Microsoft this week celebrated the first year of its Office 2010 family of products in the market, noting that the office productivity suite has sold over 30 million units, a record pace that amounts to one copy of Office sold every second. And after just one year in the market, Microsoft's free web-based Office Web Apps (OWA) solution has blown past the Google Docs competition: OWA now has about 50 million active users, Microsoft says, double the 25 million active users Google claims.
"When we released Office 2010 to the world one year ago, our critics weren't easy on us," Microsoft Office Corporate Vice President Takeshi Numoto noted in a blog post marking the milestone. "They said we were heading in the wrong direction by continuing to invest in our desktop applications in addition to the cloud. Even more recently, there've been more predictions of the PC's demise. But the reality is, based on the market results we see in our sales and adoption data, people continue to love Office on the desktop and they're embracing Office in the cloud."
Microsoft's family of Office products consists of the traditional desktop suite, Microsoft Office 2010, various server products such as SharePoint, mobile apps for Windows Phone and other platforms, and now the OWA, which provide free, web-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. The company also makes a version of the desktop suite for Mac; the current version is called Office 2011.
According to Microsoft, businesses are deploying Office 2010 five times more quickly than they deployed the previous version, Office 2007. Office 2010 is also the fastest-selling consumer version of Office ever, meaning that more people are buying retail versions of the suite and installing them manually on their PCs.
Looked at more broadly, Microsoft says there are over 750 million active users of all available Office versions worldwide, and over 1 billion instances of Office installed on PCs worldwide. (This includes only Windows PCs, not Macs or web apps.) Either figure represents a huge percentage of the estimated 1.2 billion Windows-based PCs in use worldwide.
Office isn't just successful on the desktop: Microsoft notes that 3 out of 4 companies in the US with over 500 PCs use Exchange as their primary email system, 70 percent of the Fortune 500 use Lync (or the previous version, Communications Server), and over 100 million SharePoint licenses have been sold to date.
Satisfaction with Office is also at an all-time high, something one can't say about lackluster web offerings such as Google Docs. According to Microsoft, 9 out of 10 users say that Office 2010 is the best version of Office ever and 96 percent would recommend it to others.
Looking ahead, Microsoft plans to launch its cloud-based Office productivity solution Office 365 on June 28, providing individuals and businesses of all sizes with cloud-based versions of Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync, as well as private versions of the Office Web Apps and mobile device management capabilities. And while Office Web Apps has been updated in meaningful ways a few times over the past year, there's more work to be done there, and one can't help but imagine how successful mobile versions of Office would be on the iPad, iPhone, and Android-based devices. Microsoft so far has refused to comment on such a possibility.
Related Reading:
•Office Web Apps vs. Google Cloud Connect: Which is the Better Solution for Microsoft Office Users?
•Office 365 Enters Public Beta Phase
Showing posts with label Office 2010. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Office 2010. Show all posts
Monday, June 20, 2011
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Options open up for the minimialist business
Options open up for the minimialist business
By Stephen Pritchard
Published: March 17 2010 15:17 | Last updated: March 17 2010 15:17
Twenty years ago, a laptop computer represented a significant investment for any business. Today, it costs little to buy an entry-level laptop capable of running day-to-day business applications, reasonably demanding graphics or computational software, and even entertainment applications.
According to Eilert Hanoa, chief executive of Mamut, a Norwegian software vendor specialising in small and mid-sized businesses, the cost of providing an employee with a laptop and a phone is now as low as one pound a day – an historically low figure for equipping a member of staff with the tools of their trade.
As a result, smaller businesses have also benefited from the way both the internet and mobile networks have changed their communications.
Companies can set up their telephone links, as well as links to the internet, using inexpensive mobile phones and cellular data “dongles”.
For more permanent set-ups, technologies such as voice over the internet (VoIP) have largely replaced conventional phone lines for a growing number of businesses. According to Forrester, the industry analyst firm, 14 per cent of all companies have deployed VoIP to the desktop, and a further 34 per cent are considering doing so.
Cheap, ubiquitous and increasingly quick internet access opens up a further set of options to businesses when it comes to running their IT: moving to “cloud” services.
Rather than hosting back office applications on their own computer hardware, businesses can rent space on remote servers, or even rent applications on a per-user basis from companies such as Salesforce.com and NetSuite.
Even traditional desktop applications such as word processing are moving towards the cloud, through services such as Google Docs and Microsoft’s Office Web suite. It might not be going too far, to suggest that a functioning business needs little more than some bandwidth, a web browser, and a way to print documents.
“It’s becoming rather like ordering a dish off an a la carte menu,” says Rob Lovell, chief executive and founder of ThinkGrid, a company that provides hosted desktop applications to SMEs over the internet. “You can have your e-mail, phone and desktop applications anywhere you want.”
But the flexibility and productivity gains offered by information technology have to be balanced against the time, skills and money needed to manage the technologies.
As Andy Mulholland, global chief technology officer at Capgemini, the consultants, points out businesses now spend, on average, just 5 per cent of their time on back office processes, mostly as a result of efficiencies brought by IT.
But for smaller companies, and owner-managed businesses in particular, IT is also seen as a burden. ThinkGrid’s Mr Lovell says: “They are spending more time fixing it when it is broken. They don’t want to install or manage it.”
This is leading to a new generation of companies taking a radically different approach to technology, seeing it less as an asset to be bought and managed, and more as a service to be rented or paid for as it is used.
Companies such as ThinkGrid, Salesforce.com and NetSuite base their business models on the premise that companies want IT specialists to run their IT, so they can focus on running the business. Larger enterprises have long turned to outsourcing service providers to do exactly that.
The cloud, though, breaks down IT services into bite-sized chunks that make them affordable to smaller businesses.
“All applications will move to the cloud,” predicts Zach Nelson, NetSuite’s chief executive.” Businesses will move away from software applications that force them to buy, run and maintain expensive operating systems, Mr Nelson suggests.
But not all businesses are moving at the same pace: “We do see traditional businesses migrate from on premise software to cloud, but we also meet entrepreneurs who would never run their own software,” he says. “They play games over the net, so they ask why they should run their own ERP (enterprise resource planning).”
Independent analysts agree that today’s technologies allow businesses, especially smaller companies, to do away with a whole tier of IT infrastructure.
“If the question is: ‘is it feasible to have a laptop with a net connection on tap and a range of services delivered over the internet?’, then that is the case,” suggests Joslyn Faust, an analyst in Gartner’s small to midsize business research group.
At the same time, it is not yet the case that a business can move into an office with a broadband connection, plug into an Ethernet socket or connect up to a mobile broadband service and find all their applications and services on tap.
One reason is that, according to Karl Boone, a Boston-based IT delivery expert at PA Consulting, it still requires a high degree of skill to pick the right cloud-based services. “There is still a view that IT is something that runs on boxes but what businesses need are applications. But they do need help with which applications to run,” he explains.
Businesses might also need guidance on how to connect a range of cloud-based applications together – in itself a challenging task, and one that cloud service providers have only recently started to address, through hosted applications that can mediate between programs.
Organisations also need to think about where their data is stored, and how well protected it is against virus attack or data theft, especially if they are handling personal or customer data.
Then there is the question of data ownership, and what would happen if a cloud-based software provider were to fail, or ceased trading. Simply having a local copy of the data on a PC or laptop is of limited use, if the business is unable to access the application itself.
A further concern is that access to a broadband connection cannot be guaranteed. While Mr Lovell at ThinkGrid points out that five or even 10 users could connect to his service over a conventional domestic or small business broadband link, even advocates of a minimalist approach to IT concede that businesses need a robust broadband service.
This might need to include SDSL (symmetrical digital subscriber line) or redundant ADSL connections, especially if they also use their broadband lines for streaming media or telecommunications.
As a result, some businesses might prefer to continue to run some applications themselves, or look at applications that work offline.
“That’s why we’ve adopted a hybrid software and services model, with the application running locally but 100 per cent in sync,” explains Mr Hanoa of Mamut. “To play both horses you have to be able to access the software offline, but also still access it remotely.”
None the less, the pressure on companies – especially smaller companies – to stretch their budgets further and reduce both the cost and complexity of IT, is set to continue through 2010.
“Small business has two problems: a lack of access to capital, and a lack of access to skills,” says Sean Poulley, vice president of online collaboration services at IBM. “Anything you can do to restrict these two issues is welcome. And smaller businesses want to align their [IT] costs more closely with their business needs.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web
By Stephen Pritchard
Published: March 17 2010 15:17 | Last updated: March 17 2010 15:17
Twenty years ago, a laptop computer represented a significant investment for any business. Today, it costs little to buy an entry-level laptop capable of running day-to-day business applications, reasonably demanding graphics or computational software, and even entertainment applications.
According to Eilert Hanoa, chief executive of Mamut, a Norwegian software vendor specialising in small and mid-sized businesses, the cost of providing an employee with a laptop and a phone is now as low as one pound a day – an historically low figure for equipping a member of staff with the tools of their trade.
As a result, smaller businesses have also benefited from the way both the internet and mobile networks have changed their communications.
Companies can set up their telephone links, as well as links to the internet, using inexpensive mobile phones and cellular data “dongles”.
For more permanent set-ups, technologies such as voice over the internet (VoIP) have largely replaced conventional phone lines for a growing number of businesses. According to Forrester, the industry analyst firm, 14 per cent of all companies have deployed VoIP to the desktop, and a further 34 per cent are considering doing so.
Cheap, ubiquitous and increasingly quick internet access opens up a further set of options to businesses when it comes to running their IT: moving to “cloud” services.
Rather than hosting back office applications on their own computer hardware, businesses can rent space on remote servers, or even rent applications on a per-user basis from companies such as Salesforce.com and NetSuite.
Even traditional desktop applications such as word processing are moving towards the cloud, through services such as Google Docs and Microsoft’s Office Web suite. It might not be going too far, to suggest that a functioning business needs little more than some bandwidth, a web browser, and a way to print documents.
“It’s becoming rather like ordering a dish off an a la carte menu,” says Rob Lovell, chief executive and founder of ThinkGrid, a company that provides hosted desktop applications to SMEs over the internet. “You can have your e-mail, phone and desktop applications anywhere you want.”
But the flexibility and productivity gains offered by information technology have to be balanced against the time, skills and money needed to manage the technologies.
As Andy Mulholland, global chief technology officer at Capgemini, the consultants, points out businesses now spend, on average, just 5 per cent of their time on back office processes, mostly as a result of efficiencies brought by IT.
But for smaller companies, and owner-managed businesses in particular, IT is also seen as a burden. ThinkGrid’s Mr Lovell says: “They are spending more time fixing it when it is broken. They don’t want to install or manage it.”
This is leading to a new generation of companies taking a radically different approach to technology, seeing it less as an asset to be bought and managed, and more as a service to be rented or paid for as it is used.
Companies such as ThinkGrid, Salesforce.com and NetSuite base their business models on the premise that companies want IT specialists to run their IT, so they can focus on running the business. Larger enterprises have long turned to outsourcing service providers to do exactly that.
The cloud, though, breaks down IT services into bite-sized chunks that make them affordable to smaller businesses.
“All applications will move to the cloud,” predicts Zach Nelson, NetSuite’s chief executive.” Businesses will move away from software applications that force them to buy, run and maintain expensive operating systems, Mr Nelson suggests.
But not all businesses are moving at the same pace: “We do see traditional businesses migrate from on premise software to cloud, but we also meet entrepreneurs who would never run their own software,” he says. “They play games over the net, so they ask why they should run their own ERP (enterprise resource planning).”
Independent analysts agree that today’s technologies allow businesses, especially smaller companies, to do away with a whole tier of IT infrastructure.
“If the question is: ‘is it feasible to have a laptop with a net connection on tap and a range of services delivered over the internet?’, then that is the case,” suggests Joslyn Faust, an analyst in Gartner’s small to midsize business research group.
At the same time, it is not yet the case that a business can move into an office with a broadband connection, plug into an Ethernet socket or connect up to a mobile broadband service and find all their applications and services on tap.
One reason is that, according to Karl Boone, a Boston-based IT delivery expert at PA Consulting, it still requires a high degree of skill to pick the right cloud-based services. “There is still a view that IT is something that runs on boxes but what businesses need are applications. But they do need help with which applications to run,” he explains.
Businesses might also need guidance on how to connect a range of cloud-based applications together – in itself a challenging task, and one that cloud service providers have only recently started to address, through hosted applications that can mediate between programs.
Organisations also need to think about where their data is stored, and how well protected it is against virus attack or data theft, especially if they are handling personal or customer data.
Then there is the question of data ownership, and what would happen if a cloud-based software provider were to fail, or ceased trading. Simply having a local copy of the data on a PC or laptop is of limited use, if the business is unable to access the application itself.
A further concern is that access to a broadband connection cannot be guaranteed. While Mr Lovell at ThinkGrid points out that five or even 10 users could connect to his service over a conventional domestic or small business broadband link, even advocates of a minimalist approach to IT concede that businesses need a robust broadband service.
This might need to include SDSL (symmetrical digital subscriber line) or redundant ADSL connections, especially if they also use their broadband lines for streaming media or telecommunications.
As a result, some businesses might prefer to continue to run some applications themselves, or look at applications that work offline.
“That’s why we’ve adopted a hybrid software and services model, with the application running locally but 100 per cent in sync,” explains Mr Hanoa of Mamut. “To play both horses you have to be able to access the software offline, but also still access it remotely.”
None the less, the pressure on companies – especially smaller companies – to stretch their budgets further and reduce both the cost and complexity of IT, is set to continue through 2010.
“Small business has two problems: a lack of access to capital, and a lack of access to skills,” says Sean Poulley, vice president of online collaboration services at IBM. “Anything you can do to restrict these two issues is welcome. And smaller businesses want to align their [IT] costs more closely with their business needs.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
A first look at Office 2010
Mary Branscombe reports as Microsoft reveals an improved interface and promises real-time collaboration and web apps
Published: July 14 2009 13:29 | Last updated: July 14 2009 13:29
The technical preview of Office 2010 is an early look at some of the new features coming in the next release. Updates to the desktop apps are welcome if not revolutionary, but the real shift is that Microsoft is embracing the cloud (and the mobile phone), albeit carefully and without undermining the market for the full-featured desktop versions.
There are some users who dislike the “ribbon” interface introduced in Office 2007 but according to Microsoft product manager Chris Bryant “the ribbon has helped people use more of the Office applications in Office 2007 than ever before”.
He compares it to drag and drop, first introduced in Word in 1991: “Now it’s a fundamental part of the productivity experience; we think the ribbon will be very much the same in 10 years.”
Office 2010 extends the ribbon to all the applications and it does an excellent job of it. It also introduces the option to customise the ribbon completely, which should mollify most remaining critics.
The Office menu, which replaced the File menu in Office 2007 is in turn replaced by the Backstage menu which combines useful tools and settings once found in a variety of dialog boxes in one handy place, including file properties, previews of file templates, print preview, advanced printer settings and options for sharing files (by methods such as e-mail, SharePoint or Excel services) and packaging presentations.
Expect the look of Backstage to evolve as it currently takes up rather more space than necessary for many of the features it includes.
Otherwise, the interface of Office 2010 is generally cleaner and more efficient than the previous version, using the space better and presenting appropriate commands more intelligently.
Microsoft has gone back to basics on the core application features such as text formating, copy and paste, printing and integration between the different applications says Mr Bryant, noting that around 20 per cent of all commands used in Office are about copying and pasting.
“The long-term mission of Office is really to deliver that best productivity experience. We spent more energy and more time implementing those essentials and making sure they work the way people expect.”
Integration includes making more features common across applications. Some of that is playing catch-up. PowerPoint 2010 can now compare and merge presentations the way Word lets you compare and merge versions of a document.
But new features such as a preview that helps you pick the right format for pasting information such as tables, instant translations and tools for editing photos inside applications (adjusting the brightness, contrast and colour tone or adding Photoshop-style artistic effects) are in almost all the Office programs.
PowerPoint has basic video editing tools; they don’t replace sophisticated video editing software but if you only need to adjust the contrast or brightness and select a section to play then being able to do it all in your presentation will save a lot of time.
PowerPoint also gets the first connection to the cloud: you can embed videos from online services such as YouTube into slides and upload your presentation to the PowerPoint Live service, send the URL to participants at different companies and control the presentation in their browsers (which can be Firefox or Safari as well as Internet Explorer).
Excel’s new sparklines place mini-charts into tables, highlighting trends and key figures more clearly and new Slicer tools make it easier to explore large PivotTables and PivotCharts.
Outlook has Quick Steps and Mail Tips to streamline common tasks and help you avoid common mistakes, plus a very welcome Ignore tool for dropping out of e-mail conversations that take on a life of their own. Word gets an improved navigation pane for browsing and searching within long documents.
Useful as they are, these features are not compelling reasons to upgrade and that underlines the fact that this is very much a preview version (although it’s robust enough to do real work with).
It doesn’t include the Office Web applications (available as a preview in August) or the new version of SharePoint (expected in beta in October) that will enable collaboration between document authors and allow businesses to host the web apps themselves, suggesting Microsoft still has a lot of work to do.
The real test will come when businesses can evaluate whether the collaborative tools and web apps deliver Mr Bryant’s claim of “the best productivity experience across the PC, phone and browser”.
Most collaboration today is what he calls “linear”: using e-mail to send documents. “Today, not many people co-author in real time, but we think it will be a fundamental expectation of the future.”
Both the desktop and web applications will allow real-time collaboration, and Word will allow desktop and web users to work on the same document; Microsoft is also promoting its note-taking app, OneNote, as a collaborative tool for both storing and sharing information.
Similarly most people expect to use a PC (usually their own) to edit documents but that attitude is changing: “The freedom to work from anywhere is becoming a fundamental expectation.”
For Office to remain a key business tool, Microsoft has to judge those expectations correctly and satisfy them on the platforms business users care about.
The Office web apps need to deliver the same rich features and formats as desktop Office programs rather than the basic tools of most web apps today.
Businesses will welcome the flexibility of hosting the web applications on their SharePoint servers at no extra charge and making those available through an extranet. But apart from the promise that the web apps will be included in the Office Professional Pro edition for enterprise and free to consumers and small business users through the Live service, Microsoft hasn’t finalised business models or what collaboration will be possible across these kind of boundaries.
Those issues will be as important as the features in the desktop or the web apps.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
Published: July 14 2009 13:29 | Last updated: July 14 2009 13:29
The technical preview of Office 2010 is an early look at some of the new features coming in the next release. Updates to the desktop apps are welcome if not revolutionary, but the real shift is that Microsoft is embracing the cloud (and the mobile phone), albeit carefully and without undermining the market for the full-featured desktop versions.
There are some users who dislike the “ribbon” interface introduced in Office 2007 but according to Microsoft product manager Chris Bryant “the ribbon has helped people use more of the Office applications in Office 2007 than ever before”.
He compares it to drag and drop, first introduced in Word in 1991: “Now it’s a fundamental part of the productivity experience; we think the ribbon will be very much the same in 10 years.”
Office 2010 extends the ribbon to all the applications and it does an excellent job of it. It also introduces the option to customise the ribbon completely, which should mollify most remaining critics.
The Office menu, which replaced the File menu in Office 2007 is in turn replaced by the Backstage menu which combines useful tools and settings once found in a variety of dialog boxes in one handy place, including file properties, previews of file templates, print preview, advanced printer settings and options for sharing files (by methods such as e-mail, SharePoint or Excel services) and packaging presentations.
Expect the look of Backstage to evolve as it currently takes up rather more space than necessary for many of the features it includes.
Otherwise, the interface of Office 2010 is generally cleaner and more efficient than the previous version, using the space better and presenting appropriate commands more intelligently.
Microsoft has gone back to basics on the core application features such as text formating, copy and paste, printing and integration between the different applications says Mr Bryant, noting that around 20 per cent of all commands used in Office are about copying and pasting.
“The long-term mission of Office is really to deliver that best productivity experience. We spent more energy and more time implementing those essentials and making sure they work the way people expect.”
Integration includes making more features common across applications. Some of that is playing catch-up. PowerPoint 2010 can now compare and merge presentations the way Word lets you compare and merge versions of a document.
But new features such as a preview that helps you pick the right format for pasting information such as tables, instant translations and tools for editing photos inside applications (adjusting the brightness, contrast and colour tone or adding Photoshop-style artistic effects) are in almost all the Office programs.
PowerPoint has basic video editing tools; they don’t replace sophisticated video editing software but if you only need to adjust the contrast or brightness and select a section to play then being able to do it all in your presentation will save a lot of time.
PowerPoint also gets the first connection to the cloud: you can embed videos from online services such as YouTube into slides and upload your presentation to the PowerPoint Live service, send the URL to participants at different companies and control the presentation in their browsers (which can be Firefox or Safari as well as Internet Explorer).
Excel’s new sparklines place mini-charts into tables, highlighting trends and key figures more clearly and new Slicer tools make it easier to explore large PivotTables and PivotCharts.
Outlook has Quick Steps and Mail Tips to streamline common tasks and help you avoid common mistakes, plus a very welcome Ignore tool for dropping out of e-mail conversations that take on a life of their own. Word gets an improved navigation pane for browsing and searching within long documents.
Useful as they are, these features are not compelling reasons to upgrade and that underlines the fact that this is very much a preview version (although it’s robust enough to do real work with).
It doesn’t include the Office Web applications (available as a preview in August) or the new version of SharePoint (expected in beta in October) that will enable collaboration between document authors and allow businesses to host the web apps themselves, suggesting Microsoft still has a lot of work to do.
The real test will come when businesses can evaluate whether the collaborative tools and web apps deliver Mr Bryant’s claim of “the best productivity experience across the PC, phone and browser”.
Most collaboration today is what he calls “linear”: using e-mail to send documents. “Today, not many people co-author in real time, but we think it will be a fundamental expectation of the future.”
Both the desktop and web applications will allow real-time collaboration, and Word will allow desktop and web users to work on the same document; Microsoft is also promoting its note-taking app, OneNote, as a collaborative tool for both storing and sharing information.
Similarly most people expect to use a PC (usually their own) to edit documents but that attitude is changing: “The freedom to work from anywhere is becoming a fundamental expectation.”
For Office to remain a key business tool, Microsoft has to judge those expectations correctly and satisfy them on the platforms business users care about.
The Office web apps need to deliver the same rich features and formats as desktop Office programs rather than the basic tools of most web apps today.
Businesses will welcome the flexibility of hosting the web applications on their SharePoint servers at no extra charge and making those available through an extranet. But apart from the promise that the web apps will be included in the Office Professional Pro edition for enterprise and free to consumers and small business users through the Live service, Microsoft hasn’t finalised business models or what collaboration will be possible across these kind of boundaries.
Those issues will be as important as the features in the desktop or the web apps.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
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