If you are going to have to foot the financial burden for even a small network using Microsoft products (you said 12) the cost is rather prohibitive if you are depending on local budgets. I suspect that is the reason for seeking a replacement rather than "evangelizing" Linux. It is just for this reason that virtually ALL of the Mexican public school systems networks are being converted to Linux. This is an ongoing, well publicized project. I agree that there are not likely to be easy to manage (idiot proof) solutions, but they definitely are worthy of trial. I do think that there are tools that will do what you want, but not in a related suite other than StarOffice 5.2. and if properly installed I believe it offers at least the same functionality as MS Office. Lyx is an excellent word processor/actually a publishing tool and has capabilities far beyond MS Word. I do NOT think NTFS offers ANY advantage over ext2 as far as functionality and definitely not in performance. And if there is real concern then reiserfs is available though a bit more difficult to install. In most cases there is likely to be a network advisor or sysadmin person who will handle all of these problems. The 2 real advantages here are cost savings and the very real advantage of this list as a source of help and encouragement. Try to get either from Microsoft.....
John Foster AdVance-Computing Systems