Microsoft: Office training fears overblown

Interview:  Microsoft exec insists companies won't need 'big sophisticated training plan' to roll out Office 2007

The other thing we set up to do was to not put the training burden on the shoulders of the IT staff. We really wanted to build the training right into the product and connect that to the Web, where we have really rich training materials. The No. 1 guide I point the IT staff to is something called the interactive guides. There's an interactive guide for Word, for Excel, for PowerPoint. The interactive guide is on the Web, and it lets a user point to their favorite menu item or toolbar item in Word 2003 in a little Web page, and then we play a little video that shows how you do that exact thing in Word 2007. It's essentially a transition tool that you can use. And IT doesn't have to roll anything out. If you hit help within Office, within the product, you get access to that training material.

CW: So you don't think IT departments need to build in any training, period? They can just rely on your Web site?

Capossela: Absolutely. The best thing for them to do is just take a set of users and do a pilot, where they take a group, a department, and roll out Office 2007. Obviously, do it to a small enough group that IT is going to feel comfortable supporting it and see what kind of support they need for the new user interface. I think people will be very surprised that it's far less jarring than you might think. And again, we credit that to the user feedback that we got in building the product itself.

CW: To sum up, then, you think the fears of IT pros about the need for more extensive training are unfounded?

Capossela: I think they're rational to be concerned, and planning is a good thing. But all the data we have shows us that it is something that is much, much simpler than you at first think when you hear that the user interface has changed.

CW: You said that user feedback has been far more extensive than ever before. By what magnitude?

Capossela: Certainly with the focus groups and the usability tests, where we are literally bringing people together and we're watching them and talking to them, etc., I'd say that we've probably done an order of magnitude more than we've ever done before. But the thing that was really the breakthrough this time around was the instrumentation that was built right into the product. When you were using the beta of Office 2007, we were, with your permission, tracking all the things that you were doing with the mouse, all the commands that you were using. And that data was getting sent back to us so that we knew how long people were spending doing certain tasks. That's something we've just never been able to do on this type of scale before.

We'd never had 3.5 million people downloading the beta and playing with that. The numbers are just absurd compared to what we've had in the past. We did 600,000 downloads in two days of the beta, and that was more than we had for the entire [Office] 2003 beta cycle. In two days. The vast majority of [beta testers] were sending information back to us, and that's how we got the 1 billion sessions that were tracked. We've just never done anything of that scale before.

CW: Do you have any demographic information about the pool of testers?

Capossela: It was a mix between consumers, small businesses and corporations. And it was all over the world, because we did the beta in many, many different languages. So it wasn't like it was a financial services thing in New York City. It really was incredibly broad because the download was available for anybody.

CW: Did you ask the testers for any information about themselves?