Microsoft: Office training fears overblown

Many corporate IT managers have voiced concerns that the dramatically different user interface in Microsoft's new Office 2007 software will force them to undertake more carefully planned migrations than they've had to do in the past, with an increased amount of end-user training. But Chris Capossela, corporate vice president of the product management group in Microsoft's Business Division, insists that companies won't have to devise "some big sophisticated training plan" to roll out Office 2007. During an interview at Monday night's Windows Vista and Office 2007 launch event in New York, Capossela said IT departments can find plenty of freely available interactive training materials on Microsoft's Web site. Excerpts from the interview follow.

CW: Many IT managers say they'll have to do more strategic planning for their Office 2007 rollouts because of extra training time that needs to be built in for users. What would you say to companies that are concerned about that?

Capossela: Well, we certainly didn't do this lightly. We've been working on how to do this as well as we could for the past three years. We started by unveiling the new user interface many, many, many months ago to make sure people understood there was a big change coming. And then we did dramatically more end-user testing than we've done on any other piece of software. So I would say to any of the corporations that are considering this: you should know that we've tested this thing incredibly deeply to make sure that your average Office user is going to get up and running very quickly. And the feedback we're getting is that it's far less of a concern than people think it will be initially.

There are two data points that we talk about. No. 1 is, for your average Office user, we see that it takes them about two days of working with the product before they say, "I'll never go back." For your power user -- the people who know the ins and outs of Excel, maybe the finance team, or the legal team when it comes to Word -- it takes them more like two weeks before they'll say, "Please don't ever take this away." And that was a little bit counter to what we first thought. We thought the more casual user would be more scared, and instead, it actually turned out to be the more die-hard user, because they know exactly where everything lives in the old version. So it takes them longer.

But that's not two weeks of no productivity. That's two weeks before they say, "I'll never give this product up." When they launch the product for the first time, we've designed that very first ribbon so that the vast majority of the common things are right there. There's no hunting around for it. It's literally easy to see: how do I change a font, how do I print a file, how do I open a file, how do I save a file.

CW: For those who haven't looked at Office 2007 yet, can you describe the ribbon?

Capossela: The ribbon takes the place of menus and toolbars. You used to have menus that dropped down and toolbars that stacked up on top of each other. Now the ribbon is one strip of icons and galleries that you can choose from to author your documents. The vast majority of people -- something like 85 percent of our beta users -- said they were going to be far more productive with [Office] 2007 than [Office] 2003.