Office 365 crowned king of all productivity apps

So what’s the most popular app being used by businesses right now? Unsurprisingly, it’s Microsoft’s productivity juggernaut Office 365, although Slack is revving up very nicely too.

According to the latest ‘Businesses @ Work’ report from Okta, among its customers, Office 365 has a clear lead as the most popular business productivity app – while exact usage numbers aren’t provided, at the end of last year, Microsoft’s suite had bested second-place Salesforce.com by a factor of 1.3 to 1.

Office 365 is also the top ‘lifecycle management app’, Okta further noted, although it said that both Box and G Suite weren’t far behind in this category.

And Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity suite dominates when it comes to mobile devices as well, being the most popular app here. Things are looking pretty rosy for Office 365, in short, and Okta isn’t the only firm compiling statistics which has come to this conclusion.

Not slacking off

We also mentioned Slack doing well, and the collaborative chat effort is the third fastest-growing app overall, managing no less than 44% growth throughout last year. Other messaging apps have had their market share cannibalised by Slack, and both Yammer and HipChat witnessed a steady decline throughout 2016.

Although this year could be very different with the launch of Microsoft Teams, which is going to be a serious assault for Slack to fend off.

The fastest-growing app, incidentally, is a videoconferencing service by the name of Zoom which has seen 67% growth over the last six months alone.

Okta also observed that G Suite users could be seen as being more ‘cloud-friendly’ than Office 365 customers, noting that those with Google’s productivity suite use 30% more apps on average – and were more likely to use ‘best-of-breed solutions’ (the likes of Salesforce, Slack, AWS) and software which is more customisable. They’re more likely to be tinkerers, in other words.

Via: InfoWorld

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).