Loose Coupling

I stared at the price of Microsoft Office 2007 Standard edition (£300) and then stared at the price of Microsoft Office 2007 Basic edition (£100). The difference between the two products? Microsoft Outlook 2007 which costs about £100 as a standalone product.

Basic + Outlook (£200) = Standard (£300).

Am I missing something here?

Anyway, I bought the basic as I use Thunderbird as my mail client. And I have extended Thunderbird with the Lightning extension (for calendar functionality), Google Calendar extension (for Google calendar integration with Lightning), Plaxo extension (for synchronisation of my contact details across multiple platforms) and a few other minor extensions.

The result is I have a joined-up-in-a-loosely-coupled-way PIM for free.

My understanding is that Outlook is very powerful - I couldn't possibly deny that this is the case. But I also believe it can be a drain on system resources and it does cost £100!

So, I have my T'Bird, my LinkedIn, my Plaxo, my GMail/GCal and I'm liking my web based way of working. Now, all I need is a really good online document management repository which I can share with specific people. Time for a bit of investigation...