I converse with clients in Outlook all day long, why
shouldn't my CRM/ERP/whatever live in Outlook with me?
Plus the offline capabilities are a nice bonus.
I understand the point. Until recently, my wife ran her business with Outlook, Word, Excel, and Power Point. She uses a 4 GB flash drive to backup Outlook's .pst file. And that's after purging a lot of content.
Although she was closely tied to Outlook, she was frustrated by it. Content search was confusing, and limited, from her perspective. She doesn't have a technical background, and I don't use it, myself.
However she just accepted a job in a newly elected U.S. Congressional office, where she'll be part of a team responsible for constituent services. So the casework changes from a single-user perspective to a team. It will be interesting to find out what kind of systems they will be using for collaboration.
From my limited acquaintance, I view Outlook as a single-user application. It's hard for me to envision it as a client in a multi-user setting.
Nathan.
