In last few months I have been listening to SharePoint Podshow, a podcast show about SharePoint and related technologies. Show is hosted by Nick Swan, Brett Lonsdale and Rob Foster. Show delivers interesting information about SharePoint, ISV products and interviews with key people from SharePoint community.
In episode #15 guys discussed results of a survey that was conducted by Lightning Tools (authors of a number of very good and useful tools and web parts for SharePoint). You can check the results here.
I was not surprised by the results on the following question, as I already blogged about it, and presented results of a survey made by Forrester Research:
What version of Microsoft Office is your organization running?
As survey shows there is a huge number of companies still using Office 2003 .
So, do we have a problem here? I think we do. Most enterprise clients I work with are still using Office 2003 and they do not have any plans to upgrade it to Office 2007 (let alone Vista 
). As Office 14 release is approaching I do not know what to think… enterprise market obviously found Office 2003 to be reliable enough and they do not have any intention to spend millions of [put your currency here] to upgrade their hardware, software and to educate their people to use the new tools.
How can I train my people to handle all these clients with different versions of Microsoft infrastructure? We have a small number of users still using SharePoint 2003 and majority of them on SharePoint 2007. But I am wondering do I need supermen? How can a single developer/system engineer/consultant handle tree different versions 2003/2007/v14 at the same time… Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is rushing ahead at speed of light and market just cannot follow it?
What do you think?
