It won't be clear how many users will latch onto the Google Apps offering within Salesforce.com for several months, but some customers have already considered it. Douglas Menefee, CIO of The Schumacher Group, which provides staffing and management services to hospitals, has been a Salesforce.com customer for two and a half years.

He uses Salesforce's flagship software to manage the relationships between the Schumacher Group's physicians and the 150 hospitals where they work. Since many physicians are always moving around the hospital, stopping at whatever computer is available, the ability for them to access Google Apps makes it easier for them to work on and edit documents without saving them on that machine.

"We are going to leverage the fact that Google Apps doesn't require software to be installed on workstations," Menefee told CIO over e-mail. "Additionally, we will be syncing info with [Salesforce] to improve collaboration and communication."

But Menefee stressed that certain information won't be traded over the software just yet.

"We will not at this time use Google Apps to retain any patient information due to HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and additional security discussions which need to take place," he says.

In addition, the approximately 700 full-time employees at the Schumacher Group will not be dumping Microsoft Office. "I'm not prepared to migrate [them] off of the Microsoft platform," Menefee explains. "However, I am looking to leverage the infrastructure for the 2,500 providers who are independently contracted with us."

What It Means to Microsoft

Microsoft would likely seize on Menefee's refusal to ditch Office as evidence that knowledge workers who spend all day at their desks prefer it to any other productivity software, especially since they've used it for so many years. But although Office has more bells and whistles than Google Apps and other web-based alternatives, it's not clear how many employees actually use them, according to Kaplan of Thinkstrategies.

In a survey of 420 large and small companies taken this month by Thinkstrategies and Triactive, a technical support firm for web-based software, nearly 99 percent of companies reported that Office was installed in 99 percent of their corporate PCs. By utilizing a tool that could actually track the usage of the Office applications on these computers, the study found that, at the 20 largest companies sampled, only 26 percent of the features were being used and centered around basic functions in Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

The rate of adoption with which companies have upgraded to newer versions of Office, meanwhile, has also been low. In a Computerworld survey of 727 respondents, most of whom worked in IT management, only 37 percent said they planned to upgrade to Microsoft 2007. Analysts don't know that 2008 will be much higher.