1. I like the new Ribbon UI design. Sure, it will take some getting
used to, but it would appear to be more functional than using the menus.

2. I like that there is a built-in RSS reader. I don't quite like the
functionality yet, but we'll see how it does. So far, comparing it to
my previous RSS reader (Intravnews), Intravnews is still a much better
choice. Since this is still Beta 1, I'd suspect that Outlook's handling
of RSS will get better.

3. So far, I'm not so fond of the memory usage. When I first
installed, I upgraded from Office 2003 SP2. Perhaps that was my first
mistake. After the upgrade, my CPU frequently shot up to 100% and
memory usage went as high as 700mb (I have 1GB installed on my laptop).
YIKES! It seems that the solution ended up being deleting and
re-creating my profile. Why (or how) my profile would have caused this
is beyond me, especially since my laptop was just recently rebuilt and
Office 2003 had only been on there for about a week. Anyways, now that
the CPU usage is under control, Outlook is still using quite a bit of
memory. I'm told that this may be by design, but I don't see any
documentation (yet) that references this.

4. There is a new cool "To-Do Bar", that identifies upcoming things.
It shows you a condensed Calendar view (month view), upcoming meetings,
and tasks. It doesn't take up a lot of space, and is quite
informational. This is definitely a big plus.

5. Word is now your default E-mail editor. All I will say is, let's
hope that Word as e-mail editor has vastly improved. That used to be
one thing I would always turn off.

As I continue testing Office 12, I'll post additional thoughts.

- posted by Ben Winzenz @ 10:22 AM