Office 365 Survey Results are In!

Every 18 months or so we like to survey our Research Circle (a Gartner-managed panel comprising IT or IT-business professionals) about the state of Office 365.  It’s not a broad market survey, but lets us take the pulse of users and ask some open-ended questions about what’s working and what isn’t.

For those of us regularly talking to clients about Office 365 implementations it is no surprise that adoption continues to increase:

But what was surprising is the difference between adoption and value.  We’ve been asking about adoption of the suite as a whole and its components for a while now, but this year we wanted to ask about value received.  It’s one thing to begrudgingly access some team files on OneDrive or know there’s a team site that you never use and another to really get value out of a component.  We did this using a twist on a “cost allocation” question – instead of costs we asked respondents to allocate where $100 in benefits came from across the components of Office 365.

The results are strikingly different than when simply asking which components are used.  Email and Office still come out at the top, but it’s quite a gap to the rest.  To me this isn’t a judgment on the quality of the technology, but rather it is an indication of how much work is ahead for organizations to learn how to best use these newer technologies and slowly change working behaviors.

This also shows the opportunity for any vendors or service providers competing in the digital workplace technology space.  These gaps can be filled by service providers or vendors, knowing there is an eager market for additional help.  Of course, they can also be treated as wedges for vendors that want to compete with Microsoft.  Your choice!

Clients that want to read more can check out the full results in:

How to Work With (or Compete Against) Microsoft Office 365