What Is Microsoft Office?

Transcription

1 Products, M. Silver, K. Dulaney, S. Hayward Research Note 5 December 2003 Office 2003 Has XML: What Else Is New? Microsoft's Office strategy relies heavily on XML and expanding the definition of what the Office brand means. Aside from enterprises seeking Outlook improvements or planning XML initiatives, users will have to dig to find value. Core Topics Hardware Platforms: Client Platforms Knowledge & Content Mgmt., Collaboration & E-Learning: E-Workplace Systems and Technology Key Issue How will enterprises improve the operational efficiency of their e-workplace infrastructures during the next five years? Microsoft has dominated the market for office automation software for more than five years, and its place in the infrastructure has been one of great importance. Most enterprises have significant investments in macros and applications written to Office interfaces, and the cost to redo everything is significant. However, it has been done before. The same could have been said of Lotus in the early 1990s, yet, slowly but surely, enterprises rewrote all their applications and replaced it with the Microsoft Office suite and Excel. Although the sheer volume of applications dependent on Office is significantly higher, Microsoft still needs to ensure that it avoids a similar fate. Sun Microsystems' StarOffice/OpenOffice.org is trying to become a "good enough" solution with acceptable compatibility and a much lower price point. With the "Microsoft Office System," Microsoft is attempting to engineer a fundamental shift in what Office is and its value to the enterprise. Although we see potential in some features to help ingrain Office in business processes, most end users will see little change. What Is Microsoft Office? This is not as elementary a question as it sounds. Many people still think of Microsoft Office as the suite: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and, sometimes, Access. Some also count Outlook, which is definitely in the suite, but since Outlook licenses are also included in the Exchange Server client access license (CAL), many think of Outlook as being part of Exchange. Adding to that perception is that many users use a different version of Outlook from their version of Office (many people use Office 97 along with Outlook 98 or Outlook 2000). In reality, Microsoft considers Outlook to be a more general-purpose mail client that is part of Office, and it is, indeed, developed by the Office team. Visio and Project have worn the Office logo for several years, and even SharePoint products have technically been part of the Office Gartner Reproduction of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. Gartner shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations thereof. The reader assumes sole responsibility for the selection of these materials to achieve its intended results. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice.

2 family. With this announcement, OneNote, InfoPath and other products are added. So, when Microsoft discusses the Office System, enterprises should not assume that they license it if they have software maintenance on the suite. To understand what products are included in each edition, see x. Of course the real "jewels" in Microsoft Office are the proprietary file formats that keep enterprises locked in. Enterprises have huge inventories of Word, PowerPoint and Excel files, and the level of compatibility offered by competitors has historically been insufficient for most enterprises. Although Microsoft has not made major changes to the main file formats,.doc,.xls,.ppt and.mdb, and compatibility has generally been good since Office 97 (except for Access, which changed format in Access 2000), compatibility is never perfect between versions. During the past six years, Microsoft has continually made minor changes that force enterprises to test their macros and other applications that rely on Office. Small changes Microsoft makes can cause major problems for critical applications, and Microsoft has traditionally done an extremely poor job in helping enterprises identify files that may be affected. Microsoft must do a better job helping enterprises identify files that need to be updated to be compatible with changes in versions of Office. Better documentation would help, but a software tool that automatically examines files and reports which files will have problems and (better yet) what the issues are would be a significant help to enterprises planning to upgrade, because testing is often more problematic than deployment. If Microsoft is successful in getting enterprises to integrate Office further into their business processes, this issue will become a bigger barrier for Microsoft to get users to upgrade. To that end, Microsoft is delivering Solution Accelerators prepackaged applications that use new Office System technologies to address issues like recruiting and the Sarbanes- Oxley Act of XML Is Key in 2003 The most important new feature in Office 2003 is its XML support. The XML features in Office are not exposed or usable by most end users, and this represents a bit of a departure in Microsoft's Office strategy. XML is the major new feature, and it is geared toward enabling business processes, not end users directly; in most cases, it will require significant planning and programming to implement. XML support has been in Excel since Office XP, but, in Office 2003, Microsoft makes XML extensible, adds XML support to Word and adds another product called InfoPath for creating XML-based forms. InfoPath will be included with Volume and Academic releases of Office Professional 5 December

3 Enterprise Edition By adding more XML features to Office, Microsoft is trying elevate the product beyond the horizontal productivity tool that Sun is trying to commoditize and make it a tool that gets ingrained in the business's processes. Enterprises should have a solid plan on what they will use XML for if they choose to implement Office 2003 for these features. (We compare Microsoft's Office XML strategy with Sun's StarOffice XML strategy in "Vendors Take Two Paths to XML-Enabled Office Suites.") Office 2003 Suite Features: Window Dressing? Users looking at the new version of the suite will generally see few differences in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access. New features include a new view in Word for easier reading, and the research task pane. For tablet users, Microsoft is improving ink so it can be placed anywhere instead of requiring frames, and ink is now usable in Office This is a big improvement over the add-in for Office XP, and Tablet users who need to use ink in Office documents should plan to upgrade to Office Microsoft has also added rights management capabilities (see "Microsoft's RMS Won't Immediately Affect Enterprise DRM") to Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook. When combined with Windows 2003 Server and the Rights Management Service (with the Windows Server and a Rights Management Services CAL priced separately), users can limit the ability of others to read, forward, copy or print Office 2003 documents. Users with previous versions of Office can download an Internet Explorer plug-in. Documents sent between enterprises can use Passport credentials against a Microsoft Web site to authenticate and access documents. These levels of complexity may prove challenging for early adopters of the technology. Of course, Windows Rights Management is another way for Microsoft to lock enterprises into Office and collect revenue on yet another CAL. Enterprises must ensure proper configuration to make sure retention complies with legal requirements. Enterprises not interested in XML or rights management and without large Tablet PC deployments will see little reason to upgrade these products. Outlook Microsoft has focused the bulk of its effort on Outlook upgrades, but mostly in operational improvements. Not coincidentally, Outlook is the component that is in most dire need of improvement. Outlook has largely not kept up with user demands for improved mail management tools, spam handling and bandwidth management. New features include better spam 5 December

4 filters, the ability to easily view multiple calendars simultaneously, better views for reading mail, and better performance over low bandwidth. Although the new features are a welcome improvement, there are still some challenges, and we believe Microsoft has not gone far enough. Some low bandwidth performance improvements require Exchange Server 2003, which was delivered simultaneously with Office Exchange upgrades generally require significant planning and testing, so it will be some time before these benefits are realized. The product still lacks flexibility in allowing users to create views with mixtures of the various components. Microsoft's concept of creating virtual folders to show notes in various folders that have a user-defined commonality (key word, subject, sender and so on) is good, but virtual folders cannot span physical files, meaning that notes in both the user's inbox (OST) and offline storage (PST) cannot appear together in one virtual folder. The new junk mail filter looks good when working automatically, but manual methods of blacklisting users and domains are still too cumbersome. For most organizations that use Outlook, Outlook is their workflow system. Minor improvements in productivity can increase overall company productivity enormously. For example, it would be sound to include a policy setting that warned users when they copied more than a certain number of recipients, made it more efficient to convert a message into an appointment, or helped users sending , requesting a response, to track the more closely. It is this area where Microsoft must use its leadership to help companies that are struggling under the e- mail burden a burden that consumes more of an individual's time than probably any other application in use today. Other Pieces Other members of the Office family include OneNote, SharePoint Portal Server and Microsoft's communications servers. SharePoint Team Services is renamed Windows SharePoint Services and is technically part of, and included with, Windows 2003 Server, even though it is integral to Microsoft's Office collaboration strategy. OneNote (see "Microsoft's OneNote Hasn't Found the Music") is designed to fill a gap Microsoft perceives for unstructured notetaking software. OneNote allows free-form note taking, flagging and searching, including type and ink. It also allows voice recordings that get directly tied to the notes the user takes. By 5 December

5 clicking a Smart Tag next to the note, the recording jumps to that point in the conversation. Although OneNote has many compelling features, it also represents yet one more place for users to store their information, and notes cannot be linked to e- mail messages a significant deficiency. It's somewhat ironic that, as Microsoft attempts to add structure to Word, it produces another store for unstructured data. Microsoft's major challenge for OneNote is getting word out about the product. It's the type of product that users don't quite understand when it's described to them, but get very excited about once they see it. Generating trials, especially among knowledge users, will be key to broad adoption. We believe other parts of Office could benefit from some of the interface concepts of OneNote. Microsoft has done significant work on Windows SharePoint Services. The products in the suite, as well as OneNote and InfoPath, all include closer ties to Windows SharePoint Services for improved collaboration, and one of Microsoft's main marketing messages is tied to Windows SharePoint Services. Microsoft needs to eliminate the confusion between the role of Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server and provide guidance for managed deployment of collaboration support, rather than a chaotic explosion of team sites. This issue reflects the larger problem for Microsoft of articulating a strategy to cover the scope of the smart enterprise suite (see "The Future of the Smart Enterprise Suite"). The definition of the Office System is a step forward, but major capabilities, such as Content Management Server and BizTalk, remain distinct and an extended brand is not a substitute for strategic product linkages. Who Should Move, and When Enterprises that can calculate real value from the new features and show a positive return on investment should consider deploying Office Users who are running older versions are encouraged to examine the risk posed by lack of support from Microsoft or independent software vendors for various versions, as Microsoft intends to fully support versions of Office for five years, require extended support contracts to get support during the next two, and totally discontinue support and bug fixes after that (see Figure 1). We discuss this issue in further depth in "Who Should Deploy Office 2003, and When." 5 December

6 Office 97 No Assisted Support or New Hot Fixes Figure 1 Gartner's View of Microsoft's Office Road Map P=0.7 Extended- Office 2000 Support Phase Begins Office XP P=0.7 Office Source: Gartner Research (November 2003) Product Strategy: Increase user lock-in by moving from commodity office automation to an enabler of business processes. Strengths: Installed base of suite XML enablement OneNote (fills gap but needs better integration with other Office products) Integration between applications Digital rights management Challenges: Installed-base intransigence Programming needed to take advantage of XML Too many data stores Office 12 Large-Scale Deployments Begin User backlash over licensing costs No upgrade being available users without maintenance must repurchase at full price Testing necessary to prepare for upgrade being too difficult and expensive 5 December

7 Access to digital-rights-management-protected documents from downlevel clients or between enterprises Ensuring that digital-rights-management-protected documents comply with legal requirements Consider This Product When: Older Office versions are considered too risky because of a lack of support and fear of security breaches. Tablet users need to use ink in Office documents. Rights management features are required for office automation documents and . Outlook users need low bandwidth support (Exchange 2003 required). Consider Alternatives When: Capital costs are considered too high, and users can deal with fewer features or less than 100 percent compatibility consider StarOffice, OpenOffice.org and Corel WordPerfect Suite. The enterprise wishes to prevent further lock-in to or reliance on Microsoft. Microsoft Headquarters: Redmond, Washington Web Location: Founded: 1975 Ownership: Public Bottom Line: Aside from XML features, digital rights management, and improvements to collaboration and Outlook 2003, there's not much new for users in the base Office suite. Many of the new features could be viewed as development tools, and users or IS departments will increasingly need programming ability to extract their benefits. Enterprises running Office XP should plan on skipping Office 2003 unless they have clear plans to write and deploy applications that take advantage of XML features. Enterprises interested in new products that are not included in the suite, like OneNote (and in some cases InfoPath), should evaluate the products, identify likely users, create policies governing adoption, and budget appropriately for licensing, development, deployment and training. 5 December