NEWS: Windows 7 Compatibility Center

Just checked the Windows 7 Compatibility Center and it indicated that Engagement 6.1 (listed as a Wolters Kluwer product) is compatible with Windows 7. However, after reading a bit more on the compatibility levels (see "What do the different compatibility icons mean?" on this page), it appears that CCH just told Microsoft that it's compatible. It has not undergone testing by Microsoft (no Windows 7 compatibility logo).

NEWS: Engagement 6.1 and Other Updates

I spoke with Engagement Support last week about the release of version 6.1. Basically, they've seen some sporatic issues with the synchronization of binders (sync process hangs). 6.1 has been released on a limited basis (I assume to get some real life data on the sync issue) and a wide release date hasn't been set.

While I was on the phone I also asked about Engagement's planned compatibility with Office 2010 and was told that nothing has been released internally to the Support team about Office 2010 compatibility. The support person did say he tried installing Office 2010 with Engagement 6.1 on a virtual machine and got all kinds of errors. Because I'm running Windows 7 Pro x64 the conversation naturally gravitated to Engagement's architeture, specifically 32 vs. 64-bit. The support person said that for the forseeable future (meaning he hasn't heard anything to the contrary) Engagement will be a 32-bit application. I guess those of us hoping for a true 64-bit application (and not just one that works on a 64-bit OS) are out of luck.

NEWS: Office 2010 Compatibility

I tried Office 2010 64-Bit with Engagement 5.7 running on Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit and....it didn't work. I tried faking Engagement out by manually moving the add-in files to what I thought were the appropriate locations but still not luck. I then tried to manually add them to the Office 2010 apps using the add-ins dialogs but I kept getting an error that seemed to say the code used in the Engagement 5.7 add-ins were not compatible with Office 2010 64-Bit (I don't know if they're compatible with Office 2010 32-Bit because I haven't tried it yet).

Anyone else testing Office 2010 using different combinations than I did? I'd love to hear you're experiences.

NEWS: Office 2010 Beta Released

The beta for Office 2010 has been released for general download. I've already got a copy of the beta and am planning to setup a Windows 7 machine to "see what breaks" when I try to use Engagement 5.7 with the Office 2010 64-Bit beta. I'll post when I have some findings.

NEWS: Windows 7 Compatibility Testing

I've been testing Engagement 5.7 on Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit with Office Professional Plus 2007 (32-Bit), Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro (32-Bit), and Internet Explorer 8 (there is a 64-Bit version installed with Windows 7 64-Bit but I use the 32-Bit most of the time). I setup the Windows 7 in a virtual machine using VMplayer 3.0 beta (supports Windows 7 as a Guest OS and multiple display support; the RTM has been released so I would recommend using that one) with Windows XP Pro SP3 32-Bit as the Host OS. I'm using two monitors with 2 GB of RAM allocated to the virtual machine (I'm running 3.5 GB of RAM in my Host) and my Windows 7 virtual was added to our domain. Basically, I tried to setup and use the virtual Windows 7 as my main machine during the testing period.

Generally, I've found Engagement 5.7 to work well in Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit. One item to note is that I didn't get the SQL SP2 incompatibility message that I got while installing on Windows 7 64-Bit beta. Other items I've found are below.

1) While the 2003 add-ins for Word and Excel work (displayed in the Add-ins tab), the add-ins for the Ribbon functionality (displayed in the Engagement tab) don't run properly. My guess is that something isn't working well with the 64-Bit OS.

2) I've found everything to work within Acrobat except when I try to close a PDF from the Engagement binder (right-click and select "Close workpaper"). It appears that the command is lost and nothing happens. So I'm forced to close PDFs through Acrobat instead of the Engagement binder.

3) I've had one instance where the "Pfx Engagement PDF Converter" (available from the print menu) didn't work. I think this was an isolated instance becasue I've gotten it to work several times since.

4) We upgraded our office server and workstations from Engagement 5.0 to Engagement 5.7 while I was testing on Windows 7. So, as a good Administrator I tried to convert the 5.0 binder templates to 5.7 but no luck. I had to do it on a colleague's XP machine.

So my findings were rather positive over the testing period (about 3 weeks). Next week I'm going to move to a new machine with Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit as the Host OS (no more playing around in a virtual world). What issues have others seen when moving Engagement to Windows 7? Anyone out there tested Engagement with Windows 7 32-Bit?