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| Microsoft Announces ’People-Ready’ Business Vision CEO Steve Ballmer outlines the company's vision for how people, armed with the right software, are the key to driving business success. Called "People-Ready", this vision for business is the backdrop for a series of innovative solutions in new and existing categories that Microsoft will bring to market over the next year. Addressing more than 500 business customers, Ballmer showcased new business solutions and explained how they are enabled by the integration across the company's forthcoming versions of the Windows Vista operating system, the 2007 Microsoft Office system, Windows Mobile software and the next version of Microsoft Exchange Server, as well as infrastructure offerings such as Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2005. The company's People-Ready vision is based on the belief that people are the ultimate drivers of a business' success. A business that is People-Ready gives its people software tools that enable them to collaborate and work together globally, to contact and serve customers instantly, and to streamline and reinvent processes intuitively. Along these lines, Microsoft previewed new software solutions that will deliver even greater customer value. Ballmer said that in the coming year Microsoft will apply its product portfolio and provide differentiated offerings to a much broader set of customer needs in the following categories: • Unified communications and collaboration. Microsoft is extending the rich capabilities of software to improve and advance business communications. • The next release of the Microsoft Office system will extend desktop capabilities though new server technologies. For example, with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft enables new categories with easy-to-use customization tools designed for people, workflow, and easy integration of popular collaboration tools such as wikis and blogs. In addition, technologies such as Exchange Server, Microsoft Office Live Communications Server and Microsoft Office Communicator will break down today's silos of communication (e-mail, phone, instant messaging, Web conferencing) and bring them together into an intuitive experience that helps people and organizations communicate simply and effectively while integrating seamlessly with business applications and processes. • Enterprise search. Microsoft's enterprise search technologies are moving beyond empowering people to create documents by enabling them to better manage the information they need to be successful. Through powerful new software solutions that take advantage of richness of both the client and the server such as Windows Desktop Search and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, people will have instant access to their most pressing information whether it is on their desktop, server or across their company — all from a single, intuitive and familiar user interface. • The mobile work force. The world of work is increasingly mobile. Microsoft's comprehensive approach to mobility that spans devices, software and networks addresses the needs of business in a way that no point solution provider can. Specifically, the next version of Exchange Server revolutionizes access by offering a speech-enabled and unified messaging platform that integrates e-mail, fax and voice mail in the user's inbox with support for a variety of clients, including traditional and mobile devices. The integration between Windows Mobile, Exchange Server and the 2007 Microsoft Office system enables entirely new scenarios for businesses to turn their work force into a mobile work force without having to manage additional server infrastructure, hire expensive consultants or relinquish their data to third-party providers. • Business intelligence. One way to increase the impact that people can have in an organization is to give them access to the information and insight they need. Until now, business intelligence (BI) software has been too complex, costly and disconnected from the software tools people use every day to do their jobs, but that is changing. Microsoft is significantly increasing, aligning and broadening its investment in BI with SQL Server as the foundation and with the Microsoft Office system playing an increasingly integral role. In addition, deeper integration between the next version of Microsoft Office Excel and SharePoint Server will make it easier for non-technical users to access hard-to-find corporate data and analyze it with simpler tools including new visualization technology. New solutions, including Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 and enhancements to the familiar Microsoft Office Excel software, transform BI into a mainstream technology for the most novice user by providing an easy user experience for accessing and working with business information so that decision-makers at all levels within an organization can drive better performance. • Customer relationship management (CRM). With the Microsoft Dynamics line of business management solutions, Microsoft is unifying the previously separate worlds of business process automation (such as CRM and ERP) with the world of productivity. For example, designed to be a natural extension of Microsoft Office Outlook, the Microsoft Dynamics CRM user experience provides workers with a familiar and intuitive environment that results in every person in a company being able to begin using such tools for managing sales, services and marketing processes. Microsoft CRM also adapts easily to a business' existing workflow and processes as a direct result of the innovation Microsoft has applied with respect to service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web services. Thus Microsoft CRM is tailored to suit people's roles and meet the specific needs of businesses today. • Infrastructure. While infrastructure is not something that employees typically think about, a significant portion of Microsoft's R&D over the past three years has gone into providing world-class, security-enhanced, and manageable software and server infrastructure to seamlessly support many of the new innovations coming to market later this year. For instance, new innovation in the already released SQL Server 2005 and the next version of Windows Server will play a significant role in delivering the underpinnings for all of these integrated solutions in a way that is transparent to workers. write your comments about the article :: © 2006 Computing News :: home page |