On Wed, 26 Mar 2025 at 14:52, Steve Beaver < [email protected]> wrote:
> I am going to have to bite the bullet and Upgrade from MS Office 2010 to > > Office 365 mostly for Outlook on 2 PC, My Desktop and a Laptop. I have my > own Domain. > Any suggestions ? IMHO the big recent problem with Office 365 is the introduction of pervasive AI "features". They are very hard to avoid, and to add insult to injury, they charge a significant amount for the "privilege". I managed to avoid a roughly 25% increase for my own (family) subscription by downgrading the automatic "upgrade" before the next monthly renewal, but I don't know if that's still possible, or how long it may last. (In passing, Google is doing the same thing with their products, except that there is no option to not pay the hefty price for the AI junk.) The other big issue I find is that the Office Windows apps have been turned into essentially front ends to web apps, and significant basic function has been removed. For just one example, roughly forever I have used .PST files to contain archived mail in Outlook. I have files by year and major topic going back 20+ years with every kind of business and family correspondence, including attachments, all nicely organized and multiply backed up. Now with "New Outlook", .PST files are simply not supported. Under pressure they claim to be working on some kind of read-only support, but it's not there yet, and the specs keep changing. Basically this fundamental feature has gone away. Their solution is to just keep everything online on Onedrive and/or Sharepoint (for which you'll have to pay, and also trust that they won't just lose and/or sell your data, to say nothing about using it to train their AIs), but even then there are no tools to convert all your old PSTs. I am slowly trying to work my way back out of both the Microsoft and Google infrastructures, but it's a big task. So what do do? I think you can still buy a licence for Office 2019 (or higher? I'm not keeping track) as a non subscription product. Of course it's mostly the same code, but at least you can install updates at your own pace, and avoid the pervasive AI. For a while, of course - there is no long term solution using these products. For email, you can use various combos of decent Windows app mail clients (Thunderbird, etc. even Pegasus Mail is still going, though still not open source, I believe). Of course you then need an email server - you can host your own (which can be quite fun and isn't all that hard) either on your own premises or in the cloud, or buy service from a number of "not big tech" providers. Some of those mail providers also have their own web and phone email clients. There's lots to explore. If you are consulting/contracting, then your customer(s) may want you to use their email system, which is almost certainly Microsoft cloud based, so you'll need a client that will talk to their system. My main client (using the whole Microsoft infrastructure) arbitrarily disallowed all Android email apps other than the Microsoft one, which is now taking up a lot of space on my phone, and which required me to give device privs to the customer so they can wipe my phone any time they like. Well maybe you can partition your phone, or have one for each customer, and so on, but it all adds a lot of overhead to what was once straightforward. Overall I'd say you should play around with several approaches to try to use the best for each situation. Assuming you have time. And of course: backups, backups, backups... Best of luck - keep us posted. Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
