Office XP, the latest avatar of Microsoft’s flagship Office suite, has been around for a year now, and Microsoft is aggressively trying to get ISVs onto the Office bandwagon. With about a hundred ISVs now developing apps on the Office XP platform, and in the process unlocking hitherto hidden value for users, Prashant L Rao finds that a potentially huge market could open up for the company.

To increase the uptake of Office XP among the MS Office installed base, Microsoft’s Karthik Padmanabhan is hoping that the ISV thrust will have a huge impact

Microsoft is on the horns of a unique dilemma. While most companies worry about competing products making a dent in their market share, Microsoft—in the Office space—is competing with itself. It’s not SmartSuite or StarOffice but Office 2000 itself that’s slowed uptake of Office XP. The problem lies, perhaps, in the fact that Office XP’s benefits are not directly visible to a desktop user. Unlike Office 97 or 2000 where the changes were ‘skin deep,’ here the slew of new features and functionality are mostly beneath the surface, making Office XP like an iceberg—nine-tenths of its increased functionality is hidden to the average user’s eyes.

Other factors slowing down the adoption of Office XP are the hardware requirements (only PCs sold in the last one year are powerful enough to run Office XP) and user satisfaction with older versions (Office 2000 or even 97 do a pretty good job of word processing, number crunching and simple database work). With a third of the company’s revenues coming from Office, it is crucial for Microsoft to ensure that users are clear about the benefits of Office XP, in particular its great potential as an application platform. That’s where Microsoft India’s latest plan comes into play.

Office as a development platform
Office is a major development platform abroad with 2.6 million developers. It also ties into Microsoft’s Enterprise Portal and Knowledge Management (KM) strategies in conjunction with Microsoft’s SharePoint technologies. A key advantage of deploying an Office-based application is that the base platform is already in place, speeding up the roll out, reducing the cost of the solution and making it easier to train users as everybody is familiar with it. That said, it is only in the last six months that most Indian Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) have begun significant development around this platform.

Microsoft will work with ISVs to create solutions that leverage Office XP’s features, which the average user would not tap into on his own. The aim is to convince corporate customers of the benefits of using Office as a front-end to their back-end enterprise applications for which organisations will need to roll out Office XP.

“Office has always provided a full-featured development environment right since the earlier versions. In recent times there have been special conferences and seminars on this subject. It requires knowledge of VB and COM. Most developers have this knowledge. It is extremely easy to use and very effective in solving many business problems. Yet somehow, developers did not earlier consider this as a huge opportunity,” says Nitin Paranjape, CMD, Mediline, a Microsoft ISV partner.

Microsoft is pushing aggressively to get ISVs onto the Office bandwagon. The company is pitching Office XP as the ultimate front-end to pull in, manipulate and view data from back-end systems. “Most organisations have already invested in Office. Now they can leverage that investment to automate processes like querying a back-end ERP system or database and retrieving data into Word, Excel or Access using Smart Tags. Or they could use Office Web components to integrate features like Excel’s Pivot Tables into a browser-based application,” says Karthik Padmanabhan, marketing manager, Microsoft Corporation India.

The hottest area is collaboration, knowledge management and e-learning, next comes business intelligence, then custom extensible SmartTags, and finally XML support for SCM. Microsoft has a set of development technologies called SharePoint that can be used to create collaborative websites. Office XP acts as the desktop client for SharePoint on the server to provide document management or KM capabilities. Also included in this category is e-learning. Here Microsoft Producer lets corporates integrate video clips shot on conventional video cameras with PowerPoint presentations to create a PowerPoint file that contains the video synchronised with the slides.

“Currently we have approximately 100 ISVs in India creating applications on the Office XP platform,” says Raveesh Gupta, program manager-localisation, Microsoft. “Internationally, we have seen tremendous demand for Office-based solutions, across different vertical segments, including financial services, public sector, pharmaceuticals and manufacturing. And in India too we expect tremendous potential, specifically in the enterprise segment. In fact, though I cannot mention the names of the customers, we have seen several instances of Office XP solutions winning us substantial orders with strategic customers.”

Microsoft’s ISV partners in this space include HP Services (specialising in collaboration work), Wipro Infotech (KM, document management), Mediline and Sonata (business intelligence). The company is providing ISVs with the Office Developer Edition, whose components such as Office Web Services Toolkit and SmartTag Developer Toolkit help developers take advantage of Office’s in-built VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) scripting.

“Development around Office is always custom work. ISVs are integrating their products with Office, letting users work with the data from the ISV application within Office. Corporate customers are the other target segment. Services companies are integrating Office with back-end services such as collaboration, e-mail, databases, ERP and KM,” adds Padmanabhan.

HP Services provides life-cycle services around the MS Office platform. These services range from identifying customer requirements, procurement, installation and deployment, development and maintenance. Development is typically not just at the client end but also includes server-based development to integrate with the clients. HP Services addresses the enterprise segment with these solutions. Commenting on the size of this market in India, T Gopinath, practice principals manager-horizontals for HP Services says, “Current size is estimated at around 50,000 clients for the rest of the year.”

Award-winning apps
Sonata has a specialised industry focus in financial services, manufacturing, logistics and health care. “We develop workflow automation solutions using Microsoft Office. Sonata has developed an award-winning application using Office XP and SharePoint Portal known as WorXPace. This application won the first place in the Asia Productivity eXPerience Solutions Challenge hosted by Microsoft,” says P V S N Raju, associate vice president, Sonata Software.

Sonata offers development services, consulting services and out-of-the-box solutions using Office. These services are aimed at both the enterprise and the SME segments. “WorXPace offers quick deployment and high returns for an incredibly low investment with a concept-to-deployment cycle of less than two months. The product helps boost the productivity of an organisation’s sales force, improves channel satisfaction, enables fast decision-making at the field level, makes for efficient sales cycle management and speedy business decisions. WorXPace is being piloted at an SME and is being proposed to a large FMCG enterprise,” adds Raju.

VBA, the scripting language of Office, is not a full-blown programming language. Indian ISVs are overcoming its shortcomings by using it in conjunction with other Microsoft technologies. Sonata leverages its technical resources in other development tools like VB, C++, C# , Java and distributed computing technologies like COM+, .Net , CORBA and J2EE to offer the right combination for solutions using VBA. HP does the same. “We use it in conjunction with other tools. We don’t really use VBA as a standalone tool as it cannot provide all the functionality that an enterprise needs,” says Gopinath.

Mediline has been working on Office as a development platform for the last five years. “It is a very rich tool for developers. We have developed solutions based upon Office for many customers, including Maruti, Otis, IOCL and the Birla Group. We will shortly introduce a packaged product based entirely upon MS Word and the .Net platform,” says Paranjape.

“The features of Office which are relevant to a purchase department are very different from those which a finance department would find useful. This type of demarcation is rarely done. Most companies train end users on a minimal, standard set of features and leave the rest to them. Obviously, only these few features are being used by everyone, without being aware that there is much more value lying on the desktop. Once the value of the under-utilised features of Office is shown to users and companies, it is very easy for them to adapt to newer versions of the product,” adds Paranjape.

The ISV thrust will definitely accelerate the adoption of Office XP in the corporate sector. What Microsoft needs to do is to combine this strategy with lower pricing for the SME/SOHO/home segments. That would make Office XP an unstoppable juggernaut.