An old fashioned witch hunt, that is.

Use the ESR version and don't stress about major version changes until November-ish.

Actually, no. It's not the headcount, it's the headaches when whoever programmed the home-grown solution leaves for a higher paying job. Remember, we're in education; they pay as little as they can get away with. My take-home is about 32k a year, and there hasn't been a raise (or cost-of-living-allowance increase) in 7 years. We lose more people to industry jobs that pay twice as much.

Check out the Firefox and Thunderbird ESR packages. The roadmap is clear, and the mailing list group is active. Also, use the CCK wizard, as I read that the author added in functions to make Firefox 10 look like the 3.x line.

Open source formatting, readable by the major tablet/ebook devices, and has an astounding support for creating and publishing, plus has functions for DRM (though I don't like it, publishers do). See Sigil (http://code.google.com/p/sigil/) for one of the easier writing tools.

While having in-house solutions is great, but what happens when people move on? I work in the EDU part of the IT industry, and we have a particular system that was designed by a former employee, picked up by a second, redesigned by the same person, who denies that anything could be wrong with it. Support calls to them go unanswered, and they're rarely in the office. And they are one of the three Directors in IT. Personally, I work on our Windows 7 deployment, and all the underlying AutoIt scripts, plus the virtualization of our applications. I have trained all of my colleagues in what they may need in the event of my demise (or less worrisome event). And I get paid about $34k a year.