The other day, I posted about the release of Office 2010. The comments got me wondering why companies don't upgrade more frequently.
Dan's company, for instance, is just about to jump onto Office 2007 after stewing in Office 2002 for the last 8 years. Many of you are still using Office 2003.
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The way I figure it, most companies don't upgrade because of one reason: The IT Department. That's right….I said it. IT Departments. Of course, I can back this up with lots of anecdotal (he said – she said) evidence.
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Let's do a simple exercise. Let's go into the mind of an IT Portfolio manager.
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(cue the dream sequence music…ala Wayne's World)
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Microsoft Office 2010 is coming out with tons of great features. This version will make make our Office Documents more secure and will integrate with our beloved SharePoint better than ever before. (IT folks love their SharePoint).
Financially speaking, we can upgrade easily. Given our super-duper Microsoft Enterprise Licensing agreement, our costs will be minimal.
On the other hand, we do have over 4000 users – and they are IT morons.
If we push out a new version of Office, they'll complain, they'll screw up the install, they'll flood the Help-Desk with calls saying moronic things like "my Excel crashed the Firewall".
And who knows how SAP, Essbase, Hyperion, and the other corporate applications will handle the new version of Office? In the end, the benefits don't outweigh the risks. No upgrade this year.
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(cue the coming out of dream sequence music)
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So there you are. You, as the IT Portfolio Manager, have just talked yourself out of upgrading Microsoft Office for another version. And it's my belief that this entire thought process happens faster than you can say 'Mountain Dew and Sunflower Seeds'. No meetings needed.
So as developers do we continue to support Excel 2000-2003 because the corporations still use it, or move on to (or add) support for Excel 2007+ because individuals are upgrading?
JP: I always develop for the least common denominator (to a reasonable point). That is, I won't develop for Excel 2000 because very few people are on that. But since 40% of my audience is still on Excel 2003, I'll develop for that.
Thankfully, Microsoft does a fairly good job at backwards compatibility, so all my solutions work with Excel 2007 and Excel 2010 (Beta).
I agree that IT drags their heels on upgrades At work I'm stuck with using IE 6 woohoo! So, I guess I should be grateful for Office 2003 (but still want more!)
In our company there are many custom applications built on Excel or which leverage Excel. We have been slow to upgrade to 2007 because of the very real potential for broken applications. Unfortunately, this environment leads to us piloting 2007 even as 2010 is getting ready to roll-out.
IE6 is another example were we rolled-out much later than everyone else becuase some of our web-based apps were incompatible with IE7. It took a while to get them up to snuff.
How's this for a view of the world. We still our on Windows XP/Office 2003. Just got a new laptop. The Windows Start menu is forced to "Windows Classic" — any attempted registry hacks to get to the Windows XP type start menu are automatically reversed on the next boot up. I contacted our CEO directly (no small feat in a 5000+ employee organization, but happened to have met him the week before). His response, "We needed a standard menu so our desktop support staff who access machines remotely have a standard look to deal with." My return question "So why didn't you pick the newer 'XP Start Menu'?" Interestingly, I got no response back.
So why don't companies upgrade? Because IT staff don't want to learn new things.
Having just gone through an Office 2007 upgrade for 2,000 users, I offer my insights. MS decided to fundamentally change the UI in 2007 – so people need to be trained. MS decided to tinker with VBA so it's not fully compatible, so we need to help users upgrade their own "home grown" code (as well as code written by "IT professionals"). Corporate apps that integrate with Office need to be regression tested. Hardware spec required to run 2007 is higher – so some hardware needs to be replaced.
All these extra steps take time and money (lots of money…) There is a tipping point when the benefits of the new product outweighs the costs of upgrading, but it's hard to justify significant upgrade costs in the current financial climate.
No, no ,no, you've got it wrong. The reason we don't upgrade is that we're afraid it will be more efficient than what we've got. IT professionals have a vested interest in specifying dreadful software as it keeps us in work supporting it.
The real truth is that most companies have no idea what would make their employees more productive, because no one asks the employees that question.
Therefore, not upgrading Office in a perverse way makes sense.
Hey, whats wrong with Office 2000? So what if we can not open documents from clients? Although I have heard it whispered in the halls that (gasp) we might get Office 2003 sometime in the future. Office 2000 has worked for ten years why change now? No, this is not a joke.
Ouch! I thought only my company hated it's IT department…guess it's universal. BTW, our 'hatemail' (i.e. HelpDesk) is BECAUSE we upgraded to Vista, then 7, and Office 2007 (then 2010). I've had more than one complaint about how 'Vista' made Excel do 'this or that'…thank goodness for Dilbert and DataPig!
If it ain't broke don't fix it.
You, as the IT Portfolio Manager, either need an education or to be fired.
If your organization has an "IT Portfolio Manager" then you probably have some sort of enterprise agreement with Microsoft and are paying for all the new technology.
We're going through an upgrade to Win7 from XP and server 2008 R2 from 2003. I am the lead business user on the project. We recently had an entire day session with MS staff that showed many of the new technologies. Our IT people seriously had their eyes opened as to how MS technology has progressed in the last decade.
MS has some very powerful and efficient tools that will let you run all your old junk in virtualized mode that will keep things separate from any newer applications. Most of the time the user wouldn't even know anything is different from a local application.
Business users can and should stand up and demand access to 10 years' worth of improved functionality. Call your IT people's bluff.
We waited because of all the security holes . Big news flash, they are endless security holes.
Ivan, Lu, we're still on IE6 too!
I think it's in part due to the reasons outlined in the post, about corporate applications. I work for a bank so I guess the Technology group is a little more risk averse (no sniggering at the back about banks and risk please!), and the headache of maintaining or ensuring the smooth upgrade to all the various integrated applications.
a) "no significant" benefits (features)
Make a list of 10 things that can be done in 2007/2010 that simply cant be done in 2003(native features+VBA)
On the other hand there are many things that can be done in the lower versions that cant be done in higher versions.
b) Reduced Office productivity
The new UI in 2007/2010 – offers reduced levels of productivity to Excel users who have used excel for more than 5+ years
With every new release of Excel from Excel 97 to Excel 2003 – MS would publish a "white paper" on improved office "productivity" – They stopped doing that from office 2007
c) Inadequate User Testing
Any product out of MS needs SP3 to reach a certain level of stability, something that happens only after 3 years of launch
d)Increased demand on Hardware
Sam: SP3?! You've got to have a Service Pack 3 to consider a Microsoft Product? Wow…that's tough.
What do you expect from an IT manager, who is not even interested in testing Office 2010? "We could as well skip a version, we don't have to install everything." was his comment.
The new multimedia capabilities of PowerPoint 2010 would be a big improvement for our daily business, with one or more videos in every presentation. But we experienced huge problems with SAP and Hyperion in combination with Excel 2007 when we upgraded in late 2008.
So how do you balance creativity and bookkeeping and a hesitant IT manager?
I think when your company has taken a beating due to the recession, you prioritize your IT budget into critical projects and non-critical projects. Upgrading 10,000 users from Excel 2003 to 2007 (even if it's done in phases) at a cost of $240 per user equals $2.4 million and management simply isn't going to spend that type of money on non-critical IT.
Mike.
Excel 2007 SP0 – Came with the famous "Display(Calculation)" bug.
Fixed in SP1
Just google for "list of issues fixed in Office 2007 SP2"
There is a xl file which gives list of 237 bugs fixed.
There are some shockers
a) "Remove Duplicates" on a range of cells misses some duplicate string values"
b) "Fast scrolling using the mouse wheel can crash Excel"
c) "When an AutoFilter is created on an entire row, data in rows hidden by the AutoFilter gets deleted when entire rows around the data are deleted."
By SP3 a product is almost Ready for Production
I find it interesting that when companies (and people too) purchase Excel (and the whole office suite) that they never fully use it to it's full capabilities before Microsoft wants you to move to the next office version. Excel is feature rich yet you can get to using everything.
This single supplier of market dominance requires you get a new operating system and therefore must get (at an additional cost) the lastest version of office to "complement" it. As it turns out Windows XP was better than Vista. Officer 2002 / 2003 what a difference a year makes. Not….
Mike, I missed the fact that the major software developers had employed you to evangelise their marketing strategy!
Has it never occurred to you that some companies might actually do a benefits analysis, and once they have decided on the costs; identified the benefits; identified those benefits that are real; identified the benefits that actually affect their business; identified the migration strategy and impact; they the make a rational decision that maybe it just doesn't make sense.
I would argue that it made no sense for any company to upgrade to Office 2007, especially in the last 18 months since 2010 was on the horizon.
I would argue that for many companies, Excel 2000 is still a highly viable Excel version.
@Sam, you forgot the disappearing range names in 2007, that cost me a lot of work.
Bob: I hear you. But at some point, does it not become unacceptable to deny employees 10 years worth of productivity and efficiency improvements?
Our company just upgraded everyone to Vista in the last couple of months. Yep, we're on a platform that Microsoft doesn't even support anymore (of course, we were on XP right before that – another unsupported platform). There are whisperings that we MIGHT go to Office 2010 by mid-year (we're on 2007). Although, as Bob (Phillips) said, I don't think anyone has analyzed the 'changes' that will affect us. It's going to be interesting…
Not always IT fault. We're still using Access 97. Upgraded to Office 2002 a couple of years ago and this year we upgraded to 2003 to use the XML functionality to interoperate with our enterprise system. But still using Access 97 because someone validated Access 97. Things are heavily regulated in the biotech industry and software is one of them. Software and their versions undergo a validation process to demonstrate that each function works consistently and reproducibly. Change management paperwork must be routed for approvals prior to validation, which has its own approval process. So it's an expensive and time consuming process to upgrade. Not necessarily IT to blame…