MSR Consulting TechnoBlog

Microsoft launches its Unified Communications strategy

Microsoft is taking on both the challenges and opportunities that
exist around the current unified communications platform and product
lineup.

To
do this, the Redmond software maker is introducing voice technologies
to its current lineup, developing new products and expanding the
unified communications features its current products provide, as well
as offering services itself and in association with its partners.

In a two-hour presentation at an event here in San Francisco on
June 26, Jeff Raikes, the president of the Microsoft Business Division,
presented his vision for Microsoft’s unified messaging strategy and product roadmap of the future.

“This new world of work has people at its core, and they are
assisted by the software we provide to simplify the way they work
together, especially across organizations and countries,” he said,
adding that communication choices have expanded, leading to
communications chaos.

“There are also just too many devices out there, and workers do
not have enough time to deal with the complexity associated with all of
this. This wealth of devices and connectivity is also putting strain on
IT administrators,” he said.

The PC environment had seen a lot more innovation from a
software perspective than the desktop phone, and PC innovation has
improved the richness of that experience, Raikes said, noting that
significant challenges and opportunities lie ahead in the unified
communications field.

The complexity of the user experience remains a big challenge,
with research showing that the average organization has 6.4 types of
different communication devices and 4.8 communications applications,
resulting in infrastructure islands, he said.

The real opportunities for unified communications lie on the
productivity front, around collaboration and better business results,
while meetings remain an area of great opportunity and challenge, he
said, noting that the virtual meeting experience “should and could” be
even better than actually being present at that meeting.

Raikes then gave a demonstration of the Microsoft Office
RoundTable, an audio-video collaboration device with a 360-degree
camera, expected to be released in the first half of 2007, that, when
combined with Office Communications Server 2007, delivers an immersive
conferencing experience that extends the meeting environment across
multiple locations.

The Power of Unified

Microsoft’s vision for Unified Communications enables a people-centric solution of rich, intuitive, and seamless communications across e-mail, IM, voice, data, video, and conferencing. Microsoft offers companies a complete software platform that unifies all communications with their business applications and processes, streamlining how people reach each other and communicate. Microsoft is delivering revolutionary economics and manageability, with a flexible, reliable, and secure infrastructure for Unified Communications.

Add comment June 27th, 2006

Knowledge Network For Microsoft Sharepoint Server 2007

Knowledge Network for Office SharePoint Server 2007 is powerful,
easy to use software that helps people make better decisions more
quickly. It automates the discovery and sharing of undocumented
knowledge and relationships, enabling you to quickly locate who knows
whom and who knows what within your constantly changing organization.

Knowledge
Network will make your organization more effective by providing one of
the quickest ways to connect with people who can successfully impact
your business.

Make Better Decisions Quickly

Knowledge
Network is a valuable add-on to Office SharePoint Server 2007 enhancing
enterprise search for people by automating the discovery of the
business relationships and subject matter expertise of everyone in the
network providing vital business insights enabling users to make better
decisions more quickly.

•	Discover who knows what and who knows whom within an organization. Quickly and easily locate people by subject expertise or social relationships with key contacts or companies.
•	Simplify creating automated user profiles for each member of the network. Knowledge Network automates the discovery and sharing of undocumented knowledge and relationships for each member in the network. The user-customizable automated profile is secure and requires member approval before it is shared.
•	Effectively search and pinpoint individuals. Knowledge Network provides the ability to connect with internal and external contacts, and calculates the shortest social distance between any two people in the network.

Streamline Collaboration

Connect with influential and knowledgeable people.
Knowledge Network improves collaboration by enabling people to quickly
identify internal and external key contacts: people who have specific
knowledge or strategic business relationships.

•	Use Knowledge Network to quickly identify people who have specific expertise or who can connect you to others based on the shortest social distance path to you.
•	Leverage the power of the collective relationship capital within your organization.
•	Empower your workers to make better decisions quickly by Knowledge Network to discover and locate who knows whom and who knows what within your organization.

Control Your Personal Information

Knowledge
Network enables members to easily create, update, and manage an
automated profile of their keywords and key internal and external
contacts, which they control and share with others in the Knowledge
Network.

•	Choose which information (e-mail folders and personal contacts) to include and exclude in the Knowledge Network analysis.
•	Select from five levels of who sees what (everyone, my colleagues, my workgroup, my manager, and only me) to apply to each item in your profile to control who can and who cannot associate your profile information with you.
•	Quickly and easily review your profile before it is published, selecting who sees what information.

Knowledge Network allows you to Control who can see information associated with you and your profile.
View a larger image.

1 comment June 16th, 2006

Sharepoint Services and Sharepoint Portal Server Differences

Overcoming the cost objections between WSS and SPS

Whenever I am brought into a new client to provide consulting insight on a potential Sharepoint project, I am invariably pulled into a conversation regarding the differences between Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) and Sharepoint Portal Server (SPS). To be honest, explaining this in a clear, concise way to a business audience is much harder than one would think it should be. Especially when one of the products in question is effectively ‘free’ and the other carries quite a significant price tag along with it.

Once the pricing has been exposed the questions become “Do I really need SPS?” or “Can I make WSS do what I need instead?”. These questions are being solely driven by cost consciousness at that point, which is not to say that cost shouldn’t be an important part of the decision process, it just shouldn’t be the focal point of the conversation at that stage of the process. Deflecting those questions back to the issues of the business problem you are attempting to solve however, will only work if you can easily explain the product differences in a concise, easy to understand way. Something that quite frankly I used to have a difficult time doing.

Obviously diving into technical topics isn’t going to do you any good at a table full of executives, but you do have to quickly find a way to do a product selection. So I had to train myself to ignore all of the technical mumbo jumbo that starts swimming through my head when those questions are asked, step away from the product, and focus in on the business problems to be solved as the filter through which my answer would have to pertain. (Hopefully you made sense of that convoluted sentence after reading it a few times.) Essentially I needed a way to describe the product differences that directly related to the problem the company was trying to solve….yet be generic enough that it applied to all potential Sharepoint customers.

Those who know me will be the first to tell you that being concise is not my strong point. I can ramble on and on about the most seemingly mundane topics. On topics that I am passionate about I feel it’s a disservice to throw out a quick elevator speech while skipping over all of the other wonders of the topic. As you can imagine, not everyone on the other end of my diatribes is always as passionate though so I continually have to remind myself to shut up and get on with it. Therefore, this exercise in summing up the WSS / SPS difference from a business problem perspective was more difficult for me than it should have been. In the end however, here is what I ended up with:

Collaboration vs. Aggregation

WSS is about collaboration. The act of storing and sharing information between groups of people. Whether a team, a department, or the entire organization.

SPS is about Aggregation. The act of compiling and storing information across multiple sources into a meaningful whole.

The products are extremely complimentary, in fact SPS uses WSS for a great deal of its functionality and is effectively built on top of it. This tight integration is one of the things that makes describing the differences in the products so difficult. In a general sense you can think of WSS as a means for creating and storing your content, whereas SPS provides the means of intelligently storing all of that WSS information so that you can easily navigate and search through it in multiple ways.

Once you have laid out that conceptual foundation, and the distinction between collaboration and aggregation is clear, you should be able to begin laying out the business objectives into these two categories. Now we are back to a productive conversation instead of just focusing on price.

Depending upon your audience you will likely want to be slightly more granular now and begin slicing and dicing the information you have just categorized into more meaningful sub-categories of functionality. Because there is a lot of overlap in functionality between WSS and SPS this will help to drive your audience closer to the answer of which product will best suit their needs. To do this however we need to map out some more functionality of the two products, but still do so in a way that a business user could understand it.

In my research I came across this little chart from Microsoft off of the MSDN site that does provide some high-level functional differences. The grid that I use in our consulting practice is much more involved and slightly different but this one will do fine as an example. We never show the business audience the grid itself though, it’s still too technical and invites too much discussion about issues that wouldn’t be helpful. Instead what we do is use these feature differences as a source for well structured business questions. We then ask those questions in a specific sequence to the business owners and the answers give us enough information to determine if a certain piece of functionality is needed or not. We have fields in our grid for placing a checkmark if it’s required, and the business problem that it solves for the client from the answer we were given.
For example, you might structure a question to the business user that gives you immediate insight into whether or not ‘Audience’ functionality in SPS would be required to acheive it. OK, I probably shouldn’t have used ‘Audience’ functionality as an example since there are many of us out there that would have a hard time explaining that functionality as well. Perhaps ‘Enterprise Search’ capability would be a better example. I won’t go into the question grid that we use here but if you’re interested just leave a comment and I’d be happy to expound on them. It’s not a state secret or anything.
The point here is that with a well thought out approach, and some lists of functionality and business questions you can still easily decide which of these two products is going to be the right choice for any given situation. You still face the hurdle of overcoming price objections, but at that point you will have well reasoned answers to back up the recommendation that are directly related to specific business problems. And if the recommendation is to use SPS and they desire to not bite the bullet, you have a ready-made list of functionality that also has to be thrown out or replaced by some other means.

As a side-note here. You will find that overcoming price objections in the way stated isn’t how it always works in the real world. These days there are so many small software companies providing extensions to WSS functionality that it’s entirely possible you may still provide all of the desired functionality for the project with a combination of WSS and 3rd party commercial toolsets. This is a perfectly reasonable outcome, but I caution you to be aware of the pitfalls of extending WSS functionality with 3rd party software. You will need to do highly technical due diligence and testing on that software to insure future compatibility with updates, upgrades, etc., etc. The first time you use such a product the costs involved in that due diligence may be prohibitive. But that is a topic for another day.

All of this begs the question, is SPS priced appropriately? Personally, I think it’s high for the Small to Medium business market because of the baseline cost, but priced well for the Enterprise. I think a better pricing model would be paid client licensing only with the server license being free. Personally, I believe Microsoft is missing out on available revenue in the 25-200 person businesses with their existing pricing model. But the reality is that I believe WSS is such an extremely powerful piece of software, and therefore such a great value to be included for free that it makes SPS seem so expensive given the small number of features that it brings to the table over WSS. Those few features though are incredibly important, and I think few businesses would argue that the end product of a SPS site is well worth the price. In other words, I believe that if a business either didn’t know about WSS, or if WSS was available at a price of say half of SPS that the issue of cost justification for SPS wouldn’t be nearly so contentious.

Cheers,

Matt Ridings

MSR Consulting

Add comment June 15th, 2006

Sharepoint most powerful tool in Office 2007

SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft Corp.’s Web publishing and collaboration tool, is the “most revolutionary element” of the upcoming Microsoft Office 2007 suite, Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates said today.

In a keynote speech at Microsoft’s first SharePoint Conference in Bellevue, Wash., Gates said that the collaboration and workflow capabilities enabled in Office 2007, which is due by year’s end, will be as significant as when Microsoft first brought together its separate Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications into the Office 95 suite 12 years ago.

“The idea that every worker should have that full set of tools we now take for granted,” Gates told an audience of several thousand system architects and developers. “At the server level, we have not had that.”

Microsoft’s prior versions include SharePoint Portal Server 2001 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003. Both provided basic workflow and collaboration features for workers to create internal Web portals. But they lacked “compelling” features that would have caused end users “to pound on the doors of their IT departments asking them to install,” said Peter O’Kelly, an analyst with Salt Lake City-based Burton Group’s recently created Collaboration and Content Strategies team.

“Microsoft has had a number of false starts in the past,” O’Kelly said. But he praised features in the upcoming SharePoint 2007, including wikis, blogs and RSS feeds; greater integration with Microsoft Office that allow users to access and change data in real-time through a Web browser or an Office application such as Excel; and search for data across multiple SharePoint sites at once.

He also said SharePoint’s improved authentication and other features will enable it to better publish content outside of the intranet, even to users of non-Microsoft Web browsers.

“For how people are working today and what Microsoft is promising to deliver, I think it will be absolutely pivotal for many organizations,” he said.

O’Kelly said the long-dormant collaboration market is enjoying a renaissance, with leading vendors investing “billions of dollars” in developing products to convince enterprises that their existing infrastructure of e-mail and instant messaging software combined with a server for storing file attachments is not enough.

Microsoft’s main competition for SharePoint includes IBM, which has two offerings: its venerable Lotus Notes client paired with the Domino Server, as well as a Workplace client that runs separately or with its WebSphere Java-based application server. A public beta for Notes 8.0, code-named Hannover, is expected later this year, according to O’Kelly. WebSphere Portal 6, also due out later this year, is a “pretty credible alternative”—especially for companies that are not end-to-end Microsoft users.

Other competitors, according to O’Kelly, include Oracle Corp., with its Collaboration Suite; Novell Corp. with its GroupWise messaging software; and several emerging open-source vendors, many of whom are offering cheap or free wikis via the Internet

Add comment June 10th, 2006

PowerPoint Slide Template Library Using Office Sharepoint Server 2007

With the advent of Microsoft Office 2007, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS), integration between client and server is even better than ever. Each article in this series will focus on some way that an Office System client works better with SharePoint. Today I’m going to talk about PowerPoint, and how the new MOSS 2007 Slide Library takes it to the next level.

PowerPoint presentations are the lifeblood of many a corporate meeting; however, getting a consistent message across has been difficult due to the fact that a PowerPoint deck is one big file. Sometimes, it is one really big file. If you have certain key business information and you want to ensure everyone presenting “gets it rightâ€?, your choices have generally been limited to providing a “standardsâ€? deck, containing all of your company’s boilerplate, and making everyone pull out the slides they need; or going through the tedious process of saving each slide or small block of slides individually, then having your users merge each file them into their working presentation.

That can be very difficult, not only because you might have many such standard slides, but it means that the user needs to try to copy and paste them from the base presentation into their working copy, or merge many separate files. Finding just the right slide can be a task as well. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just have each slide in its own file, and easily pick and choose which ones you wanted in your presentation? Well, with PowerPoint 2007 and MOSS, you can!

The slide library feature of MOSS allows you to create a repository of standard company slides, that is true, but because it is based on SharePoint, you can do so much more! Your library can include custom fields so you can make it easy to find just the slides you are looking for (e.g. sales figures, company policies, key executive bios), either by search, or by filter. You can separate slides for internal use only from those suitable for public consumption.

Creating a Slide Library

Creating a slide library in MOSS 2007 is just as easy as creating any other type of list or library – just go to the Create page, and select Slide Library:

You will then be asked the normal questions, like what you want to call it, if you want it on the quick launch, etc…

Accessing your library

Once you’ve created your slide library, you will want to populate it.

Open a presentation that has some slides you wish to re-use. Then, from the Office menu, select Publish, and click Publish slides.

Use the Browse button to select your site and library (and optionally folder), as normal. Now you can pick and choose which slides you want to save in the library, optionally renaming them and giving them new descriptions at the same time!

Now, what about getting the slides into a new presentation? Easy as can be! Open your slide library, tick the boxes beside the slides you want, and click the “Send to Presentationâ€? link. You will be asked if you want to create a new presentation, or insert the slides into an exiting one.

You can have the slides retain their original formatting, or assume the format of the target presentation. You can even have PowerPoint tell you if the source slides have changed since you inserted them into the presentation!

Conclusion

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 are both great products on their own, and even greater together. The MOSS slide library brings this integration to the next level.

4 comments May 30th, 2006