By Jacqueline Emigh, Betanews
At a posh, invitation-only bash in New York City on Wednesday, Microsoft launched Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. In so doing, the company touted many of the oft-repeated benefits around collaboration, employee productivity, and cost reduction. But more and more, it's relying on the products' own users to make its case.
The new Office apps made their premiere at the historic NBC Studio 8H at Rockefeller Center -- the home of everyone from Arturo Toscanini conducting Beethoven's 9th, to Chet and David calling the 1960 election, to Betty White wowing the crowd on Saturday Night Live just last week. To this illustrious roster, Microsoft this week added an ordinary customer -- Wolfje Van Dijk of Netherlands-based KPN/Getronics, its lead-off speaker.
Later, during a panel discussion, users from NBC's (current) parent General Electric, Del Monte Foods, and Australia's New South Wales Dept. of Education and Training chimed in on attesting to Office and SharePoint 2010's advantages. Yet even at the start of the event, some users present in the room weren't entirely convinced over the need to upgrade.
"Under current license agreements, we can continue to use Office 2003 for free," said Kathleen Gulley, an administrative systems manager at the large New York City-based law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, LLP. "Microsoft would need to make a compelling case for us to upgrade." Joining me in the audience Wednesday, Gulley told me that although she'd been beta testing some of the new capabilities in Office 2010, she'd signed up to go to the launch just to see if there were more features.
Is there enough change?
Canadian-based IT solutions provider Telus has already proceeded with a company-wide deployment of SharePoint 2010. But a decision to migrate from Office 2007 to Office 2010 hasn't yet been reached, said Dan Pontefract, Telus' senior director for learning, during an interview with me at the rollout.
In kicking off the launch party, KPN's Van Dijk told the assembled customers and journalists that her company will deploy Office 2010 in order to better "invest in our productivity." With PowerPoint 2010, for instance, KPN has been able to cut the time it takes to produce a presentation to only an hour or two, according to Van Dijk, a strategist at the telecommunications firm.
"Office 2010 is a brilliant innovation. Today is a great moment," she enthused.
Taking the stage next, Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft's Business Division, contended that his company's 2010 lineup of products will suit the needs of a world that's changed in myriad ways in only the past few years. Elop suggested that the social networking and other collaborative functionality in the 2010 products is prompted in large part by the "arrival of a Millennial generation who communicate quite differently than we do."
But about 80% of all employees -- across all age groups -- use social networking tools when they're not at work, according to Elop: "Employees expect the same technologies in the office as at home." Meanwhile, particularly in today's tough economic climate, businesses are looking for "demonstrable return on investment," Elop maintained.
The leader of the Microsoft division responsible for Office and SharePoint cited the results of a Forrester Research study showing that use of the 2010 releases of Microsoft Office, SharePoint, Microsoft Project, and Visio -- all released to general availability this week -- will result in an overall return on investment of 301%, with a payback period of just 7.4 months after deployment.
Microsoft will offer the 2010 generation of Office technology both as software and as a cloud-based hosting service, Elop said. But at a press Q&A session later, Chris Capossela, senior VP of Microsoft's Information Worker Product Management Group, acknowledged that the hosted service won't be available until the end of this year.
During the launch, Capossela demo'd a number of new capabilities in the Office 2010 family. New features in Outlook, for example, let users convert voice mail to e-mail as well as manage their "conversations" to the point of cleaning out redundant entries in conversation threads and even ridding their mailboxes of any unwanted threads.
Moreover, in an obvious nod to online collaborative apps from Google and Zoho, multiple users can now work on Excel spreadsheets, for instance,
collaboratively and simultaneously. In another crowd-pleaser, you can now edit videos for use in presentations from directly within PowerPoint.
Capossela also showed how, through the use of the new Microsoft Office Web Apps, PowerPoint presentations can now be distributed to other users of PowerPoint client software, in addition to Windows Mobile phones and multi-platform browsers, including a Firefox browser running on an Apple Mac. Web Apps is an online companion to Microsoft PowerPoint, Word, Excel and OneNote.
Office 2010 also offers a simpler ribbon interface than Office 2007, along with stronger integration among its various apps, according to Capossela.
As for SharePoint, key enhancements include new blogging capabilities, Facebook-like tagging, presence awareness, the ability to categorize users as experts or novices in particular subject areas, and improved search functionality based on technology obtained through Microsoft's buyout of Fast Search & Transfer back in 2008.
Next: Some users will upgrade, others not so sure...
Some users will upgrade, others not so sure
During the panel discussion that followed, users mentioned a variety of benefits to Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. "Just like [with] any corporation, cost is a concern to us," said David Glenn, director of enterprise operations at Del Monte Foods.
Glenn predicted that the collaborative functionality in the 2010 products will help speed the company's "time to market" by accelerating learning among employees. In particular, he cited the new conversation manager in Outlook and the presence awareness capabilities in SharePoint, which can identify which members are presently online.
Mark Mastrianni, GE's head of global technology acquisition and licensing, cited the more "intuitive" user interface of the 2010 lineup, the availability of a Paintbrush tool in every application, and general improvements in "how [the apps] work together."
Stephen Wilson, CIO at the New South Wales Dept. of Education and Training, told the audience that, after beta testing, his organization has now decided to build a portal based on SharePoint 2010 which will enable some 1.3 million users to share files and collaborate in other ways. The school system in Australia is standardizing on Microsoft's 2010 software from its previous "hodgepodge" of different applications, he said.
Telus, too, will use SharePoint 2010 to create a new portal, Pontefract told me later. Pontefract expects the portal to help expand employee learning way beyond the level of class instruction, a movement that's already begun at Telus. "We will connect people and their talents and skills," he elaborated.
Whether Telus will also migrate to Office 2010 is a matter that's up to the company's CIO, according to Pontefract. But the CIO has given the green light on the upgrade from SharePoint 2007. Already piloted among 1,500 users at Telus, the portal will now be extended company-wide among some 25,000 employees.
Pontefract said that he hadn't considered collaborative products from Microsoft competitors such as IBM Lotus as alternatives because Telus has long been a Microsoft IT shop.
The factors that may trigger a decision
At the conclusion of Microsoft's presentation, Gulley, the administrative systems manager at the New York City law firm, told me she was leaving the event more impressed with Office 2010 than when she arrived. Gulley found the video editing capabilities in PowerPoint and the support for Windows Mobile phones to be especially interesting.
"I can't say that we'd use the mobile capabilities, because we really don't have many mobile users right now. But we do know that this is the way the world is headed," she told me.
But while the cross-platform collaboration aspects of the 2010 products did come across clearly at the event, some users will probably continue to wonder whether the benefits will outweigh the cost. A number of questions might spring to mind. Could the learning curve associated with Microsoft's "ribbon interface" carry a negative impact on ROI for current users of Office 2003, for instance?
During the press Q&A, Ted Schadler, an analyst at Forrester Research, said that Forrester's survey only involved users who had already migrated to Office 2007.
But Capossela maintained that, when queried by Forrester, some Office 2007 users said that the ribbon interface in 2010 is "more intuitive," and they also thought that Office 2003 users will find Office 2010 easier to learn as a result.
The 35 organizations interviewed by Forrester for the survey ranged in size from about 2,000 employees to around 100,000, Schadler said.
Speaking with me later, Schadler cast doubt on the learning curve as much of a deterrent to implementation anyway. The ribbon interface tends to be an easy "lunch-time learn," and most users are able to adapt to it within two or three weeks, according to the analyst.
Might it be that some customers will hold off on deploying Office 2010 until the availability of the cloud-based service later this year? If so, which types of customers will wait? Schadler told me that most companies using Microsoft's cloud-based service will be small- to mid-sized organizations as opposed to big corporations.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
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