Outlook 2007 and Word HTML

If you work in IT or if you have been closely following the release of Outlook 2007 you’ve probably heard already that Outlook 2007 will use Word as the engine to display HTML-formatted emails. There has been quite some fuss about this and actually it is still going on. So what is this really all about? Well, to put it short; because it breaks some stuff… But really, trust me, it’s not completely a bad thing that it does so.

Some background first

Now of course the Outlook developers at Microsoft didn’t break it because they like to break things. Well… maybe they do, but not when it comes to Outlook though.
Outlook now only has to support 1 HTML engine which makes developing a lot easier and you’ll get much more consistent behavior which increases your email experience. In previous versions Outlook displayed the emails with the HTML rendering engine from Internet Explorer and when you had Outlook as the email editor it used its own (limited) engine to generate it. When you had Word as the email editor it used the Word engine to generate HTML and offered Word composing features. With Outlook 2007 they decided to get rid of both Word and Outlook as the email editor and replaced it with a single completely new and revamped editor (with Ribbon support!) based on Word.

Why didn’t they choose Internet Explorer or Outlook?

Well, Internet only displays HTML and the functionality of the Outlook editor was rather limited. Also in usage emails are much more treated like documents than like web pages. So instead of expanding the features of the Outlook editor and basically build another Word, reusing what they had already made sense. The fact that Outlook and Word have the same release and support cycle will make things even less complicated.

So now I have to buy Word 2007 as well? Ripoff!

You can stop trying to reach Neelie Kroes as you don’t have to buy Word 2007 to use Outlook 2007. When you install Outlook 2007 it will detect if Word is installed as well. If it is not installed Outlook will install the so called “stub” of Word that Outlook uses to function correctly and display the new editor. You see? They really gave it some thought and you’ll benefit from it that you won’t loose Word as the email editor if you choose to only upgrade Outlook.

What does it break?

The most noticeable features that are broken are;

• gifs don’t animate
• flash objects display as a red “X” area
• “advanced” css formatting support (which could lead to malformed newsletters)
• HTML accessibility support (like for instance for the visually impaired)

When you create fancy looking newsletters you can get a full overview of the rendering capabilities of Outlook here.

Why are not all the HTML and CSS standards supported?

When you’ve gone through the list of what is and what isn’t supported you’ll find that most of the things that aren’t supported fall within the following 2 categories;

• the feature could pose a security risk
• the feature doesn’t have to do anything with reading mail

For instance when Outlook would support embedding flash objects in mail then Outlook can’t ensure your security anymore but will have to leave that up to Adobe Flash. This means that if there is a security threat in Adobe Flash reading your mail becomes dangerous as well and Outlook can’t do a thing about it.
Other kind of risks that are taken away by not supporting these features are presenting you with spoofed content and executing scripts on opening your email.

Who are affected?

In the positive term; everybody, as you are now presented with a much more secure messaging environment than if all standards were supported. In the negative term it is much easier to explain when we define the following four groups;

• Everyday email user
• Marketing people
• Spammers
• People who require alternative output or accessibility support

The everyday email user is not affected by this. When you take a look at your emails you’ll find that they mainly consist out of text without any required formatting. In most cases you might as well have used Plain Text formatting instead of HTML.

People in marketing are a bit more affected. They will need to look at their current design template and see if they need to make some changes to the design. In many cases there is no need to make changes as they’ve already taken into account mail clients that support even less HTML and CSS features. Also many of the newsletters start with a link to read the information on the company’s website which actually is an increased sales opportunity already (free marketing tip from me ).

Spammers; do I even need to explain this one? As they are basically abusing every trick in the book giving them less to play with is bad news for them but good news for you and me.

Which brings us to the last group; People who require alternative output or accessibility support. From my point of view this group is the most negatively affected of all. Some of the features required for this are no longer supported or harder to use. This means that accessibility support is now completely up to Windows, Outlook or a 3rd party application and not up to the sender or the mail properties itself. I know Vista accessibility support has been vastly improved but I’m not sure yet if this is enough to compensate for the loss. If you are using Windows and Outlook (any version of either) with alternative output or accessibility support and want to share your experience feel free to contact me directly.

How to work around this

For the few times that I do get a moving gif file embedded in the message or a newsletter that is totally malformed I open the message in a web browser. There is a native way to open the message in a web browser by opening the message first and choose Other Actions-> View in Browser. As this was a bit too many clicks for my taste I’ve written a macro to directly display the message in a browser of my choice. You can find the code and the guide on how to implement it here; Open Message in Internet Browser

Conclusion

Changing the HTML rendering engine from Internet Explorer to Word has been quite a drastic change which affect various people but doesn’t have a great impact on your everyday Outlook use. The change should have a positive effect on future development of Outlook.

Making your Outlook 2007 implementation decision solely based on these limited HTML and CSS support limitations would be blowing things out of perspective. There are many new features in Outlook 2007 that can increase your everyday productivity which I rate much more important. To name a few of these new features;

• the “To-Do Bar”
• Calendar Overlay Mode
• improved Tasks display in Calendar
• reminders across folders
• Scheduling your Out of Office Assistant with Exchange 2007
• Instant Search
• of course; the new editor with Ribbon support

And although primarily cosmetic, showing the contact’s display picture on received emails is also a nice touch which makes emailing more personal again.