Damonte

There's one thing that OpenOffice does not have that Microsoft Office has, which OpenOffice does not and will likely not ever replace.

Microsoft Outlook.

And before anyone jumps on this thought, keep in mind that corporate users (which make up an enormous percentage of total Microsoft Office users) live and die in Microsoft Outlook.

The reason? Microsoft Exchange. Show me a mature substitute for Microsoft Outlook that integrates all the features and has support for connecting to Microsoft Exchange servers. Also keep in mind that Outlook is more than a stand-alone email and calendaring client.

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=Sarc=

Microsoft Outlook is really good for the workplace. I also love it at home too.

Both of my work terms have been at places that use it for booking meetings, office resources, and, obviously, email. It's there and it works well.

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ScratchMonkey

Isn't that protocol proprietary? That would prevent any other product from interoperation with it. You'd have to do the whole "we won't compete" bit to get specs, right?

I do recall the Evolution mail client having a commercial "Connector" addon that allowed it to talk to Exchange.

Can you explain what else it does?

And now my pet peeve: People using PowerPoint instead of simple text, or instead of very simple HTML and images. I hate getting a .ppt file as an email attachment that turns out to be nothing but a string of images with captions. I hate finding a .ppt document on a website that could easily have been rendered as a few simple web pages. Just give me the text!

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=Sarc=

On an exchange server, you can see another person's schedule. It helps when you schedule meetings within Outlook. You add the person to the invite list and you can see if the person has a scheduling conflict. There's also the task list. Another person can assign a task to you and give you a due date. It's quite a good piece of software for the office environment.

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Acid

There is a patch to upgrade older versions of Office so they can open Office 2007 files. I spent a week or so putting it on all of our town employee's computers.

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DigitalAssassin

Actually, look at most LARGE corporations and they use Lotus Notes. My company was recently purchased by CSC (~87,000 employees) and they are migrating us from Outlook to Lotus Notes.

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