MS Office 2007, Vista, and Open Source Home

State of the Market
The Microsoft family of operating system and networking software has a central and integral position in software infrastructure for organizational enterprise - Fortune 1000 companies, government municipalities, healthcare providers and midsized and small businesses. However, the state of technology and internetworking is becoming more increasingly non-Microsoft. Having the knowledge to integrate multiple generations of MS clients with the less expensive UNIX variants and the new generation of Intel based Macintosh processors will be important. Accordingly, the knowledge base and administrative skillset required for effective network administration is becoming more complex.

Reality in the Market
Microsoft launched Vista and Office 2007 to businesses in December 2006. Microsoft promoted the benefits of the joint deployment of Office 2007 and Vista as simplified use, lowered IT costs, and improved security. However, analysis by SYS-ED consultants indicates that in most situations the functional benefits has not justified the costs. Research published by the Gartner Group is consistent with our findings. A majority of organizations are deploying the 2007 Microsoft Office system either prior to or independent of Microsoft Vista.

Significant reasons for migrating to MS Office either standalone or prior to MS Vista include:

• There have been shortcomings with the drivers and certain devices.
• Approximately half of the average business PCs in North America are unable to meet the minimum requirements for the Vista operating system.
• Approximately 90% do not meet the minimum system requirements for Vista Premium requirements, 1GHz processor, 1GB of system memory, and advanced graphics.
• A large number of mobile users who run Exchange for e-mail and run Office XP or earlier versions.
• Current utilization of Windows 97 or 2000 and the requirement to interact with the new Office XML file format.
• Requiring the functionality in the new XML and/or Share Point featureset and capabilities.
• Skipping Microsoft Vista in the near short run and evaluating open source alternatives and the new software as a service medium (e.g. Google Apps).

Microsoft has yet to perfect MS Vista and MS Office 2007 and as of July 2008, they only have a 12% share of the personal productivity suite in a global market. Yet now are being forced to offer a cost-effective SaaS version of Office before Google's personal productivity suite attains maturity.

Microsoft has started to address the competitive threat posed by Google in the collaboration segment. It is a response to the collaboration SaaS being marketed by Google Apps; which is priced at $4 per user per month. Although the e-mail portion of Google Apps has yet to reach critical mass in market share, the consensus among industry technologists is that it is maturing rapidly and will present Microsoft with significant competition within the next several years. And in all likelihood it is a precursor to a larger battleground which will take place with personal productivity software, which is dominated by Microsoft Office.  

MS Office 2007: Key Considerations
In the case of the 2007 Microsoft Office system, a 500MHz processor, 256 MB RAM and 1.5 GB hard disk are minimum requirements that some older PCs won’t have. Software planning is also important, as Microsoft Windows Server 2003 or later, Microsoft Windows XP 5P2 or later and Internet Explorer 6.0 SP or later are required to support migration to the 2007 Microsoft Office system. The 2007 Microsoft Office system is backward compatible with Office 2003 and XP so end users can open and save in the older binary format. Converters are available for Office 2003 or XP users that will allow them to open the XML format.

IT management may want to consider streamlining presentation of the 2007 Microsoft Office system’s features to the subset that  users deem worthwhile.

MS Vista: Key Considerations
Microsoft has discontinued widespread distribution of Windows XP.  As of July 2008, Microsoft has reported having sold 140 million copies of Vista.  However, this is less than 15% of the estimated market of 1 billion worldwide Windows users.  Industry reports are that only 8 percent of North American software developers are currently writing applications that will run on Vista.

Deployment
Microsoft has included installation and deployment tools with Vista. They will be useful for organizations with 100 or fewer workstations. 

For larger organizations there are some excellent third party deployment options; both hardware and software.

MS Office 2007	Deployment Framework	MS Windows Vista

Attrition versus a Complete Migration
For organizations that choose to run a complete migration, the benefits include avoiding the cost and inconvenience of running two versions of MS Office in parallel for the new and older versions and application and file compatibility management between the two. The downside will be the substantial investment in hardware and training.

Attrition-based Migration
For organizations that choose attrition-based migration, the benefits include obviating the large up-front investment. However, two versions of MS Office will then be running in parallel.

Our experience has been that most organizations will choose an attrition-based migration, as the large up-front costs associated with a comprehensive migration will be prohibitive. In addition, a significant number of companies will delay their roll-out of Vista until 2009.

SYS-ED is in the process of establishing baselines for measuring and optimizing performance in Active Directory before and after an upgrade.  Our courses provide up to date information on the next generation of Microsoft software: Office 2007, Vista, Windows 2008 Server, SQL Server 2008, and Exchange Server.