Microsoft's plan to drive Office adoption in big companies by linking the software to server-based products appears to be working.
More than 40 percent of 243 companies responding to one specific survey question plan to deploy Office 2007 within six months, Forrester Research reported Tuesday.
One major driver of Office 2007 demand is SharePoint Server, Microsoft's Web-based software for sharing and managing documents created with Office. Forrester says that 41 percent of the 233 companies that responded to a separate survey question plan to implement or upgrade SharePoint Server within six months.
Office XP: it keeps on ticking....
(Credit: Microsoft)Also, the release of Office 2007 Service Pack 1 in December removed a hurdle keeping many companies from upgrading, Forrester says. Office 2007 has been available to businesses since November 2006.
Interestingly, the survey also showed that while 43 percent of companies surveyed already have Office 2007 installed, some 60 percent are still running Office XP, which hit the market way back in May 2001.
Forrester based its results on a survey of 259 "IT decision makers" at companies in North America, the United Kingdom, France and Germany.
(Credit:
Google)
Google Sites was just launched and its target is clear: Microsoft SharePoint. While it has an uphill battle--security and a lack of the complex features that SharePoint has, for example--its biggest problem is that it doesn't connect with the content production tools that most people spend their (enterprise) content-producing lives in:
Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office.
Of course, Google Sites is free, which will cover a multitude of other problems, especially since Microsoft SharePoint turns out to be amazingly overpriced for a Microsoft product. Microsoft has, according to CMS Wire's analysis, completely priced the SME market out of SharePoint.
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It continues to amaze me at how overlooked Microsoft's crown jewel is: SharePoint.
It's not overlooked by the market, which has bought it up to the tune of $1 billion or so in license fees in its first four years. Yet its competitors have largely downplayed it as a threat--even partnering with it--as it pillages their installed bases.
Now Microsoft is taking its SharePoint story one step further by decoupling it from Windows Server.
I wish I could think of some nefarious reasons for this, but it actually seems to be worse for Microsoft, not better. If Microsoft were cutting SharePoint adrift of Windows, allowing the collaboration portal to work with something other than Internet Explorer, SQL Server, Windows, and IIS, then it would be a truly killer move. (That isn't the case. If you go SharePoint, you have to buy into the complete Microsoft ecosystem.)
It's just a separate download that still only works with Windows. Microsoft gave these reasons:
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