It is easy to forget when we are presented with a piece of software that nothing about it is random. Software does not spring forth fully formed from its developers as Athena did from Zeus; rather, it is the result of years of research, development work, and testing.

It is also easy to overlook the fact that all that work is done by people, not faceless programming automatons. It is the unique personalities and personal goals of these people that shape a product , drive innovation, and impact the end-user experience.

The users of a piece of software, however, typically doesn’t see any of this when they install and run a program. They see features, icons, wizards, and may benefit from upgrades and enhancements in new versions without really understanding – or even thinking about – how these came about.

Microsoft Office has as many as 600 million users worldwide, of which 500 million are properly licensed. That makes it the most widely-used application in the world – and the introduction of a new version can have a significant impact on millions of knowledge workers and how they work.

What we don’t get to hear very often is the perspective of the people involved in creating Office 2010 from the ground up. Microsoft allowed us to talk with its developers in the final months of the development of Office 2010 and we asked them what they did to improve worker productivity and what they were most passionate about.

You can find out what they had to say in Conversations with Microsoft.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.

Imagine a world without the collaborative tools we take for granted today. Decades before the emergence of the Internet and World Wide Web, computer pioneers were building Plato, a system that pioneered chat rooms, e-mail, instant messaging, online forums and message boards, and remote screen sharing. 

When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself. -Plato

Plato (Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations) was the world’s first computer-aided teaching system and it was built in 1960 at Computer-based Education Research Lab (CERL) at the University of Illinois and eventually comprised over 1,000 workstations worldwide. It was in existence for forty years and offered coursework ranging from elementary school to university-level.  

Social computing and collaboration began on Plato in 1973. That year, Plato got Plato Notes (message forums), Talk-o-matic (chatrooms), and Term-talk (instant messaging).  

Plato was also a breeding ground for today’s technology innovators. Ray Ozzie, the creator of Lotus Notes and Microsoft’s chief software architect, worked on the Plato system in the 1970s as an undergraduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Many others including Dave Woolley, who wrote Plato Notes at the age of 17, Kim Mast, who wrote Personal Notes (the e-mail system) in 1974 at the age of 18, and Doug Brown, creator of Talk-o-matic, continued to develop collaborative technologies in their careers.  

Don Bitzer, credited by many as the “father of Plato,” is the co-inventor of the plasma display and has spent his career focusing on collaborative technologies for use in the classroom.  

This week we celebrate Plato’s 50th anniversary. Why a week and not a day? I spoke with Brian Dear, whose book on Plato (The Friendly Orange Glow: The Story of the Plato System and the Dawn of Cyberculture) will be published later this year,told me “[I]t’s hard to pin down an exact date, due to a) it being open to interpretation as to what qualifies as the first day — when the project got green-lighted? when they started designing it? when a system was actually up and running? when they did the first demo? — and b) there’s little lasting documentary evidence from those earliest weeks.”  

“May 1960 was when Daniel Alpert’s interdisciplinary group that had held meetings for weeks about the feasibility of the lab embarking on an automated teaching project, finally submitted its report to Alpert. He read it, thought about it, and decided to ignore the group’s recommendation to not proceed. Instead he asked if a 26-year-old PhD named Don Bitzer wanted to have a go at it, and Bitzer agreed. Consequently, on June 3, Alpert wrote up his own report to the Dean of the Engineering School, which instead of reiterating his group’s recommendation to not go forward with a computer education project, stated that they were indeed going forward. Bitzer went right to work on it, brought in others to help with the hardware and software, and they had a prototype up and running pretty quickly that summer. The rest is history.”  

David M. Goldes is the president of Basex.

Slowly but surely, managers are beginning to realize that facilitating efficient collaboration amongst their legions of knowledge workers is a strategic priority.  While this will certainly come through the deployment of improved knowledge sharing and collaboration tools, few managers know which tools they should consider deploying, so inertia sets in and they make few if any changes.

This is unfortunate because tools that were leading edge five or more years ago simply do not have the type of functionality to support the way we need to work today and in the coming years.

Let’s take word processing, for example.  In many respects, these tools have changed relatively little from the word processing hardware introduced by IBM in the 1960s.  That early hardware supported text entry, editing, and printing, and yet even as more features have been added over time, the way people use word processing tools has changed very little.  A Basex survey in early 2010 revealed that 25% of knowledge workers still print out their documents to compare the comments and edits they get from colleagues.

Today, companies have a choice in their core desktop productivity tools.  Not only does Microsoft offer the now-ubiquitous Office suite (the 2010 version was just released), but Google offers a cloud-based suite and OpenOffice.org offers an open-source solution.

While these three offerings will all competently compose documents, present slides, and crunch some numbers, their capabilities vary greatly when viewed in the context of how knowledge workers actually work.  To dig deeper into the differences between these offerings, we developed an entirely new version of our Knowledge Worker Impact Quotient, a tool we use to help potential users of an offering to understand the potential positive or negative impacts the piece of software might present.  We then applied this analysis to the offerings from Google, Microsoft, and OpenOffice.org, with somewhat surprising results.  There was little difference between the offerings in terms of very basic functionality but once any kind of collaborative or knowledge sharing processes were applied, significant differences became apparent.

Our findings and recommendations are available in two reports, “:What’s New in Microsoft Office 2010″: and “:Three Variations on a Theme: An In-Depth Analysis of Office Suites from Google, Microsoft, and OpenOffice.org”: – online here at http://www.basex.com/2010

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.

…But Were Afraid to Ask

We’re pleased to announce two reports focusing on the office suite and desktop productivity market, coinciding with Microsoft’s launch of Office 2010.

Which suite should I use now?

The reports, “Three Variations on a Theme: An In-Depth Analysis of Office Suites from Google, Microsoft, and OpenOffice.org” and “What’s New in Microsoft Office 2010,”  are intended for the manager who wants to understand the dramatic changes in the office suite market.

The two reports analyze the important new and updated features of Microsoft Office 2010, and compare the suite of applications to Google Apps Premier Edition and the OpenOffice.org Productivity Suite.

The report, What’s new in Microsoft Office 2010, is the industry’s first in-depth look at the new Microsoft Office 2010 suite, which consists of updated and redesigned applications for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, e-mail, mobile work, meetings, and collaborative workspaces.

Three Variations on a Theme: An In-Depth Analysis of Office Suites from Google, Microsoft, and OpenOffice.org, is a complementary report that takes an exhaustive look at these offerings and judges them based on their ability to form the foundations of a Collaborative Business Environment.

We were admittedly hesitant about recommending an upgrade from Microsoft Office 2003 to Microsoft Office 2007 due to high training costs and a lack of a consistent interface and told many companies to skip Office 2007 entirely.

Now we need to examine the move to Office 2010 in an entirely different light.

A few issues managers should consider include:
- What’s really new in Microsoft Office 2010?
- How do the tools found in office suites enhance organization-wide productivity?
- What are the differentiators between the offerings and how will they lower costs, speed time to market, and increase your productivity?
- What are the strengths and weakness of the three office suite offerings?
- Fundamentally, which office suite offering is right for your company?

These two reports are available online to Basex:TechWatch readers at the special introductory price of $299 for the set.  A free executive summary is also available.

David M. Goldes is the president of Basex.

Perhaps it’s because desktop productivity applications such as word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software are so ubiquitous and have been around for so long (relatively speaking) that many people take them for granted.

When will our suite be upgraded?

People have been using computers to process words for decades but the ante has been raised significantly in the past five years, as knowledge workers have come to rely upon basic desktop productivity tools to not only provide basic functionality but to either offer or work in concert with applications that support the levels of knowledge sharing and collaboration that are de rigueur in the twenty-first century Knowledge Economy.

Microsoft has long owned what is considered the office suite market although a host of companies have been nipping at its heels, offering everything from free, open-source suites to free online suites.

The two most prominent competitors, OpenOffice.org, which offers the OpenOffice.org Productivity Suite, and Google, which offers the free Google Apps as well as the paid Google Apps Premier Edition, have captured a tiny percentage of Microsoft’s 600 million users yet the amount of mindshare these offerings enjoy goes well beyond their actual market presence.

Many organizations have sat out the last one or two upgrade cycles in both the Microsoft Office and Windows arenas and they also haven’t upgraded their PCs, which, in many cases, may be five years or older.  As a result, the clock is ticking and these organizations will need to make decisions about new office suites this year and next.

While free software may sound appealing, the reality of the situation is quite different.  Since the market for desktop productivity tools is so large, and office suites comprise the single most-used tool or set of tools used by knowledge workers, we decided to put Microsoft Office 2010 under a microscope and see what has changed and how those changes impact the knowledge worker.  In addition, we also dissected and compared Microsoft Office 2010 and its two closest competitors, namely the Google and OpenOffice.org offerings.

We put our findings in the form of two very detailed reports and they are now both available to you online.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.

This week Google announced the preview release of an enhanced Google Docs offering.  The latest version introduces new collaborative functionality, enhancements to the basic document and spreadsheet applications, and a new standalone diagram and drawing tool.  It is currently available to current users on an opt-in basis.

There are two aspects to the new release, 1.) collaboration tools that are unique to Google Docs, and 2.) enhancements to the applications that improve its competitiveness with other office productivity applications by adding missing features.

Google has added real-time collaboration functionality, similar in some respects to what is found in Google Wave, for the joint editing of documents and spreadsheets.  Other users (up to 50) are visible via a colored flag attached to the cursor that shows their position in the text within the document editor, or a color-coded outline of the cell selected in the spreadsheet editor.  Changes made by others are visible in real-time, with no need to refresh the document to update it.

It might be slightly uncomfortable for some knowledge workers to have their typos and not-ready-for-prime-time thoughts visible to colleagues, but the benefit of eliminating potential document conflicts may compensate in most cases.  This way of working may not be for everyone, but in certain scenarios it may make eminent sense, such as when collaborating to fill in a spreadsheet or jointly editing a document.

The document editor has been enhanced with some new functionality, including commenting, support for floating images in documents, as-you-type spell check, and the ability to set tabs with a ruler interface at the top of the screen.  The spreadsheet tool has also been enhanced with cell auto complete, a formula editing bar, and the ability to drag-and-drop columns.

The new release also includes a standalone diagram and flow chart editor.  The application enables users to create drawings and export them in PNG, JPG, SVG, and PDF file formats.  It is aimed at business use and appears best suited for flow charts and organizational diagrams.  Just as the document and spreadsheet editors, real-time collaborative editing is supported, as is the ability to start a chat session with coauthors.

Under the hood, Google Docs is also much faster, thanks to a new JavaScript layout engine and the use of HTML5.  The trade off, however, is steep as off-line use of Google Docs will disappear.  On May 3, Google will discontinue support of the previous version of Google Docs, which had allowed for offline access to documents via the Google Gears browser extension.  The company has stated that it intends to replicate the functionality with HTML5, but has not announced any specifics or a time frame.

This leaves the many users of Google Docs who require offline access in a bind.  Internet access is far from ubiquitous and there are still many places, such as most aircraft or mountain retreats, which the Internet does not reach.  The new release of Google Docs does add very appealing functionality but it comes at a significant cost.

Google’s move comes at a time when Microsoft is about to release Office 2010, which includes online access to documents and a fairly robust feature set in addition to the Office rich client, which does not require an Internet connection to work.  Organizations that want to ensure zero downtime when it comes to desktop productivity should steer clear of Google Docs until this issue has been resolved.

David M. Goldes is the president of Basex.

Ten years after the PC revolution, desktop productivity software began to appear as part of suites.  In 1989, Microsoft introduced the first such offering with Microsoft Office on the Macintosh platform (a PC version followed in 1990). 

Time for my office to evolve?

It probably didn’t occur to the early designers that they were taking the first steps to integrate functionality that would – a few years later – start to positively impact the productivity of hundreds of millions of office workers.

One outcome of what became known as the suite wars was that Microsoft vanquished its competition (WordPerfect in word processing and Lotus 1-2-3 in spreadsheets) and became the dominant desktop productivity offering.

The concept of an office suite was originally more marketing than technology.  Bundling a word processor (the most popular desktop application) with a spreadsheet program (the second most popular) and presentation software would capture three “sales” all at once.

Up until that time, software used for desktop productivity purposes, be it processing words or calculating figures, was decidedly single purpose for much of its history.  At some point after PCs and networks became the de facto means of managing documents and finances, it occurred to developers to share certain functionality, such as a spell checker, across multiple programs.

Then technology such as OLE (object linking and embedding) was developed.  This allowed other programs to provide limited functionality within a host program, such as the generation of a chart or graph in a word processing document.

Today we take office suites for granted and Microsoft Office (in all of its iterations) has become the most widely deployed software application in the world, with an estimated 600 million users worldwide.

Microsoft has not, however, been sitting still.  Later this spring, the company will launch Microsoft Office 2010, a suite into which it has invested upwards of $2 billion in development costs.  Indeed, few people are aware of the extent to which the company conducts research and studies the users in its attempts to improve the knowledge worker’s experience with software and leverage what people can accomplish with the tools.   We have been testing the Office 2010 beta and will be reporting on it in an in-depth report shortly, but all signs point to a greatly improved user experience with far more support for knowledge sharing and collaboration than previous versions have offered.

Incidentally, by the time Microsoft releases Office 2010, many of its software engineers will already be working on the next version (code-named Office 15), an application that knowledge workers will not see until 2012 (presumably in beta form) at the earliest.

In the meantime, expect an in-depth look at What’s New in Microsoft Office 2010 next month in this space.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.

As perhaps the most widely-deployed e-mail client in the corporate world, Outlook is where many knowledge workers spend a majority of their time.

A new Outlook

E-mail is so central to knowledge work today that the inbox has evolved into the nexus for not only communication, but daily tasks, scheduling, and document and project management.  As a result, it is of paramount importance for knowledge workers to have an e-mail experience that fully supports their work.

The forthcoming version, Outlook 2010, receives multiple enhancements and features that were first introduced in other Microsoft Office applications.  Perhaps the most significant addition is the Fluent UI and Ribbon.  While the Ribbon has had its critics, notably those stalwarts who prefer the old drop down menu system, the fact remains that it is now the primary user interface for Office and adding it to Outlook was a logical step in order to create a unified user experience across the Office suite.

We found QuickSteps to be one of the most intriguing and promising new features.  Quick Steps provides one-click buttons to automate common and recurring tasks such as filing e-mails, sending e-mail messages to predetermined groups of co-workers, or initiating a meeting with all members of an e-mail chain.  To automate more complex or personalized tasks, Quick Steps also allows the user to create custom buttons that control the desired functionality.  The Quick Steps feature increases individual productivity by saving small amounts of time multiple times each day.

Outlook now also features the new Backstage View, which provides access to settings and account information (for more on Backstage, see our previous analysis).

Another enhancement that has been rolled across all the Office applications is integration with OneNote.  From the Outlook tasks list, the user can access notes in OneNote by selecting the new Task Notes function.  From within OneNote, notes can be turned into tasks that are synched with Outlook task and appear on the Outlook calendar.  The integration allows users to use OneNote to create tasks, but subsequently manage them from within Outlook.

To address the misuse of e-mail, such as all-hands reply to alls and the unintended inappropriate e-mailing of confidential information, Outlook now has MailTips, an alert system that notifies the user when he is about to send a message that violates e-mail usage etiquette or formal rules.  Actions that would prompt an alert include sending potentially confidential information to people outside of a workgroup or the organization, large distribution lists, recipients who are out of the office, restricted addresses, recipients who are using automatic replies, and violations of size limitations for e-mail attachments.  The feature requires Exchange 2010, which works with Outlook to determine if an alert is necessary as recipients are added and the message is being composed.

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex.

Last week, Google announced the Google Apps Marketplace, where customers of its Google Apps business software suite can search, download, and manage third party business applications that integrate with core Google Apps such as Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Calendar.

Making Google Smarter

While there are a plethora of applications available in the marketplace, and that number is certain to grow, we wanted to a look at one company’s offerings to see where the integration points were and what the benefits for the knowledge worker might be.

Smartsheet, which we first wrote about in October 2008, has taken its collaborative spreadsheet solution and released Google App offerings including Sales Pipeline Management, Crowdsourcing, and Project Management.  The new applications provide hooks into Gmail, Google Docs including spreadsheets, and contacts.  The applications are installed in a company’s Google Apps domain and are accessed via the “More” drop down menu on the top the screen in Gmail.  The integration enables single-sign on with OpenID, management of Smartsheet from the Google Apps control panel, the ability to import/export Google spreadsheets, attach Google Docs to cells, and import contact information from Gmail.  Future plans include full integration with Google Calendar, to enable project plans to be overlaid with personal calendar data.

All functionality in the Google Apps versions of Smartsheet are the same as in the company’s regular releases; indeed, consumer Gmail users can already export/import spreadsheets and attach Google Docs from the regular Smartsheet offerings in addition to being able to use the OpenID single-sign on.  Given the existing integration capabilities, the main benefit that Smartsheet users will enjoy with the new Google App version is the integration into the Gmail interface.

For end users of Google Apps, the benefits of integration between Smartsheet’s offerings, Gmail, and the rest of the Google Apps are obvious; more users will be exposed to the unique functionality of Smartsheet.

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex.

Mobility has become a defining characteristic of knowledge work. A recent Basex survey revealed that more than 40% of knowledge workers work in nontraditional, non-Dilbertian environments on a regular (two or more days per week) basis.

On the road again.

Indeed, knowledge workers have become increasingly mobile and find themselves working from whatever location they happen to be in, be it a home office, the dentist’s waiting room, or an airport lounge.  The range of devices they employ has expanded to include not just desktop PCs and laptops, but netbooks and smartphones as well.

Therefore it is becoming increasingly important to enable access to documents, spreadsheet, and presentations without tying the user to one specific computer or location.

In most organizations, there has always been a kind of second class citizenship for the mobile worker when it comes to tools and support.  Among many managers, the prevailing thinking has always been that people will typically work at the office and, as a result, the best tools are to be found there.  Sometimes tools have been limited on the grounds of corporate network security (a home user could inadvertently put an enterprise network at risk).  But given that a clear plurality of workers work remotely today, this kind of segmentation makes little sense.

It is important to note that, even among mobile workers, there exist different groups, namely those who typically work from the same computer, be it a PC in a home office or a laptop that travels with the worker, and those who work from multiple devices such as public or shared PCs, netbooks, and smartphones.  To boot, one must then differentiate the power users from the occasional users.

At the moment, the former group will most likely have standard Windows productivity software such as Microsoft Office installed on the device.  However, the latter group, whose numbers are growing, will still need to be able to access tools that are more than sufficient to support their work, regardless of device or venue.

Such tools need to provide a variety of functionality, including the ability to create and edit documents (for the purposes of this discussion documents can include word processing documents, spreadsheets, and slide shows), and critically, provide links to corporate data stores to allow the knowledge worker to access files that do not reside on the device being used – and keep files behind the firewall.

Those who are working from home office PCs and laptops will almost certainly have a copy of Microsoft Word to use, but the ability to access files that are stored in a document repository is often limited.  The established strategy to deal with lack of access or poor controls on access has been to maintain local copies of documents.  This is for two reasons: ease of access and to preclude the possibility of someone else opening and/or editing the document at the same time.  Unfortunately, this strategy can lead to more problems than it resolves including a proliferation of document versions and the potential loss of critical work if a machine goes down and is not backed up.

One potential solution may be online desktop productivity tools, a market that has been largely dominated by Google and Zoho.  With the forthcoming release of Microsoft Office 2010, the company is also unveiling a line of online tools that are complementary to their desktop counterparts.  We’ll examine the new offerings next week.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.