Office

Office is, to put it bluntly, Microsoft’s “cash cow”:Wikipedia:Cash_Cow, representing a steady influx of revenue that the company has tried to boost during the past few years by tying its components with portions of its enterprise offering.

The best-known example of this is Outlook (which is the main enabler for its Exchange mail server), but Access is also a strong suit where it regards accessing SQL Server databases in small/mid-sized businesses.

Microsoft also purchased Visio and rolled its flagship drawing/“lite” CAD product into Office 2003, therefore plugging one of the few missing feature sets on its product.

In the Mac OS X platform, Outlook is replaced by Entourage. There is no Visio equivalent, nor any hints of there ever being one in the future. The 2008 edition, however, sports decent drawing tools that are suitable for simple business diagramming.

• Command-line solution to Office update problems
• Are receipts causing your update to fail? – a set of good hints regarding how to ensure the Office updates stick.
• Microsoft Office 2004 Resource Kit 2.0
• Port 2222 Security Advisory – what really irks me is the random TCP port. Random holes anyone?

• If you hate the Microsoft User Data folder as much as I do and share my loathing for the asinine stupidity of having it smack bang in the middle of your Documents folder, just move it to ~/Library/Preferences (kudos to stevenf for pointing this out)