welcome to the january 2007 guide to microsoft in the...

January 2007Enterprise Resource Guide for Customers

Welcome to the January 2007 guide to Microsoft in the enterpriseThis guide is intended for technology, business, and public sector leaders who are interested in learning about Microsoft’s business vision and our priorities in the enterprise.

At Microsoft, we are passionate about technology and its potential to transform your organization. Our belief is that companies excel when they empower their people to drive the business forward by giving them the right tools, information, and opportunities. Fundamentally, software is instrumental to the people-ready business. Software enables us to harness information, turn data into insight, transform ideas into action, and turn change into opportunity.

Over the last 30 years, Microsoft has grown to offer products in more than 50 languages and to employ more than 60,000 employees worldwide. We believe the advantage that Microsoft offers to our enterprise customers is based on these key principles: Our focus on enterprise customers enables us to better understand and align with your needs and help you achieve successful business outcomes. Our customer-centered approach enables us to develop software that amplifies the impact of people throughout your organization. We deliver business technology through our ongoing, integrated relationships that are tailored to meet your requirements. And we are committed to a long-term vision to help you anticipate and lead in your market.

We created this guide to help make our approach in the enterprise more transparent and to provide you with a holistic view of our enterprise priorities. We encourage you to use this guide to help drive discussions around your own business challenges and technology opportunities with your Microsoft account manager and your technology partners. Your business is important to us and we appreciate your investing the time to learn more about how we can build on our relationship.

Sincerely,

Simon Witts Corporate Vice President Enterprise & Partner Group

© 2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This resource guide is for informational purposes only.MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.Microsoft, Active Directory, Aero, Axapta, BitLocker, BizTalk, Excel, Expression, Forefront, FrontPage, Groove, InfoPath, Microsoft Dynamics, Outlook, SharePoint, Visual Studio, Windows, Windows Live, Windows Mobile, Windows Server, Windows Vista, and Your Potential. Our Passion. are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual compa-nies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.Microsoft Corporation • One Microsoft Way • Redmond, WA 98052-6399 • USA Part Number 098-107347

MICROSOFT IN THE ENTERPRISE

Additional copies of this guide can be ordered online at http://www.microsoftcerg.com

A worldwide guide for enterprise customersto Microsoft priorities and our vision for the people-ready business

INTRODUCING THE PEOPLE-READY BUSINESS 01u Empowering People for Business Growth 03

u Software Foundation for the People-Ready 04 Business

u Is Your Business People-Ready? 04

MICROSOFT’S VISION FOR THE PEOPLE-READY 05BUSINESS

Optimizing Your Infrastructure 07u Core Infrastructure 10

u Business Productivity Infrastructure 13

u Application Platform Infrastructure 15

Building Business Capabilities 19u Building Customer Connections 20

u Enabling Your Mobile Workforce 23u Finding, Using, and Sharing Information 25

u Improving Compliance 28

u Driving Business Performance 30

u Driving Real-World Business Processes 33

REALIZING THE PEOPLE-READY BUSINESS VISION 35u Our Industry Commitment 35

u Our Software 45

u Our Competitive Advantage 48

u Value of a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement 51

u Role of Microsoft Services 52

u Role of Partners 53

u Executive Resources 53

CONCLUSION 55u Why Microsoft? 55

Quickly find relevant information by role:

u All roles

u Technology leadership roles (for example, CIO and senior IT management)

u Business leadership roles (for example, CEO, CFO, and VP)


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IntroducIng the people-ready busIness

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After a decade of re-engineering, redesigning, and automating business processes, where do we look next for continuing improvements to deliver profitable business outcomes? To every business’ most critical resource—the people who work there.

As communications technologies develop, business borders expand, and market reach grows, enterprises of today face new and evolving pressures. Over the last few years, Microsoft has conducted more than 10,000 interviews with our customers, to find out what matters most to you; we wanted to expand our understanding of our customers’ challenges on a worldwide level, and in the end we found that our most successful customers focus on their people. Our people-ready business vision is a direct playback from the themes and messages that we heard during these conversations. Equipping people with the capabilities, tools, information, and solutions that they need to make the biggest contribution that they can as quickly as they can will be the primary driver of success in a globally competitive, rapidly changing business environment. This section of the guide looks at what we learned through this research—at some of the factors that are changing the ways in which we work and how businesses around the world are recognizing the benefits of empowering their people.

…our most successful customers focus on their people.

With increasing globalization, organizations are working with suppliers in countries around the world, have employees that report in from remote locations far from central offices, and service customers outside their local community. With this increased business reach, organizations must also contend with emerging new competitors and increased competition for talent and jobs that transcends geography.

Customer demands are also changing. Over the last decade, more accessible product information and self-service capabilities have helped to increase customer satisfaction and lower the cost of delivering high-quality customer service. However, customers of today also expect responsive, personal service when self-service systems can’t meet their unique needs, and how a business handles these exceptions has become a key competitive differentiator.

TrendsOne world of

business

As barriers to the flow of goods, capital, and labor dissolve, collaboration of

all sorts will become more prevalent, requiring

more flexible practices and more robust security

for intellectual assets.

Always on, always connected

Pervasive wireless networks and more

powerful mobile devices make access easy but

prioritization more difficult as workers try to

balance competing demands on their

personal and professional lives.

Transparent organization

Government regulation and increasing vigilance

by shareholders, customers and

empowered consumer groups mean businesses

must operate at unprecedented levels of

visibility while maintaining control over proprietary

information.

Cost pressure

Increased competition and shrinking margins

are forcing enterprises to focus on reducing costs

in all aspects of the business. Many

organizations are faced with demands to reduce their infrastructure costs while helping ensure the security of business data

and IT systems.

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Most businesses are now facing multiple regulatory and legislative standards, and as a result compliance initiatives have seen exponential growth. As these regulatory requirements become more pervasive, complex, and costly, enterprises are challenged to rethink processes and adopt a holistic approach that supports compliance while increasing operational efficiency.

In addition to these increasing demands, enterprises are under pressure to drive better business performance. However, with the proliferation of data stores and an expanding number of business process solutions in place, it is increasingly difficult to gain valuable business insight.

Challenges such as these inevitably have an impact on both business and technology, driving priorities and setting benchmarks for competitive differentiation. In an increasingly services-based business climate, Microsoft sees four trends in this new world of work: one world of business; always on, always connected; the transparent organization; and cost pressure.

This new world of work reflects an information-intensive business world, and a natural outcome of this is the rise of what Microsoft calls the “information worker”—those who work every day to analyze, report on, and share this information. This presents new challenges: to understand and manage information and to give people at all levels the tools to find, prioritize, and use information without getting distracted or overburdened by information overload. An organization’s ability to embrace change and opportunities in the global economy is directly related to how it empowers information workers. Our customers are telling us that this means finding ways to make it easier for their people to have an impact—by giving them the tools to work more closely with their colleagues, by providing more secure

and unobtrusive access to information, and by simplifying processes to help them convert raw data into informed, actionable insight.

An organization’s ability to embrace change and opportunities in the global economy is directly related to

how it empowers information workers.

We are also seeing significant changes in how people work. A recent article in The Economist compares the “organization man” of the mid-20th century with the modern “networked person.” The organization man had a lifetime allegiance to a single corporation and valued hierarchy, loyalty, and caution, leaving decision making to the higher powers. In contrast, the networked person has wide-ranging contacts that expand far beyond the organization, is always connected to a network of peers, colleagues, and customers through multiple electronic devices, is highly mobile and, importantly, plays the role of decision maker.1 Businesses that embrace this new working style empower their people to be as effective as possible through tools that support communication, information sharing, and collaboration.

These trends in working style are likely to continue. According to the firm Yankelovich, which specializes in consumer attitudes and marketing futures, the “echo boomer” generation (1976–1986) that is now entering the workforce is a technological generation that is used to collaboration, teamwork, and self-invention. This generation has lived its entire life in the digital era—e-mail, the Internet, instant messaging, and mobile devices are a part of their everyday life. They also highly value community, which we can see through the popularity of social networking sites and interactive educational programs. Echo boomers communicate and collaborate around the clock and expect their work to be just as connected.

1 “The New Organisation,” The Economist, January 2006

introducing the people-ready business

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Destination workplaces that appeal to the top emerging talent provide a culture and tools that are symbiotic with

this new style of work.

The processes, technologies, and systems that our people rely on every day must support this digital lifestyle and changing work roles, and our customers are telling us that this is becoming increasingly important. Facing an aging, shrinking workforce, businesses need to find new ways to attract and retain the best people. Indeed, in a recent survey by the Institute of Management and Administration (IOMA), human resource (HR) professionals identified talent management as their highest priority.2 Destination workplaces that appeal to the top emerging talent provide a culture and tools that are symbiotic with this new style of work—so that their people will feel productive, enabled and, ultimately, fulfilled in their roles.

EMPOWERING PEOPLE FOR BUSINESS GROWTHMicrosoft firmly believes in the role of people in building business success, a belief that is shared by many business leaders. A survey conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) on behalf of Microsoft UK in April 2006 found that over three-quarters (78 percent) of business leaders from over 200 U.K. companies felt that their workforce was their company’s most important asset, far outranking other business assets such as products and services, market leadership, knowledge, information, and technology.

Notably, Gartner, a leading IT research and analyst firm, also recognizes the impact of people: a new Gartner research area defines a high-performance workplace as “a physical or

Customers are at the heart of every business. People who excel at developing relationships with customers are those that provide the highest level of service to achieve maximum profitability. Consumers have access to more information, more suppliers, and more purchasing channels than ever before, and personal service can be a point of distinction that will keep bringing customers back.

Technology can play a significant role in helping your people respond quickly and personally to customer requests, whether it's for product information, a transaction history, or changes to a pending order. With the tools to access the right information quickly and easily, your employees can focus on what’s most important—the customer. Technology can help your people be more effective at acquiring and keeping new customers, up-selling and cross-selling new goods and services to your existing customers, and building customer loyalty.

Generating ideas requires people to dream, challenge, reflect, and enhance. When people have access to the right information, are supported by the right processes, and are connected to the right people, they can turn their ideas into innovative processes, products, and services. In a global business, this takes place not only in conference rooms at headquarters but also in shared, virtual workspaces that bring all these aspects of collaboration together.

Technology can play a significant role in helping your people capture and protect intellectual property, streamline business processes

and workflows, and seamlessly share ideas and projects with strategic business partners up and down the value

chain. Innovative companies use technology to create new value in existing product lines and services,

innovate around new ideas and concepts, and determine how to commercialize those ideas and products and profitably ship them to customers.

People are the key to controlling costs. People use their knowledge and creativity to improve operations. Behind every process improvement, every simplified form, every transfer of knowledge from one person to another, and every act that uses information as a substitute for inventory is a person who imagined a better, more efficient way to do things and acted to turn that idea into reality.

With the right technology to support them, your people can help your company streamline operations and minimize cost, focus on business process to improve time to delivery, and use their connections with business partners to deliver value to your customers.

In the global marketplace, success depends on partners, suppliers, distributors, and the relationships

of individuals across myriad organizations to bring a product or service to market. The increasingly global scale

of business often means that those who win look to partners who can perform services that are beyond the expertise of the company.

Technology can help your people break down the barriers that are naturally created by partnerships with other businesses. Technology can help bridge the gap between your organization and those of your partners, suppliers, and distributors, enabling your people to maintain loyalty and trust by sharing a common view of information across companies and continents.

People Drive Business Outcomes

Develop Customer Relationships Drive Innovation

Improve Operations Build Partner Connections

2 “Critical Issues in HR Drive 2006 Priorities: #1 Is Talent Management,” HRFocus, January 2006

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virtual environment designed to make workers as effective as possible in supporting business goals and providing value.”3 The value that people offer is in their potential to drive business outcomes that will differentiate their business and make it more competitive. The most important of these business outcomes became clear through extensive conversations with our customers: creating loyal and profitable relationships with customers, inventing new products and services and enhancing existing ones, managing the business in the most efficient way possible, and building high-value connections with partners, suppliers, employees, and customers. When your business is people-ready, your people have the tools to achieve these four business outcomes, regardless of your business’ industry, size, and location.

SOFTWARE FOUNDATION FOR THE PEOPLE-READY BUSINESSOur customers frequently look to investments in technology to help differentiate their businesses. In many cases, technology is a strong imperative for improved business performance in the modern enterprise, and IT decision makers are increasingly focusing on actively driving business growth. In fact, in a worldwide survey of 1,400 CIOs published by Gartner, the number one CIO strategic action priority for 2006 was to “deliver projects that enable growth,” reflecting a shift in focus for CIOs to work “on” rather than just “in” the business.4 Gene Hall, the CEO for Gartner, also recently reported that the number of CIOs to leave their jobs doubled in 2006 over 2005, which he attributed to how too many were focused on cost rather than growth.5 However, we recognize that technology alone—no matter how aligned with business growth initiatives—does not hold the key to business success. IT systems will not offer creative insight into new product development, will not seize opportunities for process improvement, and will not develop strong relationships with business partners. By closely aligning your business and IT objectives, you can help ensure that the software solutions that your organization deploys empower your people to achieve these outcomes.Regardless of whether their roles involve customer service and support, sourcing, research and development, sales and marketing, operations, or delivering products or services, your people require certain capabilities from the software that they rely on. Our research has shown that they need the tools to be more mobile and to work together more effectively. They need to be able to better manage the content and information that they are inundated with every day and to derive insight from information from across the organization. And organizations need to be able to reduce the costs and

risks associated with the IT infrastructure that people rely on. The right technology meets these needs and enables your people to reach customers more effectively, harness critical business insight, and work together more productively across time, national, and geographical boundaries.

IS YOUR BUSINESS PEOPLE-READY?Do your people have the tools that they need to access information, collaborate, be effective when mobile, and connect with customers? The answers to the following four questions can be a simple, effective gauge for assessing how people-ready your organization is:

1. In a world of information overload, do your people have access to the right information at the right time to make an intelligent, informed decision every time they need to make one?

2. In today’s global business climate, can your people work with groups around the world and exchange ideas as though they were all in the same room?

3. In a world that is always on, always connected, can your people work as efficiently and effectively on the road as they can in the office?

4. Do your people have the visibility into processes so that they can apply their insight to improve operations and reduce costs?

The remainder of this guide will help you explore how Microsoft is building technology that can help your organization be people-ready.

Trends

One world of business

Always on, always

connectedTransparent organization Cost pressure

Role of Software

Simplify how people work

together

Findinformation and improve

businessinsight

Help protect and manage

content

Help reduce IT costs and

improve security

3 “The High-Performance Workplace Defined,” Gartner, July 20064 “Growing IT’s Contribution: The 2006 CIO Agenda,” Gartner, 20065 “Gartner: Consumer Tech Is Next Wave of Enterprise IT,” eWEEK, October 2006 (http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2026578,00.asp)

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MIcrosoft’s vIsIon for the people-ready busInessMicrosoft and our partners focus on helping our customers build core enterprise capabilities that are fundamental in building a people-ready business. We believe that these key capabilities are central to enabling your people to connect more effectively with customers, be more innovative, identify areas for operational improvement, and forge better connections with your partners and suppliers to help your enterprise be competitive and efficient. To achieve this, we focus on optimizing infrastructure by building technical capabilities and on enabling people by building business capabilities. Our prioritized focus areas provide a structure that you can use to assess the people-ready capabilities of your organization. Microsoft and our partners can work with you to help identify the business capabilities that would be most valuable to your organization and then map these to the technical capabilities that support them. We can also help bridge discussions between business decision makers and technical decision makers, to help ensure that business and IT priorities are in alignment. Using this process, we can help your organization build a roadmap for becoming a people-ready business. The Optimizing Your Infrastructure and Building Business Capabilities sections of this guide provide detailed guidance on these key focus areas.We are committed to not only helping you identify these capabilities, but also helping your IT staff to build, implement, and manage the solutions to achieve them through powerful yet manageable technology. Our approach to software can help you increase the speed with which you can develop and deploy solutions to address your business needs or make your business more effective; lower the costs associated with integration, training, and support; and maximize the flexibility of your organization to customize and extend unique solutions for your business. We have spoken to thousands

of our customers to find out what we and our partners can do to better equip your IT professionals and developers with the tools, technology, and information that they need to maximize their impact on your business. Based on these conversations, we offer four promises to help you build an infrastructure for a people-ready business:1. We understand that costs need to be cut and that

IT needs to focus on adding strategic value. We are committed to helping you manage complexity and achieve agility by delivering systems that enable computers—not people—to handle more of the management load and free up your IT staff to focus on adding new value.

2. We understand that businesses need to open their systems to employees, partners, suppliers, and customers while at the same time protecting information in a world of growing security threats. We are committed to delivering solutions to help you protect information and control access.

3. We understand that software plays a fundamental role in connecting people with the information and the business processes that they need to make better decisions. We deliver tools and technologies that empower your IT and development teams to advance the business with IT solutions that connect people, processes, and information and ultimately enable your business to respond to new challenges and capitalize on opportunities.

4. We understand that the difference between success and failure often hinges on how productive your people can be. We deliver communications and collaboration technologies that amplify the impact of people and bring more of their contributions to life.

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Building Business Capabilities

BuildingCustomer

Connections

Develop more profitable customer relationships with integrated,easy-to-usecollaboration and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions that enable your people to work more securely across organizational boundaries and access people and customer information from anywhere.

Driving Business

Performance

Increase your people’s access to financial and operationalinformation to help advance your business strategy and drive business performance.

Improving Compliance

Help reduce the complexity of your compliance solutions and improve your control of financial, regulatory, and operationalprocesses through familiar and easy-to-use

applications.

Finding, Using, and Sharing Information

Empower your people to make better business decisions, be more productive, and achieve greater business success by enabling them to find, use, and share information more quickly, more easily, and more securely.

Enabling Your Mobile

Workforce

Better support your mobile workforce by delivering the tools, technologies, and platform that will help them more effectively communicate,collaborate, and work while on the go.

Driving Real-World

BusinessProcesses

Bring together financialmanagement, CRM, and supply chain managementprocesses and integrate them across your organization to help your business thrive.

Core Infrastructure

Application Platform Infrastructure

Business Productivity Infrastructure

Optimizing Your Infrastructure

With Microsoft’s people-ready business vision, we focus on improving the tools that people rely on to drive business growth. Our approach is two-fold: enhancing and simplifying the tools that already work well and delivering additional tools and improvements to remove obstacles that prevent people from working productively. Part of this process is connecting your business’ needs—such as finding people and information more quickly or helping people work together more effectively—with the IT tools that support them—such as enterprise search and collaboration capabilities. When IT decision makers have a close understanding of the business’ objectives and needs, they are then in a better position to connect those needs with the required IT capabilities. From our research, it has become clear that companies today are realizing that there has never been a greater need for IT to become—and be seen as—a true strategic corporate asset that delivers ongoing business value. This changing agenda is evident by looking at what CIOs and IT leaders defined as their top priorities for 2006. The worldwide 2006 survey of 1,400 CIOs published by Gartner shows that their technology

priorities focus on business intelligence, security, mobility, collaboration, and customer relationships—IT priorities that align closely with the business challenges and trends that our enterprise customers are talking to us about today.6

The “State of the CIO” study shows that CIOs are looking for IT to proactively initiate technology solutions to enable business outcomes. This is a dramatic shift from a few years

ago when the majority of CIOs viewed the role of IT as a supporter and enabler of predefined business initiatives.

This study also affirms the strong focus that CIOs are placing on aligning business and IT priorities, which they

ranked as their number one management priority for 2006.7

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Top 10 Technology PrioritiesTop 10 Business Priorities

1. Business process improvement 2. Control operating costs 3. Attracting and growing customer relationships 4. Improve competitive advantage 5. Improve competitiveness 6. Using intelligence in products and services 7. Security breaches/disruptions 8. Revenue growth 9. Faster innovation10. Data protection and privacy

1. Business intelligence applications 2. Security technologies 3. Mobile workforce enablement 4. Collaboration technologies 5. Customer sales and service 6. Service-oriented architectures 7. Workflow management 8. Networking, voice and data communications 9. Virtualization10. Legacy application modernization

Source: Gartner EXP Survey, 2006

Top Priorities of CIOs in 2006

6 “Gartner Survey of 1,400 CIOs Shows Transformation of IT Organisation is Accelerating,” Gartner, January 23, 2006 (http://www.gartner.com/press_releases/asset_143678_11.html)7 “2006 State of the CIO,” CIO Magazine, 2006

2004

20%

IT should support and enable predefined business initiatives.

IT should proactively envision business possibilities and initiate with technology.

Changing Role of the CIOCIOs’ Philosophy on the Primary Roles of the IT Department

20062005

80%

60%

40%

Source: State of the CIO, CIO Magazine, 2003-2006

2003

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CIOs are looking to drive down infrastructure costs and free their IT staff to enable business growth. They want to refine cumbersome business processes that slow their people down. They want to give their people the software and solutions that will allow them to respond to market conditions. We understand that our customers are looking for a new, dynamic approach to supporting the evolving needs of their businesses, both for today and looking ahead to tomorrow.The business case for investing in technology that supports business objectives is compelling. Microsoft recently sponsored a study by Keystone Strategy, Inc. to correlate IT capabilities with business performance and to answer the question “does IT matter?” The study, which was conducted under the direction of Professor Marco Iansiti of the Harvard Business School and focused on manufacturing companies, looked at IT enablement of business processes in four areas: customer relationships and support, product and service development, operations and financial control, and partner and supplier management. The study found that businesses with advanced IT capabilities in these areas grew faster and had higher revenue per employee. The research findings were clear on two points:

1. Higher IT capability directly correlates with superior revenue growth, with top-performing companies growing an average 3.5 percent faster than the average for all peers in their industry.

2. Companies in the top quarter of IT capabilities had 23 percent higher revenue per employee than the lowest quarter of their peers.8

The business processes that this study focuses on align closely with the people-ready business outcomes mentioned earlier and highlight a direct connection between a business’ IT capabilities, the empowerment of its people, and its potential for growth and profitability.

To view the full study and its findings, please visit: http://www.microsoft.com/business/enterprise/itdrivesgrowth.mspx

As businesses advance their IT capabilities, they make a critical transition from reactive to proactive services management. To do this and to achieve a sustained improvement in their IT infrastructure, they take a longer term strategic view of IT infrastructure advancement and link these capability improvements to their business needs and overall business strategy. Microsoft and our partners are helping businesses break the reactive IT cycle and move toward a vision of self-managing, self-healing dynamic systems and applications. Our vision for infrastructure optimization is to help enterprises realize the full value of their IT infrastructure to drive business results, to support organizational agility with the IT infrastructure, and ultimately to build an IT infrastructure that can help advance rather than impede the business.Your IT infrastructure provides the critical foundation upon which software can deliver the services and applications that will empower your people to work more productively, collaboratively, and effectively. Infrastructure optimization—centered on using your organization’s IT assets to support

3.5%Faster Growth

IT Drives Growth

IT Leader

Source: Information Technology Drives Growth, Keystone Strategy, Inc., 2006

IT Laggard

3.3%Slower Growth

8 “Information Technology (IT) Drives Growth,” Keystone Strategy, Inc., 2006

http://www.microsoft.com/business/enterprise/itdrivesgrowth.mspx

Optimizing YOur infrastructure

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and help grow the business—can help you drive cost reduction as well as security and efficiency gains. An optimized infrastructure can also help free your IT staff to focus on driving innovation and business priorities. According to a Forrester Research study of North American enterprises, in 2006 organizations planned to direct 80 percent of overall IT spending to ongoing operations and maintenance, leaving only 20 percent for creating new capabilities to deliver competitive advantages.9 The more advanced your infrastructure, the more resources your organization will have to drive the business forward.

INFRASTRUCTURE OPTIMIZATION: MICROSOFT’S APPROACHThrough our work with Gartner and our own experience with enterprise customers, Microsoft has developed three models—focusing on core infrastructure, business productivity infrastructure, and application platform infrastructure—that outline a progression through four levels of infrastructure optimization. Our infrastructure optimization models illustrate the strategic value and business benefits of moving from a “basic” level of optimization, where the IT infrastructure is generally considered a “cost center,” toward a more “dynamic” use, where the business value of the IT infrastructure is clearly understood and the IT infrastructure is viewed as a business growth enabler and strategic business asset.

Infrastructure optimization levels reflect the adoption of best practices that optimize IT processes to help reduce cost and/or improve service levels and agility.

• Basic – Least efficient with high costs and average service levels and agility; typically use few best practices

• Standardized – Somewhat better IT costs than basic organizations but with similar service levels and agility; leverage some of the easier-to-implement best practices

• Rationalized – Very low IT labor costs and slightly improved service levels and agility compared with basic and standardized organizations; use many IT best practices and automate and standardize wherever possible

• Dynamic – Focus on enabling the business with optimal service levels and agility rather than cost reductions; may accept best practices that increase costs to optimize service levels and agility (few dynamic organizations exist today, largely because many of the prerequisite technologies are not available from a single vendor and must be assembled from an array of technologies from multiple vendors)

IDC recently completed a study of the relationship between IT labor costs and best practices for managing desktops running the Microsoft® Windows® operating system. The study focused on 141 for-profit enterprises in the United States with 1,000–20,000 PCs. Using the Microsoft infrastructure optimization models to segment the enterprises into groups, they found that organizations with a rationalized infrastructure experience an annual savings of up to U.S. $1,090 per PC in IT labor costs, with average annual per-PC costs of U.S. $1,320 at the basic level, U.S. $580 at the standardized level, and U.S. $230 at the rationalized level. The savings are related to streamlining IT operations

BasicBasic StandardizedStandardized DynamicDynamicRationalizedRationalized

Value of the Infrastructure Optimization Model

Cost Center

Uncoordinated, manual

infrastructure; knowledge not

captured

Managed IT infrastructure with limited automation

and knowledge capture

Managed and consolidated IT infrastructure with extensive automation;knowledge

captured and reused

Fullyautomated

management;dynamic

resource usage; business-linked

service level agreements; knowledge

capture and use automated

More Efficient Cost Center

BusinessEnabler

Strategic Asset

Core Infrastructure Optimization Model

DYN

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BASIC

STAN

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RDIZED

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Identity and Access Management

Desktop, Device and Server Mgmt

Security and Networking

Data Protection and Recovery

Application Platform Infrastructure Optimization Model

User ExperienceData ManagementSOA and Business ProcessDevelopmentBusiness Intelligence

DYN

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BASIC

STAN

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RDIZED

AD

VAN

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Business Productivity Infrastructure Optimization Model

Business Intelligence

Communications & Collaboration

Enterprise Content Management

DYN

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BASIC

STAN

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RATION

ALIZED

IT a

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ecur

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9 “North America’s 2006 Enterprise IT Spending Outlook,” Forrester Research, 2006

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and the use of best practices, in particular using centrally managed PC settings and configuration; having a standard desktop strategy; and having comprehensive PC security. Organizations that progress to a rationalized level also demonstrate benefits in service levels (reducing the number of service desk calls per PC per year from 8.4 at the basic level to 7.7 at the rationalized level) and business agility (reducing the number of weeks to deploy a new application from 5.4 at the basic level to 4.3 at the rationalized level).10 For more information on this study and its findings, please download the white paper at:http://www.microsoftio.com/content/overview/IDC_IO_Whitepaper.pdf

Using the Microsoft infrastructure optimization models, you can gauge the current stage of infrastructure optimization in your organization, establish a technology vision for the future, and build a clear roadmap to achieving that vision. In our experience, we have found that a fundamental part of this process is to identify your key desired business capabilities—across all functional roles—and consolidate them into a rationalized portfolio, with priorities based on the potential value, ease and speed of implementation, budget, and urgency of the outcome. You can then map these consolidated priorities to the enabling technical capabilities. By linking your business priorities to technical capabilities using these infrastructure optimization models, you can define the set of capabilities that will enable your organization to establish a platform for achieving the people-ready business vision. For more information on the Microsoft infrastructure optimization models, please visit: http://www.microsoft.com/io

CORE INFRASTRUCTURE

Today, many of our enterprise customers still run older, legacy technology, employ manual rather than automated infrastructure management techniques, and typically have not maintained their environments based on available software and technology upgrades. Building a more secure, well-managed, and dynamic core IT infrastructure can help reduce overall IT costs, make better use of IT resources, and make IT a strategic growth asset for the business. Our customers tell us that a key core infrastructure challenge is to support IT professionals in the management of servers, desktops, and applications to help eliminate unnecessary cost and complexity, to help ensure that the business is always up and running, and to establish a responsive infrastructure.The Microsoft core infrastructure optimization model maps advancing levels of infrastructure optimization to an enterprise’s ability to better understand and control cost and complexity, reduce security risk, and drive operational agility. As organizations move from a basic core infrastructure to a more optimized core infrastructure:• Security improves as organizations move from highly

vulnerable to dynamically proactive. • IT infrastructure management changes from highly manual

and reactive to highly automated and proactive. • Process moves from fragmented or non-existent to

formalized, repeatable and, in many cases, automated. • Technology is used to improve business agility and deliver

business value.

Basic

$500

Average per-PC cost for each infrastructure optimization stage

Infrastructure Optimization Drives IT Cost SavingsAnalysis of 141 U.S.-based organizations with 1,000-20,000 PCs

Rationalized

Standardized

$1,500

$1,000

Source: Optimizing Infrastructure: The Relationship Between IT Labor Costs and Best Practices for Managing the Windows Desktop, IDC, 2006

how optIMIZed Is your core Infrastructure?

u Have you consolidated to a single directory to enable role-based operating system deployment and automation of common IT processes?

u Have you minimized the number of operating system versions deployed and managed in your organization?

u Does your organization efficiently address security threats with a unified virus and malicious software (malware) solution for your server and desktop environments?

u Are your people able to automatically back up and easily restore data themselves?

10 “Optimizing Infrastructure: The Relationship Between IT Labor Costs and Best Practices for Managing the Windows Desktop,” IDC, 2006

http://www.microsoftio.com/content/overview/idc_io_whitepaper.pdf

TECHNICAL CAPABILITIESThrough our work with customers, Microsoft has identified five key technical capabilities that can have the greatest impact on your core infrastructure.

IDENTITY AND ACCESS MANAGEMENT CAPABILITYIdentity and access management has become more complex as digital identities play an increasingly central role within organizations. Our research shows that, regardless of the size of the network, businesses rarely store their identity information in one place. Multiple departments, locations, and software choices can result in a proliferation of database, directory service, and application-specific identity stores. By advancing your organization’s identity and access management capability, you can help ensure consistent user information and access rights. This may involve enabling central administration of desktop and server configurations through directory tools or establishing federated identity management across organizational and platform boundaries.

DESkTOP, DEVICE, AND SERVER MANAGEMENT CAPABILITYMany of our enterprise customers with only a basic server, desktop, and device management capability lack the technology for widespread use of automated patch management and server monitoring, do not have a consistent plan for managing multiple operating systems, and do not have an imaging strategy or mobile device provisioning. By optimizing these areas, such as through automated patch management across desktops, the establishment of a primary desktop operating system, use of server virtualization, automated asset management and tracking, and certificate provisioning and authorization for mobile devices, you can reduce the burden on your IT department and help make management of the core infrastructure more efficient and cost effective.

SECURITY AND NETWORkING CAPABILITYThe security and networking capability is about providing proactive and reactive protection of the IT and user environment. Businesses with a basic core infrastructure typically lack antivirus software on desktops, do not have a centralized firewall, and do not have an internal server for basic network services. As organizations progress through the infrastructure optimization model, they begin adding features to make their systems not only more secure—such as with wireless networking and remote access—but also more efficient—for example, implementing wide area network (WAN) optimization and using delta-driven data replication for branch offices.

DATA PROTECTION AND RECOVERY CAPABILITYThe data protection and recovery capability provides a structure for disciplined backup, storage, and restore management. As information and data stores proliferate, businesses are under increasing pressure to protect that information and provide cost-effective and time-efficient recovery when required. However, those at a basic level of optimization do not have backup and restore functionality for their critical servers. When an organization begins advancing its data protection and recovery capability, it will typically progress through three stages: first, adding backup and restore functionality to critical servers; next, adding backup and restore functionality to all servers and implementing service level agreements (SLAs); and finally, extending the backup and restore functionality to help protect desktop data as well.

IT AND SECURITY PROCESS CAPABILITYSince technology alone cannot create a secure and well-managed infrastructure, it is also important to help drive security and IT processes in conjunction with the technology. Our research has shown the value of using a process framework for managing the operations and support of IT systems, making adjustments to meet changing business needs, and optimizing processes for greater efficiency. The core infrastructure optimization model maps IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) processes to the four levels of optimization through the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF), which provides a framework for managing the operations and support of IT systems, managing change to adjust to business needs, and optimizing IT systems for efficiency. In addition, we have found that IT services management and security processes are critical to helping ensure that the people and process side of security is as advanced as the technology.


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Identity and Access Management

Desktop, Server and Device Management

Security and Networking

Data Protection and Recovery


IT and Security Process

SUPPORTING MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGIESBy working with Microsoft and our partners and using the infrastructure optimization model as a framework to identify the key capabilities that will provide the greatest impact for your enterprise, you can implement the technologies, processes, and procedures to help advance your enterprise’s level of infrastructure optimization. Our uniquely holistic approach focuses on driving innovation and consistency across our product portfolio. With the Microsoft Dynamic Systems Initiative, we pursue a vision of self-managing dynamic systems. We achieve this through knowledge-based management (using built-in models for more intelligent management, including automation), by designing for operations (recognizing and incorporating operations issues from the beginning of the IT life cycle), and by developing for a virtual infrastructure (for the flexibility to dynamically adapt to changing conditions and to utilize computing resources in the most efficient way).

Core Infrastructure Softwareu Microsoft Virtual Serveru Windows Vista™ operating systemu Microsoft Windows Storage Serveru Microsoft Forefront™ security productsu Microsoft Windows Server™ operating systemu Microsoft Office systemu Microsoft System Center u Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack for Software Assurance

Find more information on optimizing your core infrastructure at: http://www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/coreinfra/default.mspx

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core Infrastructure optIMIZatIon at hsbc MexIco Financial services firm HSBC acquired a large local bank in Mexico with more than 1,400 branch locations and wanted to take control of its decentralized IT environment. Manual deployment of software applications and security updates could take months, and the company lacked tools to monitor its IT resources effectively. With the help of Microsoft Consulting Services, HSBC Mexico implemented a centralized solution based on Microsoft products and technologies to improve their system management. Now the company can automatically install updates, get new financial services software to market quickly, and cut IT travel costs. It can also monitor systems in real time and plan for change and business growth. “We are now in a position to increase our number of employees by up to 30 percent and still support the organization with the same infrastructure.” – Gabriel Pepe, Distributed Systems Director, HSBC Mexico

business benefits• Helps cut costs and reduce time to market

through remote management • Changes the IT environment from reactive

to proactive• Supports business growth through better

system management

products and technologiesThis solution is based on Windows Server 2003 with the Microsoft Active Directory® directory service, Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003, and Microsoft Operations Manager.

Find more information on this and other examples of Microsoft and Microsoft partner core infrastructure solutions at: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies


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BUSINESS PRODUCTIVITY INFRASTRUCTURE

Today’s information-based economy and increasing rate of change is creating worldwide trends that are placing new demands on how people work and the infrastructure needed to support them. As our customers strive to become more competitive, they are looking for ways to leverage and act on the right information amidst information overload, work across boundaries with people both inside and outside organizations, manage and control sensitive business information, and streamline business processes. By implementing a single infrastructure for unified communications and collaboration, enterprise content management (ECM), and business intelligence and by uniting structured and unstructured data processes, your organization can streamline the management and control of content, data, and processes across all areas of your business.The business productivity infrastructure optimization model includes capabilities that can simplify how your people secure and manage content, work together, and find information that helps improve business insight.

TECHNICAL CAPABILITIESThrough our work with customers, Microsoft has identified three key technical capabilities that can have the greatest impact on your business productivity infrastructure.

COMMUNICATION AND COLLABORATION CAPABILITYGeographical distance no longer restricts communication and collaboration. Customers and partners expect access to businesses at any hour and from any location, and employees now communicate, collaborate, and search for and access organizational information from locations around the world and outside the physical office. As our customers advance their communication and collaboration capabilities, they are better able to connect their dispersed teams and streamline people-driven processes, simplifying how people work together and helping build customer connections so that each person can maximize his or her efficiency. For optimum competitiveness and efficiency, these organizations are implementing pervasive, contextual communication and collaboration capabilities that users can access from wherever they are working—within traditional productivity and line-of-business (LOB) applications, from desktops, laptops and mobile devices, and from either inside or outside the firewall. Optimizing your communication and collaboration systems—including messaging, instant messaging/voice, Web conferencing, and collaborative workspaces and portals—can help your organization achieve end-to-end integration, extended teaming across all LOB applications, and enterprise search and offline file access capabilities.

ENTERPRISE CONTENT MANAGEMENT CAPABILITYAcross industries, enterprises are faced with exponential growth in information as well as ever-increasing regulations about how that information is stored and managed. Our research shows that many organizations with rudimentary ECM systems face issues with compliance regulations and litigation, risk management, content chaos, multiple publishing channels, and manual processes. Organizations with more optimized ECM systems can better streamline business processes and increase the control and security of their enterprise content. Some of the key benefits of optimizing ECM systems include being able to extend content management to every information worker, facilitating compliance-based content retention, and enabling access to business processes across business and geographical boundaries. Advancing your organization’s ECM capabilities—through document and records management, Web content management, electronic forms, and search capabilities—enables better decision making by helping you to better control and manage information, ensure better risk management and content protection, lower implementation and management costs, and achieve better visibility across your organization.

Communication and Collaboration

Enterprise Content Management



Business Productivity Infrastructure Optimization Model

how optIMIZed Is your busIness productIvIty Infrastructure?

u Have you unified your communications channels to enable your employees to be quickly contacted by telephone, e-mail, or instant messaging?

u Are you currently using a standardized platform that enables all of your people to find, use, and share content with their colleagues?

u Are you able to quickly build targeted solutions that enable your people to gain insight from large amounts of data?

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BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE CAPABILITYTraditionally, business intelligence has been the domain of IT and business analysts. It has historically relied on specialized business intelligence tools, frequently requiring specialist training, and often has been implemented in a myriad of department-specific point solutions. For many of our customers, this has hampered organization-wide insight and the ability to take advantage of cost savings associated with technology consolidation. However, business intelligence is now becoming a strategic initiative that appeals to business users, executives, developers, IT professionals, and LOB workers alike—in fact, to every employee in your organization. Its importance is clear: business intelligence applications ranked as the top technology priority for CIOs in a Gartner 2006 survey.11 The Microsoft vision for business intelligence is to help improve organizational performance by providing business insights to all employees, leading to better, faster, more relevant decisions. By implementing a single business intelligence framework that ties information together across your organization, you can integrate disparate business systems and deliver business intelligence with familiar and easy-to-use software. This can make it easier for your people to analyze complex business information and empower them to make timely, accurate decisions at all levels. Note: The business intelligence capability is a shared capability between the business productivity and the application platform infrastructure optimization models. In the business productivity model, it is focused on how information is being accessed by users.

SUPPORTING MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGIESMicrosoft’s business productivity infrastructure vision is for a complete set of desktop and server software that can help streamline the way that you and your people do business. The 2007 Microsoft Office system plays a fundamental role in achieving this vision by offering a complete range of business application services including workflow, search, business data catalogs, user interfaces, open XML file formats, and a Web site and security framework (portal).

Business Productivity Infrastructure Softwareu Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007, plus:

Communication and Collaborationu Microsoft Exchange Server u Microsoft Office SharePoint® Serveru Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer u Microsoft Office Groove® Server

Enterprise Content Managementu Office SharePoint Server u Office SharePoint Designer u Exchange Server

Business Intelligenceu Microsoft SQL Server™ database platform u Microsoft Visual Studio® Tools for the Microsoft Office System

Find more information on optimizing your business productivity infrastructure at: http://www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/bizinfra/default.mspx

11 “Gartner Survey of 1,400 CIOs Shows Transformation of IT Organisation is Accelerating,” Gartner, January 23, 2006 (http://www.gartner.com/press_releases/asset_143678_11.html)

busIness productIvIty Infrastructure optIMIZatIon at cgI – Insurance busIness servIces: ecM and collaboratIon solutIon Created in 2004, the Insurance Business Services (IBS) unit of CGI—a leading IT consulting firm with close to 30,000 staff and more than 100 offices serving clients in 19 countries—provides end-to-end business process consulting to customers in the insurance industry across North America. One consequence of IBS’s growth in recent years has been the receipt of and need to respond to a growing number of requests for proposals (RFPs) and requests for information (RFIs). It was critical to find a solution that would improve the overall efficiency of the collaborative response process, resulting in higher quality proposals for customers. IBS plans to use the new workflow and document management functionality in the 2007 Microsoft Office system to improve its proposal-generation process. “We are eager to use the new capabilities in the 2007 Microsoft Office system to improve our proposal process and help us reduce the time and effort required to create high-quality proposals, resulting in better, more consistent RFPs that are accepted.” – Wayne Beck, VP Delivery, CGI Insurance Business Services

business benefits• To improve collaboration through team

workspaces• To streamline proposal processes with

forms capabilities and automated workflows

• To increase sales and staff efficiencies with a centralized and collaborative proposal process

• To improve content management and workflow processes on intranet content

products and technologiesThis solution will be based on the 2007 Microsoft Office release, the Microsoft Office InfoPath® 2007 information-gathering program, Office SharePoint Server 2007, and Windows Server 2003.

Find more information on this and other examples of Microsoft and Microsoft partner business productivity infrastructure solutions at: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies


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APPLICATION PLATFORM INFRASTRUCTURE

With the increasing demands of business in a connected world, we have seen a fundamental shift in the last 30 years in terms of supporting architectures for business applications. Static-state applications with centralized management and limited client-side functionality have evolved into wide-ranging, off-the-shelf, end-user applications driven by graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and featuring integration, a consistent development environment, and pervasive connectivity. Today’s applications are increasingly based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA): loosely coupled, interconnected through a Web services architecture such as .NET, and catering to multiple form factors supported through the use of flexible, standards-based systems. The recent explosion in form factors to support remote availability and the need for constant connectivity, the increase in global development outsourcing, and the need to connect with legacy systems are challenging for many of our customers. Furthermore, growing demand for delivery of software as a service (SaaS) is driving the need for a flexible application platform that can take advantage of SaaS components and integrate with SaaS application data. Advancing your organization’s application platform infrastructure can help you meet these needs and overcome challenges with system availability, user satisfaction and productivity, information visibility, and application development backlogs.

As organizations move from one level to the next in the application platform infrastructure optimization model, they drive more efficiency, collaboration, and agility across the IT life cycle:• Developers become part of more efficient and

collaborative development teams.• IT professionals use familiar tools to manage and deliver

applications more effectively.• Business users can manipulate reports, optimize business

processes, and share information. An optimized application platform infrastructure can enable your IT department to provide a scalable and flexible data and business intelligence foundation; connect systems across the company and enable interoperability; empower your development teams to deliver powerful applications more rapidly and that meet the needs of the business; and empower your end users with more effective business tools and experiences to help increase their productivity.

TECHNICAL CAPABILITIESThrough our work with customers, Microsoft has identified five key technical capabilities that can have the greatest impact on your application platform infrastructure.

USER ExPERIENCE CAPABILITYUser experience is frequently a late consideration in application design, and yet our customers tell us that it is critical to the ultimate usability and value of the application. Our research shows that user productivity and adoption of business tools are essential to the success of an IT department’s efforts and budget spend. A well-designed user interface—one that provides an experience for users in the office that is familiar and consistent with the applications that they use at home and while mobile—can enhance the

User Experience


SOA and Business Process

Data Management

BasicBasic StandardizedStandardized DynamicDynamicAdvancedAdvanced

Development

Application Platform Infrastructure Optimization Model

how optIMIZed Is your applIcatIon platforM Infrastructure?

u Are you integrating user experience design early in the development of custom applications to make your applications more effective?

u Can you quickly build analysis solutions that integrate data from multiple line-of-business (LOB) applications?

u Does your application platform enable you to build scalable and highly secure software services?

u Have you standardized on a data platform that enables your business to quickly and confidently respond to market opportunities?

u Can your development tools help your people manage custom applications throughout the IT life cycle?

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overall return on investment (ROI) by allowing users to more intuitively use the tools, helping reduce help-desk calls and, in many cases, enabling users to identify their own solutions in their daily operations. By investing in user experience and the design of an easy-to-use, rich interface as an integral element of the application development process in your organization, you can help increase user effectiveness, drive end-user satisfaction, and ultimately give people the tools to make better business decisions.

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE CAPABILITYTraditionally, business intelligence has been the domain of IT and business analysts. It has historically relied on specialized business intelligence tools, frequently requiring specialist training, and often has been implemented in a myriad of department-specific point solutions. For many of our customers, this has hampered organization-wide insight and the cost savings associated with technology consolidation. However, business intelligence is now becoming a strategic initiative that appeals to business users, executives, developers, IT professionals, and LOB workers alike—in fact, to every employee in your organization. Its importance is clear: business intelligence applications ranked as the top technology priority for CIOs in a Gartner 2006 survey.12 The Microsoft vision for business intelligence is to help improve organizational performance by providing business insights to all employees, leading to better, faster, more relevant decisions. By implementing a single business intelligence framework that ties information together across your organization, you can integrate disparate business systems and deliver business intelligence with familiar and easy-to-use software. This can make it easier for your people to analyze complex business information and empower them to make timely, accurate decisions at all levels. Note: The business intelligence capability is a shared capability between the business productivity and the application platform infrastructure optimization models. In the application platform model, it is focused on how information is managed and processed and how business logic is centrally managed.

SOA AND BUSINESS PROCESS CAPABILITYTo keep up with increasing customer demands, new business opportunities, and expanding government regulations, many of our enterprise customers have incrementally added information systems. For them to remain competitive and to grow, these enterprises are now looking to integrate and connect these disparate applications and systems—as well as their people—across organizational and geographical boundaries. By advancing their SOA and business process capabilities, these organizations can automate, optimize, and manage their processes and achieve real-time visibility across the business. This also enables them to integrate applications

and legacy systems and connect to trading partners and customers. We have found that building a connected and adaptable IT environment that is based on a flexible architecture is critical to this capability. Optimizing your business process management can help your organization to realize improved connectivity, better compliance, richer collaboration among teams, and greater agility so that you can respond more quickly to business opportunities. Microsoft supports this process through the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF), which provides best practice guidance on people and processes to help teams and organizations become more successful in delivering business-driven technology solutions. In addition, through Microsoft patterns & practices, we provide recommendations on designing, developing, deploying, and operating architecturally sound applications for the Microsoft application platform, with deep technical guidance and tested source code based on real-world experience.

DATA MANAGEMENT CAPABILITYIn a data-driven, always-connected world, our customers are making it a priority to ensure that their employees, customers, and partners can access the information that they need, when they need it. Finding the right information quickly and easily can help maximize employee productivity, ensure optimal customer service, and enable the organization to be more responsive to business opportunities. Data management has become a requirement for competitive differentiation, and yet our customers tell us that it is more and more challenging for their IT departments to effectively manage their data as the volumes and sources of information increase. Through our research we have seen that outdated or inefficient data management systems can lead to unplanned application downtime, poor system scalability and performance, and a lack of data security. A scalable and integrated database platform can help your organization more securely store and manage increasing amounts of data from disparate sources and help ensure that your business-critical systems and applications remain up and running.

DEVELOPMENT CAPABILITYIT development teams can be challenged by poor visibility into IT projects, communication and collaboration hurdles, outsourcing complications, and continual changes to requirements. To overcome these problems, we have found that organizations must align software application delivery to their business needs, ensure that the requirements are understood and adhered to, and make the maintenance and support of applications easier. By optimizing their development capability, organizations gain effective tools and methodologies that help their IT development teams to improve developer productivity and the management of IT

12 “Gartner Survey of 1,400 CIOs Shows Transformation of IT Organisation is Accelerating,” Gartner, January 23, 2006 (http://www.gartner.com/press_releases/asset_143678_11.html)


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projects. When your organization optimizes its development tools and processes, your development teams will be able to better manage applications throughout the IT life cycle, benefit from increased team collaboration and productivity, and improve software quality.

SUPPORTING MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGIESMicrosoft’s strategy and research and development (R&D) investments in application platform infrastructure are wide in scope, spanning clients, servers, and devices. In all aspects, we are committed to two fundamental considerations: our ability to interoperate with other vendors’ technologies and systems and our alignment with key industry standards such as Web services (WS-*) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). We have focused our efforts on three core areas across all of the products and technologies that make up our application platform:

• Helping you more easily build connected and adaptable systems – Making it easier to connect your systems, processes, people, and information in a heterogeneous environment; creating adaptable solutions that are built with process and business change in mind—including enterprise-ready scalability to meet future business needs; and providing cohesive technologies and processes across the life cycle (through our Dynamic Systems Initiative and covering security, development, deployment, and management)

• Aligning IT with the business – Helping increase productivity at the individual, team, and organizational level in your enterprise and driving predictability and quality in systems development; helping you gain greater project visibility and insight for more accurate resource allocation, prioritization, and risk management; and accelerating time to market for solutions by helping increase IT agility and responsiveness to your business needs

• Providing the tools, technologies, and business choices to fit your needs – Offering a range of solutions through thousands of independent software vendor (ISV) and systems integrator (SI) partners trained on the Microsoft platform; focusing on enterprise scalability and competitive total cost of ownership (TCO); and offering widely adopted, familiar technologies and tools

applIcatIon platforM Infrastructure optIMIZatIon at hIlton hotels: data ManageMent solutIon Based in California, Hilton Hotels develops, owns, manages, or franchises approximately 2,300 hotels, resorts, and vacation-ownership properties worldwide. Hilton Hotels needed to develop a forecasting system to improve its business analysis process by establishing more accurate pricing and financial planning. It first created its OnQ Forecast Management System, built using Microsoft SQL Server 2000, to help forecast guestroom business. Hilton Hotels decided to expand the system’s functionality to include demand-based pricing and forecasting for group, catering, and public-space sales to help focus on revenue per group and optimization of meeting space. To extend the existing application, Hilton Hotels built a solution based on .NET Framework 2.0 using Visual Studio 2005. “SQL Server 2005 provides Hilton with the power and extensibility to develop custom software that delivers revenue analysis and forecasting capabilities.” – Kathleen Sullivan, Vice President, Sales and Revenue Management Systems, Hilton

business benefits• Processes three times the data in the same

amount of time • Gains 25 percent time savings in catering

forecast generation • Provides the ability to serve guests better

by accommodating more catering requests • Enables 15 percent faster development

than using the previous system

products and technologiesThis solution is based on SQL Server 2005 running on Windows Server 2003, with SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services, Reporting Services, and Integration Services.

Find more information on this and other examples of Microsoft and Microsoft partner application platform infrastructure solutions at: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies

Application Platform Infrastructure SoftwareUser Experienceu Microsoft Expression® Interactive Designeru Microsoft Visual Studio development system

Business Intelligenceu SQL Server u Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System

SOA and Business Processu Microsoft BizTalk® Server u Office SharePoint Server u .NET Framework

Data Managementu SQL Server u Windows Server

Developmentu Visual Studio u Visual Studio Team Systemu Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office Systemu .NET Frameworku Microsoft Internet Information Services

Find more information on optimizing your application platform infrastructure at: http://www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/appplat/default.mspx

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http://www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/appplat/default.mspx

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Our enterprise customers want more than cost-effective, broad-spectrum solutions. They want technology that empowers their people to drive business growth. To help us better understand how technology needs and uses vary across different roles, we have conducted more than two years of hands-on research on specific roles that people perform within companies of various sizes and types. We’ve used this research to identify the primary business capabilities that we believe are required to support these roles and enable people to achieve their best and drive the business forward. These business capabilities have directly helped us to establish our priorities and areas of focus.

Better information technology makes a quantifiable, positive difference in business performance.

Better information technology makes a quantifiable, positive difference in business performance. That is the core finding of a multi-country research study from Keystone Strategy, Inc., sponsored by Microsoft Corporation and conducted under the direction of Professor Marco Iansiti of the Harvard Business School. This study, which focused on manufacturing companies, found that businesses with advanced IT capabilities in four key business processes—customer relationships and support, product and service development, operations and financial control, and partner and supplier management—experience faster growth and higher revenue per employee. The IT systems within these firms allow their employees to do more, and do it more effectively, through better knowledge of and control over their business.You can find out more about this research and how IT drives business growth with the research study available at:http://www.microsoft.com/business/enterprise/itdrivesgrowth.mspx

This section introduces six business focus areas that Microsoft has prioritized based on our research:

• Building customer connections – Develop more profitable customer relationships with integrated, easy-to-use collaboration and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions that enable your people to work more securely across organizational boundaries and access people and customer information from anywhere

• Enabling your mobile workforce – Better support your mobile workforce by delivering the tools, technologies, and platform that will help them more effectively communicate, collaborate, and work while on the go

• Finding, using, and sharing information – Empower your people to make better business decisions, be more productive, and achieve greater business success by enabling them to find, use, and share information more quickly, more easily, and more securely

• Improving compliance – Help reduce the complexity of your compliance solutions and improve your control of financial, regulatory, and operational processes through familiar and easy-to-use applications

• Driving business performance – Increase your people’s access to financial and operational information to help advance your business strategy and drive business performance

• Driving real-world business processes – Bring together financial management, CRM, and supply chain management processes and integrate them across your organization to help your business thrive

The following sections provide an overview of why Microsoft feels these focus areas are critical to helping our customers drive growth and increase their competitiveness.

Bu

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Bu

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buIldIng busIness capabIlItIes

http://www.microsoft.com/business/enterprise/itdrivesgrowth.mspx

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BUILDING CUSTOMER CONNECTIONS

We have found that customer experiences and perceptions, both good and bad, are inextricably linked to business performance and competitiveness. Customer connections are those moments that impact customer loyalty, when customers form lasting impressions about your company’s understanding of, and commitment to, their needs. Improving customer service and retention is at the top of the list for executive priorities according to BusinessWeek Research Services.13 The goal of customer centricity is a reality in the modern enterprise and yet can be surprisingly difficult to achieve. Our own customers tell us that delivering customer-focused, responsive, personalized services and products is complicated by several factors:• Globalization and the expectation of customers that they

receive comparable levels of service across geographies, regardless of the delivery mechanism.

• Outsourcing, which continues to expand the number of stakeholders involved in building and delivering services and products to customers.

• Increasing business execution through channels or partners, which introduces a shared responsibility for selling, delivering, and supporting products or services.

• Increasing product complexity and the race for innovation, requiring a broad base of expertise to design and build products across businesses.

For many of our customers, their existing customer relationship management (CRM) solutions don’t provide the technical capabilities that they need to overcome these challenges. Virtual teams—whether with members in different organizations, in remote offices of the same organization, or who are simply out in the field—don’t have the tools to work together effectively and to gain shared access to CRM information. Customer service representatives often don’t have a holistic view of each customer’s interactions and transactions, and without accurate customer targeting data and a comprehensive view of customer preferences, marketing and product development teams are often less effective in launching new products and services. When an organization responds to these challenges by re-evaluating its customer management model and, more broadly, how its operations and strategies impact customers, it can identify new opportunities to improve collaboration within the enterprise. Comprehensive seamless collaboration—internally, across the extended enterprise, and with customers—can give your people the tools and information that they need to enrich each customer’s experience, helping to generate increased loyalty and demand while at the same time allowing your company to better manage costs and improve your products and services.

do your people have the tools to buIld and MaIntaIn connectIons wIth your custoMers?

u Do you know your customers as well as you’d like to?

u Do your service teams feel equally effective responding to customer inquiries whether in the office or offsite?

u Are your customer interactions as high value as possible?

u Can your field sales staff easily access and update customer information when they are at customer sites?

u Could you increase the impact of your sales proposals by enabling your salespeople and key partners to work together more easily?

13 “Seizing the BI Opportunity,” BusinessWeek Research Services, May 2006 (http://mediakit.businessweek.com/pdf/research/Seizing_the_BI_Opportunity_Whitepaper_20061.pdf)

BUSINESS SCENARIOS Microsoft believes that when an enterprise optimizes its CRM capabilities and develops its ability to connect with customers, it can realize significant business results. The following scenarios highlight a few areas that our customers tell us are particularly important.

LAUNCHING NEW PRODUCTS OR SERVICESFor many of our enterprise customers, the product/service development and launch process involves numerous stakeholders across the company as well as in external organizations. When it is difficult for these stakeholders to connect and work together, the process can be inefficient. Handoffs of information and documents during the design and development process are often not closely managed, which can lead to multiple iterations that can inflate research and development (R&D) budgets and increase time to market. Dispersed field sales teams and partners can find it difficult to plan marketing campaigns and launches, particularly when they don’t have a comprehensive view of their customers to align with the value propositions for the new offer. By supporting team workspaces and workflows and by integrating enterprise content management (ECM), business intelligence, and collaborative capabilities, organizations can enable development and marketing professionals to work closely with field teams and channel partners. Organizations can also provide more secure, interactive working environments and help teams to share information and ideas more easily to enable innovation and content development for new launches. A comprehensive collaboration solution can help your company both drive new demand (by accelerating product launches, sharing market intelligence, and improving campaign execution) and manage marketing costs (by streamlining content development, improving customer targeting, and increasing field and partner effectiveness).

WINNING NEW BUSINESSDeveloping winning proposals and reacting quickly to sales and marketing opportunities can be complicated when the people involved are spread across the organization or geographical boundaries. Our enterprise customers frequently tell us that their sales teams find it difficult to work actively with a dispersed sales force and partners and that their proposal development teams can find it time consuming to manage and track versions and reviews through the approval process. These organizations also often struggle to segment and reach out to their most profitable customers. If they can’t overcome these challenges, the costs can be significant—organizations risk losing sales, having a low close rate, or finding that actual sales wins come at a high price. To be competitive, our customers are working to make it easier for their sales professionals to find and use customer information, share expertise across the extended organization, and include colleagues, partners, and others in the proposal development process. By simplifying how your sales teams can work together, your company can help improve its sales win rate (by increasing the time spent with customers, creating high-impact sales proposals, and enabling distributed team selling) and lower the cost of sales (by increasing sales force productivity, reducing training and travel costs, and enhancing the value of CRM applications).

DELIVERING RESPONSIVE SERVICEEvery interaction affects customers’ perceptions of an organization. Good experiences help improve loyalty and customers are likely to tell someone else about their positive experience. On the other hand, customers may be even more likely to share their bad experiences. Competitive companies focus on keeping their customers happy; however, for many of our customers, great customer service is getting trickier to provide, as their customers are demanding more options, more customization, more self-service, and faster responses to their questions. To enable better customer responsiveness, these organizations are providing their customer-facing staff with improved tools that give them timely access to customer, product, and operational information as well as to each other. These new tools help call center staff, account teams, field service technicians, and channel partners to identify critical customer issues and work together to resolve them. Providing your people with these tools can help increase customer retention (through improved responsiveness and knowledge sharing and by enabling proactive support) and contain your service costs (by reducing the time needed to resolve problems, expanding the available options for service, such as with Web and mobile services, and improving service productivity).

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building business capabilities

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SUPPORTING MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGIESMicrosoft’s collaboration and CRM vision is to empower people to work better with the information, people, and systems needed to develop more valuable connections with customers. Our technology can help your people manage communication better, work together in dispersed and global teams more effectively, access people and information more easily, and enrich structured workflow processes—whether in the office or remotely through robust mobile solutions. Microsoft has emerged as a leader in collaboration services because of our 30-year history in understanding end-user needs, innovative and widely used productivity applications, proven infrastructure-level integration of collaboration services, an extensive partner and developer ecosystem, and a commitment to standards-based interoperability. Collaboration features in the Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 suite, including group workspaces, automated alerts, and Web-based meetings, provide a comprehensive toolset to help your people work together more effectively, whether they are launching new products or services or preparing proposals to win new business. The integration of Exchange Server 2007 with the 2007 Microsoft Office system enhances this collaboration toolset: the new Scheduling Assistant, Calendar Assistant, and Booking Attendant make calendaring simpler, and LinkAccess enables remote access to shared resources on SharePoint sites through Microsoft Office Outlook® Web Access without a virtual private network (VPN) connection. Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 form the foundation for the Microsoft unified communications platform by integrating e-mail, contacts, and collaboration information with telephone service to create a seamless communications experience, helping improve the responsiveness and accessibility of your people. In addition, Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM software empowers your customer service, sales, and marketing staff with comprehensive customer information in a familiar environment that is a natural extension of Microsoft Office and the Microsoft Office Outlook messaging and collaboration client; based on the scalable and security-enhanced .NET platform, Microsoft Dynamics CRM can be used to connect decentralized business units and departments to a wider, centralized CRM system to help ensure organization-wide sharing of customer information.

supporting Microsoft softwareu Office Enterprise 2007, including Groove and InfoPath u Office SharePoint Server u Exchange Server u Office Communications Server u Microsoft Office Live Meetingu Microsoft Dynamics CRMu Microsoft Windows Mobile® softwareu Microsoft Windows Rights Management Services

Find more information on building customer connections at: http://www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/customerconnections/ default.mspx

buIldIng custoMer connectIons at lockheed Lockheed, with 130,000 employees spread over 35 countries, is a worldwide leader in advanced technology systems, products, and services. The Maritime Systems & Sensors (MS2) Department at Lockheed was expanding to include civilian agencies. MS2 sought to minimize manual processes and improve collaboration to expedite the proposal development process for its customers to create and review proposals with stakeholders quickly and ensure content quality and relevance.Empowered by the 2007 Microsoft Office system, Lockheed implemented a solution that provides its team with tools to: • Easily organize and locate proposal content

by enabling a centralized online proposal repository with the ability to capture and organize existing proposals.

• Quickly locate expert resources and collaborate with them in developing the proposals and effectively locate data in order to simplify content reuse and information repurposing.

business benefits• Increases their ability to share content on a

“need to know” basis• Reduces the time and cost spent on creating

proposals• Decreases the cost of finding and sharing

information with team members • Decreases the time to generate a proposal

(from assigning sections and authors to publication), resulting in an increased capacity to process more proposals

products and technologiesThis solution is based on the 2007 Microsoft Office system.

Find more information on this and other examples of Microsoft and Microsoft partner CRM and collaboration solutions at: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies

http://www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/customerconnections/default.mspx

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ENABLING YOUR MOBILE WORkFORCE

A growing constituency of today’s workforce is discovering value in working outside of the office. Communicating with others and accessing and entering information away from the desk is improving the productivity of all types of professionals, from consultants, sales representatives, and installation technicians to physicians, administrators, and store managers. In fact, mobility is becoming a necessity for many of our customers: without effective mobility tools, their people often find that they cannot respond quickly enough to business opportunities, customer interactions in the field are less effective, service delivery suffers, and communication with partners and suppliers is inefficient. Ultimately, our customers tell us that without an effective mobile workforce, they run the risk of their competitors gaining competitive advantage. This necessity is also quickly becoming an expectation, as the current generation entering the workforce relies on being constantly connected, no matter where they are. According to a survey conducted by Gartner among 1,400 global CIOs, “mobile workforce enablement” was scored third in the top ten technology priorities for calendar year 2006.14 Mobility benefits can span individuals and teams regardless of their role in a company. However, we have found that mobility has the greatest strategic impact when it’s considered across functional areas within an organization, in particular with those responsible for sourcing, customer acquisition, and customer service.The right mobility solution can help your organization address issues such as lower productivity due to time lost while on the road, slow decision making due to poor access to critical business information, and lower customer satisfaction due to processes that require time away from customers. An IDC survey supports this, reporting the top three reasons for deploying a mobile solution as improved productivity, providing ease of information, and improving customer service.15

BUSINESS SCENARIOSThe following business scenarios highlight typical opportunities for a mobility solution that could yield immediate business results by enhancing productivity, increasing customer responsiveness, and enabling greater adaptability.

ACqUIRING CUSTOMERSMore and more businesses are implementing mobility solutions that enable timeliness and responsiveness to speed key activities such as sales transactions and responding to customer inquiries. When empowered with mobility tools, their sales representatives can make the most of their time while on the road and between sales calls. Location no longer has to prevent an employee from responding to customer e-mail, updating reports, or preparing for client meetings. Our customers find that this improved productivity can help lead to differentiated levels of customer service, satisfaction, and sales and, ultimately, increased revenue and profitability. By providing your salespeople with the tools that they need while in the field, you can help improve communication and enable them to respond more quickly to customer requests, helping lead to higher customer satisfaction and reduced customer churn.

do your people have the tools to work effectIvely whIle MobIle?

u Would your sales teams be more effective if they could use the same familiar tools and applications on mobile devices as they use in the office?

u Are your mobile sales teams confident that they can always access up-to-date customer and product information?

u Can your people seamlessly connect with suppliers to help decrease inventory costs while increasing customer responsiveness?

14 “Gartner Survey of 1,400 CIOs Shows Transformation of IT Organisation is Accelerating,” Gartner, January 23, 2006 (http://www.gartner.com/press_releases/asset_143678_11.html)15 “Mobilizing the Enterprise in 2006,” IDC, 2005

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PROVIDING SUPERIOR CUSTOMER SERVICE AND SUPPORTCustomer service and support teams that regularly work offsite can benefit from technology that helps them stay connected. Mobile technology can enable field service people to access key customer information on site or when preparing for a customer meeting when out of the office. Furthermore, enabling them to use electronic forms on mobile hardware can help eliminate errors and the high cost of manual processing required for paper-based forms. In addition, mobile technology can enable support professionals to assist customers by connecting to applications remotely. When your service and support teams have access to familiar mobile technology that is compatible with their existing systems and practices, their need for training and support can be reduced and they will be able to respond more quickly to customer needs.

IMPROVING SOURCING AND PARTNER RELATIONSHIPSMobility also comes into play with sourcing to suppliers. People in sourcing and procurement roles typically have strong, collaborative relationships across the supply chain. However, our research has shown that they frequently struggle with slow and inefficient business processes due to paper-based forms, a lack of effective communication avenues with suppliers and partners, difficulty integrating the organization’s processes and data across partners, suppliers, and vendors, and slow decision-making processes. When suppliers, the sales channel, and other partners have on-the-go access to essential information, they can gain greater visibility across all parts of the supply chain. In addition, our customers find that when they put in place the technology to enable their people to communicate and share information in more ways and in a wider variety of contexts, they can improve relationships with their partners. The potential benefits of a mobility solution include improved communication with suppliers and partners, better access to inventory and supplier data, and faster decision making. Mobile technology has the potential to increase the productivity of your global teams and empower your employees to coordinate more closely with suppliers.

SUPPORTING MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGIESMicrosoft mobile technology can enable organizations to transition from deploying point solutions today to robust and strategic mobile solutions that meet their demands tomorrow. Our mobile technologies provide customers with a consistent platform—whether connecting though an application or a browser on a device or a mobile PC. The Microsoft portfolio of software, servers, and services provides an integrated, end-to-end approach that can scale as your organization grows, and centralized management capabilities make it easier to manage mobile assets and mobile PCs. Security is core to our vision: new capabilities built into the Windows platform and Windows-powered mobile hardware help protect user data, confidential intellectual property, and transaction information. Building on the Microsoft mobile platform, our partners today deliver vertical solutions in the retail, education, healthcare, government, professional services, and manufacturing industries. Whether you choose to work with a Microsoft partner to customize an application to fit specific employees’ tasks or make broader mobile adoption easier by providing familiar applications and features, our technologies offer a consistent platform for enabling your mobile workforce.

MobIle workforce enableMent at dyson In the United Kingdom, Dyson vacuum cleaners are maintained and serviced by 177 field engineers. Until recently, the engineers relied on paper schedules and forms, which required administration each evening. Dyson worked with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Blackbay to roll out its Service Connect application, which works with Windows Mobile software running on Panasonic Toughbook devices. Engineers can view their schedules at any time and can input data directly into the device at each job. The system saves at least one hour of administration a day per engineer, resulting in an overall business saving of 220 hours a day, and information gathered in the field is now accurate and available in real time. Parts are ordered correctly, resulting in a higher first-time fix rate, and Dyson can provide a more professional service to Dyson vacuum cleaner owners, improve response times, and streamline business processes.

“Engineers can now resolve issues immediately. The scheduling has improved, and communications costs have dropped because employees use data rather than voice.” – Malcolm Hird, National Field Service Manager, Dyson

business benefits• Eliminates 220 hours of administration a day• Information is accurate and up to date • Substantially improves customer service and

response time• Has minimal impact on internal IT resources

and systems • Cuts costs and streamlines business

products and technologiesThis solution is based Windows Mobile 5.0 software for Pocket PC.

Find more information on this and other examples of Microsoft and Microsoft partner mobile solutions at: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies

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New features in Windows Vista, such as Windows Collaboration for peer-to-peer ad hoc meetings and improved power management for expanded battery life, support your mobile workers, whether they are connecting with your suppliers or presenting to potential new customers. Direct Push Technology with Exchange Server 2007 and Windows Mobile with the Messaging and Security Feature Pack (MSFP) enables mobile users to access up-to-date inbox, calendar, contacts, and tasks information, helping ensure that they never lose touch with your customers and business partners. With Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile, your mobile employees can identify their co-workers’ presence status and engage them in dialogues using their mobile devices. In addition, with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile, your sales staff can capture, track, and store critical information about sales activities, manage account information, and track existing opportunities through a browser-based client or mobile device. Security features are an important part of any mobile solution: Microsoft BitLocker™ Drive Encryption in Windows Vista helps protect data if a laptop is lost or stolen, and mobile device security and policies can be managed from the Exchange Server 2007 infrastructure.

Supporting Microsoft Softwareu Windows Mobile with the Messaging and Security

Feature Pack u Windows Vista u Exchange Server u Office Communicator Mobile supported by Office

Communications Server u Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobileu Office Enterprise 2007

Find more information on enabling mobile workforces at: http://www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/mobility/campaign_overview.mspx

FINDING, USING, AND SHARING INFORMATION

For many of our enterprise customers, vital information is scattered across different computers, devices, intranets, servers, databases, and applications, as well as the Web—and it is increasingly difficult to access as their organizational structures become more complex (virtual, flat, and distributed). In this age of information overload, businesses face a monumental challenge in managing information, a problem that is only expected to increase. IDC estimates that by 2008, each information worker will produce 3 gigabytes (GB) of new content each year.16 Simply finding the right information is proving to be a challenge: IDC estimates that information workers currently spend an average of 3.5 hours per week searching for but not finding information and a further 3 hours per week re-creating content. For an organization with 1,000 information workers, this could exceed U.S. $5.2 million a year in searching and a further U.S. $4.5 million in re-creating content.17 However, finding information is the beginning of a larger equation. Business value is realized when users can efficiently apply information and gain insight to solve business needs and then share that insight within the organization to help ensure ongoing value creation. Despite this, in many organizations, people are challenged by overly complex data that is difficult to structure, organize, and process, disjointed information management tools, complex forms and formats, and out-of-date information. Furthermore, disconnected teams and physical boundaries restrict the exchange of information and knowledge. Microsoft understands that an effective information management solution goes beyond search capabilities to provide the tools to not only find the right information quickly, but also use the information—manipulating it, synthesizing it, and delivering it—to fill an organizational

do your people have the tools to fInd, use, and share InforMatIon?

u Can you simultaneously search for people and information on your desktop, on your intranet, in line-of-business (LOB) data, in the corporate directory, and on the Internet?

u Can you seamlessly set storage, access, and distribution policies for your sensitive information?

u How do your teams share information? Can they publish content to a central repository or Web site using familiar, everyday applications?

16 “How Much Information?”, UC Berkeley, 2003, and IDC, February 200517 “The Hidden Costs of Information Work,” IDC, April 2006

http://www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/mobility/campaign_overview.mspx

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need and share it so that it provides maximum value. By implementing a solution that enables your people to find, use, and share information more quickly, easily, and securely, you will help them to make better business decisions, be more productive, and achieve greater business success.

BUSINESS SCENARIOSThe following scenarios highlight how an enterprise can achieve business results by implementing a comprehensive information management solution.

qUICkLY CONNECTING WITH THE RIGHT INFORMATIONFor optimal individual and organizational productivity, many of our enterprise customers are recognizing that they need a business-ready search solution that will quickly, seamlessly, and more securely connect their people with the right information across borders. These organizations are looking for a solution that is tuned for enterprise content and provides highly relevant results; respects security and privacy models by only showing content that the user is permitted to access; and is scalable, manageable, and extensible. It should search across files and e-mail on desktops, structured and unstructured data silos on the corporate network, and the Internet. Furthermore, it should include the ability to search for people, so that the wealth of information and expertise that is not stored as “data” can also be accessed. Finally, it should be a familiar, easy-to-use, intuitive solution that returns comprehensive, unified results without requiring the end user to search through multiple interfaces and systems. By implementing a comprehensive information management system such as this, you enable your people to spend less time looking for information and more time turning that information into valuable business insight.

EFFECTIVELY APPLYING INFORMATIONPeople need the tools to sort through and select the right information quickly, retrieve up-to-date information on demand, and organize and reuse search information. They also need to be able to seamlessly integrate information into their everyday applications, transform that information into knowledge with a comprehensive and integrated suite of information management tools, and synthesize the information into dynamic and professional presentations and documents. At the same time, a major priority for our enterprise customers is to set storage, access, and distribution policies on documents and e-mail messages to help control data use to maximize the protection of the company’s intellectual property and simplify regulatory compliance efforts. By implementing an enterprise-wide data management system that provides these tools and capabilities, you can enable your people to turn data, facts, and figures into knowledge and insight that your organization can use to drive the business forward.

fIndIng, usIng, and sharIng InforMatIon at the MInIstry of attorney general The Ministry of Attorney General for the Province of British Columbia (BC) in Canada is responsible for law reform, the administration of justice, and providing legal services that ensure lawful public administration. To effectively connect its vast set of constituents, it needs a technology solution that will help its offices collaborate on and share information in a highly secure environment. The province is now working on a number of new initiatives to automate workflow and enable greater collaboration, knowledge management, and information sharing throughout its offices. As part of the Microsoft Office Rapid Deployment Technology Adoption Program, the province plans to pilot an integrated enterprise portal and content management solution based on Office SharePoint Server 2007. The portal will serve as a centralized document repository with role-based security to allow for quick retrieval of case information in a highly secure environment.

“We are eager to understand how the 2007 Microsoft Office system can meet our requirements for Enterprise Content Management. Of particular interest is the single document repository, enterprise search, and Web content management; along with the workflow enabled by InfoPath.” – Robert McDonald, Director, Application Management, Ministry of Attorney General

business benefits• To enhance content management with

out-of-the-box workflows that enable users to define retention policies, assign permissions, and add content types

• To reduce administration and litigation costs through more efficient access to, use of, and reuse of documents

• To reduce the training and maintenance costs of supporting incompatible point-specific solutions with a centralized portal and consistent workflows

products and technologiesThis solution will be based on the 2007 Microsoft Office suites and in particular Microsoft Office Excel® 2007 spreadsheet software and Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Find more information on this and other examples of Microsoft and Microsoft partner mobile solutions at: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies

readyto change the marketwith new ideas

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CONVERTING BUSINESS INSIGHT INTO ORGANIZATIONAL kNOWLEDGEBusiness insight at an individual or departmental level is valuable, but its power is exponential when it can be shared effectively across an organization. However, many of our customers face several hurdles to disseminating information in their organizations. When teams are virtually and geographically dispersed, they need the means to work together dynamically and effectively in collaborative workspaces that put the team, tools, and information in one place. They need to be able to easily create and host meetings online and to collaborate in impromptu sessions either on or off the corporate network. When publishing and distributing content, they need tools that overcome the complexity of Web publishing, for example by enabling them to publish from within familiar applications. Recipients need a means of filtering and storing content to avoid overloaded inboxes. To gain valuable business insight and to extend that insight beyond the borders of the organization, people also need timely access to experts and the tools to easily connect and integrate with customers, partners, and suppliers. Meanwhile, organizations also need to have the security tools and policies in place so that business information can be shared with external customers, partners, and vendors with confidence. With these tools, your people can work together more effectively to make better collective decisions. These tools can also help you maximize organizational intelligence by enabling your people to efficiently communicate and share ideas and information with their peers, customers, partners, and suppliers to drive business growth.

SUPPORTING MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGIESRecognizing that “search” isn’t enough for a complete information management solution, Microsoft offers a comprehensive platform that includes enterprise search capabilities—across the Internet, desktop, and corporate network—complemented by powerful and familiar tools for using and sharing information easily and more securely. The Microsoft platform provides flexible, rich information management capabilities that include end-to-end solutions for finding, using, and sharing information. With these capabilities, your business can customize the way that searches are performed, visualized, and integrated into your applications and shared across teams and with partners. Windows Vista introduces powerful, pervasive search capabilities that extend search possibilities to a wider range of formats including e-mail, handwriting files, audio recordings, and personal profiles, as well as across enterprise sites, LOB data, and the Internet. Additional new features include Search Folders, live icons and document previews, and the new Microsoft Windows Aero™ user interface, which make

it easier for users to search for and identify the information that they need. With the 2007 Microsoft Office system and Office SharePoint Server 2007, your people can use and share information more effectively with report centers, personal portals, and server-based Excel spreadsheets, and the new Business Data Catalog and XML file formats enable systems integration with familiar Microsoft Office programs. Integrated business intelligence capabilities in Office SharePoint Server 2007, including dashboards, Web parts, and key performance indicators, help you get insight from your organization’s information more effectively. Office SharePoint Server 2007 also provides Web content authoring and approval tools and document management features that simplify the process of collaboratively developing and sharing content.

Supporting Microsoft SoftwareCustomized find, use, and share capability (highly customized search, desktop, and server information management solution)u Desktop: Windows Vista Enterprise, Office Enterprise 2007

(with Groove and InfoPath)u Server: Office SharePoint Server

Basic find, use, and share capability (non-customized, out-of the-box search, desktop, and server information management solution)u Desktop: Windows Vista Businessu Server: Office SharePoint Server

Comprehensive search (high-intensity search, LOB integration, complex web of data sources)u Desktop: Microsoft Windows Desktop Search, Microsoft

Windows Live™ Searchu Server: Office SharePoint Server, Microsoft Office

SharePoint Server for Search

Standalone search (non-customized, out-of the-box search)u Desktop: Windows Desktop Search, Windows Live Searchu Server: Office SharePoint Server for Search

Find more information on finding, using, and sharing information at: http://www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/info/default.mspx

http://www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/info/default.mspx

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IMPROVING COMPLIANCE

Financial, regulatory, and operational standards are getting tougher, more complex, and intertwined, and the consequences of noncompliance are significant. Processes that compliance and governance depend on, such as audits and legal discovery, are expensive, and many of our customers are finding that point solutions targeting specific, narrow sets of regulations may address a short-term need, but the return on investment (ROI) and benefits are limited. Furthermore, Gartner predicts that implementing a targeted solution for each regulatory challenge will cost a company more than 10 times as much as adopting a proactive approach.18 In a 2006 Gartner survey, more than 1,400 CIOs estimated that compliance would claim nearly 12 percent of the IT budget, increasing to 14.2 percent by 2009,19 and IDC estimates the average labor cost of Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance for public companies with more than U.S. $1 billion in annual revenue to be U.S. $3.7 million.20 Beyond the costs, many of our enterprise customers struggle to link internal and external controls to policies, to align IT investments with business objectives, to manage exposure to legal risk, to overcome documentation inefficiencies and ad hoc processes, and to manage governance for content destruction and archiving.However, while some of our customers view compliance as a burden, others see it as an opportunity to create genuine competitive advantages for their organizations. They use compliance initiatives as a starting point to partner across enterprise departments to help lower operating costs and improve business performance by streamlining processes, standardizing reporting, and integrating technologies while also being able to deliver the organization’s compliance status at any time. A strategic approach to compliance involves strategy, architecture, and transformation, achieved through three stages: people (gaining user adoption and acceptance around the new processes, policies, and IT solution); process (defining the organizational vision and new processes to achieve compliance and deliver added benefits); and enabling technologies (implementing the applications and infrastructure that enable the people and processes, as well as ensuring that the technologies support the compliance journey so that transformation can begin and the benefits can be realized). Through collaboration and enterprise content management (ECM) technologies, Microsoft and our partners can help your organization develop a holistic compliance solution that can deliver additional benefits. These technologies, combined with information management, process, and governance, can help your organization to achieve competitive advantage by helping increase your operational effectiveness across the enterprise while helping reduce and mitigate risk, streamline audit management, and promote best practices.

do your people have the tools to ensure regulatory coMplIance?

u When you e-mail sensitive information, can you ensure that your files are not forwarded to or copied, printed, or even opened by unintended recipients?

u How easily can you adapt to new regulations that require policy-based retention and archiving of records?

u How does your company ensure that review and permissions are implemented and managed in accordance with regulatory compliance requirements?

IMprovIng coMplIance at healthsouth corporatIon Based in Alabama, HealthSouth is one of the largest healthcare service providers in the United States, employing more than 40,000 employees at 1,100 facilities with 16,000 desktop computers. Each month, 1,100 HealthSouth facility administrators manually completed thousands of Excel spreadsheets and sent them by e-mail to accountants at the head office. To improve SOX compliance, HealthSouth needed to automate the submission of financial data from facilities to the head office, replace thousands of nonstandard spreadsheets with standard templates, create an audit trail to track facility data from submission to final posting, and ensure appropriate access to spreadsheets and clear document versioning. Working with systems integrator Deloitte Consulting, HealthSouth standardized financial data submission to a central portal built with SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and now tracks all financial data submitted to the head office.

“SharePoint Portal Server provided HealthSouth with a responsive and reliable software solution to help us meet our compliance goals—without a lengthy and expensive undertaking.” – Randy Carpenter, Senior V. P. and Chief Information Officer, HealthSouth

business benefits• Reduced spreadsheet versions from

thousands to a template library of 325• Increased productivity by 10 percent

by eliminating redundant spreadsheets and improving shared access to files on SharePoint Portal Server 2003

• Saved an estimated U.S. $1 million by using existing technology instead of buying commercially available alternatives

• Improved audit trail and document versioning

• Improved data integrity

products and technologiesThis solution is based on Excel 2003, SharePoint Portal Server 2003, and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services.

Find more information on this and other examples of Microsoft and Microsoft partner compliance solutions at: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies

18 “Gartner Says Enterprises Implementing Sarbanes-Oxley “Quick Fix” Solutions in 2004 Will No Longer Use Those Systems by the End of 2005,” Gartner, 2004 (http://www.gartner.com/press_releases/asset_66307_11.html)19 “Understanding the Costs of Compliance,” Gartner, July 200620 “The Compliance Chasm,” IDC, July 2005

BUSINESS SCENARIOSThe following scenarios highlight opportunities to implement a holistic compliance solution.

MANAGING ELECTRONIC RECORDS Improved controls and processes can provide more than the means for becoming compliant with financial, regulatory, and operational standards. Many of our customers have found that by providing more transparency into business processes, they gain more control over the flow of their information. However, with the proliferation of electronic records and information, organizations are increasingly challenged to fully maintain electronic records archives. Accurate and secure electronic records archives are a requirement for regulatory standards such as Title 21 Code of Federal Regulations Part 11 (21 CFR Part 11), which establishes strict criteria for pharmaceutical companies and other businesses regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that use electronic records and signatures. Some of the most challenging aspects involve security access rights, auditing and versioning, content search and management, and the management of electronic signatures. A highly secure, integrated electronic records archiving system helps ensure that information can be accessed easily and destroyed routinely when it is no longer needed and can provide the means for your people to manage document user rights. This can enable your organization to fulfill legal and financial requirements, help reduce its exposure to risk, and help protect its image and competitive position.

IMPROVING SARBANES-OxLEY COMPLIANCEProcesses currently used to help enterprises meet SOX compliance requirements are often exceptionally manual and time consuming. Our research shows that, by demonstrating strong accounting and control practices, firms can reduce exposure to documentation inefficiencies and financial accounting inconsistencies in order to comply with SOX. In addition, implementing improved auditing tools and central document management capabilities helps reduce exposure to sections 302 and 404 of compliance requirements for SOX. By implementing auditing and workflow technologies, your organization can enhance its existing processes for controlling and reporting information in a long-term strategic manner.

PROTECTING THE PRIVACY AND SECURITY OF PERSONAL INFORMATIONThe privacy and security of customer and employee information is an increasingly complex challenge as the requirements grow and the risks and consequences of data breaches increase. With a highly secure infrastructure, a robust identity management system, process controls relating to the availability and flow of personal information, and reliable tools for auditing and reporting on data access and use, your organization can help reduce these risks and satisfy compliance needs.


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SUPPORTING MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGIESMicrosoft’s vision for compliance solutions is for a strategic approach that puts people at the center of processes and information and embeds compliance capabilities as part of the broader integrated IT platform rather than as tactical solutions focused on specific regulations. Our solutions integrate with familiar, frequently used applications to help you reduce the complexity and cost of addressing multiple requirements, improve your reporting efficiency, and reduce risk. The Microsoft platform offers capabilities in application, integration, data, and infrastructure services, including ECM, collaboration, business monitoring, identity and access management, reporting, and security. In combination with the business services offered through our strong ecosystem of Microsoft partners, such as steering and governance, business management, risks and controls management, and change management, this platform provides the full range of tools to meet your organization’s compliance requirements and help build competitive advantage. The Microsoft Enterprise CAL (Client Access License) provides a comprehensive suite of components to build compliance solutions. Additive CALs are also available for Windows Rights Management Services and the Forefront security suite. New features in Windows Vista, the 2007 Microsoft Office system, and Exchange Server 2007 can help you protect confidential and personal information: BitLocker Drive Encryption helps protect data on lost or stolen machines, Group Policy helps you control the use of removable storage devices, and shadow copy and snapshot capabilities help you recover data. Office Enterprise 2007 also provides an end-to-end system for creating, managing and storing enterprise content, including the ability to apply usage and retention policies to documents and e-mail messages and to tag information with rich metadata. Furthermore, Office SharePoint Server 2007 enables you to specify retention and auditing policies for business records in accordance with compliance regulations and provides information rights management and content control mechanisms to help protect proprietary and confidential information.

Supporting Microsoft Softwareu Office Enterprise 2007u Office SharePoint Server u Exchange Server u Windows Vista Enterprise u Forefront u Windows Rights Management Services

DRIVING BUSINESS PERFORMANCE

In today’s fast-paced and highly competitive business climate, Microsoft’s customers are finding that the agility with which they manage their data, information, and knowledge and measure their performance can determine their ongoing competitive and market position. This is fueling a need for a structured business performance operating model that enforces visibility, individual empowerment, and accountability from the executive team down to everyone in the organization. Business performance management plays a fundamental role in driving better business results, and according to a recent report from Gartner, business intelligence applications were the number one technology priority for CIOs in 2006.21 However, for effective performance management, business intelligence alone is not enough: organizations must also take appropriate action on the insight and ensure alignment with overall business strategy. Through working with our enterprise customers, we have learned that the challenges to achieving this are many: lack of information consistency across multiple systems, inefficient access to information, difficulty transforming data into relevant information that can guide business decisions, and lack of user-friendly tools that don’t require extensive training or specialized knowledge. These factors all make it hard to gain actionable insights. An effective performance management solution can be framed as a consistent, closed-loop process (from budgeting and planning to consolidation and reporting) encompassing three fundamental principles: driving effective planning, ensuring alignment, and enabling more effective decision making at all levels of the company while ensuring that key business processes are conducted under the guidance of the overall company strategy. A solution that has been designed based on these principles can help your organization gain a holistic view of your enterprise and link processes into a coherent system to help drive improved revenue, profitable growth, operational efficiencies, and collaboration and

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do your people have the tools to drIve your busIness’ perforMance?

u How easily can your employees access the insight that they need for effective planning, budgeting, forecasting, and analysis?

u Do your people have a holistic view of customers to gain a deep understanding of their needs and opportunities?

u How do you ensure that project prioritization and funding decisions are in alignment with business objectives?

u Can your people easily access operational information from within their everyday applications?

21 “ Gartner Survey of 1,400 CIOs Shows Transformation of IT Organisation is Accelerating,” Gartner, January 23, 2006 (http://www.gartner.com/press_releases/asset_143678_11.html)


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insights throughout the value chain. It can also help improve strategic decision-making processes and the delivery of consistent, timely, and aligned metrics. In this way, you can empower your employees to set, measure, and meet aligned goals though better insights, analysis, and decision making.

BUSINESS SCENARIOSThe following are typical scenarios in which a holistic performance management solution can help enterprises realize immediate benefits.

IMPROVING BUDGET PLANNING, FORECASTING, AND SCORECARDINGIncreased access to information helps advance the business strategy, ultimately affecting the bottom line. However, for many of our enterprise customers, budgeting practices and tools differ across business groups, forecasting is separated from the budgeting process, and too often there are multiple versions of budgets and spreadsheets being e-mailed around. By providing the tools to enable automated population of budgets to actual reports and ad hoc querying of all data that is available in business processes, as well as by ensuring that standard reporting is centrally managed and produced, organizations can effectively overcome these challenges. This enables them to help improve decision making through closed-loop planning, budgeting, and forecasting, to ensure collective ownership with a focus on business drivers and value creation, and to reduce the time, effort, and inaccuracy involved in the budgeting process. With improved visibility into financial and operational information and easy-to-use analysis, forecasting, and reporting tools, your organization can drive a better understanding of past and present business conditions and enable your people to identify and act on trends and opportunities earlier.

IMPROVING SALES AND MARkETING ROIWe understand that companies need quick and easy access to key information to make decisions that impact their customers, sales and profit growth opportunities, and business operations. However, our customers often tell us that this is challenging: it can be extremely difficult to summarize customer information in terms of opportunities and profitability; sales and marketing teams frequently have limited tools to help them collaborate and share information; sales representatives can be challenged to analyze customer and product information in a timely way for cross-selling and up-selling opportunities; and sales executives often have only limited access to accurate and complete sales data. Solutions that deliver user-friendly tools and applications to enable quick access to customer data, easily generated “role”-specific campaign and product performance reports, and scorecards that drill down to enable analysis and insight

can help improve your organization’s profitability and enable you to identify and act on sales and marketing data and opportunities earlier.

ACHIEVING BETTER PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENTProgram managers routinely need to get critical information to key individuals to enhance decision making and strategic planning, and project portfolios should be streamlined to align project activities with corporate strategy. This becomes challenging, however, when there is a lack of integrated information across the organization. Our customers report that, too often, the selection of initiatives for investment is made for emotional rather than rational reasons, and governance for decision making may be autonomous or unclear. Furthermore, when different models and analysis are used for competing initiatives, relative assessments for funding become even more difficult. When your organization has rich tools for portfolio analysis, modeling, prioritization, and optimization and provides a collaborative, centralized environment where all decision-making information is stored, you can help ensure that resources are aligned with business objectives and achieve a higher return on capital and people investments.

IMPROVING OPERATIONSDay-by-day operational reporting is a fact of corporate life. Employees must constantly interpret and deliver operational information seamlessly and professionally with co-workers, customers, partners, and suppliers. It can often be challenging to ensure that the information is accurate and consistent and then to use the information to quickly track and address critical issues. A solution that integrates back-end operational information sources into the everyday tools that decision makers know how to use, that uses a single source of operating information to provide a macro view into operations with the ability to drill into detail, and that supports role-specific roll-up reporting and analysis can help optimize and streamline operational reporting. By empowering people to track what is actually happening across the business on a regular basis, your company can become more responsive and competitive.

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drIvIng busIness perforMance at hyundaI Motor coMpany The Hyundai Motor Company, which manufactures and sells vehicles around the world, wanted to analyze data from parts sales, vehicle sales, and other information to reveal subtle vehicle repair trends not discernable from warranty data alone. The company sought to identify and fix problems sooner, both in the field and on the assembly line, potentially saving Hyundai a significant amount of money in warranty repair costs and increasing the quality of the vehicles it builds. Working with Microsoft partner Nagamoto Designs, Hyundai is deploying a business intelligence data warehouse using SQL Server 2005, running on Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition. Hyundai anticipates that the data warehouse will help it to reduce warranty costs by millions of dollars while enhancing customer satisfaction by enabling it to detect potential problems earlier.

“We’re using SQL Server 2005 to find out not only where we can improve, but also where our cars are holding up better than expected, so that we can incorporate those lessons into new models.” – Bruce Shibuya, Vice President, Hyundai-Kia North American Quality Center

business benefits• Agility to identify potential problems

faster• Enhanced quality through use of non-

warranty data • Lower total cost of ownership (TCO) in the

areas of development, deployment, and maintenance

• Easier regulatory compliance

products and technologiesThis solution is based on SQL Server 2005, running on Windows Server 2003, and uses SQL Server Analysis Services, Integration Services, and Reporting Services.

Find more information on this and other examples of Microsoft and Microsoft partner business performance solutions at: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies

SUPPORTING MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGIESMicrosoft’s vision is to extend business intelligence tools and applications to a broader base of business users, simplifying how they can collect, manipulate, and act on information in order to achieve continuing business improvement. Our solutions enable a comprehensive performance management approach that is designed to provide critical business information to users throughout an enterprise in a familiar and easy-to-use environment. Based on a robust platform, these technologies can provide data integration capabilities that will help your people transform data from across disparate enterprise systems into powerful insights and to share structured and unstructured information seamlessly across your organization to make working together simpler and easier. Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 provides comprehensive business performance management capabilities, including scorecarding, analytics, planning, budgeting, forecasting, consolidation, and financial reporting, to help improve operational and financial performance across all aspects of a business and aid in Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance. For organizations looking to improve their sales and marketing return on investment (ROI), Office Excel 2007 helps logically assemble disparate financial information and provides enhanced visualization and analysis tools that help quantify and compare trends. Furthermore, Excel Services (running on Office SharePoint Server 2007) can help improve your organization’s operational reporting through real-time, interactive Excel spreadsheets from a Web browser, providing a single, central, up-to-date version for your employees while helping to protect any proprietary information embedded in documents, such as financial models.

Supporting Microsoft Softwareu Office PerformancePoint Server (Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager,

ProClarity Analytics)u Office Enterprise 2007u Office SharePoint Serveru SQL Server

Find more information on driving business performance at: http://www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/performance/default.mspx

DRIVING REAL-WORLD BUSINESS PROCESSES

Facing globalization, increasing competition, and customer demands for better service, faster delivery, and more innovative products, there is no room for inefficiency in the modern organization. For a company to be competitive, its processes must be optimized to enable the business to be more agile, responsive, and cohesive. However, our customers frequently tell us that they struggle to overcome costly and inefficient distribution methods, lengthy time to market for new services, a lack of operational efficiency, difficulty balancing customer demands with cost pressures, fierce and emerging competition, and regulatory compliance requirements. These challenges are amplified by a dependence on two very distinct worlds of software: business process automation software (which automates processes in areas such as accounting, sales, and production) and personal productivity software (the tools that we use daily including word processing software, e-mail, spreadsheet software, and the Internet). Furthermore, too often investments in enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management (SCM) systems fail to deliver because they are overly complex and require specialized training. In fact, organizations only license 15 percent of employees to use their ERP systems.22 Merging these two worlds of software can simplify your people’s access to ERP, CRM, and SCM systems and empower them to combat inefficiencies, improve visibility, and drive processes that will help the business succeed. Whether your people are managing relationships with customers or seeking operational excellence through integrating end-to-end processes, you can provide them with role-based tools that work like and with their everyday applications. This can help lower transaction costs, reduce economic friction, deliver more transparent and real-time information to decision makers, and enhance responsiveness and personalization for new levels of customer service and self-service.

BUSINESS SCENARIOSThe following scenarios highlight how an enterprise can integrate business process capabilities across the organization and help increase user productivity by implementing a business management solution that works like and with Microsoft Office.

IMPROVING ACCOUNTING PROCESSES AND FINANCIAL INSIGHTA major challenge that our enterprise customers tell us about is having to contend with too much financial information in too many places, making it difficult to access the right information at the right time and in the right format to be useful in budgeting and reporting. In addition, complex corporate governance requirements are made more challenging by aggressive reporting timelines and changing and conflicting financial regulations. And business growth—both internally and through acquisitions—leads to the need to account for new areas of the organization. For maximum efficiency and insight, accounting and financial professionals need a full view of financial data with the tools to create, edit, and update budgets quickly, easily, and accurately; solid documentation and workflow processes to support “proof” towards auditability; and critical up-to-the-minute fiscal information to give them a clear understanding of how financial consolidation takes place across a new organization, division, or department. Integrating your business management solutions with the familiar applications that your accounting and financial teams use every day can provide real-time, shared, accurate financial information across the company, making budgeting easier, supporting corporate governance compliance, and providing quick access to the always-changing numbers.

MAxIMIZING OPERATIONAL PERFORMANCEIn a world of tight margins, increasing customer expectations, and global competition, organizations can’t afford to have an inefficient supply chain. When people have access to each step in the order and delivery cycle, they can help ensure accurate, on-time product delivery. Furthermore, a demand-driven supply network can help ensure that the right product is in stock in the right quantity to support a marketing program and the resulting demand. Finally, when operations managers have access to key metrics including customer order, supplier, and product data, as well as shipping reports, they are empowered to identify waste and drive it out of the supply chain—whether it is in inventory sitting on a shelf, incomplete or inaccurate deliveries, lost opportunities to share information with suppliers, lack of effective demand-planning tools and systems, or time spent on activities that can be automated with the right technology solutions. An

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do your people have the tools to drIve real-world busIness processes?

u How easily can your people share financial and operational information between departments?

u Do your partners and suppliers have real-time access to your supply chain management systems?

u Would integrating customer insight and partner and supplier data into your internal systems help your people develop more targeted sales and marketing campaigns?

22 “The Enterprise Resource Planning Spending Report, 2005–2006,” AMR Research Market Analytix Mall, October 2006

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integrated supply chain management system can help your people streamline order entry, distribution, demand forecasting, and supplier collaboration processes. It can also enable them to proactively and profitably link pricing, promotions, and other sales incentives and make more informed decisions as a result of more accurate data and a better understanding of customer demand. Ultimately, it will help them gain a better understanding of what customers want and need, helping improve product development, delivery times, and customer satisfaction.

OPTIMIZING SALES AND MARkETING PROCESSESOperational complexity, disparate systems, and scattered customer data and business information lead to some of the biggest problems that our enterprise customers are facing today: lost sales productivity, ineffective marketing, and poor access to critical business information. Lack of sales automation can lead to missed sales targets, incorrect revenue projections, and product inventory miscalculations. When marketing campaigns are not connected with sales, leads are generated but not tracked or associated with individual sales opportunities, making it impossible to measure return on investment (ROI) and unlikely that specific leads will be nurtured. Finally, information silos can mean that people rely on inaccurate and duplicate customer information, leading to ineffective and inefficient marketing and inconsistent, sometimes contradictory messages to customers. With simplified, consistent, and automated sales and account management, marketing and sales integration, and synchronization of data silos, your sales and marketing teams will be able to better understand internal data and external market trends to help grow sales and to get the information that they need to better collaborate and understand the business and your customers.

SUPPORTING MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGIESMicrosoft’s vision is to help your organization build an infrastructure that can be adapted to deliver information and support processes in ways that most closely mirror your people’s working styles and needs: we call this delivering “the last mile of productivity,” helping all of your people contribute to the overall success of the organization. We invest significantly in understanding our customers, which helps us to deliver on this vision: each year we conduct 1,100 usability and research studies involving 10,000 participants as well as more than 1,700 site visits with our customers in their own environments. This research has helped us bring two powerful information systems together more intuitively and more completely than ever before: business process software and personal productivity software. Microsoft Dynamics, a line of business management solutions for financial management, CRM, and SCM, and Microsoft Office have been designed to work together in new ways, helping you increase the penetration of business data throughout your organization and thereby helping improve employee productivity, customer loyalty, and overall business efficiency.

Supporting Microsoft Softwareu Microsoft Dynamics u Office Enterprise 2007u Office SharePoint Server u Windows Mobileu SQL Server u BizTalk Server

Find more information on driving real-world business processes at: http://www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/process/default.mspx

drIvIng real-world busIness processes at oldcastle precast Oldcastle Precast is a U.S. $800 million manufacturer of precast concrete products. It has 70 plants across the United States and Canada with more than 3,500 employees. Having successfully implemented Microsoft Business Solutions–Axapta® 2.5 software, now part of the Microsoft Dynamics line of business solutions, in 2001 to streamline and automate its core business processes, Oldcastle has decided to take advantage of the new capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0. This upgrade will help Oldcastle put in place a platform to future-proof its ambitious expansion plans, achieving new business productivities without increasing support costs. Oldcastle is working with Microsoft and Microsoft Certified Partner Tectura to take part in the Microsoft Dynamics AX Technology Adoption Program for its upgrade to version 4.0.

“In today’s world you have to move forward. To grow, we need a platform that scales with our business. Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0 will support us and help us achieve this.” – Bill Blyth, CIO and Project Manager, Oldcastle Precast

business benefits• Fuels business productivity• Complete business picture supports more

confident decision making • Future-proofs growth plans without

increasing support costs• Upgrade path is familiar to users• Fits with existing IT infrastructure

products and technologiesThis solution is based on Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0, Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server, Outlook 2003, Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2001, Microsoft Smartphone 2003 software, and SQL Server 2005.

Find more information on this and other examples of Microsoft and Microsoft partner business solutions at: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies

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realIZIng the people-ready busIness vIsIonMicrosoft can help your organization realize the people-ready business vision through our industry commitment and our range of products, licensing, services, and partners. Beyond simply providing the right platform of innovative software, we are committed to building the right relationships and delivering the right solutions. We will work closely with you to develop an understanding of your unique business objectives and requirements. And we will stand behind our solutions and offer you support every step of the way.This section provides you with a perspective on how Microsoft has built programs and resources that can help you build a people-ready business. Our broad range of programs and resources are optimized around helping your organization build the technical and business capabilities that your people need to drive success. We also encourage you to discuss these programs and resources with your Microsoft account manager, who can connect you with Microsoft experts to learn more about each of these topics.

OUR INDUSTRY COMMITMENTMicrosoft has invested in building extensive knowledge of industries that we believe will benefit the most from investments in technology, and we have built strong relationships with partners that provide leading solutions in these industries. As our industry knowledge deepens, we are also increasingly channeling industry-specific feedback and perspectives to our software development teams to ensure that the Microsoft software platform meets unique industry needs. For each of these priority industries, we have an experienced, dedicated team that develops and guides our industry vision. These teams interact and work with our partners, business groups, and key industry associations and standards bodies toensure a deep understanding of the drivers and priorities for

the industry to maximize our contribution to solving business and technology problems, now and into the future. For each of our priority industries, we have identified key focus areas that we believe represent the most critical customer business needs, issues, or problem areas and are where we and our partners can deliver exceptional value. We are also sensitive to the differences between commercial and public sector industries and understand that public sector organizations have unique challenges and priorities that can be distinct from the world of “business.” Through our Connected Industry Framework approach, we are sharing public sector best practices for policy, infrastructure, and solution requirements with our field, partners, and customers. We currently have three frameworks that meet the specialized needs of health, government, and education industries. Partners are fundamental to Microsoft’s industry approach, and together we are committed to delivering the technology and solutions in these areas to help our customers realize the people-ready business vision. Our partners can deliver targeted solutions through their extensive knowledge of the business needs and IT challenges that are unique to each industry.

the top IndustrIes that we Invest In Include:• Financial services• Manufacturing• Retail• Hospitality• Professional services• Healthcare (health

providers and health plans)

• Government • Education• Telecommunications• Hosting• Media & entertainment

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The following sections provide an overview of our comprehensive approach to industry by sharing our key focus areas within each prioritized industry. Within each section, we also provide examples of how an investment in building the business capabilities explored earlier in this guide can have a significant impact in the industry.For detailed information on each of these industries, please visit: http://www.microsoft.com/business/industry.mspx

FINANCIAL SERVICES Microsoft has found that the financial services industry, an industry long known for predictable business practices and measured evolution, is facing sweeping, unprecedented change. Financial services institutions are contending with mega-mergers, decreasing margins, a more challenging regulatory environment, and fierce competition—these and other realities mean that they must constantly seek a competitive edge and identify a path for long-term profitability. In the past, IT investments within financial services institutions have typically involved a complex set of systems that include multiple products and channels, often running on multiple operating system environments. To remain competitive, many of our financial services customers are now looking to integrate their IT infrastructure, introduce cross-channel consistency, and lower their cost base. Microsoft and our partners work closely with banking, capital markets/securities, and insurance firms to achieve these goals.Microsoft focuses on five areas in the financial services industry:

• Advisor platforms – Enabling financial advisors to work more effectively and efficiently across information sources and distribution channels to better service clients. Through integrated systems, your advisors can gain a more holistic view of your customers and a better chance to successfully cross-sell.

• Channel renewal – Helping banking institutions make their investment in renewing one channel a potential investment in all channels by centering on renewing channels such as automated teller machines (ATMs), call centers, or teller systems with reusable business components that set the stage for cross-channel consistency.

• Insurance value chain – Using a comprehensive approach involving the development of global and industry standards–based solutions that link disconnected systems and processes. Leveraging standards leads to applications and solutions that can share a pre-installed capability to more easily integrate within the value chain.

ExAMPLES OF BUILDING BUSINESS CAPABILITIES IN THE FINANCIAL SERVICES INDUSTRY

Building Customer Connections Microsoft and our partners are working to help provide customer-facing staff in financial services firms with a 360-degree view of the customer—to help them up-sell/cross-sell across their wide-ranging products and services—and to help them achieve cross-channel consistency across their multiple customer-facing channels.

Driving Business Performance Microsoft and our partners are committed to helping enable financial services customers to improve their efficiency, reduce risk, and maximize their customer interactions. Integrated systems that span multiple channels can help you provide immediate access to full customer information, enable self-service functions, improve reporting processes, and meet compliance requirements.

realizing the people-ready business vision


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• Payments – Delivering a more modern, integrated, and competitive payments platform to meet today’s demands while also helping put you in a position to identify and capitalize on new services and revenue sources.

• Risk management and compliance – Using an architectural model to help financial institutions align IT and business processes. We focus on supporting risk management and compliance while enabling your organization to achieve critical business objectives, such as improved customer satisfaction, greater operational efficiency, and enhanced competitiveness.

Find more information on Microsoft’s approach for the financial services industry at:http://www.microsoft.com/industry/financialservices/

MANUFACTURINGIn a rapidly changing global market, manufacturers face continuous demand for product innovation, mandates for increased operational productivity, a complex global supply chain, and competitive pressure to meet high customer expectations. Microsoft’s approach is to work with partners and industry experts to offer an integrated set of platforms to help you handle the most difficult challenges, whether in product life-cycle management, supply chain performance, operational performance, or customer sales and service performance. Microsoft technology and vertical applications developed by our partners can help you to manage quality, cost, production flow, and security in new ways from the plant floor to the back office.Microsoft focuses on six areas in the manufacturing industry:

• Customer centricity – Developing solutions that help your organization improve customer satisfaction and retention, improve operational efficiency and profitability, reduce time to market, and make products that customers will like (i.e. buy).

• Plant operations – Enabling you to streamline operations by creating a connected environment that helps improve information access, enable real-time communication, and optimize decision making. Lean solutions can enable your organization to transform production operations from a push-based, forecast-driven model to a pull-based, on-demand model.

• Product life-cycle management – Helping you improve new product innovation, reduce time to market, and capture design intent through core collaboration and integration capabilities while using the familiar look and feel of Microsoft Office.

• Supply chain planning and execution – Helping your organization to proactively adapt with greater agility

as business requirements change, to lower supply chain costs, and to improve customer satisfaction.

• Supply chain visibility and collaboration – Helping get real-time visibility into your value chains to support proactive decision making and coordinate a complex range of activities among many partners in a high-speed business environment including global regulatory compliance.

• Research and development – Helping life sciences manufacturers collaborate inside and outside of your discovery and development “enterprise” and enabling flexible clinical trials that allow the integration of old and new markets.

Find more information on Microsoft’s approach for the manufacturing industry at: http://www.microsoft.com/industry/manufacturing/

ExAMPLES OF BUILDING BUSINESS CAPABILITIES IN THE MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY

Finding, Using, and Sharing Information Microsoft and our partners are working with manufacturers to build solutions that can help them keep track of changing design/customer requirements and specifications during the development process. A reliable, easy-to-use information management system can help you reduce rework, speed the design-to-build cycle, increase customer satisfaction, and increase manufacturing productivity.

Driving Real-World Business Processes Microsoft and our partners also build business management solutions that help manufacturers to predictably forecast demand and develop the agility to respond to shifts in demand. An integrated business management solution that draws information from plant systems up into enterprise systems enables “reality-based” performance management and can help you achieve perfect order performance.

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RETAILOur research shows that the retail industry is heavily influenced by the economy, consumer confidence, government regulation, and globalization. Using innovative technologies, our leading retail customers are finding new ways to respond to market trends, new avenues for meeting consumer preferences, and new opportunities to tailor each shopping experience to match every customer’s expectations. Our focus with our partners is to help retailers achieve competitive advantage through an enhanced customer experience, improved employee productivity, and efficient operations by better connecting information, systems, and people. Microsoft and our partners provide the technical solutions to help your people work more innovatively, collaboratively, and effectively to help increase your organization’s competitive edge.Microsoft focuses on three areas in the retail industry:

• Real-time analytics – Driving increased business performance and customer satisfaction by better connecting information, processes, systems, and people. By enabling real-time visibility and customized analysis of data in a familiar, flexible, and easy-to-use collaborative environment, you can empower your people to act on information quickly and in a consistent way, helping them make more proactive and accurate decisions and improving collaboration between headquarters, stores, and suppliers.

• Store systems – Helping you achieve competitive advantage through an enhanced customer experience, improved employee productivity, and efficient store operations. With flexible software and systems that continually evolve to meet your organization’s needs, you can drive innovation, easily integrating and adding new services, experiences, and value-add capabilities for customers and employees in response to changing business needs today and tomorrow.

• Supply chain management – Helping you and your suppliers quickly share, view, and analyze documents and data to make more informed and accurate business decisions in a collaborative environment with solutions that can more easily provide a single, consolidated view of product information whenever and wherever it is needed. By helping improve communication and visibility throughout the supply chain, we can help you create better experiences for your suppliers, customers, and employees.

Find more information on Microsoft’s approach for the retail industry at: http://www.microsoft.com/industry/retail/

ExAMPLES OF BUILDING BUSINESS CAPABILITIES IN THE RETAIL INDUSTRY

Enabling Your Mobile Workforce Microsoft and our partners understand that store managers are the ones who can make it all come together for customers. We work with retailers to build store system mobility solutions to enable store managers to spend more time on the sales floor and less time stuck in the back office. These solutions can help you get more customers into the store, sell more to customers when they are in the store, get customers into the store more often, and reduce costs through operational efficiencies and improved employee productivity.

Driving Business Performance Microsoft and our partners also work with our retail customers to build solutions that help them overcome the challenges of ad hoc, paper-based processes and the need to track multiple vendor systems and metrics—ultimately helping you deliver superior customer service and ensure product quality and availability.



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HOSPITALITYOur hospitality customers around the world face wide-ranging issues including market globalization, non–brand-loyal guests, excess capacity, increasing labor and food costs, complex regulations, and increasing guest expectations. Microsoft provides a framework for addressing these challenges and enabling the next generation of hospitality innovation. Microsoft and our partners can help you take advantage of technology solutions and opportunities that can transform operations and improve guest experiences, empowering your people to contribute to the organization’s success, whether through delivering superior guest services and amenities, driving efficient business processes, or enabling your guests to personalize their experience.Microsoft focuses on two areas in the hospitality industry:

• Enhancing guest experiences – Focusing on technology that enables your hotel staff to provide guests with a personalized blend of services that enhances customer satisfaction and loyalty.

• Improving customer service – Empowering your people with real-time access to the information and tools that they need to deliver fast, high-quality, personal service that fosters loyalty and leads to repeat guest visits.

Find more information on Microsoft’s approach for the hospitality industry at: http://www.microsoft.com/industry/hospitality/

PROFESSIONAL SERVICESProfessional services firms typically differentiate themselves through subject matter expertise and process excellence. Our most successful professional services customers exhibit market leadership by showcasing their firm know-how and approach through best practice development. To truly get ahead of the competition and build sustainable leadership, these firms frequently need to expand their competencies

so that they can rapidly adapt to changes in the complexity of organizations, control massive amounts of content and information, do more with less in the face of growing margin pressures, proactively manage risk, and achieve consistent compliance, all while building a respected reputation and brand. To help our professional services customers meet these challenges and drive business growth and agility, we have developed a holistic solutions framework that encompasses service delivery management, practice performance management, and client experience management. With this framework, Microsoft and our partners can help your organization achieve operational excellence, control risk, leverage your assets, achieve alignment and execution of business strategy, build client satisfaction, and differentiate your services. Microsoft focuses on three areas in the professional services industry:

• Service delivery management – Enabling your employees to collaborate effectively; deliver high-quality client service with greater efficiency, speed, and risk control; and drive business success.

• Practice performance management – Equipping your mobile professionals with the business intelligence necessary to capitalize on the firm’s human, intellectual, and client assets and to focus on strategies for sustained business growth.

• Client experience management – Enabling your organization to use technology to help grow revenue, manage risk, and stand out in the marketplace.

Find more information on Microsoft’s approach for the professional services industry at: http://www.microsoft.com/industry/professionalservices/

ExAMPLE OF BUILDING BUSINESS CAPABILITIES IN THE HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY

Building Customer ConnectionsMicrosoft and our partners work with our hospitality customers to build solutions that help them personalize their guests’ experiences. These solutions can help your organization develop comprehensive guest profiles, drive guest-centric data down to the transaction level, and generate realistic profiles of the spending and stay patterns of your guests. Guest-centric solutions can help your people to stay in touch with your customers’ needs and build marketing programs to help increase your customers’ loyalty and spending.

ExAMPLE OF BUILDING BUSINESS CAPABILITIES IN THE PROFESSIONAL SERVICES INDUSTRY

Finding, Using, and Sharing Information Microsoft and our partners work with professional services firms to help them improve how they identify expertise, repurpose content, streamline production and analysis, and deliver targeted solutions to clients. A reliable, easy-to-use, and familiar approach to knowledge management and sharing information can help you reduce rework, speed deliverables, increase team productivity, and drive customer satisfaction.

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HEALTHCAREThe broad-scale, data-intensive nature of healthcare and sensitivity to privacy concerns make healthcare IT an important issue for both governments and commercial organizations. Microsoft and our partners understand the potential that e-health, or technology-enabled healthcare, has to improve health service delivery. With the Microsoft Connected Health Framework, we help move healthcare towards a series of easily available, interconnected, reliable, and efficient services. The Connected Health Framework is based on an open, extensible, and agile service-oriented architecture (SOA) for delivering health solutions underpinned by an architectural blueprint. It provides a detailed description of key services such as security, identity management, data structure, and standards compliance (including Health Level 7 [HL7]) based on the Microsoft platform for SOAs. Microsoft and our partners focus on two key areas in the healthcare industry: health providers and health plans. (For information on life sciences, please see the manufacturing industry section.) Find more information on Microsoft’s approach for the healthcare industry at: http://www.microsoft.com/industry/healthcare/

HEALTH PROVIDERSHealth organizations are facing increasing patient expectations coupled with spiraling health costs. The top challenges that our health provider customers report globally are to increase patient safety, improve the quality of care, create an environment for patient-centered care, and reduce the impact of the health cost burden. Cost-effective solutions that provide true patient-centered care can help your organization reduce medical errors, increase efficiency, and streamline administration, leading to cost savings. With our extensive network of industry-expert partners, we are committed to transforming the delivery of services to health organizations through innovative technology solutions.Microsoft focuses on five areas in the health provider industry:

• Clinical records – Connecting and aggregating fragmented islands of clinical and other data while enabling customized and personalized information access, which helps improve productivity and the quality of care.

• Clinical management – Enabling cross-organizational communications and collaboration to help you reduce medical errors, streamline the referral and patient transfer process, and support your healthcare teams in making better informed, evidence-based care decisions, helping improve the quality of care and dramatically reduce costs.

• Outcomes reporting – Enabling meaningful business intelligence, decision support, and more highly evolved integrated healthcare delivery systems (IHDS) through business scorecards and indicators from multiple back-end applications with associated data, access to clinical and financial key performance indicators, and automation of data analysis processes.

• Delivery transformation – Helping our medical customers to improve patient, family, and clinical satisfaction by providing anywhere, anytime access to information—ultimately helping you to compete more effectively, reduce medical costs, and improve the quality of care delivery.

• Disease surveillance – Helping you provide for early warning, tracking, and ongoing management of disease and/or epidemic outbreaks, whether brought about by natural or manmade causes.

ExAMPLE OF BUILDING BUSINESS CAPABILITIES IN THE HEALTH PROVIDER INDUSTRY

Enabling Your Mobile Workforce Microsoft and our partners help healthcare providers overcome the challenges of disconnected systems that contain patient information, the use and storage of extensive amounts of paper, and the need for physicians and nurses to access patient information from a variety of sources and settings. Our mobility solutions can help you enable easier access to patient information.



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HEALTH PLANSIn the United States, the healthcare industry is changing rapidly, and our health plan customers are working to adapt to industry trends including relentless cost increases, growing consumer expectations, a highly fragmented and disconnected ecosystem, and increasing government regulations. Our research shows that the U.S. industry is heavily influenced by medical cost inflation, aging, and health habit demographics as well as the economy, politics, government regulations, and consumer sentiment. Our most successful health plan customers are adopting information management strategies to manage these issues and looking to transform their organizations into consumer-focused, knowledge-driven, and highly collaborative organizations. Innovative Microsoft software and partner solutions can help you realize this vision by establishing collaborative information-sharing and decision-making processes across your organization, with fewer resources and less complexity.Microsoft focuses on four areas in the health plan industry:

• Health plan collaboration – Providing cross-organizational communication and collaboration capabilities to support the processes that health plans are now implementing to help improve member health, the quality and affordability of care, and the bottom line.

• Health plan business process and intelligence – Helping provide actionable knowledge to people anywhere to help translate strategy into performance, enable consumers to make better informed decisions, and enable providers to deliver evidence-based care.

• Health plan customer experience – Helping enable you to drive down costs, quickly support new products, and handle increasingly complex customer interactions across the customer’s channel of choice.

• Health plan risk management/compliance – Helping you to reduce security and compliance risk by improving information protection and providing internal controls to meet Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requirements and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance mandates.

GOVERNMENTGovernments that we work with globally are reporting unprecedented fiscal and service delivery challenges. At the same time, they must respond to natural disasters, local emergencies, and evolving security threats while managing the converging economic costs of aging populations, red tape, tax avoidance, and benefits fraud. These challenges are driving reforms, reorganization, and technology-enabled changes in the way that these governments operate. From automated templates to integrated IT systems, Microsoft and our partners can help you and the people who work with you reach citizens, improve collaboration between organizations, accurately report to supervising authorities, and maximize your technology investments. To help government customers plan for and respond to these challenging circumstances, Microsoft has developed the Connected Government Framework (CGF). The CGF is based on an open, extensible, and agile service-oriented architecture (SOA) for delivering government solutions underpinned by an architectural blueprint. It provides generic and scenario-specific recommendations on how to design, develop, deploy, and operate an architecturally sound interoperability infrastructure in key areas, including identity and access management, messaging and Web services, integration, process orchestration, transactions, and business architecture.Microsoft focuses on the following areas in the government industry: • Public services and e-government

- Strategic change programs – Enabling the transformation of key functions of government that are dependent on a legacy system and/or mainframe system infrastructure supporting service delivery and/or administration both within and increasingly across agencies or functions.

ExAMPLE OF BUILDING BUSINESS CAPABILITIES IN THE HEALTH PLAN INDUSTRY

Improving Compliance Microsoft and our partners deliver solutions to support compliance with Title 21 Code of Federal Regulations Part 11 (21 CFR Part 11), as well as other healthcare compliance requirements such as for the HIPAA and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Good Practices (GxP) mandates, through granular access to document audit details and management of user rights and permissions in a highly secure environment.

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- Citizen service delivery – Supporting the delivery of services to citizens from an individual agency or from across agencies, through different channels—phone, Web, mobile, and touch screens.

- E-government enabling systems – Helping enable the digitization of processes, the elimination of manual data entry, and the implementation of smart features, alerts, and validations to help streamline government administration and service delivery to citizens.

- Governance and transparency – Supporting strengthened governance and transparency in government administration and service delivery in both developed economies and emerging markets.

- Government administration – Supporting the administrative and management processes of government agencies.

- Postal services – Providing postal services–specific solutions in the various activities of posts: mail, parcels, logistics, retail, and finance. Supporting posts in their transformation journey and innovation agenda through an integrated IT platform—from servers to desktop and mobile applications.

• Public safety and national security- Defense

• Command and control – Building capabilities supporting or contributing to tactical, operational, and strategic decision making, situational awareness, and command functions in defense/military organizations and agencies.

• Network centric operations – Focusing on enabling a network centric environment where information systems interoperate by integrating open standards into a common global framework, employing common security and operational standards and processes and allowing for mobile operations in constrained bandwidth environments.

- Intelligence – Building capabilities through partners to help intelligence organizations improve data fusion, analysis, visualization, and report dissemination.

- Justice – Providing capabilities to support justice systems and customers from the local to national and international levels.

- Homeland (internal) security • Crisis management – Helping government or

non-government organizations (NGOs) prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters (either natural or manmade). Key components include coordinated emergency response capabilities and asset management and tracking.

• Transportation and border security – Focusing on the integration of three types of homeland/internal security–related systems: entry/exit systems, cargo tracking systems, and biometric verification systems to establish a state-of-the-art border infrastructure to support national and local government security, customs, and border control operations.

- First responders – Supporting police, fire, ambulance, and other emergency responders at the local level and in disaster relief operations.

Find more information on Microsoft’s approach for the government industry at: http://www.microsoft.com/industry/government/

EDUCATIONEducation within the 21st century must be fundamentally different to the education of the 20th century. In the age of digital technology, the way we communicate, learn, and develop has evolved, and our education customers are looking for systems that match this. Whereas in the traditional classroom, learning was an individual effort, driven by a teacher, conducted in a single medium, and focused very much on facts, today educational institutions need to support learning that is more collaborative, student centered, conducted using a range of media, and focused on critical thinking and informed decision making. Working closely with worldwide education communities, Microsoft has developed technologies, tools, programs, and solutions that can help your organization address these education challenges while improving teaching and learning opportunities. With e-learning and administrative solutions to support both primary and secondary education (K-12) and higher education, as well as continuing education, museums, and libraries, Microsoft and our partners are committed to enabling educators, students, and educational institutions to realize their full potential.

ExAMPLE OF BUILDING BUSINESS CAPABILITIES IN THE GOVERNMENT INDUSTRY

Building Customer/Citizen Connections Microsoft and our partners deliver solutions that can help government representatives to work more effectively with constituents/citizens to integrate multiple views and needs into government policies and programs. A collaborative policy development solution streamlines the policy development process while enabling key government and industry stakeholders to work better together.



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Microsoft focuses on two areas in the education industry:

• Managing the institution – Providing technology, tools, solutions, and services to help educators and administrators easily, efficiently, and effectively design and manage an education environment where students are engaged, parents are connected, administrators are empowered, and teachers are inspired.

• Teaching and learning – Helping foster education environments where educators and students use technology, communication, and collaboration creatively to develop skills, maximize their opportunities, and prepare for the changing demands of the 21st century.

Find more information on Microsoft’s approach for the education industry at: http://www.microsoft.com/industry/education/

TELECOMMUNICATIONSNow, more than ever, our service provider customers—including network operators, mobile operators, and cable operators—are looking for ways to deliver new sets of services that offer greater value to subscribers, build customer loyalty, and generate new revenue streams. In particular, our customers are investing heavily in new Internet Protocol (IP) infrastructures and infrastructures to deliver value-added services, and software is playing an increasingly important role. Wireline, wireless, and cable operators are continuing to adopt broadband, and service possibilities are also being driven by next-generation digital subscriber line (DSL) and fiber deployments, the proliferation of wireless technology, and the adoption of broadband wireless. These trends map directly to the growing core Microsoft strength in service enablement. The Microsoft Connected Services Framework (CSF) provides the common service capabilities that your company needs to connect content services and networks to pursue new service opportunities while managing cost. We are also developing a range of solutions that round out this architecture and form the basis for the triple play: • Voice – Enhanced voice over IP (VoIP) services, instant

messaging and presence service (IMPS), etc.

• Video – Microsoft TV (MSTV)• Data – Hosted messaging & collaboration, mobile

messaging, hosted customer relationship management (CRM), My Mobile Media, etc.

Microsoft focuses on four areas in the telecommunications industry:

• Business support systems – Providing infrastructure offerings in the areas of customer care, billing, fraud, and mediation.

• Operations – Delivering solutions that address the IT operations of telecommunications operators.

• Operations support systems – Providing infrastructure offerings in the areas of provisioning, inventory management, network management, planning and engineering, and workforce management.

• Service network – Offering a set of value-added services that operators can host internally with a Microsoft-based platform and architecture, as well as a set of Microsoft “Live” or third-party services that Microsoft has enabled for operators to rebrand.

Find more information on Microsoft’s approach for the telecommunications industry at: http://www.microsoft.com/serviceproviders

ExAMPLE OF BUILDING BUSINESS CAPABILITIES IN THE EDUCATION INDUSTRY

Enabling Your Mobile WorkforceMicrosoft and our partners help schools and universities implement strategic, holistic mobility solutions as a way to enable administrators, teachers, and students to collaborate more effectively, increase access to information, and enhance the teaching and learning environment.

ExAMPLE OF BUILDING BUSINESS CAPABILITIES IN THE TELECOMMUNICATIONS INDUSTRY

Building Customer Connections Through the Microsoft Customer Care Framework, Microsoft and our partners provide an enterprise software solution for contact centers that delivers a unified agent desktop, consolidating data from core business systems such as billing, CRM, and order management to the customer service agent desktop. This solution can significantly improve the ability of your customer care agents to respond to customer requests, regardless of the channel that they use, and facilitates the introduction of new services and products by network service providers.

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HOSTINGMicrosoft has found that growing pressure on companies and end users to adapt to rapidly evolving organizational and virtual structures, to satisfy increasingly complex security requirements, to use a diverse set of computing devices, and to still reduce costs is helping build momentum for delivery of software as a service (SaaS) in the hosting industry. Microsoft delivers a full range of hosting solutions that you can deploy in your datacenters and offer as services. Microsoft focuses on two areas in the hosting industry:

• SaaS and hosted independent software vendors (ISVs) – Delivering an end-to-end platform and tool offering for SaaS providers.

• Service provider offerings – Providing a comprehensive approach for a Windows-based Web and application hosting environment.

Find more information on Microsoft’s approach for the hosting industry at: http://www.microsoft.com/serviceproviders/hosters

MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENTFor our media & entertainment customers, the continued proliferation of broadband, mobile advancements, and the battle for the triple play (voice/video/data) are creating new opportunities, while the consumer and business requirements of the digital lifestyle represent challenges and opportunities for the industry. The shift from analog to digital content creation and distribution, regulatory mandates, piracy, and industry restructuring are ongoing challenges. As a result, these organizations are continuing to focus on streamlining operations, economizing and exploiting new business models and revenue opportunities in multiplatform distribution channels, online advertising, business process integration, digital asset management, digital rights management, and interoperability of business, production, and data systems. The Microsoft Connected Services Framework (CSF) can help you streamline the creation, management, and delivery of content and provides a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to help you manage how disparate applications work together.Microsoft focuses on three areas in the media & entertainment industry:

• Content distribution – Delivering a comprehensive approach to enabling the delivery of digital content for media and entertainment companies.

• Content production – Providing an innovative approach using Web services standards in dealing with end-to-end creation, editing, and management of digital content.

• Process management – Enabling the entire workflow of digital content.

Find more information on Microsoft’s approach for the media & entertainment industry at: http://www.microsoft.com/resources/mediaandentertainment/

ExAMPLE OF BUILDING BUSINESS CAPABILITIES IN THE HOSTING INDUSTRY

Driving Business PerformanceWith the Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration, Microsoft and our partners provide hosting providers with a foundation for electronic messaging and collaboration services. This solution provides flexible business modeling, which can enable you to offer a broad range of messaging services—from basic e-mail to higher value services, such as collaboration, calendar sharing, additional storage, personalized domains, and synchronization with mobile devices.

ExAMPLE OF BUILDING BUSINESS CAPABILITIES IN THE MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY

Driving Business PerformanceMicrosoft and our partners help content providers to create flexible enterprise solutions and business management tools, which can transform them into agile, responsive, and productive organizations and enable them to capitalize on new ways of producing and managing content. These solutions can help you stay competitive in a converging and dynamic business environment by delivering new services, generating new revenue, gaining market share, and exciting your audiences.

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/mediaandentertainment/



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OUR SOFTWAREOur founding vision, to empower people through software by enabling them to harness their creativity, imagination, and intellect, has evolved beyond individuals working in isolation to enable workgroups, organizations, and the wider value chain. Our commitment to helping organizations become people-ready is manifested in four key attributes of our software:

• Innovative and responsive to real customer needs. Microsoft software is designed to work with what you have and provides a platform to take advantage of new developments and innovation in the industry, so as the world changes, Microsoft solutions continue to evolve to help keep you competitive.

• Familiar and easy to use, maximizing the impact of your people while minimizing complexity and cost.

• Easy to integrate and connect to the software and devices that you and your business partners use, today and tomorrow. Based on industry standards, Microsoft software works across boundaries and provides a platform for a seamless experience.

• Widely supported by millions of partners, developers and support professionals around the world. A vast ecosystem of solution providers, software vendors, and support organizations helps ensure that you will be able to match the right solution with your business needs.

Microsoft makes a significant investment in research and development (R&D), and with a commitment to spend more than U.S. $40 billion over the next five years, we continue to lead the industry in software research to deliver innovation for our customers. In 1991, we became one of the first software companies to create its own computer science research organization. As part of a dynamic industry that is continually reinventing itself, we saw the need to support long-term computer science research—research that is not bound by product cycles—so that there would be new foundations and technology breakthroughs upon which future generations could build. Since then, Microsoft Research has evolved into an organization with more than 700 researchers studying more than 55 research areas, including speech recognition, information retrieval, user interface (UI) research, programming tools and methodologies, operating systems and networking, graphics, natural language processing, machine learning, and mathematical sciences.The results of these investments in R&D are reflected in our motivation to continue to advance technology to better support and empower the way that people work, live, and play. These investments each year lead directly into our

software roadmap for the following year and demonstrate our commitment to building on prior investments and continuing to evolve and innovate into the future. Microsoft researchers work closely with product development groups to transfer research technology into Microsoft products through a dedicated technology transfer team. This helps bridge the long-range research and near-term product development functions within Microsoft to fulfill our shared vision: seeing our innovative work reflected in improved software products for our customers.In addition, Microsoft has fostered one of the world’s largest communities of software developers. Today, our developer network (MSDN) works with a community of more than 6 million professional developers. We not only transfer our ideas from the laboratory into our own products, but through the publication process and through our licensing program we hope to foster continued innovation in the software industry. For example, with the 2007 Microsoft Office release, we include a newly redesigned UI intended to help customers get more out of their desktop applications. This new UI represents a massive investment in R&D, and we are making elements of it available to qualified developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) through a new royalty-free licensing agreement. This licensing program will enable developers to build applications that have the look and feel of the 2007 Microsoft Office system applications, which will ultimately benefit users by offering them a consistent user interface.The software roadmap that follows provides an estimated timeline on key upcoming Microsoft enterprise software releases, which can assist you in planning resources such as hardware upgrades.

enterprIse product roadMap tool

Microsoft understands that visibility into our future product releases is important to your IT strategic planning. The Enterprise Product Roadmap (EPR) tool is a powerful resource that your Microsoft account team can use to build a customized roadmap of Microsoft software and hardware tailored to your current and future technology requirements. As we work with you to optimize your infrastructure and build business capabilities, a customized roadmap can help you understand technology dependencies and enable better purchasing and deployment decisions. We invite you to work with your account manager today to start building a custom roadmap.

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200820072006 and prior

Systems Management Server 2003 R2

Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007

Microsoft Operations Manager 2005

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007

Microsoft Antigen Forefront

Microsoft Client Protection Microsoft Forefront Client Security

Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 Virtual PC 2007

Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2006

System Center Data Protection Manager v2

Microsoft Identity Integration Server 2003 SP2

Identity Integration Server “Gemini” (code name)

Microsoft Internet Security & Acceleration (ISA) Server 2006

Microsoft Forefront ISA Server

Virtual Server 2005 R2 Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Windows Server “Longhorn”

with Windows Server virtualization

Windows Storage Server R2 Windows Storage Server “Longhorn” (code name)

Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003

Windows Compute Cluster Server “Longhorn” (code name)

Windows Vista

Windows XP Service Pack (SP) 2 Windows XP SP3

Windows Server 2003 R2

Core

infr

astr

uctu

re

Ope

ratin

g sy

stem

IT o

pera

tions

Secu

rity

Windows Server “Longhorn” (code name)

This release timeline highlights selected infrastructure software and represents the latest information available at the time of publication. This information is provided for planning purposes only and is subject to change.

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager



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200820072006 and prior

App

licat

ion

plat

form

.NET Framework 2.0 .NET Framework 3.0 .NET Framework “Orcas” (code name)

SQL Server 2005 SP1 SQL Server Update

Microsoft Host Integration Server 2004 Host Integration Server 2006

BizTalk Server 2006 BizTalk Server 2006 R2 BizTalk Server v6

Visual Studio 2005 Visual Studio “Orcas” (code name)

FrontPage Microsoft Expression

Microsoft Dynamics AX 5.0, Microsoft Dynamics GP 11.0, Microsoft Dynamics NAV 6.0,

Microsoft Dynamics SL 8.0

Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0 Additions,

Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0, Microsoft Dynamics NAV 5.0,

Microsoft Dynamics SL 7.0

Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0, Microsoft Dynamics GP 9.0

Extensions, Microsoft Dynamics

NAV 4.0 SP1, Microsoft Dynamics SL 6.5

Busi

ness

pro

duct

ivity

pla

tfor

m

Exchange Server 2003 SP2 Exchange Server 2007

Office 2003 Enterprise Edition Office Enterprise 2007

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Office SharePoint Server 2007

Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005 SP1

Office Communications Server 2007

Live Meeting 2006 Office Live Meeting 2007

Microsoft Office Communicator 2005 Office Communicator 2007

Duet™ 1.0 Duet Value Packs

Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2006

Office Project Portfolio Server 2007

Microsoft FrontPage® 2003 Office SharePoint Designer 2007

Business Scorecard ManagerOffice PerformancePoint

Server 2007ProClarity Analytics

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0Microsoft Dynamics CRM

“Live” (code name)

Microsoft Dynamics CRM “Titan” (code name)

Microsoft Dynamics CRM “Titan +1” (code name)

This release timeline highlights selected infrastructure software and represents the latest information available at the time of publication. This information is provided for planning purposes only and is subject to change.

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OUR COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGEToday’s enterprise software market is more competitive than ever and Microsoft is committed to innovating and delivering solutions that meet our customers’ needs. This section provides an overview of our strategy compared with other companies in the areas of enterprise search, server platform, and messaging platform. Our commitment and dedication to our customers and product vision continue to be our priority: we make significant investments in research and development (R&D), increasing our annual spend by an average of 20 percent each year, and the results of this investment have put us at the forefront of cutting-edge development in the software industry. Microsoft has clearly become a leader in enterprise platform software. In an IDC survey of 1,740 organizations worldwide, respondents reported that 42.3 percent of their mission-critical applications run on Windows Server, versus 11.1 percent on UNIX, 10.8 percent on Sun Solaris, and 8.6 percent on IBM AIX; furthermore, respondents reported using technologies from Microsoft more than any other company as their primary application platform vendor, Web services vendor, and service-oriented architecture (SOA) vendor and for messaging or queuing technologies.23 While maintaining our competitive advantage is clearly a priority for us, Microsoft is also committed to interoperability. Our customers tell us that interoperability is as important to them as security and reliability. In a recent survey by Jupiter Research, 72 percent of IT decision makers ranked Microsoft number one in interoperability.24 A recent example of our interoperability efforts is the formation of the Interop Vendor Alliance, a global, cross-industry group of software and hardware vendors that will work together to identify opportunities for enhancing interoperability with Microsoft systems on behalf of their customers. The goal of this alliance is to proactively work with partners and competitors alike to help increase customers’ return on investment (ROI) in their IT solutions while reducing the cost and risk associated with integrating diverse systems.To learn more about the Interop Vendor Alliance, please visit: http://interopvendoralliance.org

GOOGLE AND ENTERPRISE SEARCHThe ability to find, use, and share information in the enterprise is a rapidly evolving technology area: in an April 2006 study, IDC estimated that information workers now spend 48 percent of their time searching for and analyzing information (9.5 and 9.6 hours per week, respectively). These tasks together cost an organization more than U.S. $28,000 per worker per year.25 Our customers need to be able to successfully locate and apply information to make better, faster, more relevant, more localized, and more impactful decisions. Among the highest-value ideas to emerge recently is the concept of giving information workers a single point of entry into all of the information available to them, from the local desktop to the corporate network and beyond. To that end, Microsoft is developing Windows Live Search, an application that provides this much-needed single point of entry into all the content that is made available by Microsoft search technologies, enabling a seamless search of all structured and unstructured data in a single integrated solution that has deep visibility into local content, portals, line-of-business (LOB) applications, and beyond.Based on our research, Microsoft has found that an enterprise search user experience should:

• Present results in context with the same sophistication, speed, and relevance as enterprise-scale solutions, from within the desktop application that users work with every day.

• Provide a single point of entry to the content that they need, no matter where or how it is stored, without requiring them to toggle through multiple tools and manually collate, filter and merge the results from browser toolbars, local search tools, Web-based search engines, and isolated LOB queries and reports.

• Provide alerts and easily available updates by proactively informing a user when new content of interest becomes available, with the opportunity to easily execute previous searches.

• Connect with people, not just content, and present results based on social distance, expertise, and other useful properties with the ability to easily refine, filter and group results based on a range of criteria including job title and department.

• Present data from the entire business, including visibility into the highest-value customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and industry-specific LOB applications.

• Be actionable by enabling the user to check the content in or out of content libraries, collaborate on it, and easily extract important excerpts (such as slides from a presentation), all within the context of the search results.

23 “2005 Mission-Critical Survey,” IDC, 2005 (http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/8/a/18a10d4f-deec-4d5e-8b24-87c29c2ec9af/IDC-MS-MissionCritical-WW-261005.pdf)24 “Interoperability: How Technology Managers Rate Microsoft and Its Technologies for Development,” Jupiter Research, 2004 (http://labs.microsoft.com/windowsserver/facts/analyses/interop.mspx)25 “The Hidden Costs of Information Work,” IDC, April 2006



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We understand that in the enterprise, search is not everything; rather, it is a means to an end. The search technologies that we offer coupled with the breadth of our information management platform put us in a highly differentiated and strategic position when compared with Google and our other competitors. Windows Live Search for the desktop provides information from across the enterprise in a single application, showing relevant and actionable results. Together with Windows Vista, the 2007 Microsoft Office system, and Office SharePoint Server 2007, the comprehensive Microsoft enterprise search approach enables your people to find, use, and share information and drive business performance.To read more about Microsoft’s approach to enterprise search, please visit: http://www.microsoft.com/livesearch/default.mspx

LINUxWhen making informed decisions about how to best meet their business needs, customers frequently ask Microsoft to provide evidence of how the Windows Server operating system delivers unique value when compared with Linux. Microsoft’s answer to that question lies in our ability to address customer needs, and we have invested significantly in understanding the issues that our customers face with respect to IT. Based on research from several sources and conversations with technology decision makers and IT professionals, the five characteristics that customers consider to be essential attributes of any IT platform include:

• Total cost of ownership (TCO) – Because Linux is open-source software, people believe that it is free or inexpensive. In reality, the most common (and usable) Linux alternatives are commercialized distributions that can cost as much or more than Windows to acquire and support. Acquisition costs are a very small component of TCO. Even when the costs of both operating systems are comparable, research shows that Windows offers a lower TCO because it provides cost advantages in the other, larger components of TCO, such as staffing and downtime.26 In addition to what they must pay, companies that are making an investment in IT should consider what they will get in return, including features or capabilities that improve productivity and deliver additional value. Windows Server 2003 offers many features that are not available on Linux yet have proven to be useful or essential in enterprise IT environments. One example is Active Directory, which is recognized by both Windows and Linux users as a powerful tool for identity management in large networks.

• Reliability – End-user availability, ease of maintenance, and predictability are essential attributes of a server platform. A study published by Yankee Group in April 2005 found that an overwhelming 88 percent of corporations reported that Windows Server 2003 provides performance and reliability that are equal to or better than Linux in comparable usage scenarios.27 A study published by Security Innovation in November 2005 found that, overall, Linux administrators required 68 percent more time on average to maintain the system.”28

• Security – Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Initiative has resulted in significant advances in the security of Windows Server 2003. For example, a Yankee Group report published in July 2005 noted “a 100 percent improvement in Microsoft’s security in the previous 12 months.”29 The report also identified that the surveyed companies had reduced the time that they spend applying and distributing Windows patches by 50–80 percent with Microsoft’s monthly schedule of patch management (whereas Linux administrators reported spending 15–23 percent longer on patch management distribution than in the same period in 2004). Furthermore, the study found that it takes Linux administrators 30 percent longer—or approximately four hours—to bring their Linux servers online following a security attack compared with Windows Server.

• Interoperability – SOAs based on Web service standards have emerged as the leading enabler for interoperability as they can deliver excellent scalability, a better ability to leverage existing systems and applications, lower IT costs, and improved user productivity. Microsoft offers a leading platform for SOAs because we have developed many Web service standards (such as Simple Object Access Protocol [SOAP]), offer developer tools with deeply integrated support for Web services, and deliver a compelling cost/value proposition.

• Intellectual property indemnification – Companies are liable for “unauthorized” use of the intellectual property rights contained in software. To help protect organizations from the risk of litigation, Microsoft provides uncapped monetary intellectual property indemnification on server and client software. In contrast, Linux and other open-source software vendors provide limited, if any, indemnification coverage.

To read white papers, customer case studies, and more analyst insight on the advantages of the Windows Server platform, please visit: http://www.getthefacts.com

26 “File, Web, and Database Server Administration: The Realities Windows and Linux Administrators Face and Their Demands for Change,” META Group, May 2005 (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/facts/analyses/metawinsrv.mspx) 27 “2005 North American Linux and Windows TCO Comparison, Part 1,” Yankee Group, April 2005 (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/facts/analyses/yankeetcoupdate.mspx) 28 “Reliability: Analyzing Solution Uptime as Business Needs Change,” Security Innovation, November 2005 (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/facts/analyses/sievolving.mspx) 29 “2005 North American Linux and Windows TCO Comparison Report, Part 2,” Yankee Group, July 2005 (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/facts/analyses/yankeetcoupdate2.mspx)

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IBM LOTUS NOTES/DOMINOMicrosoft has found that businesses are increasingly viewing collaboration as an enterprise strategy involving a commitment to a consistent platform and infrastructure, not isolated capabilities enabled by individual products. The end-user experience with the Microsoft Office Outlook client, coupled with security, compliance, and content management support across the Microsoft platform, provides a compelling solution for customers. Transitioning from a legacy IBM Lotus Notes/Domino installation to the Microsoft communications and collaboration platform can help you:

• Elevate the effectiveness of your people by enabling those who work with you to be more effective wherever and however they work—because they’re always using the same familiar and flexible set of modern tools whether in the office or on the road.

• Improve business processes and organizational effectiveness through a flexible, scalable, and collaborative platform that helps enable people to work globally across organizational boundaries.

• Reduce the cost and complexity of your infrastructure and reduce the time that administrators spend managing and troubleshooting issues by updating legacy systems to a modern, integrated platform.

• Better utilize existing Microsoft investments by delivering substantial new collaboration capabilities and business value with technologies that you may already use.

According to March 2006 estimates by The Radicati Group, market share for IBM Lotus Notes/Domino will continue to decrease. They estimate that in 2006 IBM Lotus Notes/Domino occupied 20 percent of corporate mailboxes and predict that this will drop to 14 percent by 2009. Additionally, they estimate that IBM Lotus Notes/Domino will lose 10 million users between 2006 and 2009. During this same time period, they estimate that Exchange Server will gain 62 million users.30 Microsoft offers a wide variety of tools, services, best practices, and guidance to enable our customers to take a business-focused approach to modernizing their collaboration environment. Workflow technology built into the 2007 Microsoft Office system delivers a comprehensive set of capabilities for enabling workflow without requiring partner products. Furthermore, our approach to enabling access to information anytime, anywhere, on any device can give your workforce pervasive, easy-to-use collaboration tools that work across organizational boundaries.For more information on transitioning from IBM Lotus Notes/Domino to the Microsoft communications and collaboration platform, please visit:http://www.microsoft.com/business/notes/default.mspx

30 “Microsoft Exchange Market Share Statistics,” The Radicati Group, 2006 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=80114)



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VALUE OF A MICROSOFT ENTERPRISE AGREEMENTTo get the most out of their IT investments, our customers tell us that they want licensing options that allow them to rationalize their technology choices while focusing on fewer vendors and standardizing software across their organizations. The Microsoft Enterprise Agreement Volume Licensing program offers enterprises a flexible and cost-effective way to acquire the latest Microsoft technology, enables IT standardization across the enterprise, simplifies license management, and provides maintenance benefits. An Enterprise Agreement provides you with the choice and flexibility to purchase the options that are right for your organization and can grow as your business needs evolve, helping you get the most out of your software investments and reduce the time that your people spend managing software licenses.With an Enterprise Agreement, your organization receives:• Volume pricing on the latest Microsoft software, including

Office Enterprise 2007, Windows Vista Enterprise, Client Access Licenses (CALs) in packaged suites (Core CAL Suite and Enterprise CAL Suite) and server software such as Windows Server, Office SharePoint Server, Exchange Server, and SQL Server.

• Software Assurance, which provides a powerful combination of benefits including upgrade rights to the latest technology, product support, deployment planning, training, and home use rights.

• The ability to license exclusive technology, such as the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack for Software Assurance (including SoftGrid), available only to customers that have licensed Windows Vista through an Enterprise Agreement.

The Enterprise Agreement program has a three-year enrollment term, with equal, annual payments spread over the term to help simplify your budgeting process. The Enterprise Agreement program also makes the same products available at the original order price as your organization grows. In addition, Step-up Licenses allow you to migrate from Standard Edition software products to Enterprise Edition software products, giving you the flexibility to upgrade software as your company needs increase over time.An Enterprise Agreement provides the additional benefits of helping simplify your administration and budget processes by enabling you to centrally track purchases and manage licenses with online management tools and to centralize your purchasing so that you can share software products and extended benefits with qualified affiliates. For more information on Microsoft Enterprise Agreements, please visit:http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/programs/ent

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ROLE OF MICROSOFT SERVICES“By offering technical expertise, training, and support, Microsoft Services helped reduce both our risk with this project and our time spent completing it.” – Vinnie Clements, Senior Director of IT, MCI Inc., United StatesMicrosoft Services, the consulting, technical support, and customer service arm for Microsoft, can help you maximize your investment in Microsoft technology. Our team works with you and your people to achieve the successful adoption, deployment, and innovative use of high-value Microsoft solutions that generate rapid, meaningful, and measurable results. Microsoft Services advisors offer a unique depth of Microsoft technology experience, knowledge, and expertise. Our close relationship with Microsoft product groups and our team of experts trained specifically on our products make us one of the best resources available to help you lead the successful implementation of mission-critical, enterprise solutions based on Microsoft technology. We also offer the assurance that we will continue to work with you and your partner once the solution has been implemented to make sure that it meets your expectations and to help you run it effectively.

We have designed our consulting and support services specifically to help you reduce risk, accelerate deployment, and optimize your solutions. We are also committed to working with our partners in delivering services; in fact, in fiscal year 2006, 78 percent of Microsoft Services revenue was derived from customer projects in which Microsoft worked with a partner to deliver services. To help ensure that our partners have the resources and services expertise needed for successful engagements, Microsoft is investing over U.S. $30 million in fiscal year 2007 in a skill-building partner certification program. Together, Microsoft Services and our partners create and share best practices and offer you comprehensive technological expertise with resources for every stage of the Microsoft IT life cycle. Microsoft Services and our service partners focus on providing your organization with the right set of services at the right time through a breadth of unique services—from customized engagements to large support projects or repeatable offerings.For more information about the consulting and support offerings available from Microsoft Services, please contact your Microsoft representative or visit: http://www.microsoft.com/microsoftservices/

consultIng servIces

enterprise strategy consulting Maximizing the value of your investment in Microsoft technology

Enterprise Strategy Consulting systematically enables the productive use of the Microsoft platform to solve your business challenges and deliver increased business value. A consultant works with you as your long-term information technology advisor, establishing a framework that helps your organization strategically plan, build, deploy, and successfully realize the value of Microsoft technology solutions—helping you to drive competitive advantage and reduce IT risk and complexity.

Microsoft consulting services (Mcs) Enabling IT excellence

MCS consultants work with you and your partner to combine in-depth technical knowledge with an understanding of your business and industry to help architect, implement, and deploy leading-edge Microsoft technologies and solutions. We offer a wide range of consulting services, including custom consulting services; assessment and review services; planning, architecture, and design services; proof-of-concept services; packaged consulting services; and operations consulting.

support servIces

Microsoft services premier support Taking IT support and service to the next level

Microsoft Services Premier Support provides you with the highest level of direct support through preventative services, problem resolution support, and a direct support relationship. Premier Support offers a complete portfolio of proactive services, including technology health checks and workshops, to help improve the operational health of your IT environment and transfer knowledge to your staff. If an incident occurs, Premier Support provides the highest level of reactive support available, including Critical Situation Escalation Management and Rapid Onsite Support for business-critical incidents.

Microsoft Services also offers you additional forms of support including Microsoft Services Essential Support, custom support services, packaged support services, and innovative support resources for additional life-cycle support, to help you drive productivity through proven services and to help maximize Microsoft technology benefits through assisted support.



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ROLE OF PARTNERSMicrosoft partners play a fundamental role in delivering solutions that enable people-ready businesses. Microsoft has an extensive ecosystem of partners that have specialized knowledge and experience in building solutions based on Microsoft technologies and that offer you industry and business expertise. Our partners can help your organization get the most from your software investments and amplify your people’s ability to achieve successful business outcomes. Microsoft partners offer value through:

• Delivery assurance – Microsoft partners work cooperatively with Microsoft to test, support, and improve Microsoft software, helping give you assurance that their technology solutions will enable your people to perform at their best.

• Specialized innovation to empower people – Microsoft partners know what businesses and their people need and they have the specialized expertise to innovatively adapt Microsoft software to help you achieve a unique competitive edge.

• Efficient, user-centered business processes – Microsoft partners know how to use the standardization and simplicity built into Microsoft software to reduce complexity in your work environment through efficient, user-centered business processes that amplify, not disrupt, your people’s impact.

• Value-based business outcomes – Microsoft partners know how to apply the interoperability and innovative features of Microsoft software to connect business applications and processes, providing value-based business outcomes in terms of overall costs, return, and contribution to profit, progress, and productivity.

Microsoft Solution Finder provides an extensive database of partner solutions. This tool can help you find solutions that enable your people to develop customer relationships, drive innovation, improve operations, and build connections. To find a partner to help you build a people-ready business, please visit:http://www.microsoft.com/peopleready/solutionfinder

ExECUTIVE RESOURCESThe following highlighted resources can help you explore more closely the opportunities and capabilities that we have presented in this guide. These resources are generally available worldwide, and your Microsoft account manager can also direct you to locally relevant resources.

MICROSOFT ExECUTIVE CIRCLEWith the Microsoft Executive Circle, Microsoft has partnered with luminaries from academia and industry to develop exclusive thought-leadership and best-practice insights delivered through unique experiences, resources, and connections. By participating in the Microsoft Executive Circle, you can benefit from: • Personalized access to articles, interviews, and white

papers that span business disciplines and industries.• Exclusive invitations to senior executive roundtables,

forums, interactive webcasts, and summits.• Opportunities to connect with like-minded peers facing

similar business challenges.• Unique connections and insights with senior Microsoft

executives outlining best practices and future technology roadmaps.

An exclusive program for senior business executives in larger organizations, Microsoft Executive Circle is designed to help you amplify your personal and business success. For more information and to join the Microsoft Executive Circle, please visit:http://www.microsoft.com/business/executivecircle/

ExECUTIVE BRIEFING CENTERSMicrosoft has established several Executive Briefing Centers around the world to support and host Executive Briefing programs with key enterprise customers to highlight the business value of Microsoft solutions and services. A visit to an Executive Briefing Center will provide you with a unique opportunity to understand our technology direction, to ask questions, and to build closer business relationships through strategic, customized briefings. For more information on visiting a local Microsoft Executive Briefing Center, please contact your Microsoft account manager or your local Microsoft office (for details, please see later in this section) or visit: http://www.microsoft.com/ebc

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RAPID ECONOMIC JUSTIFICATIONThe Microsoft Rapid Economic Justification (REJ) framework can help you evaluate the value of an IT initiative for business performance improvement within the context of acceptable risks. Developed based on an analysis of numerous customer organizations, this framework can help you ensure that the initiative is aligned with your organization’s critical success factors and makes optimal use of resources.The framework identifies key best practices for more effective IT decision making, including a shared vision of the valuable opportunities that exist across IT and business units, good business planning for every initiative, and effective communication of a good economic justification. A key catalyst for the effective application of these best practices is the efficient creation of an economic justification and a value proposition for the IT project. An easily implemented best practice is to view the value proposition not simply as a static document but as a dynamic mission-critical tool used for the improvement of business and IT governance within your organization. We encourage you to share the REJ framework with key stakeholders throughout your organization for use in evaluating new projects.For more information on the REJ framework, please visit: http://www.microsoft.com/value

LOCAL MICROSOFT EVENTSMicrosoft and our partners host a variety of events, such as executive breakfasts, to enable our customers to learn more about our vision for the enterprise, as well as the products, technologies, services, and solutions that we jointly offer to support it. These events provide you with an ideal opportunity to explore how building a people-ready IT infrastructure and delivering people-ready business capabilities can help your people connect more effectively with your customers, drive innovation in your products and services, identify opportunities for operational excellence, and collaborate more closely and effectively with your business partners. To learn about upcoming events in your area, please contact your Microsoft account manager or your local Microsoft office (for details, please see later in this section) or visit:http://www.microsoft.com/events

MICROSOFT SOLUTION SHOWCASE FOR THE MICROSOFT OFFICE SYSTEMThe Solution Showcase presents a sample of scenarios—organized into both industry and departmental categories—that highlight how the Microsoft Office system can help our customers address critical business problems using Microsoft Office software and services. Examples of solutions profiled in the Solution Showcase include Six Sigma projects for operations teams, proposal generation solutions for sales teams, and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) solutions for finance teams. Solution scenarios are also listed by industry and department. The Solution Showcase provides you with an overview of each solution and its benefits, the specific Microsoft Office technology that is used in the solution, an example of how one of our customers has implemented the solution, and links to specific partners with related capabilities and solution offerings. To explore the solutions that are profiled in the Solution Showcase, please visit:http://www.microsoft.com/office/showcase

LOCAL MICROSOFT OFFICESIf you would like to discuss any information in this guide in more detail, please contact your Microsoft account manager. If you are not aware of who your account manager is, please contact your local Microsoft office. A complete listing of Microsoft offices worldwide is available at: http://www.microsoft.com/worldwide/

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conclusIon: why MIcrosoft?Never before has technology had the potential to be so instrumental in enabling businesses to seize opportunities and embrace change. At Microsoft, our mission and values are to help people and organizations throughout the world to realize their full potential. Our people-ready business vision recognizes that people are the ultimate drivers of business success. Your people develop customer relationships, drive innovation, improve operations, and build partner connections—software provides the foundation to help them achieve these business outcomes.Our hope is that the ideas in this planning guide have inspired you in ways that will help to transform your business. Our priority in the enterprise is to help you realize the people-ready business vision by understanding your business and helping you to optimize your infrastructure and build business capabilities. To achieve this, we have built an extensive enterprise sales and service organization that is dedicated to understanding our enterprise customers’ needs, building customer and partner relationships, sharing best practices, and providing feedback and guidance to our product development teams. With more than 30 years of innovation history, Microsoft has been instrumental in shaping how people use computers to generate business results. As our business model has expanded to include four core lines of business—desktop and server platform, business applications, entertainment and devices, and online community—our innovation has accelerated. Over the past decade, Microsoft has become a recognized leader in enterprise platform software, and over the next decade, we expect the rapid pace of technology change to result in dramatic new capabilities for our enterprise customers.

We are committed to providing software that fits naturally with the way that people, businesses, and technologies work. We carefully study the way that people work today and collaborate with more than 40 customer advisory boards to identify trends and anticipate how people will work in the future. We continually evolve our software and solutions, fortify security features, and improve management and development tools. We also invest significantly in research and development (R&D) and plan to spend more than U.S. $40 billion over the next five years to provide innovation that leads directly into our products. As a successful global corporation, we also have a responsibility to use our resources and influence to make a positive impact on the world and its people. We are committed to helping countries improve their global competitiveness, promote local economic growth and development, and drive innovation. Microsoft recognizes that for millions of people, the promise of technology is still unrealized. We’ve therefore made a comprehensive commitment to promote digital inclusion that includes training a quarter of a billion people who are underserved by technology by 2010.In the coming years, we will continue to build on our success in the enterprise and our aspiration is to become the one software company that you bet your business on. We look forward to strengthening our relationship with you and earning your trust as a valued business advisor.

January 2007Enterprise Resource Guide for Customers

Welcome to the January 2007 guide to Microsoft in the enterpriseThis guide is intended for technology, business, and public sector leaders who are interested in learning about Microsoft’s business vision and our priorities in the enterprise.

At Microsoft, we are passionate about technology and its potential to transform your organization. Our belief is that companies excel when they empower their people to drive the business forward by giving them the right tools, information, and opportunities. Fundamentally, software is instrumental to the people-ready business. Software enables us to harness information, turn data into insight, transform ideas into action, and turn change into opportunity.

Over the last 30 years, Microsoft has grown to offer products in more than 50 languages and to employ more than 60,000 employees worldwide. We believe the advantage that Microsoft offers to our enterprise customers is based on these key principles: Our focus on enterprise customers enables us to better understand and align with your needs and help you achieve successful business outcomes. Our customer-centered approach enables us to develop software that amplifies the impact of people throughout your organization. We deliver business technology through our ongoing, integrated relationships that are tailored to meet your requirements. And we are committed to a long-term vision to help you anticipate and lead in your market.

We created this guide to help make our approach in the enterprise more transparent and to provide you with a holistic view of our enterprise priorities. We encourage you to use this guide to help drive discussions around your own business challenges and technology opportunities with your Microsoft account manager and your technology partners. Your business is important to us and we appreciate your investing the time to learn more about how we can build on our relationship.

Sincerely,

Simon Witts Corporate Vice President Enterprise & Partner Group

© 2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This resource guide is for informational purposes only.MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.Microsoft, Active Directory, Aero, Axapta, BitLocker, BizTalk, Excel, Expression, Forefront, FrontPage, Groove, InfoPath, Microsoft Dynamics, Outlook, SharePoint, Visual Studio, Windows, Windows Live, Windows Mobile, Windows Server, Windows Vista, and Your Potential. Our Passion. are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual compa-nies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.Microsoft Corporation • One Microsoft Way • Redmond, WA 98052-6399 • USA Part Number 098-107347

MICROSOFT IN THE ENTERPRISE


A worldwide guide for enterprise customersto Microsoft priorities and our vision for the people-ready business

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