Commercial, Open Source App Suites Offer Alternatives To Microsoft Office

In a keynote speech at this year's Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft COO Kevin Turner exhorted partners to go out and convince customers to give up their old editions of Microsoft Office, the company's ubiquitous desktop application suite.

Turner's intention, of course, was that resellers get those customers to upgrade to Office 2010, the latest release of Microsoft's cash cow product, not switch to some other competing software. But there's a growing number of commercial and open-source alternatives to Office, making that an option for solution providers and their customers.

"Microsoft Office doesn't dominate the way it used to," said Doug Heintzman, strategy director for IBM collaboration solutions, including the company's free Lotus Symphony personal productivity application suite. "This is a very dynamic and changing landscape."

That may be a bit optimistic. Microsoft puts the number of Office users worldwide at some 750 million and Office is estimated to hold a 94-percent share of the desktop productivity software market.

It's indisputable, however, that businesses and consumers today have more personal productivity application options than they have had in years. The cloud-based Google Docs (part of the broader Google Apps line) is probably the best-known alternative to Office, although the online Zoho Office Suite also is gaining converts. Other Office alternatives include a number of free products, such as the aforementioned Lotus Symphony, and open-source products such as OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice.

Are businesses migrating en masse to these products? Hardly. Earlier this year Forrester Research surveyed 150 IT decision-makers about their use of alternative productivity tool suites and found that, generally speaking, the level of adoption remains relatively small. But the study did find some usage of alternatives either as complementary tools to Microsoft Office or outright replacements in certain segments.

When asked if they had any interest in Web-based alternatives to Office, such as Google Docs and Zoho, 44 percent said they were "somewhat interested" while another 15 percent were actively looking at such applications and 10 percent were piloting/experimenting with them. But only 3 percent were actually implementing them or had them up and running. Twenty-seven percent had no interest whatsoever.

Interest is lower for OpenOffice.org and suites such as IBM's Lotus Symphony (which is based on OpenOffice.org). While 5 percent already have such alternatives or are implementing them, 50 percent are not interested in them at all. The rest are somewhat interested (29 percent), actively considering them (7 percent) or piloting/experimenting with them (9 percent). And fully 75 percent were not interested in "lower-cost substitute productivity tools" such as Corel WordPerfect Office.

NEXT: Cost Drives Some Customers To Alternatives

"Office isn't going away overnight," acknowledged David Hoff, technology vice president at Cloud Sherpas, an Atlanta-based Google Docs reseller and consultant. But he said the market is "definitely going through a significant period of disruption" and some Office owners have stopped purchasing additional licenses of the Microsoft product, opting for Google Docs and other alternatives instead.

"There's been a pretty significant uptake of [Google] Docs within the last six-to-nine months," Hoff said. Cloud Sherpas resells the Google service, develops add-on applications for the Google App Engine, and provides related services such as migrating data to Google Docs from older systems like Lotus Notes/Domino.

An obvious driver for that is cost: Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Business, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook, is priced at $200 for one user/one PC and $280 for one user/two PCs. That can make a free product like Lotus Symphony or OpenOffice.org appear rather attractive.

Some organizations have adopted Lotus Symphony "as a direct replacement for Microsoft Office and they have slashed their software budgets quite significantly," said Andy Gerrard, U.K. sales manager for Group Business Software (GBS), a major IBM partner and Lotus reseller. One such customer is the St. Helens Council, the governing body for the U.K. municipality, which has some 3,000 employees using Symphony.

IBM offers Symphony as a free download and bundled with its Notes software. GBS generates some revenue by offering Symphony-related services such as technical support and software development assistance, Gerrard said. A key selling point for Symphony adoption is the fact that users can save documents in Office-compatible formats. St. Helens workers create documents using Symphony, then upload the text to an open-source document management system. "For the customers, it's great," the GBS executive said.

The changing nature of IT is also a driver of growing acceptance of Office alternatives, IBM's Heintzman said. A lot of content generated by social networks and collaboration systems doesn't involve traditional word processing or spreadsheet applications. And more work today is being done through mobile computing and cloud services, not on the desktop.

Recognizing these shifts, Microsoft in June launched Office 365, a cloud version of the desktop Office suite, priced at $6 per user, per month, that's targeted toward SMBs.

Microsoft hasn't disclosed many details about Office 365 subscriptions. Two weeks after its launch the company said more than 50,000 businesses and organizations had signed up for the 30-day free trial. Currently the company will only disclose that there are "millions of paid users" of Microsoft's cloud productivity applications, including Office 365, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online and the Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS) – the latter the application service that Office 365 is replacing. (Microsoft did not make an executive available to comment for this story.)

NEXT: The Open-Source Option

Zoho Corp. competes with Microsoft Office with its online productivity applications, including Writer, Sheet (spreadsheet) and Show (presentation) software. Following the same pricing model as Google, the apps are free for individuals and carry a subscription fee for businesses.

While many SMBs are using Zoho's productivity suite as an alternative to Microsoft Office, larger companies often use them in conjunction with other Zoho software, including the popular CRM app, according to Raju Vegesna, a Zoho evangelist. "Contextual integration is what's driving some of the adoption," he said, noting that users create documents and spreadsheets that are appended to CRM or accounting systems.

"An office suite should be part of your workflow," he said. "You should be able to create a document and see it within that application's context."

Zoho's productivity applications are about 95 percent compatible with Microsoft Office, according to Vegesna, with the goal to reach 100 percent compatibility in the next six to 12 months. The company also offers Zoho Office for SharePoint, which allows users to create and edit documents and store them in Microsoft SharePoint. "Collaboration is key," Vegesna said. And the Zoho Plugin for Microsoft Office, which some larger Microsoft customers requested, lets users access and edit Zoho documents and spreadsheets from Office while offline.

Aren't users giving up some functionality if they abandon Microsoft Office? Google, Zoho and others say their products are functionally equivalent to Office, or nearly so. Hoff at Cloud Sherpas points out that Google recently updated its Google presentation application putting it on a par with Microsoft PowerPoint. And the alternatives offer more in the way of collaboration capabilities, they argue.

Besides, Hoff argues, between 50 and 80 percent of Office users don't need all of its features and functions. "I think it's got to the point that it's more complex than it needs to be," he said.

In the open-source software world, meanwhile, things seem to be settling down after the future of the OpenOffice.org open-source desktop productivity application software was in question following Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems nearly two years ago.

Last year a group of developers who contributed to OpenOffice.org decided to split off on their own after they questioned Oracle's commitment to the open source community. They created an alternative called LibreOffice that debuted in January and is now on release 3.4.4.

In April Oracle said it would stop selling a commercial version of the OpenOffice.org suite and, in June, decided to turn the OpenOffice.org code over to the Apache Software Foundation. That move was made with IBM's blessing (Lotus Symphony is based on OpenOffice.org, remember) and Heintzman said IBM is now working closely with the ASF on future OpenOffice.org development. IBM will continue to offer a free OpenOffice.org application suite, but no decision has been made on whether to continue the Symphony brand.

"We have a lot of demand from our customers," Heintzman said, noting that Symphony is especially popular in educational and government markets – the latter because open file formats are sometimes a statutory requirement for documents.

With the overall trend toward integrating personal productivity applications with operational systems like finance and CRM, solution providers and ISVs can embed OpenOffice.org within their own solutions and develop services around them, Heintzman said. "It really opens up a lot of opportunities for partners."