Cloud-based Office tools: Right for you?

The Museum of Modern Art’s migration to the cloud started last June, when MoMA moved from an on-premises email system to Google’s cloud-based Gmail and Calendar, says Juan Montes, chief technology officer for the New York-based museum. And now, he says, he’s seeing employees turn to other cloud-based productivity applications on their own as they become more comfortable with the notion.

“There’s wide adoption of what I call the Google collaboration space, and it’s a mixed bag of things in there,” Montes says. “We see people putting up Microsoft Office docs in Google to share and collaborate within the organization as well as outside it.”

Montes says that cloud-based software clearly has a strong foothold in his organization, but that he’s still not quite ready to completely switch over to the cloud for personal productivity applications. Why?

Because, he says, he doesn’t think personal cloud-based productivity tools are ready for prime time, despite the popularity of certain cloud-based applications among some MoMA staff. He still has questions about compatibility — particularly when sharing files with workers in other companies — and security, and he wonders whether cloud solutions really have as many features and functions as on-premises Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel.

[See related story: Could cloud computing change how we communicate?]

Moving to the cloud incrementally

The Hendrick Automotive Group of Charlotte, N.C., recently moved its on-premises email to the cloud using Office 365, Microsoft’s cloud-based office suite.

IT director Robert Taylor says he doesn’t have the final numbers to determine whether the cloud will be cheaper than on-premises software in terms of fixed costs, but he says he expects it will likely be a financial wash between the two.

However, he says, there’s a big gain in terms of how his 20 IT staff members spend their time “because we can grow the business without acquiring additional IT people or we can reallocate those human capital resources to developing other applications” that support the organization’s core business.

Taylor says the company’s 7,000 employees didn’t have any problems with adopting the new cloud-based email system. The company had moved its point-of-sale application to the cloud seven years ago, so many were already familiar with the cloud concept, and Taylor says he went with Office 365 because workers already know how to use the Microsoft application.

Taylor says he would like to move more of Hendrick’s Office suite of applications to the cloud but hasn’t yet done so because integrating cloud-based products with the company’s industry-specific applications has so far proven problematic.

But he doesn’t expect that to be an issue forever. He says he expects that applications of all kinds will migrate to the cloud in the future, as vendors focus on how to make all of them work seamlessly together.

Most shops at least considering the move

Taylor and Montes are among the many IT leaders weighing the pros and cons of cloud computing, particularly when it comes to personal productivity tools that have traditionally been nearly synonymous with the on-premises Microsoft Office suite. For a majority of workers, Word, Excel and PowerPoint are the tools they grew up using and best understand. And the prevalence of the product is staggering; in 2009, Forrester Research calculated that 89% of enterprise customers used some version of Microsoft Office for worker productivity and collaboration.

As cloud computing takes off for both professional and personal use, analysts say an increasing number of IT executives are finding themselves asking whether cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools are the way to go.

A 2011 Forrester survey of 150 IT decision-makers found that while all 150 were supporting some version of Microsoft Office, 72% of them were considering cloud-based applications. More specifically, 3% were either in the process of implementing or had already implemented a Web-based Office alternative such as Google Docs or Zoho, 15% were piloting or experimenting, 10% were actively looking and 44% said they were somewhat interested.

“A lot of people are asking these kinds of questions, but I think it will take years for companies to sort it all out,” says Stanton Jones, an analyst at Information Services Group (ISG) in Stamford, Conn.

The city of Los Angeles moved from an on-premises email system to Gmail two years ago, saving the city approximately $1 million annually in software, hardware and support costs, says general manager and CTO Randi Levin.

Gmail is now used by about 17,000 users in all parts of the city, except for the police department.

Levin says the city opted for Gmail because of the cost savings, and not necessarily because it was run in the cloud. However, she says the IT department and users alike have found plenty of benefits that come with the cloud.

Many city workers like the fact that they can now access email on their own devices, whether they’re smartphones, tablets or traditional PCs, Levin says. IT likes that it gained a disaster-recovery system — something it didn’t have previously — as part of the overall package. IT also enjoys shifting its resources away from supporting and updating the email system, as Gmail requires practically no support.

Weighing bandwidth, usability factors

Montes says MoMA moved to the cloud for the reasons usually cited for such a migration: The cloud provided an application that was cheaper and easier to maintain while providing more scalability, storage and redundancy. Workers have an easier time accessing it on the go, too.

All of these benefits — and workers’ increasing familiarity with cloud-based tools — have Montes considering whether to more formally support moving more productivity applications to the cloud. He says he’s looking at Office 365 as well as Google Apps. He’s already reviewed MoMA’s network to ensure there’s enough bandwidth to support such cloud-based applications — a necessity to prevent any latency.

Still, he says he has questions on how well workers would take to these cloud-based versions of their everyday applications and whether the quality of those cloud applications could really match the functions that users have with the on-premises versions.

Glenn Oclassen Jr., vice president of cloud adoption at Appirio, the San Mateo, Calif.-based company that helped MoMA move to the cloud, says many organizations are facing the same dilemma.

“We all spent a good part of our careers getting used to Microsoft Office products. Not only have we gotten used to it, but it became the metaphor for how personal productivity is done,” he says. “With [cloud] solutions, you’re unlearning a lot of the behavior that represents what we think is how personal productivity works.”

IT must, for example, get workers to stop emailing documents back and forth for updates and instead learn how to work simultaneously on the same file — a much more efficient and effective way to collaborate. After all, Oclassen says, that kind of efficient collaboration is one of the main benefits of cloud.

“That process change is often the much bigger challenge,” he says.

Oclassen says organizations must also be ready to train their employees on how the cloud tools work as well as how to change work processes and work flow to optimize it all.

Jones says CIOs certainly see that increased ability for collaboration as one of the main selling points of moving personal productivity tools to the cloud. They also see cloud as being more cost-effective and easier to manage, as upgrades are handled by the vendor and not the company’s IT staff. Greater access from a range of mobile devices is another benefit of cloud.

Downsides to consider

There are also potential downfalls and limitations with these cloud applications. “They’re not for everyone,” says Forrester analyst TJ Keitt.

For example, an Excel power user who has built a lot of macros and has a high number of cells built in complicated formulas will find a drop-off in the functionality of those complex macros when switching to cloud-based spreadsheets, he says.

Others make similar observations, saying that the Web-based alternatives to PowerPoint and Excel don’t have the same levels of functionality — yet.

Consider the experience at Enterasys Networks of Andover, Mass.

CIO Dan Pelton says the company, which went to cloud-based Salesforce.com for its customer relationship management (CRM) system in 2003, now has a cloud-first mentality across the board. It is migrating from on-premises Microsoft Exchange for email to Google for mail and calendar for its 1,100 workers. He says Google was about 35% cheaper and provided more upgrades — both well worth the training and hand-holding that it took to get employees used to the new cloud-based email application.

Despite a positive experience, however, Enterasys Networks’ Pelton says he doesn’t think the other cloud-based worker productivity applications have enough features compared with Microsoft’s on-premises versions.

“We don’t think they can completely replace Microsoft Office, particularly when it comes to the really complex spreadsheets that finance uses. We’re also a very PowerPoint-heavy company, so it’s going to be a stretch for people to make the move to cloud [versions],” he says. “Docs, spreadsheets and presentations — people say they can’t give those up. And we didn’t want to fight all those battles at once. So we kept them with Office.”

LA’s Levin says user adoption has been an issue for many workers, although she acknowledged that wasn’t related to the cloud but rather due to switching from one vendor’s product to another. But the frequent updates and changes that come through automatically — the case with most cloud products — can perpetuate user frustrations. “This rate of change still throws some people off,” she says.

Levin also says that some were concerned about security and privacy in the cloud but that she sees the large cloud providers able to provide more security experts and security features than nearly any individual organization could.

Not moving to the cloud totally — yet

Still, Pelton believes that his company will someday make the switch wholesale. Once employees get access to cloud-based alternatives, and “because Google Docs meets most needs and allows for that collaboration,” it’s only a matter of time.

Pelton says he thinks the benefits of the cloud, coupled with improvements to the Web-based productivity and collaboration tools, could eventually tip the scales in favor of moving all those personal productivity tools into the cloud.

With Gmail fully deployed, Levin says workers increasingly are using other applications within the cloud-based suite, such as Google Docs, and finding the kind of productivity gains that the cloud has long promised. But she still doesn’t see the city switching completely to the cloud because too many workers would resist the move, because most are unfamiliar with Google products and some actually need all the features their current Microsoft products offer.

“I don’t think we’ll ever take [desktop Microsoft] all away. At this point, I think it will be negatively received,” she says.

Next: Could cloud computing change how we communicate?

Mary K. Pratt is a Computerworld contributing writer in Waltham, Mass. Contact her at marykpratt@verizon.net.