundation, not the core operating system. And WPF is available for XP as well; and there aren’t yet many applications which use it. So forget the wow for now.

That said, it is mostly an improvement. Why mostly? Mainly because of driver quality. For example, I’ve been chasing an Intel display driver bug for a couple of weeks. It made certain games unplayable and also caused problems when more than one display was active. Last week Intel posted an update that fixes the problem. That’s on a laptop; on my desktop the sound card doesn’t work as it should – because Creative’s Vista drivers are still in beta and far from production quality. I get stuttering sound from a supposedly high-end X-Fi card.

These issues will gradually disappear as the hardware vendors properly support Vista. That said, I have a scanner that will probably never work. It’s old enough that the vendor has no incentive to come up with a driver.

The other major issue is software compatibility. Everything has to work with XP, but Vista is new and there may be problems. Most of these are caused by the new security feature called User Account Control. In reality I have not had many problems. If you have a few key applications you depend on, it makes sense to verify whether or not they run on Vista before making the switch.

Upgrade? Buy new?

Now a few specifics. Would I upgrade a laptop? No, not unless you enjoy techie problems or can get a supported upgrade pack from the vendor. Laptops are stuffed with devices, updating the hardware is near-impossible, and things like sleep and resume are prone to go wrong.

Would I upgrade a desktop? Possibly, if it is no more than a couple of years old. It’s still somewhat risky. I’d plan to upgrade the RAM to 1GB or more, update the motherboard BIOS, and buy a new graphics card. You might get away without; but my impression is that Vista is more demanding (ie. slower) on the same hardware than XP.

Would I buy a new compter – desktop or laptop – with Vista rather than XP? Yes, provided you’ve established that you can run or replace the applications you depend on and the hardware you intend to plug in. 

Vista is a better version of Windows, more logically organized, more pleasant to use, more secure. The best feature for usability is the search box on the start menu. No more hunting through the fly-out menus; just click Start, type the first few letters of what you want and hit Enter.

Security

How much more secure? Unfortunately the blizzard of hype and counter-hype has obscured the security changes in Vista. A substantial industry has been built on security weaknesses in Windows, and this industry is desperate to persuade us that we still need its services, while journalists everywhere are keen to find and publicise any security problems; and undoubtedly there are and will be problems to find.

The key change is that users by default run without local administrator permissions. This brings Windows into line with standard practice on other operating systems including Linux and Mac OS X. In consequence system files are protected unless the user passes a dialog approving a change. Some claim that these dialogs pop up frequently and are annoying. I can’t substantiate that – I don’t often see them, and when they do appear I don’t find them particularly objectionable though there are cases when I’m not sure why admin rights are needed.

Of course if a virus comes along in an email attachment and says, “I’m an important update from Microsoft, please run me”, and you click Allow, then Vista isn’t going to help you.

Another less publicized change is Internet Explorer’s Protected mode, again on by default. This means IE runs with even more limited rights, and should help to prevent silent installs of malicious software. Arguably, this makes IE more secure than FireFox on Vista. 

In reality, this is a process. The changes in Vista mean that software vendors might actually stop producing applications that breach basic Windows guidelines. A side-effect will be better separation of application code and data, which will help with backup as well as security. It will make sense to set Vista to a higher level of security, where you have to enter an admin password to make system changes, and the intrusive dialogs will appear less often.

The first full release of the Open XML to Open Document Format translator is available for download. Great news for interoperability – or is it?

I like to try things out before writing about them, so here’s what I did. I downloaded the Word 2007 add-in and ran the setup. Then I opened Word, and opened the document I was working on, which happens to be called Using DigiKam.docx. This is just under 800 words long and contains no graphics. I went to Home – Save As, and looked for Open Document in the list of document types. No deal. Puzzled, I looked again at the Home menu in Word 2007. Ah, there it is. A separate top-level entry for ODF with Open and Save As menu items. Not ideal in terms of integration, but never mind.

Note: there is an important issue here. Imagine you are an organization that has decided to mandate ODF for your documents, but to continue using Microsoft Office. What you want to do is to fiddle with Group Policy and have Word default to opening and saving ODT (Open Document Text). As far as I can tell, this is not possible with this version 1.0 release. In fact it is worse than that. If you have a new document, and choose ODF – Save As, you get the following error:

Please save your document before exporting to ODF. So instead of just clicking Save, users have to save twice, first as .docx, next as ODT. Ugly. It gets worse, read on.

OK, so I decided to save my current document as ODF. A wait message appeared: it took the converter about 30 seconds to save the document. I don’t like to think what would happen to a 10,000 word report full of charts and tables.

Next, I closed the document, went to ODF – Open, and chose the document I just saved. Another 30 seconds later I get this message about lost elements:

If I go into details, it tells me that the header dimensions and document creation and modification dates might have been lost. Fair enough, nothing drastic – unless perhaps I am laying out a booklet for publication. Of course you would be mad to use a document converter like this in such circumstances – but let’s not forget the implications of potential inflexible government legislation that might mandate such a thing.

I notice a curious thing. My opened document has been renamed to Using DigiKam_tmp.docx. Let me get my head round this. Let’s say I want always to save in ODF. I have to save as .docx, then export to ODF. Then I open the ODF document, which now has _tmp appended. I make some changes, and want to export it as ODF. I get, you guessed it, the “Please save before exporting” message. So I click save, and get a view of all my temporary documents, because the converter puts the imported document in my temp folder. If I try to save it directly, I get a “this file is read-only” error. So I save it to My Documents, then I go to ODF – Save As. Next session, I go to ODF – Open and guess what. My file is now called Using DigiKam_tmp_tmp.docx.

So the message is: don’t even think about using this converter as a means of standardising on Open Document while still using Word. It will cause immense and unnecessary hassle. However, it could still be useful for importing and exporting documents interchanged with others using, say, Open Office.

Not the same

That said, I noticed something else about my round-tripped document. It was different. In Word, I have my Normal style set with no space before or after. After round-tripping, these paragraphs had 10pt space after applied.

It gets worse. The converter lost all my paragraph styles – not the formatting, but the style tagging. This is a deal-breaker for me, as I depend on paragraph styles; but I am probably in a minority. Still, it prompted me to look at the list of unsupported features. Casting my eye down the page I came across this item:

In Open XML in real spacing between two consecutive paragraphs is the biger [stet]. For example first paragraph style has spacing after 10pt and second has spacing before 20pt the real spacing is 20pt. In Open Document Format real spacing is sum. In our example the real spacing is 30pt.

Is that my spacing problem? It could be related; but this is not what I would call a model of clarity. Let’s just say that the ODF converter will mess up your paragraph spacing.

Question: why was I warned that I might lose “header dimensions”, but these more significant issues – no paragraph styles, messed up spacing – went unmentioned?

Not professional quality

I realise that despite the flaws this converter could be a life-saver if you get a document that would otherwise be unreadable, or if you are forced by regulation to send a document in ODF format. However it does not merit Microsoft’s effusive press release, nor Brian Jones enthusiatic blog entry. It falls far short of the standards set by Microsoft Office. Perhaps I am judging too swiftly; but you will understand my scepticism considering the design flaws noted above, the extreme performance problems, and the fact that it somewhat messed up my short document without any graphics.

Practical considerations

In closing, some practical notes. If you really want to work with Open Document, don’t use Microsoft Office. If you want to use Microsoft Office, don’t use the converter except in an emergency, not in this release at least. For Word documents, RTF is the least bad option and macro-free; or failing that, the Office binary formats are actually well understood by third-party applications.

What if you use an application that supports Open Document and want to distribute richly formatted documents to others? Well, in the real world Microsoft Office is everywhere, so the same applies: RTF or Microsoft Office binary formats will help the recipients to get their work done.

Update: I spoke to Microsoft’s Jean Paoli about a number of Office Open XML issues – see here for the interview. He acknowledged there are some issues but said that performance is usually better than I found it to be. I’m sceptical but will try to do some more testing.

Technorati tags: odf, open document, microsoft office, office open xml, ooxml, standards, xml, rtf