So, Thinking of Alternatives To Microsoft office?

For Information & Knowledge Management Professionals

November 11, 2008

So, Thinking Of Alternatives To Microsoft Office?

Direct Answers To Frequently Asked Questions

by Kyle McNabb with Matthew Brown, Rob Koplowitz, Sheri McLeish, Keith K. Tsang, and Charlie Coit

Executi v e S ummary

Enterprises today have something not seen for at least the past decade: unprecedented choice in desktop productivity tools. Google, IBM, open source, and numerous enterprise Web 2.0 vendors offer alternatives to desktop productivity's gorilla: Microsoft Office. Choice is good. But with choice comes confusion as those looking closely at desktop productivity investments wonder if they can save money or better serve employees with an alternative. This document answers frequently asked questions posed by information and knowledge management (I&KM) professionals responsible for evaluating desktop productivity alternatives.

Question s

1. What's the adoption rate of the leading Microsoft Office alternatives?

2. What's keeping enterprises from aggressively embracing these technologies?

3. How are other enterprises using these alternatives to Microsoft Office?

4. Will we cut costs by moving to an alternative?

5. What, in addition to cost, should we factor into any evaluation?

6. What can we do internally to focus our evaluations?

7. What trends should we keep an eye on to see how these alternatives mature?

Today's Desktop productivity Market Offers CHoice ANd Confusion Microsoft Office sits atop the desktop productivity market and has done so for at least the past 10 years. But change may be afoot as open source and enterprise Web 2.0 have ushered in alternatives to today's desktop productivity gorilla. , IBM, Novell, and Sun Microsystems offer variations of open source's answer to Microsoft Office -- 2.4.1. Enterprise Web 2.0 vendors such as ThinkFree and Zoho offer software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based desktop productivity tools. And Google, with Google Apps Premier Edition, offers enterprises email, chat, calendaring, word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation support funded in part by advertising.

Pushed by peers in finance, many I&KM professionals have been chartered to evaluate desktop productivity alternatives. Many focus on reducing costs, while others desire to reduce their dependency on Microsoft (see Figure 1). Others focus their desktop productivity investments on improving

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information worker productivity. And many we've spoken to noted that all three objectives drive their desktop productivity investments, making it difficult for anyone to assess if they can, or should, move employees off of Microsoft Office. We asked numerous I&KM pros, desktop productivity vendors, and systems integrators for insight into answering frequently asked questions about alternatives to Microsoft Office.

Figure 1 Primary Drivers For Desktop Productivity Investments

"To what degree do you agree with the following statement: Our primary driver for evaluating desktop productivity solutions is to . . ."

Strongly disagree Somewhat disagree Neither agree nor disagree Agree Strongly agree

2%

Improve information worker productivity

19%

3%

48%

29%

Reduce license fees 5%

17%

31%

38% 9%

Reduce dependency on Microsoft

8%

26%

27%

28% 10%

Base: 259 IT decision-makers (percentages may not total 100 because of rounding)

Source: March 2008 North American And Western European Enterprise Microsoft Office 2007 Adoption Online Survey

47082

Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

1. What's the adoption rate of the leading Microsoft Office alternatives?

Frankly, adoption of alternatives to Microsoft Office is extremely low among enterprises in North America and Western Europe.

? has millions of downloads, but only a fraction move to production. At last

count, 's alternative to Microsoft Office had well over 130 million downloads worldwide. However, we estimate that less than 10% of these downloads translate into full production use of this open source community's alternative to Microsoft Office. Add in use of Sun Microsystems' StarOffice and Novell's Novell Edition, and the number still remains below 10% of all OpenOffice downloads. Further, use is heavily concentrated in the public sector and in emerging nations.1

? Google Apps Premier Edition gets interest for email and calendaring. While Google and its

assault on Microsoft get plenty of media coverage, adoption and use of Google Apps Premier

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Edition's Docs functionality remains miniscule. Interest in Google's mail and calendaring support within Google Apps is a different story. We've spoken to numerous large enterprises over the past nine months intrigued by the opportunity to use Google's mail and calendaring as an alternative to Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes. But judging by consumer use alone, between 0% and 6% of North American adults using a PC at home and at work use Google Docs (see Figure 2).

? Corel's WordPerfect Office continues to find its niche in legal circles. Corel's products have

a small, but influential, share of the desktop productivity market. We estimate that Corel has less than a 3% enterprise market share, primarily driven by the use of WordPerfect among legal professionals in private law firms, enterprise legal teams, and public sector firms. Corel's WordPerfect Office X4 suite offers email and calendaring support, as well as digital note taking with Lightning, making it a more comparable solution to Microsoft Office than other alternatives.

? IBM Lotus Symphony just left the starting blocks. IBM reintroduced its Lotus Symphony

offering as a new desktop productivity suite based on in late 2007 and announced its general availability in late May 2008. We estimate approximately 3 million downloads of Symphony have occurred since late 2007, with the majority of these downloads occurring since its May 2008 general availability announcement -- still a fraction of the estimated 1.2 million monthly downloads of . IBM Lotus Symphony only includes word processing, spreadsheet functionality, and presentation support. IBM offers Symphony as a free download and as a part of its Lotus Notes and Lotus Foundations products.

? Numerous SaaS alternatives remain experimental. Vendors such as ThinkFree and Zoho

have gained mindshare but have yet to show material enterprise adoption. We've found mostly experimental use among enterprises that claim to use these SaaS-based alternatives to Microsoft Office. These enterprises were not foregoing their investments in Microsoft Office in favor of these alternatives, but rather were using them as a novelty or as an experiment for blended work in the office and at home. In many cases, users of these alternatives used Microsoft Office in parallel.

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Figure 2 Desktop Productivity Technology Use At Work And Home

"On a home PC, which of the following software programs or suites do you regularly use?"

Microsoft Word

77%

Microsoft Excel

58%

Microsoft PowerPoint

29%

Microsoft Outlook

24%

Microsoft Works

16%

Google Docs 3%

StarOffice 3%

Corel WordPerfect Suite 3%

Apple iWork 2%

None of the above

11%

Other office program/suite 2%

Don't know 1%

Other office Web site(s) 0%

Base: 1,956 US online adults with a PC at home who also regularly use a PC at work in a typical day (multiple responses accepted)

Source: North American Technographics? Consumer Software And Home Office Online Survey, Q1 2008

47082

Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

2. What's keeping enterprises from aggressively embracing these technologies?

With unprecedented choice in desktop productivity, many I&KM pros ask why so few enterprises adopt alternatives. Based on our interviews with those evaluating different alternatives, we have identified five primary reasons why enterprises hesitate to pursue other options.

? Lack of an email and calendaring support. One I&KM pro for a large, multinational

auto manufacturer said: "Can I write a document with ? Yes. Can I craft a spreadsheet? Yes. Can I get my job done? Not without email and calendaring support." Many information workers spend the majority of their day in email, usually using Microsoft Outlook. Without an effective alternative to Outlook to help business people manage email, calendars, contacts, and tasks, many enterprises begrudgingly admit that they just can't move off of Microsoft Office.

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? Adoption of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. While , IBM, and Google

attempt to commoditize desktop productivity, Microsoft wants to sink deeper into business processes and employee collaboration work styles with SharePoint. We recently found that 70% of enterprises have either implemented or plan to implement SharePoint 2007 (see Figure 3).2 Surveyed enterprises said that they bring in SharePoint to improve the sharing of content created by Office desktop applications. Many enterprises noted that the integration between Excel and Excel Services and PowerPoint and SharePoint's Slide Library offered support that they could not find elsewhere. Taking full advantage of SharePoint 2007 requires use of the Office 2007 desktop.3

? Confusion over file format wars. File formats matter, especially to those concerned with

document longevity and interoperability. Throughout 2007 and into early 2008, the media played up the Open Document Format (ODF) versus Office Open XML (OOXML) debate, trying to turn it into a Betamax versus VHS battle -- with the loser relegated to obscurity. Both ODF and OOXML have achieved International Organization for Standardization (ISO) approval as industry open standards.4 Still, many enterprises expressed confusion regarding the ODF versus OOXML debate. One enterprise architect for employee productivity at a large financial services firm stated, "We already had an answer, PDF/A."5

? Fear of the unknown. SaaS-based desktop productivity offerings from Google, ThinkFree, and

Zoho, for example, present more questions than answers for many evaluators. Security and availability concerns keep many evaluators from taking these alternatives seriously. Many admit to believing that these vendors can offer a secure environment, but cannot come to terms with using these alternatives to both create and manage sensitive intellectual property created with the tools -- such as contracts, quotes, and business plans. Others point out the need for offline and unplugged support and cannot fathom the change management needed to move people to a pure online desktop productivity environment.

? Poor knowledge of how business people use desktop productivity tools. Business people

don't simply create and edit documents, craft presentations, or analyze data in spreadsheets. They create and edit contracts and proposals, craft customer sales presentations, and perform monthly financial analysis in spreadsheets. Those evaluating alternatives need to move beyond feature and functionality comparisons to focus on how their business people use desktop productivity tools in their daily tasks and business processes. "We just don't have the resources or skills at this time to do this correctly. And doing it incorrectly may cost us 10 times what we could possibly save," claimed a senior IT manager at a large insurance enterprise.

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