Windows email programs

[Bo Borland]

My company uses 2003 Outlook for all email. I am not one of the IT guys. Is there some reason why they use such an old version? Is it more stable, intuitive ???

Also the IT guys are currently installing a service pack of some kind.. is there a new corporate security thing going on? or is big brother just trying to track online usage

[John Cipriano]

Upgrading a whole company's worth of Office licenses costs a lot of money, and most people won't figure out how to use the new features. And with Office the new version makes it harder to find the old features too

Microsoft offers a plan that includes upgrade and downgrade "rights" but that's very expensive as well.

Edit: also, even though 2003 is not the newest version, it can read and write all of the current formats once you install the compatibility pack.

I'm curious, which service pack are they installing? Is it for XP or Vista? Or maybe Office? All of the workstations I'm responsible for are XP SP3 right now.

Service packs are just a collection of all previous patches up to a certain point in time and they simplify the process of updating machines, especially ones that are very far behind. There's no big brother stuff going on, unless you happen to work for big brother I suppose.

[Wiz Feinberg]

To further expand on Cip's explanation, MS Office 2003 Professional allows businesses to install it on up to five workstations, under the same license key. That saves a lot of moolah over buying a separate license for each computer.

Once all licenses have been applied and activated, should one need to reinstall Office 2003 after a computer has crashed, a call to Microsoft usually results in a new code, or unlocking of the old one, to get it installed onto that PC.