Sage Pastel Xpress/Partner V12 and 64 bit Outlook

EDIT: After migrating the department to V17, there were no issues out the box. V17 has a much newer DLL file installed out of the box, which interfaces with 64 bit Outlook just fine.

The Sage Pastel Xpress and Partner products pretty much rule the South African landscape for accounting packages. Almost everywhere you go, you’ll find some Pastel product keeping the books up to date. Our school is no exception, running Partner for the 3 ladies in our accounts department.

With my recent move to Office 365 for mail, I installed Office 2016 64 bit edition on the PC of the debtors clerk to access her mail in Outlook. No problem there, everything worked as it should. However, a few days later she called me back as she was unable to send statements out of Pastel Partner, as the PC now through up an error message when Partner tried to invoke Outlook. This wasn’t a problem in the past, as we’ve only ever used the 32 bit editions of Office. Office 2016 is the first time we’ve installed the 64 bit edition of Office.

It turns out that out of the box, Partner V12 can’t interface with Outlook 64 bit. I don’t have a 32 bit edition of Office 2016 at work, so I needed to get the functionality restored. Luckily, a bit of internet searching revealed the answer: use a replacement DLL file on the Partner installation disk. The process is as follows:

• Close Partner and Outlook.
• Copy the NewMail.dll file from the Pastel disk\Utils\Outlook 64-bit folder to C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Softline Pastel. Overwrite the existing file.
• Run the Component Setup utility in the Pastel folder in the Start menu. This will briefly re-register files, including the replaced DLL file.
• Try to mail any statement from inside Partner, it should now invoke Outlook correctly.

I checked a Partner V11 disk and this didn’t contain the DLL file, so I assume it only started being introduced with V12. It’s possible that using the DLL file from the V12 disk would work with previous Partner versions going back a while, but I don’t know how compatible or reliable it will be. I have yet to test Partner V14 or V17 to see if they are compatible out the box or will also need the DLL file replaced. Since V14 and V17 were digital downloads with no extra folders, it’s going to prove interesting when I migrate the accounts department.