As we were starting to upgrade computers on our network to Microsoft Office 2010 from 2007 today (First 10 as an initial test) we quickly realised that users who had used Office 2010 could no longer retrieve their email from a computer running Office 2007. Instead they were presented with the error:

The Mail profile “<profile name>” was created with a newer version of Outlook and might contain information that is not compatible with the current version of Outlook, if you experience problems with this profile, you can create a new profile. In Control panel open Mail then show profiles then click Add.

Although we are migrating all of our workstations to Office 2010 this was going to be a staged process and so we had to pause there and think up a solution.

The solution was fairly straight forward after thinking on it over a cup of coffee.

Firstly…