Done with Office

That's it, I'm finished with Office. I had a situation yesterday which, while rare, still made me call it quits with that terrible suite. (Sorry in advance for the rant-share)

I have a client who is a little stingy when it comes to upgrading equipment and software, but he needed to replace one of the computers in his office so he went and bought a Windows 8 computer and Office Home and Business 2013 (including Outlook 2013).

The problem is that he still has Exchange 2003.

So I installed an older version of Outlook (2007), and everything seemed to be fine, but soon problems developed which I traced to the fact that there were now two Mail snap-ins in the Control Panel, so the two of them were fighting over who got to handle the Exchange account, and the 2013 version was winning out.

So I went to remove Outlook 2013 because it wasn't being used. Guess what: can't be done! When you purchase Home and Office 2013 through the online store, it is impossible to select which components get installed. I had no way to install just Word and Excel from 2013 and run them alongside Outlook 2007.

This, combined with all the other crap that MS is doing with Office, has made my resolve to push things like Libre Office even greater. Or, heaven forbid, I'll even start pushing Macs. MS is not moving in the right direction and I'm sick of it. They topped out at Windows 7 and Office 2010, and I simply can't see them recovering. I don't know, maybe now that Balmer is out things will change, but they need to push Gates out too.

Ugh, I'm sick of it. Sorry again for the rant.

Why is Office 2013 a problem with Exchange 2003? I would expect that to be a very common configuration.

One of the world's largest companies I just finished up working for had only just upgraded from Exchange 2003 this year.

Edit: A quick Google does show there seems to be problems. I think that's a semi significant fail by MS. Does "not supported" equal "doesn't work" though?

Outlook's the only thing that keeps us tied to Office, there isn't an alternative is there?

I have Office 2010. I don't have Outlook installed. I don't even know what Outlook does. Something to do with e-mail? Every once in a while I get a dialog box telling me I need to configure Outlook and I just cancel out of it and ignore it. I guess Outlook doesn't do anything I need to do...

tanstaafl.

Outlook is a thing of multiple capabilities and complexities.

What do you need the replacement to interface with, back end, application wise, and user interface wise? On what platforms?

Yeah. Despite what K447 said, yeah, Outlook is just another email and calendar program. It's got a bunch of crap added to it that makes it work well in a corporate environment, such as allowing you to schedule meetings based on the freetime listed on everyone else's calendar, but its total function is still just email and calendar.

If you need connectivity to Exchange, OS X out of the box supports it. It's not 100%, but it does mail, calendar and address book stuff well enough. Many other clients exist as long as Exchange has the web access component turned on. Evolution for Linux is one.

I find it somewhat amusing that out of the box, Windows can't talk to Exchange. But OS X can.

The mentality to keep Office and Windows so isolated and separate inside Microsoft has always been weird to me. Apple introduces their first tablet in 2010, and day 1 shipped touch capable office productive apps. Microsoft, who deserves credit for trying to push tablets earlier on the Windows side, still lacks a proper tablet version of Office in 2013.

Where I work half the company uses Exchange and the other half is on Google's corporate gmail offering. Talk about a mess! Nothing seems to be compatible between the two and about all you can do is send emails back and forth. Calendar scheduling between the two is riddled with issues and I’ve missed several meetings because I trusted what the calendar said.

And to think at one time we were all on Lotus Notes, ahh the good O'l days.

Back on subject, just today in a meeting someone summed MS up pretty good. When talking about Excel issues he made the comment - “Microsoft products aren’t even compatible with themselves.”

Not Supported means they care even less than if it was supported and they still broke it.

In this case, yes, as far as I know, it means "this will not work in any way, and if you try it, Outlook 2013 will stop you and say you're running a stupid-old version of Exchange." I wasn't able to get any farther than installing Outlook 2013 on that computer. The second I tried to get it to load the user's Exchange account, it simply said it was not possible.


My guess is that you have a version of Office installed that includes Outlook (which, as Tony said, is pretty much just email and calendaring), and when you click on an email link or otherwise initiate something that would pull up a new email message, it's making a call to Windows to load the default mail program, which will be Outlook unless you've selected something else. If you use webmail for email, you'd need some kind of alternate application running to tell Windows what to do. For example, I have a GMail notification application that handles new email clicks.


My wife would laugh hysterically at that. She despised Lotus Notes with every fiber of her being. Perhaps it was the way it was implemented, but among her many complaints about how awful Lotus Notes was, the biggest one was that searching her email always took her at least 10 minutes to get her the results. I'd say the real problem with your company is that they didn't commit. Either go all in with Google Apps (my preference), or go all Exchange. I have no idea why you would move from one solution of Lotus Notes (regardless of how good/bad it is), and go to a two-system solution. Perhaps the biggest IT problem in your company is not the technology but the decision makers


Yeah, it sounds like Balmer was a HUGE proponent of keeping that in-fighting. I have no idea how he lasted so long there. MS needs to make some significant changes.


Sadly, the only desktop alternative that I know of is no longer being developed: Thunderbird. Apparently there's a plugin for Thunderbird that will add Exchange functionality. I have no clue how well it works, though.

Tom, you forgot to mention that iOS also has Exchange support built in. I can't remember, does Android have Exchange support?

If the Exchange server has IMAP access open, you can use whatever email client you want. Personally, I use fdm, mutt, and a custom ldap query tool for address resolution. With only 1 meeting a week, I don't much care about the whole calendering thing, though I do also have some automated tools for hooking emailed meetings into KDE's korganizer. Of course, this isn't a solution that many would find palatable.

If going the IMAP route, you can also use Zimbra Desktop. No need for the Zimbra server side of things. Again, though, integration with Exchange calendering is a shortcoming.

Thank you! I didn't even know I could do that. Now those pesky requests to configure and set up Outlook will be a thing of the past.

tanstaafl.

Years ago I was a certified developer in Lotus Notes so I’ve kind of got a bias. I was even published in a coupled magazines (OK no more bragging). If your mailbox is not indexed you are right, searching sucks. However if she goes into the properties and indexes the database (don’t know how in the newer versions) searching works great. If your company is stingy on HD space they might have this locked down. You can also do advanced searches and even save your search criteria. I least you could do all this in the past.

The company I worked for dropped Lotus Notes to save money. To save more money they put half the company on gmail. The reason only half the company went to gmail was that anyone that supported a government entity was not allowed to have gmail. This was definitely a bad decision and it’s a mess.

Yep, bad management!. We basically ran our company on Lotus Noyes since version 1.0. We got some new head of IT and he said we could save $ by switching to Exchange. Since LN was so ingrained in the company we lost millions switching over to Exchange and Sharepoint. He only lasted about a year. I think he got a kickback from MS because the prior three companies he worked for also switched to Exchange.