p.s. I did have to install Setuptools for it to work.

I will be the first to acknowledge that the new Office presents great and powerful features and opportutnies. But it is a little difficult for us to ensure that the almost 2m people who recieve email from pMailer on a monthly basis all install a plugin to view more css-driven mailers.

The gripe is that in order to deliver Office 2007 compliant email, those who don’t use Office 2007 and could have received a richer experience via mail from marketers, will now be unable to.

We’ll have to work around it. Nothing new, and I’m sure we’ll still be able to deliver rich and well-designed mailers going forward as Office 2007 begins to penetrate the market further.

Josh

I’d like to delve a little further into this email rendering issue.

After a chat with Josh (Prefix), and some questions from my own customers and partners, I’ve been looking into this and have some information to share.

First, a little background. In Office 2003, Microsoft used the Word HTML rendering engine to create and edit emails in Outlook, but, confusingly, used Internet Explorer’s engine to display emails.This was quite frustrating to designers, as their emails looked different at the receiving end. Obviously, the solution was to use the same engine for editing and viewing.

I don’t pretend to know the reasons for Microsoft’s choice of the Word engine over Internet Explorer’s (which I believe is clearly superior from a web-standards point of view). I can only speculate.

There are ways around this, although certainly not as easy as ticking a checkbox in a menu dialog.

The ability to modify and enhance functionality in the Office 2007 system is vastly improved over previous releases. Creating custom forms, or custom form regions in Outlook is the most relevant feature here.

It’s possible to build an Outlook add-in that replaces the current form inspector (the bit that decodes and displays an email - e.g. the Outlook reading pane) with a custom one. This is fairly easy to do in VS2008, as it’s mostly wizard driven. This custom inspector would have the IE7 browser on it’s surface (this is available as a control in Visual Studio 2008 - shipping March 2008), and would display the email in all it’s standards-compliant glory.

I actually stumbled upon a code sample that did this (will post it as soon as I find it again). Something like this could be cooked up in a day and sent to people on the receiving end. With ClickOnce deployment (another new Office add-in feature that’s available in VS2008), an end user could install this with a minimum of fuss, and spend the rest of the day basking in the CSS goodness of pMailer.

Based on the relative simplicity of such a solution, I’m sure that Microsoft will soon release something like it. I’ll let you know if we do.

I apologise for the length of this post, but I hope that you found it helpful.

Aatish