Vista business release an exercise in corporate collaboration

Stan Beer
Thursday, 30 November 2006 16:53

Your IT - Home IT

“I believe that whilst many people are comfortable now with texting and searching and using the web, we haven’t really come to terms with the underlying changes that are going on as a result of the world being so connected.

“The capability that individuals have now to connect with others, collaborate with others and to create opportunities to innovate. That’s where the products we’re announcing today are positioned.”

That’s all very high sounding stuff and no doubt all the amazing new collaboration features made possible by products that few users even know exist  or will ever use should be useful to the big end of town. However, the very pertinent question was raised from the floor of how many users today are even using the collaboration features of Office 2003 and how is that expected to grow with Office 2007?

Vamos’ answer was an admission that the question hit the mark and was despatched with the obligatory optimistic spin.

“The penetration of collaboration tools is low but there is enormous upside,” said Vamos. “There will be demand when organizations realize the productivity gains that are possible. There are now lower barriers to entry and many (collaboration) features are out of the box.”

Since increased productivity was such a focus of the event, we thought to raise the question of how much cost had been factored in to lost productivity and expense due to the need to retrain users in Office 2007 and Vista.

Vamos was dismissive of this once again with his flair for optimism.

“There’s always going to have to be some training because you have to focus on new features. However, it feels enough like what you’ve used before and after one hour of use, you’ll never want to back.”

After the audience suffered through a full half-hour of hand-held corporate early adopters waxing lyrical about how much money Microsoft’s new products had saved them, Jeff Putt, director of Windows business in Australia, promised the faithful they would never again have to wait so long between drinks.

“This is the most tested software that’s ever been released,” Putt said. “There will be less big block service pack releases in future and more incremental releases.”