Customers migrating to Vista and Office 2007 are bound to run into the occasional compatibility problem with their existing applications. But while that's to be expected, one reader has been flabbergasted to find that Salesforce.com seems to have no inclination to fix a compatibility problem that he and other customers have encountered between Salesforce and Office 2007. "We are a small software company that use Customers migrating to Vista and Office 2007 are bound to run into the occasional compatibility problem with their existing applications. But while that’s to be expected, one reader has been flabbergasted to find that Salesforce.com seems to have no inclination to fix a compatibility problem that he and other customers have encountered between Salesforce and Office 2007.“We are a small software company that uses Salesforce for our CRM,” the reader wrote. “We have 28 employees and use the typical features, including mail merge to create customer letters, sales proposals, etc. The trouble started when we decided to upgrade to MS Office 2007. Some of our team were enamored with the new features, and many of the new computers we ordered came with Vista and Office 07, and frankly I did not want to continue to downgrade them to Office 03. We did some testing with a couple of workstations, and when we saw an issue with generating our template merge documents, we contacted Salesforce tech support.”Salesforce tech support informed the reader that Office 2007 support would be available by April 12th, so the reader’s company waited until April 15th. “When we started rolling out the upgrade we were 90% done when we discovered there was still a problem with the mail merge template,” the reader wrote. “So we contacted tech support and walked through making sure we’d downloaded everything correctly. When it still didn’t work, they escalated us to tier two support.” It soon become obvious however that tier two didn’t have a clue either. “The mail merge templates they had me create are just garbage. So, I start looking at the Salesforce discussion groups and find that I am just one of a whole community of people with the same issues. How can it be that Salesforce has completely dropped the ball on Office 2007? The workstations are throwing errors whenever Word or Excel are opened, we have installed, removed, and attempted workarounds and found that the whole Salesforce Office integration is completely broken, and the community is in trouble.”By late April, the reader was basically reduced to hoping that he could get the Salesforce sales staff to make somebody answers that the tech staff wasn’t producing. “I have not been successful in getting any response, so I will focus on that strategy today and see what I can do to raise the urgency of the issue.”Yesterday, though, the reader gave up. “The final status is that the case — case number 01214697 — is closed, with no fix, and they now won’t respond,” the reader wrote. “I have opened additional cases. My case has been viewed hundreds of times. When others open a case they go through exactly the same procedure, as for the same information, etc. My sales rep has not been helpful, and I have lost hope.” Don’t lose hope. Now and then, the Gripe Line can help. I’m not sure what will happen with Salesforce here, but if you’ve got one where you’re getting desperate, post your comments on my website or write me at Foster@gripe2ed.com.Read and post commetns about this story here. Technology Industry