transientis.com - António Melo’s transient moods

My laptop was slow. It was several years old. Nothing new here.

I just said: I need a fast machine, big disk, 2 GBs of memory. More, I don’t care about the laptop’s size. I don’t care about its weight. I don’t care about the graphics card. I don’t care about the installed software. I just need a fast machine for my (power demanding) day to day work.

I tried to convince our IT that it makes no sense (to me) having a single computer model / configuration for the whole organization. I understand having a single model has its advantages, but I suggested we could stick to 2 models / configurations - one for the R&D (my department) and other for the Professional Services’ personnel.

As I told our IT before the purchase, this does not mean that “our” machines should be better that “their” machines. For me, it would make all sense that their laptop could be more expensive, if that’s the case. Maybe 1 giga is enough for them, but, as they travel a lot, they should have a lighter laptop with better battery autonomy.

Well, no success. Here I have the standard 1 GB configuration laptop. And, as the standard configuration, it also cames the new standard software.

Office 2007, it is. I also had to hear the disclaimer “Look António, this Outlook 2007 has very nice features, although it is heavier and slower than Outlook 2003″. I replied “I exchanged the machine because the other was slow. No 2 gigas were allowed. I didn’t ask for office 2007 and the first thing you tell me is that it is slower? Please, give me a break.”

Unfortunately, this was not all. I started seeing some odd email renderings. Images or graphics that would not be displayed. some emails, from several sources would not render well. Other would render just fine. Weird stuff.

We developed a tool that every day sends an email with a progress report. To have an idea, look at an email rendered in outlook 2003:

And a similar one rendered in outlook 2007:

What the… What happened to the bars? They seem that were not rendered. And no, the graphics are not done through scripts. No, they are not done with dhtml. No, not even with images. Yes, I just have a simple outer span with plain simple inner spans with specific background-color:

<span style=’float:left;display:block;background-color:green; position:relative;left:0;width:180;top:1;height:11;z-index=1′ >
</span>
Using the “View in browser” feature of the (not so) nice outlook 2007, this is what we get:

So, the problem had to be with the rendering engine of outlook 2007. I googled for: outlook 2007 html rendering

Here are 2 of the first hits today:

Microsoft takes email design back 5 years - http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/archives/2007/01/microsoft_takes_email_design_b.html

Word 2007 HTML and CSS Rendering Capabilities in Outlook 2007 - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338200.aspx

How come Microsoft breaks (even more) the html support? Why deciding to go to the word html rendering? Is it because of security concerns? To have a consistent office layout viewer? If so, why not have the IE engine stripped out of scripting capabilities?

I definitely am thinking of not using outlook 2007 and start using the much lighter (and that works) outlook webmail access.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 12th, 2007 at 4:38 am and is filed under Technology, The Office. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.