Office 2007: Fit for business?

By Jon Honeyball

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We look at the case for Microsoft’s office upgrade, and the reasons why many businesses should sit back and wait

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You’ve read the reviews and the in-depth articles about the new features of Office 2007. You’ve braved a multi-hundred-megabyte download from Microsoft. You feel you have the T-shirt, the mug and the sticker.

But now comes the big question, the one that’s been lurking at the back of your mind for all this time: what’s in it for your business? You like the latest toys, and you’ve read all those adverts about competitive edge. You want your office to have that modern, crisp, potted-plant and espresso-maker feel. So why are you finding it so hard to reach for your pen to sign the cheque?

To be honest, I’d be surprised if you weren’t having such difficulties. What Microsoft is doing is incredibly brave. At the same time as introducing Windows Vista, the company is bringing to market a whole new Office suite.

Now I know that Office upgrades have been a bit of a joke in the past, and installing the latest was a little like grabbing some fast food from a drive-through vendor: it felt good at the time, but a few hours later you weren’t quite sure where your money went. And because of that, there are a great number of companies that are happy today on Office 2000. I’ll accept that Outlook 2000 was a little challenging, but a few selective upgrades like Outlook 2003 made all the difference. And if that wasn’t enough, there was an Office XP release in the middle too.

But Office 2007 is different. Not only is it full of whizzy new things, but it’s far more than just a client-side package. Sure, you can install the client side of Office 2007 alone if you want to. Indeed, you could buy the separate Word, Excel and PowerPoint if you had the urge. But the underlying theme of the new edition is that this isn’t just a client-side thing, this is a server-side thing too.

Office politics
At this point, I have a confession to make. I still haven’t come to an overall decision about Office 2007 in terms of its relevance for the business desktop.

Let’s get a few simple scenarios out of the way. If you’re a home user, then Office 2007 is fabulous. The client-side install will give you a whole raft of functionality. We know that most people use very little of the available functionality, and it’s clear that this is because they’re simply overwhelmed by the packages. There’s so much on offer, they simply don’t know where to start. The overall “discoverability” of the package is poor, and users can’t remember where they found a specific function, or a way of performing a task when they need it again. Attempts to simplify things, like the self-hiding menus in previous versions, were laughably bad at reducing clutter. All that happened was that a user wouldn’t know where the function was, and its new inclusion in the menus just made things worse, as they muttered about “where did that come from?” and “well it didn’t use to be there”. A few random clicks around the menus in a usually failed effort to find a function like mail merge ended up with a whole shotgun worth of new menu entries peppering the once-simple UI.

Office 2007 changes that. The task-oriented nature of the Ribbon is an inspiration. It’s the first truly radical user interface design in an Office suite since... well, since forever. And if a user is reasonably happy to look and learn, and think, rather than just stabbing the keyboard hotkeys by rote, then there’s no question that Office 2007 will make more things possible.

That’s fine for the home world. But how does this translate into the business arena? First, we need to look at the traditional business user, who is often self-taught – there’s no money or time for expensive and largely useless training courses. They have remarkably simple needs from IT – Word, Excel and Outlook already cater for most of their needs.

And although Microsoft would hate to hear it, these users are really quite happy with what they have. They’re proficient, quick and effective at the basic office-oriented IT functions that they have to do each day. Write an email, rattle off a letter, work out some numbers. The reality of normal day-to-day business is that it doesn’t have a high IT requirement.

Even quite large and profitable organisations can fall into this group. Even global companies, although they’ll tend to have a group of IT professionals who manage the network and core server integrity. “Our needs are simple,” said one global IT director to me recently. “Email, letters and reports, some number crunching, and our line-of-business applications like HR, CRM and accounts come from big applications, centrally managed.”

And look at the technical skills available to these organisations, even quite large ones. They went through hell and back to get themselves through the Y2K rollover, and the move to Windows 2000 and Active Directory wasn’t a
small shift. Indeed, many of these organisations are still running on Windows 2000 quite happily, using hardware that can typically be some
five years old now.

In the realm of file and print services, there’s little push for them to move. They could move to Server 2003, but that would entail upgrading all the CALs to 2003 CALs. At this point, it’s clear that Microsoft has made a big mistake by continuing to insist on client-side licensing for its server products when this is based around a platform version. For example, it isn’t unreasonable to consider the NT era (3.1 through to 4) as one platform. Windows 2000 Server and Server 2003 is another era. Longhorn Server will be a new one, bringing much new functionality to the table, including a big push to 64-bit operation.

Wouldn’t it make sense to have a “platform” licence that covered 2000 Server and 2003 Server? Well yes, except Microsoft is pushing everyone onto its rolling licensing scheme, which means you get the upgrades while you’re paying the annual fees. However, it’s clear that there are still a great deal of Server 2000, Office 2000 and Windows 2000 (and XP) products that have been paid for as outright licence purchases. Whether that was a good idea isn’t relevant, that’s how it was bought. Shifting over to an Enterprise Licence, or equivalent involves quite a lot of work, hassle and thought time for a business. And it’s a rat’s nest of complexity, often needing external expertise to unravel.

IT enthusiast home users will find it reasonably easy to get to grips with the Ribbon, but there may be some hostility towards it from less tech-savvy business users.

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