[April 10, 2018]

Despite New Collaboration Tools, Outlook Remains King of the Office 365 Enterprise App Ecosystem

A new independent survey, "The Office 365 app usage report 2018," found that despite hype around new collaboration tools, Outlook remains the most used application among enterprise workers across all age groups, job functions and industries. The survey, which queried 1022 business professionals worldwide regarding their use of Office 365, found that respondents are five-times more likely to use Outlook as their go-to app, compared to other Office apps, such as SharePoint and OneDrive. A majority of respondents indicated using Outlook 10 or more times daily.

As new collaboration tools in the Office 365 suite of applications, such as Teams, Yammer and other office applications, such as Slack, Dropbox and Box (News - Alert) start to root themselves in enterprise organizations, information workers are still gravitating towards office mainstays, like email. And while most organizations are already using Office 365 as their main productivity hub, a majority of survey respondents indicated that they plan to not only continue, but deepen their investments in Office 365 in the future.

Despite the sunny outlook, 34 percent of respondents cited that they rarely or never get training on new Office 365 apps or updates, while 18 percent have no formal policy regarding updates or new apps. Additionally, there has been a significant rise in the use of Office 365 for email only in 2017, compared to those who have had it since 2014 and prior. This is not surprising, given that the return on investment of moving email to the cloud is uniquely profound. It's also possible that lack of formal training paired with hesitancy in learning to use new tools and features has hindered adoption of Office 365 offerings beyond email.

Commissioned by harmon.ie, the survey sheds light on how enterprise workers are really using all thatOffice 365 has to offer. Key findings include:

• 55 percent of respondents indicated that Outlook is their most used Office 365 app, with 58 percent of respondents indicating they use it 10 times a day or more.
• A majority (38 percent) expect to use Outlook the same amount in the future, with 27 percent expecting to use it a lot more.
• Microsoft (News - Alert) Teams is getting a lot of attention, but only 16 percent of users indicated Teams as one of their top three apps, compared to 75 percent who indicated email as one of their top three apps. Teams is relatively young compared to Outlook, which may play a factor in the adoption rate.
• Of all job roles, accountants, human resources and creative roles are the least likely to use Outlook as one of their top three apps (35 percent, 41 percent and 47 percent), while senior management reports the most reliance on email (92.5 percent list it as one of their top three apps).
• In terms of industries, over 90 percent of construction and education respondents count Outlook as one of their top three apps (highest), while marketing and military report the lowest usage at around 55 percent (as one of their top three apps).
• Surprisingly, a higher percentage of small companies use Office 365 as their main hub for all work (25.7 percent) - whereas 21 percent of large companies (1,000+ employees) use it as their main hub. Additionally, employees at larger organizations (15 percent) have more choice over their apps than smaller companies (12.6 percent) do.

"It's clear that Outlook remains the workhorse of the enterprise, but if organizations expect employees to start using new collaboration tools, they need to do a better job of effectively integrating them into their current workflows, rather than overwhelming them with new and complicated user interfaces," said David Lavenda, vice president of product strategy, harmon.ie. "Instead of leaving employees to fend for themselves, IT leaders must start helping them extract the most value from their organization's technology investments and find solutions that enable them to work easier and smarter."

Full text of the survey, which was completed by Fifty Five and Five, a London-based research and marketing firm focused on the Microsoft partner ecosystem, can be found here.

About harmon.ie
harmon.ie makes user experience tools for the digital workspace, built to deliver information the way the human brain works. The company is a pioneer in Topic Computing; its flagship harmon.ie Collage solution breaks down data siloes from business applications by grouping information by topics, thereby surfacing what's most important to knowledge workers. harmon.ie provides a cohesive, people-first user experience supported by cognitive science and powered by machine learning to enhance employee productivity and help organizations overwhelmed with data. The company is a Microsoft Partner of the Year Finalist and an IBM (News - Alert) global partner.

Follow harmon.ie on Twitter and LinkedIn.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180410005316/en/

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