While we are fortunate to work with highly innovative clients who are excited to use the newest technology, we always advise them to hold off on adopting the latest software version until any issues are sorted out. For consumers, trying out new features and exploring the latest version isn’t a big deal. However, for business users, if there’s a learning curve, glitches, or crashes, it can greatly harm productivity. That’s why we invest a lot of time testing new applications and operating systems before recommending them to our clients. You might have heard that Microsoft recently launched Office 2016. We spent some time with it and have mixed feedback for our business users. Here’s the good, the bad, and the ugly about the Office 2016 suite:
- The Good: Built to make business better.
Word is probably our favorite when it comes to the new suite of products. While there has been minimal change to formatting and structure – the overall design has definitely gotten a facelift. We’re all about function, though and when it comes to function we see definite improvements.
- Word has many more templates. This allows businesses to refine their documents and be more professional without having to go online and download templates to use inside Word. There are also some pretty awesome co-authoring features that we wrote about in this blog.
- In Outlook, attachments link to recent documents. This is a useful feature since you can access it on any device that runs Office. You can quickly attach documents in emails in Outlook or refer to them in an email on your phone. This is especially helpful for mobile users or those who work on multiple devices. (Let’s be honest, around 90% of the workforce does this nowadays.)
- OneDrive is also attempting to make its way into the life of business users by making sharing documents, collaborating on documents and authoring documents across devices a little simpler.
- The Bad: Buggy Plug-ins Crashing Outlook
One of our employees experienced so many issues with his regular mail plugins (Go To Meeting and Sidekick being his biggest used ones) that he had to completely disable them to avoid crashing Outlook. While we’re sure this will be fixed in updates, it’s definitely not something that early adopters like to have to do. Particularly when they’re extremely reliant on the capabilities provided by those plugins.
- The Ugly: Outlook 2016 Not Working in Mac OS X El Capitan
For the earliest of early adopters with Apple’s latest Mac OS X El Capitan, Outlook 2016 just plain refused to work, continually crashing for users. While this was apparently fixed on October 13th – it’s a prime example of how making an immediate switch isn’t always the best idea for business users.
If you’re interested, here’s a breakdown of all the new features and improvements directly from Microsoft. Overall, we have to say that Microsoft’s push towards the cloud, mobility and a new pricing model will really change the way businesses think about licensing (particularly in the middle of the Microsoft SAM Audit push). The good outweighs the bad in this particular scenario. While there are still some bugs to work out, Microsoft is working diligently to eliminate them and overall we think Office 2016 is a great investment for companies that are looking to upgrade and eliminate the capital expense.
