Hi Milly,
Sorry - incorrect information being posted here. No Outlook application,
included with all versions of Office to date. Access application woefully
lacking customizability (is that even a word?), etc.
Yes, but for many "home" users, they don't have Exchange (for full
Outlook) and can't afford Office Pro (to get Access) and there are
plenty free and open-source alternatives for "personal" email and databases.
However, in the corporate market it's a different story; lack of Outlook
and Access are probably the least of the worries. Staff training,
support, compatibility, group policy and hands-free custom deployments
will probably be the big deciding factors. The "fear" factor is also a
big problem; if corporation A runs Microsoft Office and everything works
perfectly, and corporation B runs OpenOffice and can't get Document X to
open, they are going to look pretty stupid and no one from OpenOffice is
going to care.
However, as I see it; Open Source is the future, OpenOffice is on the up
and Microsoft Office is in decline. Once you grab OpenXchange
http://www.open-xchange.org/
or look at open-source LDAP and iMAP, the corporate jigsaw starts to
fall into place. The recent bungled migrations with .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0
and mismatched compatibilities of Office servers in Office 2007 and
SharePoint servers x 3, the whole Microsoft strategy becomes a corporate
liability instead of an asset.
Thing is, Microsoft is about fashions and fads and "that was last year's
model", but the open-source community think carefully about how their
products will fit into the bigger picture of open standards and
long-term goals. That's why UNIX/Linux web technologies are so
successful; you build it once and it runs for years; you hardly ever
have to reboot, but with Microsoft, you have to upgrade every five
minutes and every patch you apply requires a reboot - even for a
production server.
