Spiceworks, the professional network for IT, announced the results of a new study examining organizations’ adoption and perceptions of office productivity suites. The†study shows†the vast majority of organizations are still running unsupported Microsoft Office suites, such as Office 2007, Office 2003, and Office XP. However, the findings indicate that although organizations have put off updating their productivity suites in recent years, an†increase in IT budgets†in 2018 is enabling more organizations to invest in newer, cloud-based offerings.
“Although they’re aware of the security risks of running end of life software, many IT departments haven’t had the budget, time, or resources required to implement new productivity suites and train end users accordingly,” said Peter Tsai, senior technology analyst at Spiceworks. “However, as IT budgets and staff begin to grow in 2018, more organizations will look to invest in newer cloud-based and as-a-service productivity suites with more resources to manage the transition.”
Many businesses slow to upgrade unsupported productivity suites
A Spiceworks survey of IT departments across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom shows 82 percent of organizations are using the on-premises version of Microsoft Office. When using Spiceworks network data to further examine which versions of Microsoft Office businesses are using, the data shows Office 2010 is the most commonly used version in the workplace. Eighty-three percent of organizations across the globe are running Office 2010 on their network while 46 percent are running Office 2013 and 17 percent are running Office 2016.
However, similar to†operating system upgrades, many organizations have put off updating their productivity software. The study shows 68 percent of companies are still running at least one instance of Office 2007, despite reaching its end of support date on October 10, 2017. Additionally, 46 percent of companies are still running at least one instance of Office 2003, while 15 percent are running Office XP, 21 percent are running Office 2000, and 3 percent are running one or more instances of Office 97 on their networks.
Productivity suite adoption trends: Cloud-based solutions are on the rise
Although Microsoft Office is still the dominant productivity suite in the workplace, Spiceworks survey data shows 53 percent of organizations are using Office 365, and an additional 17 percent plan to adopt it in the next two years. In fact, among all productivity suites, Office 365 is expected to see the most growth, particularly in enterprises with more than 1,000 employees where 24 percent plan to adopt Office 365 within the next two years.
Additionally, 17 percent of organizations are using G Suite by Google and 16 percent are using the free online version of Google’s productivity tools, such as Gmail and Google Docs. However, Google has a much stronger position in some industries, such as education where 54 percent of organizations reported using G Suite and 29 percent reported using Google’s free productivity apps. Sixteen percent of companies also reported using open-source productivity suites like LibreOffice and OpenOffice while 3 percent reported using Apple iWork for iCloud.
In terms of future usage, most productivity suites are expected to see more modest gains compared to Office 365. An additional 3 percent of businesses plan to adopt G Suite, 2 percent plan to adopt Google’s free productivity apps, and 2 percent plan to adopt open source productivity suites.
