Enterprises still wary of Office 2010

Microsoft was happy to point out the other day that it sells 30 copies of new Office 2010 software suite every minute and we’ve reported that it is well-reviewed and generally well received in the market. But it’s one thing for a consumer to download Office 2010 onto their PC and another for an enterprise with 10,000 employees to upgrade to it. A new study out today shows businesses are taking their time migrating because of a number of concerns.

So far only 4 percent of businesses surveyed have fully deployed Office 2010 since it was released in the spring and while 90 percent eventually plan to upgrade to it, only 20 percent plan to upgrade to it before this year is out. The survey of 953 IT people at companies of various sizes globally shows about 70 percent of respondents “have significant concerns about the complexity of the migration,” according to Dell Kace, which commissioned the survey done by Dimensional Research.

A caveat: Kace Networks, which Dell acquired in February, makes deployment management and system management appliances. You turn on their hardware when you are migrating to a new OS, deploying software or performing security and patch management. So, yes, Dell Kace manages to slip in a sales pitch with the study results. Nonetheless, the study speaks to migration issues that we’ve reported about related to Office 2010 as well as Windows 7. The study details three migration worries companies have with Office 2010 that give them pause, namely training, compatibility and that busy ribbon interface that takes some getting used to.

Fifty-two percent have not deployed Office 2010 at all, 28 percent have only deployed it on test machines, 7 percent add it only to newly-purchased machines and only 4 percent have gone “all in” to borrow a phrase.

Meanwhile, 45 percent have concerns about training employees on the ribbon interface, the menu of options across the top of a document. Office 2007 had a ribbon, but Office 2003 did not, so users moving to 2010 from 2003 may be intimidated by the ribbon, said Ken Drachnik, director of product marketing for Dell Kace, while adding that initial angst about a new UI eventually subsides. However, ribbon-anxiety was the top of seven respondent concerns about 2010.

While initial adoption of 2010 is slow, it should pick up soon, said Rob Meinhardt, president of Dell Kace. The study showed 42 percent of respondents plan to deploy Office 2010 in 2011, 18 percent in 2012 and 7 percent after 2012. This indicates that companies are at least now in the planning stages. “They’re asking us ‘How are we going to attack this problem? Do we require hardware upgrades? What kind of training is required? Are there going to be compatibility issues?’” he said.

But adoption of Office 2010 is clearly slower than the migration for previous versions of Office for a more fundamental reason, Meinhardt said. This is not news, but gone are the days of the homogeneous environment where your OS and applications came from the same place and end users were happy because this was the only life they knew. Today, IT environments are more heterogeneous, with Windows servers running alongside Linux, desktops running XP, Vista, Windows 7 and even a few Windows 98s tucked in a corner. Employees have started using Google Docs at their desks and iPads and Android phones in conference rooms.

“I don’t think this necessarily bodes particularly well for Microsoft, if that’s the case, but I think it bodes well for the users and for people who are in platform infrastructure management,” Meinhardt said, slipping in his plug.

To be fair to Microsoft, migrations to new versions of Oracle, Adobe or AutoCAD software have also been problematic. But when your software is used by 750 million people worldwide, change gets noticed.

“Whatever your weapon of choice is, when you need to change it out it’s a big deal. What’s unique about Office is the just the sheer number of people that it touches,” Meinhardt said.