Office 2007 a slow burner for businesses

Three-quarters of businesses plan to wait at least three years before upgrading to the newly launched Microsoft Office 2007, according to new research from Forrester.

The report, Office Productivity Software Trends: 2007 And Beyond, questioned 118 companies in Europe and the US about their future office software plans.

Of those using Microsoft Office just over half (52 per cent) are still on Office 2003, with many enterprises only having completed that upgrade in the last 18 months and 74 per cent saying they plan to wait three to five years before moving to Office 2007.

That supports the verdict of silicon.com's CIO Jury last year, which found most businesses plan to wait at least two years before upgrading to Office 2007.

Just over a quarter of businesses (26 per cent) say they would consider alternatives to Microsoft such as Google and Openoffice.org because of concerns with licensing costs and the new look and feel of Office 2007. Survey respondents indicated Office 2007 could be too difficult for employees to learn and that it could have a negative impact on productivity.

For future innovation almost all the survey respondents expect Microsoft to be the leader, closely followed by Google ahead of more traditional enterprise vendors such as Adobe, IBM and Sun.

The Forrester report said: "Google's approach to office productivity not only has the attention of enterprises, it's also a real, long-term threat to Microsoft's office productivity dominance. Google's model focuses on influencing consumer expectations and the firm hopes that consumers will influence enterprise IT buyer behaviour."

The current debate over Opendocument file format standards is also of little concern to CIOs when making decisions on office productivity suites, with one respondent from a financial services company saying: "The news is entertaining but we're not changing direction just for a file format."