Jon Honeyball gets close to the next bona fide beta of Windows, gets in deep with printer ink coverage and still finds time to buy some new computers.

The arrival of Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 (ES2K3) is a significant event in the history of this product. First, it brings to a close the second era of the codebase. Released back in 1996 on the NT 4 wave, ES4 (there was no 1, 2 or 3) brought enterprise-level email, contact management, diary management and so forth to the Windows Server platform in a new and comprehensive BackOffice application.

OneNote is one of those rare apps you'll wonder how you ever managed without it. It's basically a note-taking application where you work on sheets of electronic paper, putting down your ideas and rearranging them.

At its heart, you can think of InfoPath as being a forms engine. Drag the item you need onto the page, wire it up to a data source, and you have something akin to Microsoft Access. But that's where the similarities end.

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