Report: Office 2007 demand 'healthier than thought'

There is quite a bit of difference of opinion as to when and whether business users should upgrade to Windows Vista, but Office 2007 isn't suffering from the same fate.

According to Forrester Research (which has really been cranking out the studies in the past few days), businesses are deploying Office 2007 at a rapid clip. More than 40 percent of the 259 IT decision makers in North America and Western Europe that Forrester surveyed already have deployed Office 2007.

"The adoption of Office 2007 appears a lot healthier than what people thought," said Kyle McNabb, principal researcher for the study. "Lots of enterprises are adopting it with Service Pack 1."

Other findings from Forrester's "The State Of Microsoft Office 2007 Desktop Adoption" study (which is only available to subscribers to Forrester's research service):

• The majority of those surveyed plan to deploy Office 2007 within the next 12 months (21 percent immediately, 43 percent within 6 months and 29 percent within 12 months)
• SharePoint Server 2007 is being deployed at almost identical rates and often in tandem with Office 2007.
• Of those surveyed, 43 percent said Office 2007 rollouts were tied to upgrades in PC hardware
• *The release of Office 2007 SP1 "removed a hurdle keeping many from moving forward in calendar year 2007."

According to conventional wisdom, many businesses prefer to deploy new versions of Windows and Office at the same time to reduce costs associated with upgrading to a new release. With Windows Vista and Office 2007, however, that rule doesn't seem to be holding true. As part of the findings of a different survey released earlier this week, Forrester has found business adoption of Vista to be sluggish, with adoption of Vista by enterprises growing "a little more than five percentage points during 2007 to end at 6.3%.

(Microsoft doesn't break out for public consumption the percentage of Vista sales that have gone to businesses vs. consumers.)

I asked McNabb whether any IT pros surveyed as part of this study expressed any ambivalence about waiting for Office 14 vs. upgrading to Office 2007. After all, Office 14 is still rumored to be a 2009 release. McNabb said those who were weighing this choice were "very much in the minority," a fact he attributed to "Microsoft telling many customers not to expect major changes in the desktop with Office 14."

And what about Google Apps? Any IT pros surveyed looking seriously at a completely Google-hosted alternative to Office 2007? "Enterprises are looking at Open Office and Google, but they are not yet looking to move to them," McNabb said. "Less than one percent are giving any real fuel to (Microsoft) alternatives."