+ 1 for Office 2007 and Crossover

[kendoori]

I finally decided to opt for purchasing Crossover and am glad that I did. Kudos to Codeweavers for taming Office and making it usable under Ubuntu. I'm running the 9.0 beta and it works very well.

Back story here is that for a variety of reasons I need to continue to run Office 2007, especially Outlook with connectivity to a hosted Exchange server. While I do have an exit strategy for some of this, for right now I needed a reliable way of running these specific apps.

I initially followed all the various threads on how to use Wine to do this, and also experimented with Crossover. Was never able to get Outlook working properly under Wine alone. I eventually built an XP virtual machine using VirtualBox and that has served me well for almost a year.

Even though XP runs well as a guest, and Vbox is efficient, running two different OS at the same time for me always felt clunky.

My two cents is that if you have a business reason to run MS Office 2007 and you run Linux as your day-today OS, save yourself some trouble and go with Crossover.

[anaconda]

I would wote for Wine... Office2007 installs and works well under wine. Atleast word, excell and powerpoint.

I guess Outlook2007 wont work in wine, but who needs it? Ubuntu has several good mail programs, eg. thunderbird.

[JackRock]

I guess Outlook2007 wont work in wine, but who needs it? Ubuntu has several good mail programs, eg. thunderbird.

Because many good companies use exchange servers for email work, both within and without the office. This can only be done (right now) with Outlook, since the Exchange servers are designed by and for microsoft.

[edmondt]

because many good companies use exchange servers for email work, both within and without the office. This can only be done (right now) with outlook, since the exchange servers are designed by and for microsoft.

+1

[kendoori]

I tried hard to get all this to work properly under Wine. And while I'm a believer in open source, there is a time and place (especially if you are doing this for business) to pay fair value for product, especially if it does the job.

My point for posting was to validate that using Crossover with Outlook is practical, so that others who might be hesitating don't. In my case, I should have done this sooner. Using the time is money equation, the $39 would have been totally worth it, as I spent many many hours trying to do this for free ;-)

IMHO, in spite of the other email clients out there (and I've used Thunderbird, Zimbra and Evolution), if you are using an Exchange server for the backend, and need to interact with others on the same server (calendar, free/busy etc...), Outlook is still the way to go. I'm finding that running Outlook under Crossover works better for me than running a virtual machine with Outlook (e.g. hyperlinks launch my Ubuntu's default browser etc...).

[v1ad]

openoffice ftw

[edmondt]

Where did you guys find Crossover 9.0 beta?

I'm using Crossover 8 and Outlook 2007 connects good with exchange :)

Beats using Evolution :)