Now the playtime is handled, I need to configure this machine with the boring stuff: mail and office software. Firefox is my default browser, mainly because I believe in supporting alternatives, but also because it reduces my attractiveness to malware.
The old machine had an OEM licence for MS Office XP Pro, but I never used Access or any of the other whizbang bits and bobs. Just Word, Excel and Outlook for mail. The Office 2007 Home and Student should suit me but the OEM licence is only for one PC and the full price product gives you three licences for only a little more. And the Home and Student package doesn’t include Outlook, they expect you to use Windows Mail. Out of this this complexity came a decision to try OpenOffice (again).
For those who don’t know, Windows Mail is Outlook Express rebadged. It offers a single mail identity and something called “Microsoft Communities”, which is really newsgroups. I didn’t realise Microsoft had bought Usenet.
Let me be blunt: Microsoft have completely missed the boat. One identity? At work, I have one mail account. Some people are also members of shared accounts for support purposes. A few executives have secretariesPA’s who send mail in their names, but everyone else has one account. Home is different. My partner and I have 5 POP3 accounts between us (including a spamtrap account), the cat has her own account (for moderating her blog comments) and I have another 3 webmail accounts. One identity? I am not creating 9 Vista accounts just to collect email.
So I set Windows Mail up to collect the spamtrap mail. Works well, I get daily mails from F-Secure (whose product refused to install). Then I tried to import the outlook.pst file copied over from the old PC. Windows Mail complained that MAPI wasn’t running. A quick bit of googling reveals that many weary travellers have trudged this path before me. The recommended solution is to install the trial version of Office 2007 with Outlook just to get a free MAPI service. Hmmm, time to look more closely at Thunderbird.
Outlook XP supports multiple accounts and is quite flexible in selecting which account you send mails from, but it only has a single tree. I discovered this when I set up my second personal mail account, A single tree has its advantages but it makes it difficult to determine where your mails are coming from. So, I used Thunderbird for all the other POP3 accounts. It provides excellent flexibilty in deciding which tree to store the mail messages in. However, the Mozilla Foundation have announced that Thunderbird will not be developed any further. It’s not clear whether that includes bug fixes or the occasional vulnerability that’s encountered.
So, Thunderbird is my main mail client. It offers import for Outlook but it falls over 5 minutes into my 113 Mb pst file. My partner and I have decided to boldly leave our mail history behind us.
OpenOffice 2.3 is my office application. It works well enough, my only real concern is interoperability with MS Office. In particular, I have a few spreadsheets with VBA macros that I also need to be able to run at work. I don’t mind if they don’t work under OO, as long as they’re not deleted.