What does corporate IT think of Office 2010?
While there's enthusiasm for the new version of Office, according to a survey of 950 IT professionals conducted by Dimensional Research, there's no rush to roll it out: Enterprise IT views Office 2010 as a complex and daunting upgrade.
Eighty-five percent of survey respondents plan to upgrade to Office 2010 eventually, but only 18 percent have plans to deploy broadly in 2010. As of now, only 4 percent have Office 2010 fully deployed in their environments, and 52 percent have not deployed it in any way. The rest are deploying Office 2010 on test machines or on new machines only.
A majority of survey respondents (78 percent) cited concerns keeping them from doing a migration this year, with the top concerns being the new ribbon interface, compatibility with current applications and licensing.
"At this time it seems that migration concerns are outweighing confidence of a speedy Office 2010 migration, said Diane Hagglund, senior research analyst for Dimensional Research.
The Ribbon user interface, where a set of toolbars are arranged on tabs across the top of an Office document, was introduced in Office 2007 and enhanced in Office 2010. Still, Office 2003 users remain intimidated by it. According to the survey, 45 percent of respondents are worried about training employees on the new Ribbon interface. Incompatibility with add-in applications was also listed as worrisome by 33 percent of survey respondents. Incompatibility with Office 2003 formats was listed as worrisome by the same amount of respondents, 33 percent.
