Office 2007 winning converts, survey says

Microsoft’s Office 2007 is seeing strong adoption by corporate users that will only pick up steam over the next 12 months, according to a Forrester Research survey released Tuesday.

The driver for adoption is not necessarily the popular suite of productivity applications but the allure of integration of the Office client software with back-end Office servers, namely SharePoint . In fact, adoption of SharePoint is helping foster Office 2007 upgrades, according to Forrester.

Office’s changing role has Microsoft positioning it as a front-end client for such tasks as document management, collaboration and unified communications .

With the Office 2007 suite, users can set up content management, integrate with online services, and deploy real-time communication tools and other infrastructures using any of the eight Office servers. That means Office is no longer a desktop decision made by the desktop team. It is also an infrastructure decision that ultimately involves IT.

“For large organizations, they are driven to move forward [with Office] given the improved support on the server side,” says Kyle McNabb, the analyst who spearheaded the survey with nearly 300 IT professionals in North America and Europe. The independent study was conducted by Forrester online without any outside sponsorship or funding, according to the company.

“Those large organizations want the full experience with Word, Outlook, Excel, and PowerPoint in particular,” McNabb says.

He adds that a subset of users also was driven to Office 2007 just by the desire to keep up with new versions or with licensing commitments.

“We don’t have definitive data, but I would guess the majority, say 60-40, are driven by SharePoint rather than keeping current,” McNabb says. And he adds that 92 percent of respondents named the combination of Office clients and back-end server options as being in line with their long-term strategies.

The survey, entitled “The State of Microsoft Office 2007 Desktop Adoption,” showed that 43 percent of respondents have Office 2007 in use in their enterprise. Those results do not reflect a wholesale upgrade to Office 2007, however, because users were allowed to list all the Office versions they are running. Office XP topped the list with 60 percent, while Office 2003 came in at 46 percent. Office 2000 still showed 20 percent, and Office 97 had 7 percent.

The survey also showed that 43 percent plan to deploy Office 2007 in the next six months and that 29 percent plan rollouts within the next 12 months.

In addition, 43 percent said those rollouts were tied to upgrades in PC hardware, 32 percent said their rollouts would be broad and enterprise-wide, while 25 percent said they would be project-by-project.

McNabb says the majority of users evaluating a move to Office 2007 also looked at Open Office, and gave a passing glance to Google and its online Google Docs. IBM’s Symphony tools also were mentioned.

But McNabb says he doesn’t see anything that tells him having a comparable word processor to Microsoft Word would compel users to move off Microsoft.

“It’s the lack of a comparable Outlook solution that keeps many of them from even looking,” McNabb says.

“Part of the problem in trying to evaluate Office right now is that it is so broad,” he says, “But the feedback we got was that even though users looked at alternatives they were not compelled to move.”

McNabb says the surprise in the survey was that he expected to see more hesitation in upgrading to Office 2007 and even some users saying they would move small populations of workers to open source or other low-cost alternatives.

“We did not see that,” he says. “It’s not to say it’s not out there, but we did not see it.”

McNabb’s conclusion is that Microsoft is in a fairly good position.

“Office is no longer Word, PowerPoint, Access, and Excel. There is a wider portfolio on the desktop and server that is drawing a lot of attention,” he says.