Computerworld - The way analyst Alan Lepofsky figures it, organizations have several options when it comes to their worker productivity applications. Besides ignoring the cloud option completely, IT leaders could:
- Move their existing on-premises products (likely Microsoft Office) to the cloud, opting for the same or similar applications in a Web-based format.
- Move just the storage but not the tool to the cloud, using applications like Dropbox to share files.
- Use cloud applications to enable a whole new way of processing work flow and communications.
"You can move to the Office suite in the cloud, but then you can ask, 'Why do we create word processing docs at all? Maybe we want to move to blogs, wikis, online communities,'" says Lepofsky, an analyst with Constellation Research Inc. "For many, 80% of what they do doesn't have to be a Word doc. It could be just a wiki page."
Lepofsky says cloud vendors are offering more alternatives to the tried-and-true Microsoft Office suite of applications, but may require changes in how information is created as well as shared.
For example, workers switching from PowerPoint to Prezi, cloud-based presentation software, need to "rethink how you would do a presentation." Those who switch from Word to applications such as Evernote or Microsoft OneNote will find that these enable sharing and collaboration and eliminate document files altogether. "It's just a page," Lepofsky says.
Organizations could also find that other cloud options, such as Jive, Socialtext and Yammer in the enterprise social network space, could be better platforms than word processing applications, Lepofsky adds.
There is, not surprisingly, a steep learning curve to such moves, as organizations will have to train employees to work in new ways, Lepofsky says. And champions of this new paradigm will likely have to sell the idea to skeptical colleagues, many of whom spent their academic and professional careers with traditional word processing and presentation tools.
CareCore National LLC, a specialty benefit management company headquartered in Bluffton, S.C., is already part of this new way of thinking.
Company executive vice president and CTO William Moore says the company in 2010 started to aggressively adopt cloud solutions and today the company runs all of its 80 or so applications in the cloud.
"Cloud has us ask how it could change the organization," Moore says. "We wanted to look at what users were really doing with tools and ask whether there were tools more finely grained in matching to what we're doing."
Moore says the answers led to some seemingly radical changes. First, he took email away from the majority of the company's 1,200 employees. He says most of them were using their inboxes for storage anyway, so he gave them Cisco Quad, an enterprise collaboration platform, to interact through new collaboration spaces instead.
Then he took Microsoft Office away from a bulk of the workers, who now use blogs and other Web-based tools to communicate and collaborate in what he considers more effective formats.
Only about 200 workers, including company executives and account managers, still have Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Office because, Moore says, their jobs and responsibilities really require those tools.
"Cloud has delivered really good capabilities for us," Moore says, "and a new view of the world around us."
Next: Cloud-based productivity tools: Right for you?
Mary K. Pratt is a Computerworld contributing writer in Waltham, Mass. Contact her at marykpratt@verizon.net.
Read more about Cloud Computing in Computerworld's Cloud Computing Topic Center.
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