Microsoft Office 2010: Who will take the upgrade plunge and why?

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.