Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog

Stats on Usage of Microsoft Office and Rival Productivity Suites

2008-11-18T19:44:20-08:00

Blogger: Guy Creese

At the end of the first week in November I submitted a report on alternatives to Microsoft Office (e.g., Corel WordPerfect, Google Apps, IBM Lotus Symphony, OpenOffice.org, Sun StarOffice, ThinkFree, and Zoho) to Burton's Editing group. It's entitled, "Productivity Suite Proliferation: Is It Time to Ditch Microsoft Office?" and should be out in the next several months.

Every corporation needs to make up its own mind, but I came across some interesting stats that give a picture of current usage. A press release issued on November 14 by Clickstream Technologies entitled, "Study finds Google Docs Struggles to Gain Foothold in Productivity Suite Market Dominated by Microsoft," says,

From May to November 2008, ClickStream Technologies' standing panel of adult U.S. internet users showed that use of free productivity applications such as Google Docs and OpenOffice remains low, while Microsoft Office is in use by over 50% of adult U.S. internet users and shows no signs of declining popularity.1

Of all free productivity applications observed, OpenOffice (a client application) was the most popular, in use by 5% of all users. OpenOffice also had the heaviest and highest frequency of use among free apps, with an average of 548 clicks performed and 8.7 days of use per user.

Google Docs (a web-based application) was the 2nd most popular free productivity app, used by 1% of users. Google docs also had the lightest use of all productivity apps, with an average of 40 actions performed in the app (compare with 548 in OpenOffice and 1,797 in Microsoft Word), and the fewest average days used during the 6-month period. Although 1% of users had Gears installed on their machine, there was no evidence of its use in conjunction with Google Docs, nor did any user click on “Offline” or “Get Google Gears now” in their Docs account.

Of all participants who used Google Docs or Google Spreadsheets during the study, 68% also used Word at least once, indicating that Google Docs has yet to be considered a stand-alone product by most of its users. By contrast, only 26% of OpenOffice users also used Word during the 6-month study. Although Google Docs and Spreadsheets has been touted as a potential competitor to the Microsoft Office Suite, OpenOffice is currently the more likely app to take that position, possibly indicating the value of offline and local processing enabled by installed applications.

The Roadmap of SaaS: That Is, the Map of Roads

2008-11-18T11:29:54-08:00

Blogger: Guy Creese

Today I was in Rotterdam, where I discussed the roadmap and vision of SaaS at the first European SaaS Conference. I must admit that as I was putting the presentation together several months ago I was a bit stumped on how to talk about the SaaS roadmap--it sort of wanders all over the place, with different application arriving at different times. For example, SaaS-based web conferencing and SaaS-based web analytics came out in 1995 and 1996, and so have now been around for over a decade, while SaaS-based document sharing solutions arrived only several years ago. All of a sudden, it came to me--while the destinations were all over the place, the roads weren't. I needed to describe the roads themselves: the map of roads. Once I thought of the problem that way, it became very clear. There are three stages of roads:

Gravel Road: 1993-1999--During this time, hardy pioneers were blazing new trails--startups were looking for a way to break into a market and SaaS (called ASP at the time) was an attention-grabbing hook. Meanwhile, on the customer side, enterprise departments were looking for a software alternative. However, there were no real customization/configuration capabilities.
Highway: 2000-2006--At this point, SaaS started to go mainstream. Departments (e.g., HR, Sales, Marketing) began using SaaS because sometimes it was a better solution than software and they could buy it faster than software. At the same time, the vendor attitude of "You can have any color you want as long as it's black" attitude started to soften, with suppliers starting to allow some customization via configuration settings.
Superhighway: 2007+--Today, SaaS is accepted as a delivery model and being exploited. Large vendors are buying up SaaS providers and enterprises are starting to look at migrating significant portions of their business to SaaS (e.g., e-mail). Also, SaaS is now being viewed as a platform.

The conference had some big players in attendance--IBM, Iron Mountain, KPMG, Microsoft, and Salesforce.com were there; Google was supposed to present, but backed out at the last minute.

GroupWise 8 Released: Time, Task, and Contact Management

2008-11-17T13:13:10-08:00

Blogger: Bill Pray

Novell released GroupWise 8 today. While IBM and Microsoft dominate the e-mail market, Novell GroupWise has held a loyal customer base for many years. This release has some new features that the Novell loyalists should enjoy.

While Novell touts this release as being a "benchmark for Web 2.0-Enabled Collaboration", the most intriguing enhancements in this release are the ones for time, task, and contact management. E-mail clients tend to be where information workers "live" when it comes to desktop applications. Even with the explosive growth of social networking, team workspaces, feed readers, and new work models driven by the incoming Gen Y workforce, most information workers still spend a significant amount of time in e-mail.

In time management, the iCal standard continues to make headway as the major vendors embrace and implement it. GroupWise 8 includes subscribe and publish capabilities. Also implemented is the Internet Free/Busy part of the iCal standard, providing the ability for users to publish their free/busy information to a URL. In the past, it has been virtually impossible to share calendar and free/busy information across organizations without significant IT intervention to implement connectors between systems. Most information workers still resort to the telephone in order to schedule meetings that include attendees from different organizations.

One other very useful feature added to the GroupWise calendar is the ability to display two time zones on the calendar. This makes it easier for users traveling and working across time zones to manage meetings.

GroupWise 8 also provides "light" project management capabilities. E-mail clients replaced the paper planners of the 1980s with combined calendar and task functions. But the task management features have lagged in development in the e-mail client - mostly consisting of lists tied to the calendar. By adding "light" project management capabilities - subtasks, percentage complete tracking, the ability to create project "home" views in the client - GroupWise 8 provides users a functional tool for personal project management.

Phil Karren, a Novell product manager, summarizes his research findings on contact management and executives by saying "contacts are their currency." For executives, contacts inside and outside organization, as well as personal and business, are important to their success. E-mail clients absorbed the independent software contact management capabilities delivered in the 1990s and became a key technology for users to track and maintain their relationships. The enhancements in contact management in GroupWise 8 provide the ability to add numerous e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, photo, and physical addresses. The contact's free busy URL can be added for easy free/busy search. Physical addresses can be displayed in maps from popular mapping sites. Perhaps the most useful feature is the contact history, which provides a log of all interactions with that particular contact as captured in the e-mail client.

Novell's claim regarding "Web 2.0-Enabled Collaboration" is based on enhancements for Web 2.0 connections in GroupWise 8 that include an embedded web browser, RSS feed support, and integration with Novell's Teaming + Conferencing.

Some other points to note in this release:

The upcoming end of life for Netware is forcing many GroupWise customers to move their implementations to Linux or Windows servers - or consider replacing GroupWise with another solution. Any upgrade plan to GroupWise 8 needs to include plans to move to Linux or Windows for the servers.

Novell is still working on the future of GroupWise Mobile Server. Novell OEM's the solution from Nokia. Nokia has announced that it is discontinuing the product. Nokia has committed to maintaining the software for another couple of years, but Novell will need to find a replacement.

Integration with third party solutions continues to be a challenge for GroupWise. Several partners have stepped in and provide integration solutions spanning CRM, social networking (notably Facebook), team workspaces (notably SharePoint), and mobile devices (notably iPhone).

Google Search Appliance Now Available as a VM

2008-11-11T06:18:14-08:00

Blogger: Guy Creese

You can now download a free virtual machine version of the Google Search Appliance (GSA) from the Google Code site. The download notes point out:

The Google Search Appliance virtual edition is targeted for development and trial use, and not for production use. To that end:

This is a software download
The number of documents crawled and indexed is limited to 50,000
Developers can test against the features of the Google Search Appliance

The FAQs point out, "You can download Google Search Appliance virtual edition software onto any server that is supported by VMWare virtualization." Interesting that it doesn't support the Microsoft virtual machine environments.

While developers will find the VM version useful, companies thinking about/curious about a GSA should also try it out. It's a way to kick the tires of the product without going into full trial mode with a sales rep.

Google Continues to Be Both Stupid and Smart

2008-11-08T11:56:01-08:00

Blogger: Guy Creese

Google is an odd mix of being both stupid and smart. The most recent example of stupid was shown in a recent article in PCWorld entitled, "Salesforce.com and Google Execs Blast Oracle, SAP, MS":

Girouard [Dave Girouard, Google Enterprise VP] also had choice words for traditional enterprise software vendors, saying that they haven't learned from the successes of Web-based software for consumers, and are thus failing to meet the expectations of those same consumers when they go to work.

"There's an amazing disconnect between the innovation and user experiences delivered in the consumer world and the stagnant, unenlightened world of enterprise computing that puts the user experience far in the background and focuses on business process," he said.

Uh, let me get this straight. Girouard is saying that competing vendors are stupid for supporting business processes such as role-based administration and records management for documents? (Both of which Google Apps doesn't offer, I might add). The enterprise clients I talk to certainly don't share Google's view. Yes, they appreciate good usability, but that includes not having to save each Google Apps document to their C drive if they want to control it via a records management system.

You see a remark like Dave's and it makes you wonder if Google will ever be successful at selling anything more than search appliances to enterprises--and then you see them do something smart like adding Google Analytics to Google Apps. This new feature allows Google Apps administrators to see how users are interacting with the online documents--which ones are most popular, and which ones aren't. This can be an important thing to know if everyone is supposed to be reading a major company announcement--and they aren't. This understanding of crowd behavior is something that software suites can't offer, and does make Google Apps more useful than software-based legacy applications. Rather than doing negative campaigning, Google should be marketing what it does well--and Google Analytics within Google Apps is one of those things.

Oracle Buys Intellectual Property Assets of Tacit Software

2008-11-03T13:20:13-08:00

Blogger: Mike Gotta

Interesting - while Tacit was never a broad-based success on the market, it was considered unique in its underlying discovery, correlation and brokering engine. The acquisition should augment the capabilities Oracle had acquired from BEA regarding its Pathways product. I would imagine that ultimately - the assets will find their way into products other than Beehive - namely WebCenter (given its focus on Enterprise 2.0).

Enhances Oracle Beehive with Expertise Location Capabilities

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif – Nov 3, 2008
News Facts

Today Oracle announced that it has acquired the intellectual property assets of Tacit Software.
Tacit Software’s unique automated profiling technology is an expertise location solution that helps organizations uncover new opportunities for collaboration.
Oracle plans to integrate Tacit Software into Oracle Beehive, a secure, integrated, standards-based enterprise collaboration platform.
The combined solution is expected to enable enterprises to make effective and immediate use of the knowledge present in their people, messaging and content.
Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

Oracle Buys Intellectual Property Assets of Tacit Software

SharePoint Zeitgeist: Caution Before Proceeding

2008-11-03T06:55:45-08:00

Blogger: Craig Roth

Here's a quick pointer to a good article on the status of SharePoint in the enterprise by J. Nicholas Hoover of InformationWeek. Over the past year there has been a noticeable shift in the SharePoint zeitgeist. Before that SharePoint mostly flew under the radar while word of mouth and Microsoft events and press releases touted its ease of use and popularity. Now it's been picked up on radar and is being examined more closely. I have had several conversations with the IT press writing articles such as Hoover's that describe pros and cons, question its abilities, or warn against wandering into it without thinking. Another good example is "Microsoft SharePoint popularity comes with issues" by John Fontana of NetworkWorld. Our SharePoint workshops at Burton Group continue to be filled by attendees that want a more objective view of SharePoint's good and bad points than can be found in inexpensive seminars by Microsoft partners. And our clients continue to ask us these questions on a regular basis. All of this points to a shift in the way SharePoint is being examined.

I want to point out these articles are cautionary in tone, not negative. The frequency with which you see common sense advice being applied to SharePoint (understand it, plan, manage your resources, pay attention to governance, avoid or shore up its weak points, etc.) reflects the hurried, ad hoc approach that SharePoint is often deployed with. I'm glad to see that SharePoint is now being tracked by the IT radar so its benefits, of which there are many to go along with its faults, can be exploited by the organizations that are desperately in need of collaboration support. And I hope that the extra introspection and examination step being introduced before deployments encourages organizations to perform due diligence against alternatives from other vendors, some of which they may already have in house, before assuming that the end users cry for SharePoint isn't just a general cry for a simple web-based collaboration or content management solution.

Note: This is a cross-posting from the KnowledgeForward blog

Liferay Social Office, Another Supporter of SharePoint Protocols

2008-10-31T13:32:56-07:00

Blogger: Larry Cannell

Liferay, the makers of the popular open source portal, will soon be releasing a new product called Social Office. This is collaborative workspace product that consists of newly developed features combined with capabilities that were previously offered as portal add-ons. A Liferay Social Office site provides document libraries, team calendars, activity tracking, instant messaging, blogs, wikis, message boards, and announcements.

However, what I find to be the most interesting new feature of Social Office is its support for Microsoft Office. Liferay Social Office will support (as other open source vendors have called it) "the SharePoint protocol.” Specifically, Social Office will support two protocols used by SharePoint: MS-DWSS (Document Workspace Web Services) and Microsoft’s version of WebDAV. Documentation for these (and other) protocols used by SharePoint and desktop Office applications were released by Microsoft earlier this year. I blogged about this a few weeks ago (“Cloning SharePoint” and “What the heck is a SharePoint Protocol?”). In short, support for these two protocols facilitates the use of the “Shared Workspace” pane in Office applications. This enables management of document workspaces from within desktop applications like Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.

Two new vendors supporting a protocol does not make for a trend, but I will be on the lookout for others to follow. Maybe then the argument could be made that MS-DWSS is the POP3 for collaborative workspaces.

How Web 2.0 Is Influencing the Future of Intranets

2008-10-29T07:06:58-07:00

Blogger: Larry Cannell

Last week I participated in our European Catalyst Conference in Prague and it was a wonderful experience. Prague is a fantastic city and the conference was full of good sessions, stimulating conversation, and incredible food.

If you missed it, the video below is a screencast of a session I presented at our North American Catalyst Conference a few weeks earlier.

How Web 2.0 is Influencing the Future of Intranets

“The expectations of tomorrow's workers are being molded today by popular consumer Internet services. These capabilities may not directly translate to enterprise use but will have a strong influence on future products and services. This session explores how today's consumer Internet is impacting the future of intranets.”

You may also view this on YouTube.

Microsoft PDC: It Comes Down to Promise vs. Reality

2008-10-28T01:50:15-07:00

Blogger: Guy Creese

I'm observing Microsoft's PDC Conference at a seven time zone distance (I'm on vacation in London ["on holiday" as they say in the UK] while PDC is taking place in Los Angeles). Microsoft so far is saying the right things--for example, that part of Azure's purpose is to blur the line between software and services. However, the devil is in the details. For example, how seamless will the experience be: for developers, for end users, for buyers (e.g., licensing), and for IT (e.g., monitoring the online and in-house services from a single, unified dashboard). In short, the announcement is heartening for enterprises and their IT departments; however, how Microsoft delivers the reality (e.g., seamlessness and pricing) will make all the difference in the world. Microsoft's current offerings are not seamless (e.g., partners at the moment can't significantly customize SharePoint when it's hosted by Microsoft) and in some cases expensive (e.g., Office vs. every other productivity suite), and continuing along the same lines just won't fly with the clients I talk to.

The announcements I was pre-briefed about under NDA take place today (I think). So I'll have to wait to offer commentary about them. Nevertheless, I would urge you to monitor what Microsoft is saying at PDC. This appears to be the largest coming out party to date for Microsoft's future direction.