Alea jacta Ouest

There are a number of posts in the MS forums from users who had significant issues upgrading their Outlook identity for Office 2011.
The upgrade process begins, then you get a message telling you that it failed and you need to repair the identity with a previous version of the Database Utility.
My take on the warning is that the identity had some sort of corruption that the new Database Utility doesn’t know how to fix.

MS posted a Knowledge Base note about the issue with a solution:
support.microsoft.co…

Unfortunately, this approach still sometimes fails. There is still an alternate route that has proven more successful:
Either reinstall Office 2011 and update it to at least SP1 (14.1) but NOT SP2 (14.2) or restore Office 14.1.x and use the database utility from this version (/Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/Office/Microsoft Database Utility) to repair your identity.
If it succeeds, you can then relaunch Outlook 14.2 to upgrade, and finally use, your identity for Outlook 14.2.

…I would suggest rebuilding your Outlook identity.
Launch Outlook pressing the option key down to get to the database utility.

Rebuilding the identity will:

• Ensure you are upgrading a somewhat clean identity
• Automatically create a backup of your current identity in ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2011 Identities in case something goes bad during the upgrade (there has been numerous reports of corrupted identities that failed to upgrade).

In case you didn’t use these steps and your identity failed to upgrade, MS now has a Knowledge Base article providing instructions on how to get out of this mess:
support.microsoft.co…

Mac OS X 10.7.3 came out recently. Among the many little things it corrected here and there, it also brought new localizations for Catalan, Croatian, Greek, Hebrew, Romanian, Slovak, Thai, and Ukrainian.
This means that the System now provides proper spelling dictionaries for these languages too!

Since Outlook tape directly into the standard Mac OS X spelling API, it should provide spell checking for these languages as well automatically.
(though Hebrew remains an issue since there is no proper right-to-left support in any of the Office for Mac applications)