The problem is I can't think of any companies who are whiter than white and don't have some ethical grey area in their past or present. Short of becoming totally self sufficient its a total minefield.

I spent most of my childhood playing in an unregulated builders tip, graveyard and in woodlands, fun games included exploding the gas canister, pushing the fridge down the slope of rubble and throwing javelins made of sharpend fence poles at one another. It didn't cause me any harm and myself, stumpy, one-eye, pincushion and hubert all survived into adulthood, well hubert is a little odd about enclused spaces after being buried alive in the tunnel we dug in the graveyard.

Well, TBH the formet is true, the latter is for comic effect, although I'm often very surprised I made it into adulthood, I still have a scar below one eye from where a friend loosed an arrow from a homemade longbow at my head.

I'm just worried that the Irony will be lost on the courts.

All the universities I've experienced in the UK (including ones i've worked for in senior ICT roles) have been platform agnostic, to the point that it's a nightmare as an admin. Running messaging systems we weren't allowed to dictate to users at all what they chose to connect and dealing with things like the buggy IMAP implementation of the last release of Eudora caused no end of headaches!

There were some managers who tried to push their agendas either way and as a department we certainly encouraged people to work with standardised platforms and software, but ultimately as long as the end platform was secure with AV/etc you could connect with whatever you could get working.

On the other hand we did ridicule people who people who tried to push their own agenda (be it FOSS or Microsoft) when they didn't actually have the knowledge or ability to back up their demands...

I tell the salesmen that every day, and then point out that their shiny new device would lead to them having to renegotiating all their previous contracts because it would invalidate the data security clauses they were so keen to add to get the business in the first place

"one that would cost me $30 mil and return $180 mil, and another that would cost $200 mil and would return $600+? If I had the $200 million to spend, choosing the latter one would be a no-brainer."

Of course the sensible thing to do would be to invest that $200 in 6 films at $30 each and make $1080 with the bonus of $19 million to buy a yacht out of your initial investment.

If I understand you correctly, I can do exactly that in a list view via View, Current VIew, Active Appointments and then adding an end date filter. That's with outlook 2007 though, earlier versions are a bit clunkier.. You can even use sql to generate the query if you are bored enough.

As for stability, Outlook is exceptionally stable, especially compared to Evolution or Entourage, YMMV of course, plug ins will always degrade stability, but that's the nature of any software.

Back to the topic though, the general attitude of the FOSS community towards products like Outlook/Exchange is exactly why they aren't taken seriously by business. You need to pick your targets and fight those ones. Exchange isn't one of them, it is lightyears ahead of any competition and just getting better whilst the alternatives are floundering. Cloud based solutions are an alternative, but Exchange is at least 2 or 3 generations ahead of any of the competitors and continually innovating. I've yet to meet an email admin who would choose to impliment an large corporate solution on FOSS groupware solution or even a plain old mailbox server.

It's quite clear that a number of people here (mostly people who aren't email admins in the corporate environment) don't actually understand the business requirements for a groupware solution. Certainly my current business would struggle to operate if we went to a different solution with less features.

Surely it's going to be a lot of time lost attaching a million of them to a plough in the morning.

And I pity the poor farmer who has to milk enough to get a pint for his breakfast.