Sylver Dragon's Journal: Abandoning proprietary software

At my place of work (a University) we are once again facing licensing costs for a number of software packages as students come in. Specifically, we have a number of students who are given laptops as part of their program, on which we normally install a suite of software. Because we don't want the costs of the program to spiral out of hand, we have a hard limit on the amount we spend per laptop. As is often the case, it's a balaning act. We need a reasonably powerful system, as the students will be working with ArcGIS and can end up doing some pretty massive analysis tasks. We don't want systems which weigh too much, since most of the students will end up either carrying the system in a backpack regularly and/or will need to take the system in the field to collect data (it's a masters level program, so they have to do a real project for it). and, of course, we can't spend a ton of money on the system.
So, normal installs include: Windows XP (Included in the laptop cost, and requred), ArcGIS Desktop (required, but we get it at no cost. Thank you ESRI.), Microsoft Office (I'm thinking about getting one of the instructors to give OO.org a whril and see if I can move us that way.), Adobe Acrobat Pro. (We need PDF authoring.), Photoshop (Right now I'm seeing if Gimp will be a good replacement.), EndNote (For tracking bibliographic references, etc.).
The problem is, all of this software costs money, and a significat chunk of the laptop cost is being eaten up in software costs. When the new director of the program was faced with the costs for Photoshop he was a take aback. At that time, I was able to convince him that it might be worthwhile to pursue other, free, options. So, has anyone out there tried this? Any suggestions? The list I need to replace amount to:

• MS Office
  • The replacement has to cover Word, Excel, and Visio
  • Also need a replacement for Outlook with the same meeting and calendaring functionality
  • Also would want to replace Exchange while I'm at it
• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Acrobat
  • Has to be able to generate and read PDF's. The Arc products output PDF's, so this is a hard requirement
• EndNote

For generating PDFs

[johndiii]

We use a driver that allows printing to PDF format. I'm not sure of the cost (IIRC we have a distribution license and it goes with our product), but I'd think it would be lower than Acrobat itself. If you're talking about editing PDFs, though, I think that you are stuck with Adobe's product (or something similar in cost).

Ideas

[nizo]

* MS Office
o The replacement has to cover Word, Excel, and Visio

Openoffice and dia

o Also need a replacement for Outlook with the same meeting and calendaring functionality
o Also would want to replace Exchange while I'm at it

We replaced exchange with thunderbird+webcalen

Re:

[Sylver Dragon]

Openoffice and dia
I had been considering trying to move towards OpenOffice, but I had not seen dia, which would have been a sticking point as we would need a visio replacement. I'll have to poke at it and see how it looks for our environment.

We replaced exchange with thunderbird+webcalendar+ldap+postfix (server running linux).
I had figured that this would take a mish-mash of this sort, I have yet to see a good integrated Exchange replacement. As for this setup, what did you use to read your calendar