Outlook 2007: Progression or Regression
Having played and worked with internet technologies for over a decade I thought the bad old days were coming to an end. After 5 years Microsoft had finally released an update to their flagship browser Internet Explorer. Whilst not perfect IE7 is definitely a step forward in terms standards compliance. Now this may not mean much to the lay-person but to my development team and I it was music to our ears. Standard compliance put simply means we can develop to this standard safe in the knowledge that most browsers will display the work we create in the same way.
Happy times ahead it seemed, well apparently no. It seems with Microsoft us developers are doomed not to have an easy life. For although they have taken a tentative step forward with IE7 they have taken a huge step backwards with their imminent release of Outlook 2007.
Without getting too technical, previous releases of Outlook have always used IE as their rendering engine, in other words if a HTML email looked correct in IE you could guarantee it would look the same in Outlook. Now in their wisdom they have decided to change this in the next release of Outlook, instead of using IE, essentially Outlook will be using Word to render HTML content.
So when I say this is a big step back it really is, and whilst I understand some of the reasoning behind this move, it still heralds some interesting times ahead. At Five by Five we have consistently been producing creative yet effective email campaigns for many years, so as an experienced team we know what worked and what didn’t. Using our extensive back catalogue of email campaigns as testing material I have been testing a range of emails. The results were, well to put it mildly, horrendous. At best the emails were slightly broken, in some cases so garbled it was almost funny.
So it looks like, in both development and design, with HTML emails it will be back to basics.
Further Reading:
2 Responses to “Outlook 2007: Progression or Regression”
Baj Says:
I’m shocked.
As a contractor currently working in affiliate marketing, I am no longer involved in email campaigns, however as an ex-employee of Lawtons I can completely sympathise with headaches this will cause Al and his team. I would be interested to see what solutions the fivebyfive team come up with to target Outlook 2007 users, perhaps you can update the blog later?
February 1st, 2007 at 9:30 pm
Millzy Says:
Ut oh!
Say hello to ‘click here to read the latest newsletter’ style emails!
February 5th, 2007 at 5:50 pm
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