Customer Rating:  
Summary: Reduced functionality, features, and kludgy interface
Comment: My workplace just upgraded to 2009 from 2006, and while 2006 was easily the best version of this software I've ever used, the 2009 version is easily the worst and has gone backward in functuality.
For one thing, the program doesn't support Windows 2000, which all of the computers where I am run. I know, they should upgrade to XP, but they won't do that, so I'm stuck using this on a VPN running Server 2003, which is acceptable, though slow.
Guiding myself around the interface is now a pain; instead of giving you a choice between panning and zooming via the toolbar, you're stuck with the left mouse button panning, and the right button dragging the box to zoom in. Nobody uses the right mouse button for click and drag interaction, and I never use the panning feature, preferring to use the arrow keys, so this works horribly for me. The interface also defaults to an ugly black background within the toolbars instead of the cool blue of Office 2007 in XP/2003 or basic grey of Mappoint 2006 (I know in Vista it's probably translucent), which makes the program seem more intimidating than friendly.
Pushpin choices are extremely reduced, and you're stuck with only a few landmark pins and a few colored pins (up to 20) which seemed to be designed on the rush. In 2006 to pinpoint a destination, I could differentiate it as a business or home by using a pin to do so; that's no longer the case here. It's either one of the basic pins, slowly adding custom ones, or you're out of luck.
Searching has been seriously kludged. I used to be able to type an address in the style [123 Sample Rd, WI] to save time and unneeded keystrokes to get to the address I needed within my state without having to type the city, and go right past matching addresses in other states. No longer does it default to WI with the [, WI] command. It lists every address from the beginning in Alabama, and if it's a common number/street combo, you'll be hitting Page Down quite a few times. Then you also get the blended listings from Live Search. This should be a good thing, right? But it slows down the search process, and often it's redunant and uneeded if you're just searching for a basic address, not a business name or type.
I'm also finding it hard to zoom the map to a certain geographic area, such as a county after a click on the county's name, and I have to pan the map into frame and zoom manually to place an entire county or city in focus of the window. Zooming options have seemed to lessen too, as my favorite default of 18 miles has seemed to change to 20 miles, losing street grid information within that view.
This program is wonderful and my favorite map program, but things that weren't broken were 'fixed', and have ruined the user experience for me. I would love to see a software update to address these problems, but for now I'm going to use a combo of paper maps, Google Earth, and the kludge of Mappoint 2009 to search for maps rather than depending on this alone.
Customer Rating:
Summary: 2004 Mappoint version was easier to work with.
Comment: 2004 version had the pan or select mode to move around the map. The select mode enabled you to "square" off or "size" the viewing area to the best fit. Also bringing in the custom pushpins is a pain. Best thing was the updated addresses which decreased the number of addresses that could not be mapped.
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