We stubbornly refused to deploy Outlook 2003 last August, preferring to wait until Outlook 2007 was ready. So we've got about 250 faculty and academic staff, plus 1800 students, using the web interface exclusively.
There are latency issues and browser and ZWC bugs, some of them new to 5.0 (we upgraded from 4.5.10 on January 19), making a fair number of people wish for a supported fat client. Roughly 150 long-time Mac users seem happiest with the combination of Apple Mail and the iSync connector... though the recent addition of Safari 3 support makes web browsers more attractive again. Firefox still has issues on Macs... in ZWC, we see display problems and keyboard shortcut failures (especially the delete key being ignored). On the Windows platform we have perhaps 100 users of Thunderbird or (rarely) other IMAP clients. The rest are currently using ZWC via Firefox.
We intend to roll out Outlook 2007 to about 400 administrative staff in March on the help desk's theory that they live in MS Office. Currently they are still using the GroupWise fat client.
Printing, mail-merge and other MS Office integration possibilities, sync with legacy PDAs, and the prejudice that "desktop applications are faster and more capable" are the stated reasons for preferring Outlook 2007 to the web.  |