Today marks the business launch of Microsoft’s new range of products in the Irish market. The logo’s say Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange 2007. Don’t be mistaken in thinking that it’s just three products. Office is now a brand that encompasses a range of products in the Office System. The core of this is the famous Office suite and add-ons such as Project, Visio and InfoPath. But Office System includes server prodcuts too. Using these server products you can enable geographically or logically dispersed users to work with each other.
If you listened to Newstalk this morning you may have heard a poorly chosen quote of a MS rep in the news. MS launched a report that delves into how business are losing money because users cannot use, find or access information in a timely or efficient manner. By using an integrated solution, e.g. Exchaange 2007, Sharepoint Portal Server 2007 and Live Communication Server, you can enable employees who work in logical teams to work together, no matter where they are located.
The reality in modern business is that you can have a person in Dublin working with people in Los Angeles and Shanghai on one project. They might work together for a short time but need rapid, secure and reliable services to collaborate. Once the project is over they might work with different people on another project. Having Sharepoint Services enable users to quickly provision and customise a secure collaboration web site where they can work together, share information and share files. Using Sharepoint Portal can tie these websites together, enabling corporate branding and search mechanisms. Live Communications Server enable voice and video so that people can talk face to face using an internal communications system without needless waste on travel time and expenses. Exchange 2007 provides an integrated messaging solution that ties into these products. The major step forward with Exchange 2007 for the business is that it features Unified Messaging. UM enables Voice Mail and Fax services to be integrated into Exchange so that incoming messages can be delivered right into a users mailbox. The mobility functions of Exchange 2007 enable a business user to access their data no matter where they are: on the WAN via Outlook, over the web via SSL secured Outlook Web Access and over the air via secure push mail to the PDA (without the need for Blackberry subscriptions).
Server solutions don’t stop there. Microsoft Dynamics, Business Scorecard Manager and Project Server are just some more of the integrated business solutions that are availabel for business use.
The key is integration. Many organisations choose solutions from many vendors. But these solutions just don’t integrate. The business gets basic functionality but cannot easilly integrate the solutions. Business users then find doing what should be a simple taks to be quite difficult, often leading to wasted or redundant effort. MS solves this by not only integrating the server solutions with each other by leveraging Active Directory but also by tightly integrating Office 2007, the cornerstone of the Office System brand.
I highly recommend that you look into these solutions if this is something you are interested in.