September 27, 2005

Gartner sees Office 12 migrations happening in 2008, and calls IBM Workplace "far more real today"

Microsoft's Office 12 is the next version of its Office System product, and some more details were unveiled at their Professional Developers Conference in September 2005. Some of the fancy new features will be a slick new user interface, a new document format based on XML, some content, document and records management features, as well as document workflow functionality, based on WWF, the new Windows Workflow Foundation. Many of these new features are extremely interesting, but technical details were not unveiled. The actual product with these features (and it would be no suprise if some of these features were changed or cancelled along the way) will not ship before the end of 2006.

In the Gartner analysis "Consider Microsoft's Office 12 Plans, but with Caution", they conclude that releasing some details of these many powerful and positive enhancements so far in advance of the actual delivery of the product may freeze the market for competitors, and this would be a pity. You should be cautious with your Office 12 plans because:

  • what you saw and heard at PDC may not be what you get,
  • Office 12 delivery may slip well into 2007,
  • if your business relies on Microsoft technology, you will also be upgrading operating systems, databases, middleware, content management tools, ... to the latest versions of Microsoft's software, which will be delivered between now and the end of 2006. Some of these software upgrades may also imply additional hardware upgrades. Gartner expects that many companies will not be in a position to roll out Office 12 before 2008 because of this.
  • pricing and licensing details were (deliberately ?) not revealed, which makes cost-of-ownership calculations and comparisons a bit difficult ;-)
  • the PDC announcement did not refer to new features based on Groove Networks' technology, except for collaboration based on Groove's Virtual Office, but it would be a shame if Microsoft did not exploit more of Groove in Office 12

Although Microsoft will provide planning guides for the implementation of and migration to Office 12, it may be worthwhile - according to Gartner - to look at Office System alternatives such as IBM Workplace. Gartner calls Workplace "far more real today" than Office 12, as IBM is shipping Workplace Services Express and other Workplace products, and will be steadily enhancing its offering before the launch of Office 12. Workplace will also be OpenDoc-compliant, and is getting more and more collaboration features from Lotus Notes. Thank you Ed Brill for constantly telling us how great Lotus Notes is ...

More information about Office 12 can be found at the "The future of Microsoft Office" site, while you can find more information about its major commercial competitor at IBM's Workplace page. Another interesting commercial competitor is StarOffice, Sun's own collection of word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing and database applications, which is the first product to support the OpenDocument XML-based file format, and is now in its version 8.

Posted by Patrick Van Renterghem at September 27, 2005 06:23 PM
Comments