We have a client who wants to share contacts, calendaring information, etc. in a ten person firm that uses Office on Windows 98/2K. Outlook is their email and PIM client and they have no intention of switching.
We are writing a project management application for them (VB + MS Access as DB, upgrade to Postgres in 18 months).
We want this application to share contact information for clients and vendors and allow task scheduling. Managers can go into the database app, schedule a bunch of tasks for their people which later pop up in their employee’s Outlook task lists. Since they don’t have any collaboration and messaging server, we are doing this with Office automation and a heavy dose of brute force. It works, but it is slow and requires users to synch with the DB often.
Exchange would eliminate a bunch of problems, but it costs somewhere around $3000 and has reliability issues. Is there an alternative Collaboration and Messaging server product that plays nice with MS Office? Is there any chance that this hypothetical solution will not be derailed by MS changing crucial file formats?
Thanks for any and all suggestions.
-Brian
