Upgrading your enterprise to Office clients to 2010 – performance incentives
The last couple years have been very interesting from a collaboration, social, IT, and end-user productivity perspectives. We have a seen a tremendous growth of unstructured documentation – or the recognition of it – which leads to companies to want more efficient collaboration tools.
The so called shift of generations, events like the economy breakdown and the H1N1 flu all makes good cases for better end-users efficiency. For example, we are seeing bigger recognition that instant messaging, voice over IP, video conferencing, and remote work are becoming essential work tools – it’s not just your family friendly Geocities (/wink), My Space, Facebook, or Twitter.
With that came along the Office 2007 suites for both client and server. On the client side, we introduced the Fluent interface (or Ribbon bar) which was a shock for a lot – but a welcome one. Try to make Pivot charts with 2003 to see what difference the 2007 ribbon (and more) brings. And we all know about SharePoint 2007’s successes.
But did large enterprise move to the 2007 Office client? Of course some or lots did – but I still have a lot of customers with 2002 or 2003 (or sometimes worst…). Those enterprise are usually geographically dispersed and their deployment tools are usually too complex for practical use. They were used to deploy new Office with new Windows. Did these enterprise move to Windows Vista? Those deployments are often IT driven that try to get a business buy-in.
What this created is a gap. A lot of their employees bought new laptops or even Netbooks. They’ve had Windows Vista or XP on the Netbooks – but they also had Office 2007 at home. They love the 2007 interface and have started making noise at work so that they understand why they can’t have the new version.
This gap is creating a shift where the end-users are demanding IT to deploy Office 2007 – and massively. Now bringing this discussion back to SharePoint, I find that a simple yet very important factor for IT to consider – especially for those branch deployments – is the 2007 file format. Everything is compressed now. Those large files that are now being pulled more & more in the centralized (or sometimes dispersed) SharePoint through collaboration & search could be automatically smaller by size and save precious network bandwidth.
This is today. Tomorrow brings 2010 and even more performance benefits from an Office client perspective.
First of all, Office 2010 supports the Cobalt protocol. The Cobalt protocol is what we built for Office Online so that users only send the compressed differentiation, or delta, of the file. This means that a user opening a 5 MB Word file and apply updates totalling 150 KB, only those 150 KB or less – since it will compress it – will be sent back to the server.
Cobalt also allows for multi-user editing. For the Office client, it allows co-authoring for Word and PowerPoint. For the SharePoint Office Web Application, it allows for Excel and OneNote co-authoring. The co-authoring of Excel in SharePoint is very slick, each user see the all changes almost automatically. The versioning and presence integration is also very well done with this co-authoring.
Second, there is a new component called the Upload Center that allows the user to save his change and close Word right away. Word will update the server asynchronously in the background instead of blocking the user. This allows for a user perspective performance gain – especially on low latency / low bandwidth environments.
3rd, there is the Offline Document cache (which works with the Upload center) that supports Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, SharePoint, and Groove. Note that OneNote is already cached differently.
3rd, the Office Web Applications allows for users to view Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote documents without a client – and only send the updates with Cobalt again.
Last, the SharePoint Workspaces (formerly Groove) is more complete and allows for a very good offline experience for remote users.
Note that there are also tools such as NXPowerLite that optimize files – for example, when you cut & paste a Visio diagram in Word, it looks nice but it’s also very big – NXPowerLite ‘takes a picture’ of that object and inserts the picture instead. I’ve a had a case of a Word document at over 10 MB with Visio objects in it – and it reduced to less than 750KB when I switched the objects to pictures.
As you can see, Office 2010 will bring very good performance incentive that both IT and end-users will want. And of course, it brings so much more too :) And let’s face it, you’ll want Windows 7 too! With the large audience with the beta/pre-release versions, companies need not wait for a service pack to plan installing Office 2010.
Maxime