Johannesburg, 15 Jun 2010
While Internet connectivity in sub-Sahara Africa is still a limiting factor when it comes to online services, this has not slowed downloads of the beta version of Microsoft's Office 2010.
So says Marc Israel, information worker business group lead for Microsoft west, east, central Africa and the Indian Ocean Islands. “The Internet has been a big barrier, but the increased Internet capacity that was promised is now here.”
Israel, who has been travelling through 13 countries on the continent to meet with Microsoft customers and partners to get feedback, says the results he's received are promising: “We have seen around 20 000 downloads of the Office beta within the sub-Sahara region, excluding SA.”
“Microsoft rolled out the enterprise version of Office 2010 on 15 April through its volume licence, designed for large corporations, before making it generally available in stores.”
He says the consumer market, driven by the distributor channels and retail channels, will see stock available on shelves from today. “System builders will also get access to OEM versions of the productivity suite, so it should be on new PCs by the end of the month.”
Open to collaboration
A Frost & Sullivan study reports the productivity benefits gained from Office 2010 can be appreciated by understanding the functionalities contributed to the business environment, both for large and small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) which are in transition and need to bridge the business divide.
When asked about the new collaboration tools present in Office 2010, in relation to bandwidth availability issues in Africa, Israel said: “SharePoint has seen a large increase in deployment in both the SME and enterprise space, which leverage the features present in Office 2010 for collaboration.”
He adds that SharePoint now features an offline mode that allows low-bandwidth areas to still function, synchronising files when connectivity resumes.
The Office Online productivity suite also forms part of the release, and is part of Microsoft's strategy to bring things into the cloud, along with its SkyDrive offering, which provides a collaborative workspace from which to share documents and files.
Israel says with this release, Microsoft is bringing Office 2010's productivity to three key areas: mobile, PC, and Web. “The key difference is in the feature set. Most competing productivity suites do not offer the same spectrum of features.
“Microsoft is looking into the mobile arena, as it is the platform of choice in Africa, with its high mobile penetration rate.”
He says Microsoft recently signed an agreement with Nokia to bring Office applications to the Symbian operating system, which is fairly well entrenched and positioned in the mobile market, especially as Africa still uses older model phones.
Social integration
“Office is one of the most popular applications in the suite, with Excel taking top spot among customers.” Israel explains that e-mail, collaboration and the integration of contacts and social networks is key to business, and Outlook has been designed to work within these groups.
When asked whether the social networking integration would detract from productivity, he says it's true that on one side it will distract people from their work. “But there is an increased use of social networking for information gathering and marketing in the work place.”
Israel says it's like the telephone in the office. It exists to be used for work, but is also sometimes used for personal calls. “The difficult part is finding the right balance between usage,” he concludes.
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