Office Upgrade Guarantee Hits Snags

By Nate Mook | Published March 30, 2007, 3:48 PM

Customers who purchased Office Student and Teacher 2003 after October 26, 2006 planning to take advantage of the "Technology Guarantee Program" that offered a free upgrade to Office 2007 have found themselves missing Outlook due to a packaging change.

At issue is the new Office Home and Student 2007, which replaces the former Student and Teacher SKU. Unlike its predecessor, Microsoft Outlook is not included in the update; therefore, Microsoft promised to send the product on a separate disc to those customers taking advantage of the promotion.

But that didn't happen. According to reports received by BetaNews, customers only received Office Home and Student 2007, leaving them without the e-mail and communications client.

"After fruitless phone calls and a visit to the CS chat room I reported the problem to officetechguarantee @ one.microsoft.upgrade.com on 1 March 2007," one BetaNews reader told us. Eight e-mails later, he was notified that Microsoft was "researching the issue" and told, "This is a known issue for every order of Office Home and Student that we are attempting to resolve."

Despite the miscommunication and seeming confusion within the Redmond company, the story does end on a positive note.

After digging into the issue for BetaNews, Microsoft said it believes the problem was related to both order fulfillment and a shipping error. The company is contacting those customers who sent an e-mail to the support alias for the Technology Guarantee Program, promising that Outlook 2007 will be shipped out soon.

Those Office 2003 customers who purchased the product after October 26 and have not sent in an upgrade request should act fast: the redemption materials must be postmarked by March 31, 2007. Shipping will take between four to six weeks.

Comments

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I dont know why Microsoft did not include the outlook ine the student and home editions.
it is strange

http://www.software-asli.com

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Because they want to make the suite less worthy, pressuring people to pay for an upgraded suite.

Evil jerks.

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Perhaps (and this is just a guess) because outlook is an enterprise/business email client and Outlook Express/Windows Mail should work just fine for students and home users?

Durrrrr....

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Office 2000 was the last really good version. :)

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95 was revolutionary.
2k was revolutionary as well considering it was damn light.

2k7 is not bad, but it's definitely not light.
(with a semi-outdated PC)

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2k was light? Which version did you have? 2k took forever and a day to install when it was released, and is decidedly ugly (read: incompatible) on XP SP2.

More and more I'm recommending OpenOffice to our clients. Office is just getting silly in pricing/packaging/bloat. Unless you need Outlook or Access, there are much better alternatives.

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Office 97 Pro installs lightning fast compared to Office 2000, BUT, Office 2000 seems more stable to me, especially with EPS embedding and things such as that.

Even though Office 2000 installs slower than 97, it beats out every other install in terms of time and does still seem robust and capable. So by comparison to Office XP, 2003 and 2007, yes, Office 2000 seems light.

I'm running it on Windows XP SP2 and it seems to work very, very well, with no incompatibilities that I can find. I run in Classic mode or with a WindowBlinds 5.5 skin in place and it seems just fine.

I have a legal copy of Office XP and just do not like it. It seems to offer nothing useful that I need over 2000, and I do not appreciate the interface changes and the perceived bloat.

I tried both Office 2003 and Office 2007, and I just can't see myself using any version of Microsoft office after the 2000 version.

I'm more than happy with Open Office 2.x on my other machines and once MS Office 2000 stops working properly and I'm forced to ugprade, I'll likely switch my main machine to Open Office as well.

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I have 2 copies of 2k3 and a copy of 2k7, works great.

And yes the 2k7 copy I have is full pro with groove :)

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How could they take Outlook out of the thing? What a rip. :(

Screw MS - go with Open Office! w00t! :)

For those who love MS office, it seems 2007 may not be all that awesome, but I do hope they fix it.

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[laughing]. Outlook 2007 still doesn't correctly render HTML e-mails with inline CSS, right?

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Why post the comment if you dont know? Guess some people cant wait to bash MS even if they dont have a clue what they are talking about.

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...

You must be new here. :p

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Nah, just annoyed that betanews doesnt take a more proactive stance and install a moderation system like slashdot where we can filter out crap like this.

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Ohgod...users modding mods...

I thought slashdot was the example of why we *don't* do it that way...

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The irony is that all of the FREE seeded copies from MS are the full Pro version!

You just have to hang with the right crowd I guess.
And they even include Groove...

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