News

Most Microsoft Office Implementations Remain On-Premises

A survey also finds that older Office versions are still in wide use.

• By Kurt Mackie
• 11/07/2017

The cloud may be the wave of the future, but when it comes to productivity software, most companies have stayed ground-bound.

In other words, the future has yet to hit Microsoft Office.

Most organizations (82 percent) typically use the premises-installed Office productivity suite products, according to an industry survey of 1,168 IT pros.

The survey, announced on Monday, was carried out by Spiceworks, a provider of Web site learning resources for IT pros as well as software tools. It was conducted in September across various organizational types and sizes in the United States and Canada. Per that survey, Office 2010 was the most used edition at 83 percent, followed by Office 2007 (68 percent) and Office 2003 (46 percent).

Office 2007 was being used at the time of the survey, even though it had just one more month of support left. It fell out of "extended support" last month. Office 2003 lost support about three years ago. The survey found that organizations also continued to use some very old Office editions, such as Office XP (15 percent), Office 2000 (21 percent) and Office 97 (3 percent).

Of the newer Office editions in use, 46 percent used Office 2013 while 17 percent used the current Office 2016 product.

About half (53 percent) of the respondents also were using Office 365, the subscription-based version of the product that gets regular feature updates, unlike the "boxed" perpetual-license Office versions. The respondents also used Google's G Suite (17 percent) and Google Docs (16 percent).

Open source productivity suites, such Libre Office and OpenOffice were used by 16 percent, according to the survey.

In general, the survey found a preference among organizations for using premises-installed Microsoft Office suites, even the unsupported and out-of-date editions. However, it identified Office 365 as the productivity suite that's expected to have the most growth "over the next two years," according to Spiceworks' report.

Microsoft has previously announced that it plans to produce a Microsoft Office 2019 product, which is expected to arrive in "late 2018." However, it also earlier announced a policy change affecting all of its perpetual-license Microsoft Office products. Those products won't be able to connect with other Office 365 services on Oct. 13, 2020. Namely, those perpetual-license installed Office suites won't be able to use Office 365 services such as OneDrive for Business, Skye for Business clients and Outlook.

Possibly, the coming policy change affecting perpetual-license Office suites will be a factor in compelling organizations to shift more toward using Office 365. It could shift them from their preference for using installed Office suites, as identified by Spiceworks.