Question

To ask the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross representing the House of Commons Commission, what estimate he has made of the cost to date of introducing Office 365; what the final cost of introducing Office 365 is expected to be; and what feedback on the installation has been received so far from (a) hon. Members and (b) House staff.

The costs of the Microsoft 365 project to September 2014 are:

2013/14 £355,667
2014/15 £144,333

The net savings made as a result of this project for 2014 to 2020 are:

Office 2013 is the latest versions of Word, Excel, and Outlook. Microsoft 365 is Microsoft's cloud hosted version of these tools, together with some new tools accessible once a user's email box has been migrated to Microsoft 365.

The Microsoft 365 project has provided all users with the upgraded version of the Office 2013 suite. 90% of Members and their staff have upgraded their machines to Office 2013. As part of the pilot of Microsoft 365, 12 Members and their staff have had their mailboxes migrated to Microsoft 365. The remaining Members and their staff email boxes will be migrated to Microsoft 365 in June and July 2014. All House staff have completed both of these steps.

The general feedback from Members and their staff has been that the new product is similar to Office 2007, with some people liking the new features. We have received some negative feedback about the colour scheme of Outlook 2013 and about the new location of file/print/save buttons in Office 2013; similar feedback was received from House staff. In response PICT have produced guidance for staff on how to darken the colour scheme in Outlook and have been assured by Microsoft that they are working to address the interface issues in future upgrades.

There were some difficulties reported by people upgrading their Office 2013 remotely. This was due to the slow download of security updates for users with poor broadband connections.

The Members and their staff taking part in the pilots of Microsoft 365 have given positive feedback on the communications, support materials and service provided by PICT. As part of the migration Members have to reconnect their mobile devices to the new service and this has caused some difficulty for Blackberry users.

The migration of House staff to Microsoft 365 overlapped with unrelated network failures in January–February 2014, which affected perception of the product. Feedback from those migrated after the network was stabilised was much more positive. We have recently initiated 30 pilots of the wider suite of tools in Microsoft 365, and we have received positive feedback from these pilots, with users requesting to keep the new tools.