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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.

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:

I just read Glyn Moody's post on the importance of open data and, increasingly, open source, in science. Good science requires good data--data available to any who want to replicate another's results and ensure that true science is going on, not pseudo-science.

Marry that to Tim O'Reilly's insistence that data, not code, is the new lock-in (and cross that with my own declaration that Microsoft's new platform for lock-in is Sharepoint, not Office), and you end up with what I think is an implicit, urgent need in open source today:

The need to ensure data remains free/open.

Wow. I guess when you have more cash than taste you can afford to buy research reports that say all sorts of nice things about you. Open-source companies have to rely on things like products that please customers; Microsoft can afford to ramrod research down customers' throats.

A great example, as Mary Jo notes on ZDNet, is two new Microsoft-commissioned research reports that (gasp!) find Microsoft Sharepoint is a better investment for systems integrators and that "Office Open XML (is) the format showing the most progressive adoption rates in the marketplace over the next 12 months."

The research is of dubious value given that it's bought and paid for, but what is fascinating is the target of the research: open source.

Bayarsaikhan has posted the top 25 most active open-source projects on Microsoft's Codeplex site. Looking at the list, it looks like Microsoft developers spend their time doing much the same as the rest of the Java/other world: play games and make the Web world pretty with AJAX. You can see the top project interests below in the Codeplex tag cloud.

Codeplex is interesting to me for several reasons, but primarily because it demonstrates something that I've argued for many years now: open source on the Windows platform is a huge opportunity for Microsoft. It is something for the company to embrace, not despise.

And it does several things well (better than Sourceforge, in my opinion): ... Read more

If this hasn't come through in my blog, I have a sincere respect for Microsoft. I particularly appreciate what it has done with SharePoint. Microsoft has grown a lightweight collaboration portal into $800 million in revenue in just a few short years. It is the fastest-growing product in Microsoft's history.

Microsoft being Microsoft, it is sharing the wealth with its partner ecosystem. Yes, Microsoft routinely runs roughshod over its partners but, to be fair, it's hard for a company that size to do much of anything without squashing partners in the process. But in the case of SharePoint, partners will help to drive SharePoint into all sizes of enterprises and into all kinds of applications, according to an article on CMP Channel.

This is where things get interesting, because what's good for Microsoft and its partners is not necessarily good for Microsoft's customers.