Just over a year ago, LibreOffice became the offshoot of the popular OpenOffice application suite. At that time, I switched over, both on the Windows workstation (required at work) and the home Mac. It was a deliberate attempt to move away from Microsoft Office. I had been using OpenOffice at home and sporadically at work since it first appeared.

       It wasn't such a big leap, after all. I continue to receive MS Office documents and LibreOffice handles them just fine. In those rare cases that it hasn't, I simply request a PDF version of the same document and move on.

       But there are two parts to the full office suite: documents and email. Documents are handled. The next phase was to switch email to Thunderbird, giving up Outlook.

       This was a greater leap, as Outlook has the all-important Calendar feature. Without this lynch-pin, Outlook would be quickly forgotten by IT departments.

       Thunderbird has an add-on named Lightening to provide Calendaring. It can provide an easy interface to the iCal format: used in Apple mail programs, among others.

       The pros: Lightening can send and receive calendar events, meeting, tasks, etc. It also become a tabbed view in Thunderbird. This, in my opinion, is what makes it such a nice add-in.

       The big con: it currently is unable to use a shared Exchange resource: such as a shared calendar or look for meeting rooms. It's this critical function that keeps Outlook at the top of email programs used in the enterprise.

       Would IT departments be willing to switch? Here is where the rubber meets the road: LibreOffice and Thunderbird are free, open-sourced projects. Microsoft Office costs a bundle, as does Exchange and related licenses. The question becomes: does anybody really need to pay so much just for the meeting room feature? I think not.

       And I'm not the only one. Google Apps is making big inroads to displacing Microsoft Office. It has all the features, including calendaring, that a business is seeking.

       But certainly, my year away from Office has been an easy, relaxed one. Computers and applications were supposed to make life better, and this was a good switch.