Oh boy Steve, could I ever say a lot in response to this. At my old job I worked for a university. In our IT shop we were a Microsoft shop, but we would consider other vendors or open source. In my current position, it is basically use what Microsoft has and don't consider anything else. I just don't get it. For example, I like to use third party controls in application development because they've tackled the really tough problems that would take us a long time to accomplish. But here, its do not consider any third party controls at all! I've asked why. Basically, I think its someone got burned way back in the day when there were a lot of third party companies writing controls and the inevitable pruning of those companies happened. I think they made a bet on some third party control authoring company that went out of business and now they don't trust any of them. But it isn't just controls, its other things. Like we don't look at any collaboration software/suites. When it comes to SQL Server third party controls, only 1 person (the head DBA) has a license. The rest of the DBAs are just outta luck. (Although I will say that we're switching from Idera to Redgate this year, or so I've been told.)