Tag Archives: office

May 11 2015

Strategies for replacing Microsoft Office

In my previous blogpost I discussed why Microsoft is still so dominant in the productivity software space and why it is hard to move to alternative office products. However, if you are still considering to replace MS Office, here is how to do it:

Commitment

The most important point is management commitment. Don’t be naive, it will be a hard process and without the full support from the management up to the CEO, this project will fail. IBM, my former employer tried to save MS Office licenses in favour for IBM’s own product Symphony and later for Apache OpenOffice. When thinking of 400.000 IBMers, internal communication could have easily been moved to the Open Document Format, however, this effort never had the buy in of the upper management. Although Office licenses were restricted strongly and you were required to run a complex exception process to get one, most management still produced PowerPoints and Excel files. Internal tools were still developed as Excel macros and it sooner or later became a real pain if you would not have Microsoft Office installed. My personal opinion is that the missing commitment from management was the main reason why they gave up on this mid 2014 and purchased Office licenses again.

Introduce an internal file format standard

Establish ODF as the one and only accepted internal standard for editable files. For non-editable files, PDF should be the way to go. Also for sharing files with externals, as long as they don’t need to be edited, use PDF. Provide your corporate templates in the new format.

Stop developing Excel macros

Get your developer on board and provide education how to start developing in your new productivity tool suite. Regardless if it is Apache OpenOffice or LibreOffice (or any other alternative), they all come with a more or less powerful scripting language to fulfill most requirements. If it is worth migrating existing Excel macros to the new platform depends on how many and how complex they are. Maybe they can still live in Excel until they are sunset anyway.

Provide education to your users

In the very end it is all about user acceptance. The better they get educated, the higher chances are they accept the new platform. Don’t underestimate this point, from a cost perspective this might be the biggest portion of the project!

Consider web based solutions

Give your end users new functionality by moving towards the web. There are alternatives out on the market (Google, IBM Docs, Zoho, ….). Maybe these new possibilities attract your users.

I am sure, there are a lot more points to consider, but without the ones mentioned above, I am pretty sure such a project will fail. Please feel free to join the conversation on Twitter via @emarcusnet!

Apr 17 2015

Why is Microsoft Office still so dominant?

If you think about productivity tools, Microsoft Office is the product it is all about. Even the term Office is used as a synonyme for productivity tools and competitive products use it in their name (LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Softmaker Office, etc…).

At least there are competitive products available, and there always were. Actually the grounds of productivity tools was once prepared by Lotus with its 1-2-3 spreadsheet calculation tool accompanied by AmiPro and Freelance to form the Lotus SmartSuite. But Microsoft soon took over this market with Word, Excel and Powerpoint and kept it tight since then. Allthough Microsoft Office is rich on functions, the alternative players can provide what 99% of users require, so

why is Microsoft Office still so predominant?

In the recent years I saw a number of projects with the goal to replace Microsoft Office. But none of them declared victory over Redmond’s cashcow. Here are some reasons why:

Compatibility

None of the competitive tools achieved a decent file format compatibility. Meaning, when exchanging documents with Microsoft Office users, the layout, tables, etc… often get misplaced making the document look differently then the original. Allthough import/export filters for the older binary based Microsoft formats (like .doc, .xls and .ppt) made progress over the years, the new XML based formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) are again quite a hurdle.

I would see this as the main reason for failing user acceptance.

Excel macros

Don’t underestimate the number of application like Excel macros which are out in the world and sometimes vital to companies. I saw enterprises running critical reports based on Excel macros. Those macros can be complex, reading input data from various sources etc… To migrate them to another platform is a project of its own and even if possible ruins every serious cost case.

Integration

A lot of 3rd party tools provide connectors to Microsoft Office. This could be an Outlook plugin or the possibility to produce an Excel sheet as the result of a query, etc. For alternative office tools such integrations are often missing.

User acceptance

Finally, the employees are used to the Microsoft products from home / school / previous jobs -make them use an alternative usually costs high education and motivation efforts.

In my next blopost I will talk about strategies that could be considered when attempting to move away from Microsoft Office to an alternative product.