Microsoft is attempting to appease Office 2007 users who have been up-in-arms over the company's decision to change the rendering engine in Outlook 2007. But the Softies are stopping short of promising to make changes to the product in order to restore backwards compatibility.

Microsoft was caught off-guard by the outcry resulting from the Outlook 2007 rendering-engine changes, said Business Division Corporate Vice President Chris Capossela. Microsoft decided to make the Word 2007 rendering engine the default back in the beta-testing phase. Microsoft received overwhelmingly positive feedback from testers on the move, Capossela said.

Starting in early 2007, however, a number of bloggers began complaining vociferiously that the rendering-engine changes broke their e-mail newsletters.

Microsoft is preparing a new Knowledge Base (KB) article that will attempt to answer questions raised by the rendering-engine critics.

"In past versions, Outlook actually used two rendering engines – Internet Explorer’s engine was used for reading content, and then Word was used for editing content when a user was composing messages," according to the KB article, the final version of which Microsoft has yet to post to its Web site. "If you were replying or forwarding HTML emails, previous versions of Outlook would first use Internet Explorer’s rendering engine to view it, then would have to switch over to Word, the compose engine, when you were replying."

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