Microsoft Enterprise Customer Guide 2011

2008
IS YOUR BUSINESS PEOPLE-READY?

People Drive Business Outcomes Software Is the Foundation for the People-Ready Business
2 2 2
THE ROLE OF SOFTWARE IS EXPANDING

Industry Trends Our Approach: Software plus Services
4 4 5
ROLE-BASED PRODUCTIVITY: REALIZING BUSINESS VALUE

Business Solutions Our Commitment to Industry
8 12 28
DYNAMIC IT: TRANSFORMING IT INTO A STRATEGIC ASSET

Core Infrastructure Optimization Business Productivity Infrastructure Optimization Application Platform Optimization
36 42 46 50
WHY MICROSOFT?
Executive Resources
54 60
MICROSOFT IN THE ENTERPRISE

A worldwide guide for enterprise customers to Microsoft priorities and our vision for the people-ready business
QUICK REFERENCE Use this quick reference to easily find information on key topics: QUICK REFERENCE
Pages Use this quick reference to easily find information on key topics:
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Customer service Finance IT professionals PRODUCTS and developers Marketing Windows Server Operations Windows Vista Sales 2007 Microsoft Office System Sourcing
ROLES
Office SharePoint Server Exchange Server MICROSOFT SOFTWARE Forefront Server Exchange
Forefront
Microsoft Dynamics SOLUTIONS
23-24, 43-45 12, 15, 17-18, 23-24, 26-27 Microsoft Office 13, 15, 17-18, 21, 23-24, 26-27, Business Solutions XX, XX, XXXX, XX 43-45, 48-49, 52-53, 58 XX, XX Infrastructure Optimization XX, XX, Office Communications Server 17-18, 26-27, 48-49 XXXX Industry Solutions XX, Office PerformancePoint Server 21, 23-24, 48-49, 52-53 Office SharePoint Server 15, 17-18, 21, 23-24, 48-49, Microsoft Partners XX, XX, XX, XX 52-53 SQL Server 15, 21, 23-24, 48-49, 52-53 System Center 23-24, 43-45 XX, XX Microsoft Services Visual Studio 52-53 Windows Mobile 15, 17-18, 26-27 Microsoft Server XX Windows Licensing and the Enterprise Agreement42-45, 57 Windows Vista 23-24, 26-27, 43-45
XX, XX, XX XXXX 7, 17-18, 23-24, 26-27, 48-49 XX, XX
8-13, 17, 25 Pages 8-14, 19, 22 36-53 8-13, 16, 19 XX, XX 8-15, 20, 22-23 XX 8-13, 16-17, 20, 25 XX, XX XX, XX, 8-13, 25-26
BUSINESS SOLUTIONS
Business performance management Customer relationship management (CRM) Enterprise resource planning (ERP) Governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) Mobility
19-21 16-18 14-15 22-24 25-27
Education Financial services Government Health Hospitality Manufacturing Media & entertainment Professional services Retail Telecommunications
INDUSTRIES
28, 33-34 28-29 28, 32-33 28, 31-32 28, 30-31 28-30 28, 35 28, 31 28, 30 28, 34-35 57-58 59 57 55-56
ADDITIONAL TOPICS
Interoperability Microsoft Enterprise Agreement Microsoft Partners Microsoft Services
Welcome to the 2008 guide to Microsoft in the enterprise

This guide is intended for technology, business, and public sector leaders who are interested in learning about Microsofts business vision and our enterprise priorities. 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, and our software enables you 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 80,000 people worldwide. At the heart of our company are values and attributes that directly influence the software that we deliver to our customers. We are committed to understanding how software is used and then using this knowledge to build software that is familiar and easy for your people to use. Our deep relationships with our customers and partners enable us to offer software that is widely used and supported. We have a fundamental belief in interoperability and are committed to ensuring that our software is easy to integrate and connect with what you already have. And we take a deep and long-term approach to our research and development, helping us to deliver software that is continually innovating and changing to meet your needs, now and into the future. 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 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 further our relationship together.
Sincerely,
Simon Witts Corporate Vice President Enterprise & Partner Group

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 businesss most critical resourcethe people who work there. At Microsoft, we believe passionately that people are at the heart of every business and every business success, and our mission is to help people realize their full potential.
SOFTWARE IS THE FOUNDATION FOR THE PEOPLE-READY BUSINESS

At Microsoft, we know that technology alone does not hold the key to business success. We believe that by closely aligning your business and IT objectives, you can help ensure that the software solutions your organization deploys empower your people to achieve profitable business outcomes. The right software solutions can meet the unique needs of your peoplewhether their roles involve customer service, sourcing, marketing, sales, operations, or financewhile delivering the fundamental capabilities required for success in the modern enterprise. Through our research we have found that people 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 they need to be able to derive insight from information from across the organization. At the same time, as IT becomes ever more important to deliver these capabilities, organizations need to be able to reduce the associated costs and risks. 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.
PEOPLE DRIVE BUSINESS OUTCOMES

Todays business environment is characterized by global competition, the breakdown of boundaries between organizations and their business partners and suppliers, increasing customer expectations for value and service, and ever more complex regulatory requirements. At the same time, people must cope with information overload and find ways to efficiently extract and use informationwhether to connect customer feedback to product design, identify opportunities to up-sell services to clients, or know at any given moment just how well the business is performing. As a result, it is becoming more and more difficult to maintain a competitive advantage and grow a business in new and profitable areas. While the challenges facing businesses steadily grow and change, the way that people choose to work is changing just as quicklywe are becoming more mobile and more connected, with constant access through e-mail, the Internet, and instant messaging. People bring the vision and creativity to drive innovative new opportunities for their businesses. Our research shows us that 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, is proving to be the primary driver of success in this globally competitive, rapidly changing business environment. As the nature of the workplace evolves, the challenge facing our customers is to deliver the tools and environment that will truly empower people to have an impact. To attract the top emerging talent, businesses will increasingly need to support the digital lifestyle of the current generation, who expect to bring their technology experience as consumers into the enterprise.
To learn more about our people-ready business vision, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/peopleready.
When your business is people-ready, your people have the tools to help them achieve these four critical business outcomes, regardless of your businesss industry, size, and location.
Develop Customer Relationships

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 is 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 is most importantthe 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.
Drive Innovation
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, develop new ideas and concepts, and determine how to commercialize those ideas and products and profitably ship them to customers.
People Drive Business Outcomes

Improve Operations
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 processes to improve time to delivery, and use their connections with business partners to deliver value to your customers.
Build Partner Connections

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 succeed 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.
Dramatic advances in technologythe development of the minicomputer, the rise of the personal computer, the emergence of the Internethave revolutionized the way that information is created, stored, shared, and used. These changes have transformed the world in fundamental ways. Today, people communicate and collaborate instantly with colleagues around the world, sell to customers on the other side of the globe, and use mobile devices to access information from wherever they are. Several decades of technology advances have also transformed the way that large companies operate. Desktop applications have made people significantly more productive. Line-of-business applications have automated processes that previously required considerable manual labor. Once-unimaginable amounts of information about customers, markets, and competitors can now be instantly accessed and analyzed. But IT departments are struggling in the face of the rapid evolution of technology, the ever-faster pace of business, and the growing demand to add value while constantly reducing cost. On average, IT departments in North America spend 70 percent of their budget on ongoing operations and maintenance,1 leaving limited time and resources for creating new capabilities that deliver true competitive advantage. In this section, we provide an overview of how Microsoft sees the role of software expanding and why we believe our software plus services approach can continue to improve the way that your people work while empowering your IT organization to become a more strategic asset for the business.
Software as a Service
The software as a service (or SaaS) model of online software delivery is proving attractive as it enables businesses to use their fixed assets more efficiently and take advantage of a lower-cost infrastructure, which helps to reduce ongoing operational costs. Online services can also enable IT departments to eliminate the work of managing server hardware, deploying patches, monitoring performance, maintaining failover sites, and deploying upgrades. And because online services typically can be implemented with no additional upfront hardware or software costs, they can enable businesses to roll out new capabilities much more inexpensively than in the past. In the coming years, we expect large organizations to increasingly take advantage of online services to enhance or expand their IT capacity. A 2007 IDC study found that 94 percent of respondents felt that SaaS was important as a business strategy and 67 percent felt that it was very important.2 In the same report, IDC estimates that on-demand software will account for 5 percent of the overall software market in 2011, up from 2 percent in 2006. In a recent McKinsey & Company and Sand Hill Group survey of 475 senior IT and business executives, 80 percent of respondents said they expected to use a subscription and on-demand licensing model for software over the next two years.3
What Licensing Licensing Models Will You Use What Models Will You Use Over the Next Two Years?Next Two Years? Over the
99%
Traditional license and maintenance
INDUSTRY TRENDS
As technology continues to advance, new breakthroughs are transforming the world once again. The foundation for this transformation is the combination of ever-more powerful devices, expanding data storage capacity on devices and in massive data centers, and the growing ubiquity of broadband networks. This combination of power, capacity, and speed has opened the door to a new generation of software that resides on the Internet, is downloaded quickly when needed, and is used directly by people on PCs or other devices. This approach is also helping both IT and commercial software developers rethink how to build enterprise applications and deliver next-generation Web experiences to customers and partners.
80%
Subscription and on-demand
60%
Transaction based
33%
Ad funded
Source: Enterprise Software Customer Survey, McKinsey & Company, Inc. and Sand Hill Group, May 2007
Today, many enterprise customers use services available from Microsoft to enhance their investments in Microsoft software. For example, Microsoft Windows Server Update Services helps ease the deployment of Microsoft product updates throughout an organization. Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services for messaging security and management also help many of our business customers to mitigate messaging risks before they reach the corporate firewall. These and other online services are
1 2 3
Oliver Young, 2007 Enterprise IT Budget Outlook: North America, Forrester Research, Inc., February 2007 Erin TenWolde, Reaching Critical Mass in the SaaS Ecosystem: Are We There Yet?, IDC, Doc #206699, May 2007 Enterprise Software Customer Survey, McKinsey & Company, Inc. and Sand Hill Group, May 2007
increasingly enabling IT organizations to free up resources and apply their technical expertise to value-producing initiatives that can improve their core business processes and deliver true competitive advantage.
become ever more essential to maintaining competitiveness and agility as online services become prevalent in the coming years.
Next-Generation Web Experiences

The term Web 2.0 has been commonly used to describe online experiences that extend beyond the capabilities expected in first-generation Web sites. Interactive capabilities such as social networking, wikis, and blogs have become commonplace and are increasingly being used within a business context. As companies explore how to best capture consumer interest, strengthen customer relationships, and build partner and supplier connections, corporate Web sites are evolving to deliver a nextgeneration Web experience and rich interactive applications that extend outside the browser to take advantage of local storage, local peripherals, and desktop application integration. Delivering an exceptional user experience is about more than great-looking Web sites. It is about creating engaging, sophisticated experiences that capture a customers imagination. It is about connecting with a larger community of partners and suppliers and working together to capture new markets. Recognizing that the Web is constantly changing, systems, applications, and staff need to anticipate those changes, remaining flexible while keeping up with growth. This is driving businesses to reevaluate the technology and infrastructure platform that can best enable them to attract, engage, and excite people online.
Service-Oriented Architecture
IT departments are managing increasingly complex IT portfolios and yet as business needs change, they must still ensure that technologies remain aligned with business goals. Critical business systems such as customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions typically operate in isolation from other critical business systemsdespite the fact that business processes often span multiple applications. To obtain an end-to-end view of a complex business process, organizations need to integrate information and process silos. In the past, this has been accomplished through either time-consuming manual interventions or hard-coded solutions that are difficult to maintain. Service orientation is an approach to organizing distributed IT resources into an integrated solution that breaks down information silos and maximizes business agility. Service orientation modularizes IT resources, creating loosely coupled business processes that integrate information across business systems. Critical to a well-designed service-oriented architecture (SOA) is producing business process solutions that are relatively free from the constraints of the underlying IT infrastructure, enabling the improved agility that businesses seek. A recent IDC study found that the most common reason for enterprise adoption of SOA was to aid in internal integration efforts, while external integration was most often cited by software and service firms.4 The SOA approach ultimately enables the delivery of a new generation of applications (sometimes called composite applications). These applications provide end users with more accurate and comprehensive information and insight into processes, as well as the flexibility to access this information in the most suitable form and presentation factor, whether through the Web, a rich client, or a mobile device. Dynamic applications enable businesses to improve and automate manual tasks, to gain a consistent view of customers and partner relations, and to orchestrate business processes that comply with internal mandates and external regulations. The net result is that businesses are able to achieve the agility necessary for superior marketplace performance. Many enterprises are building services today and are shifting from a tightly coupled, inflexible application infrastructure to a loosely coupled SOA approach. We believe that this approach will
OUR APPROACH: SOFTWARE PLUS SERVICES

The SaaS approach was initially thought by some to signal the beginning of a new era in which Internet-based services would replace the traditional client-based software that is installed onto PCs and other devices and then updated or upgraded when a new version becomes available. Today, some enterprise technology vendors see the interest in services as a return to centralized computing with minimal software on the desktop. Others see great opportunity for increased user empowerment but are not yet addressing enterprise requirements such as policy and compliance. However, we believe that by combining elements of Internet services with client or server software, IT departments can deliver solutions that provide new capabilities and deliver new levels of utility, convenience, and flexibility. Our software plus services approach offers an ideal balance between the advantages of the connection between people, devices, and information that the Internet provides and the rich interactivity and high performance that can be achieved only
Sandra Rogers, Deepening Tracks on the SOA Journey, IDC, Doc #206730, May 2007
by software that sits on a device with a powerful processor. In many cases, traditional software will provide the foundation for enhancing the computing experienceadvances in voice communications, the incorporation of speech into computing interfaces, and improved handwriting and reading capabilities will all transform the way we interact with computers. While there are clear benefits to a services model for software delivery, we believe that the next generation of software will blend these benefits with the best aspects of traditional client and server software.
At Microsoft, we are updating our existing tools and building entirely new tools that will help your developers create solutions that meld the benefits of broad reach and rich experiences and provide the flexibility of server- and services-based software. One example is the Microsoft Silverlight cross-browser, crossplatform plug-in. Created to work with all leading browsers, it enables developers to incorporate into any Web application the kind of stunning graphics, media, text, animation, interactivity, and overlays that traditional Windows-based applications offer. Microsoft can also help you to create next-generation Web experiences for customers, partners, and suppliers. Through our comprehensive application platform, we offer a broad range of software and services to help you optimize your Web investments and infrastructure and enable your developers to make the most of their existing skills. With more than 450 million daily visitors to MSN.com, 315 million active Microsoft Hotmail Web-based e-mail accounts, and 280 million active MSN Messenger accounts, our Web properties and Microsoft adCenter can also help you find new audiences and reach more customers.
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This balanced approach enables us to deliver an optimized user experience that is consistent, powerful, and seamless across the desktop, Web, and other deviceswhile also offering the scalability, reliability, and security that our enterprise customers expect. Our software plus services approach also helps ensure that people can access the applications and information that they need even when they are not connected to the Internet.
Combining Reach and Richness

The software plus services approach enables developers and IT professionals to more easily develop and support applications that provide the kind of experiences that their users are looking for. Until now, developers who focused on a specific type of application have often struggled to adapt their solutions to different requirements and devices. For example, Web developers have traditionally found it complex and challenging to provide richer, more interactive experiences. And developers of applications based on the Microsoft Windows operating system have found it equally challenging to maintain the richness of the experiences that they are accustomed to delivering while taking advantage of the broader reach available through the Internet or the accessibility provided by devices. With software plus services and the capabilities provided by the Microsoft platform, developers can quickly incorporate the degree of reach and the richness of experience that is most appropriate for the experience that they seek to deliver.
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Offering Choice
The software plus services approach provides significantly greater levels of flexibility and choice, enabling organizations to access the powerful capabilities of enterprise software through ITmanaged on-site servers, as online services, or as a balance of both, depending on their specific business needs. Over time, we expect that three deployment models will become mainstream and that our customers will use a combination of these approaches to meet their unique business requirements: h On-premise servers Running their IT infrastructure on servers within their own data center when control and customization are the paramount consideration h Off-premise hosted services from partners Accessing IT capabilities through service providers that host applications and solutions and offer specialized management and expertise h Online services from Microsoft Accessing broad-based Online or Live service offerings hosted in Microsoft data centers, which offer the benefits of low cost that come with Microsofts huge scale Microsoft plans to deliver a wide variety of new solutions under two key families of service offerings: h Live services from Microsoft are designed primarily for individuals, business end users, and virtual workgroups. Live offerings span entertainment, communication, and productivity. These services emphasize ease of use, simplicity of access, and flexibility; they are ideally suited for situations where people either do not have access to professional technical expertise or do not require high levels of system management.
h Online services are for organizations with more advanced IT needs where power and flexibility are critical. Online services from Microsoft give businesses the ability to control access to data, manage users, apply business and compliance policy, and meet high availability standards while providing performance, scalability, enhanced security, management features, and service-level capabilities to support missioncritical applications and systems. Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 offers perhaps the most complete example of our software plus services vision today. Exchange Server 2007 can be deployed and managed by IT, is available online as a hosted service offering from a number of Microsoft partners, or is available through the Exchange Online service offering from Microsoft (for organizations requiring 5,000 or more licenses). We also offer additional Exchange Hosted Services to meet your e-mail security, continuity, and compliance needs.
DEPLOYMENT CHOICE
We also provide a range of choice on the client. The Microsoft Office Outlook messaging and collaboration client provides people with a full-featured and rich interface that is well integrated with other Microsoft Office desktop productivity applications. Office Outlook Web Access provides a consistent user experience over the Web and Office Outlook Mobile extends Office Outlook to mobile devices. And Office Outlook Voice Access provides seamless access to e-mail and calendar information from a telephone. These differentiated offerings enable you to deliver the right messaging and collaboration client capabilities to the right users.
Continuing Our Innovation

Software plus services is already having a dramatic impact on the way that individuals communicate, create, and share content and experiences. It is also changing the way that organizations think about creating, deploying, and managing the information systems that are essential to their day-to-day operations. But in many ways, this is still the very beginning of the software plus services era. In the coming months and years, a new generation of innovations that harness the power of client or server software and the flexibility of Internet-based services will deliver new capabilities that will continue to transform peoples lives at home and at work. Microsoft will play a vital role in this next evolution of computing by delivering a comprehensive services platform along with the infrastructure and support that will enable our partners to develop, deliver, and host a broader range of servicesbased offerings for enterprise customers.
ON-PREMISE / IT MANAGED PARTNER HOSTED ONLINE SERVICES ONLINE SERVICES FROM MICROSOFT
CHOICE OF USER EXPERIENCE
SERVICES FOR MESSAGING, SECURITY, AND MANAGEMENT
The changing role of software is opening up new opportunities for businesses to drive improved productivity. This section looks at how our business productivity and application software can help you realize more business value from your software through role-based productivity, as well as how with our partners we tailor productivity solutions to meet specific industry needs.
THE NEXT LEVEL OF PRODUCTIVITY

The influence of technology in business has been profound. We have seen significant gains in business efficiency by using technology to accelerate and optimize enterprise workflows. Across all areas of business, software has been used to automate processesparticularly in areas such as accounting, sales, and production. In the last decade, significant progress has also been made in developing tools that help people work more efficiently and productively. Personal productivity tools have delivered considerable benefits to individuals everyday work. For example, these tools have helped people to better manage their e-mail, schedules, and tasks; improved their ability to work while out of the office; and helped them better protect sensitive corporate information. At an individual level, this has enabled people to improve their responsiveness, minimize rework, and reduce cycle times. We have also seen significant improvements in team productivity. Software has simplified team collaboration and accelerated information sharing, helping teams deliver better results. As information has proliferated, this software has made it easier for people to find and share information, whether they are in the next cubicle or outside the office. And teams have also benefited from tools to help preserve organizational security by helping control access to and the use of sensitive data. The benefits of process automation coupled with improved productivity at a personal and team level have dramatically changed the way that people work. With the automation of routine, standardized processes and powerful tools to help tackle all of the non-routine elements of peoples work, is there opportunity for more improvement? At Microsoft, we believe that there is. Although personal and team productivity tools have had a profound effect on business, typically they are disjointed from the business process automation software that businesses also depend on, which can prove to be a major hurdle to superior customer service, efficient business operations, and innovative product development.
We see a powerful opportunity to bridge these two worlds of softwarepersonal/team productivity and business process automationand bring them together in a way that is tailored to an individuals role, providing another level of productivity that we call role-based productivity. For example, by enabling your salespeople to access relevant customer information from within their e-mail application, you can help them save time and effort by not forcing them to use a specialized line-of-business (LOB) application. Role-based productivity provides a foundation for the people-ready business, connecting people with tools designed to help them augment business processes based on their role, whether for employees through an intranet, extended out to the supply chain through an extranet, or even for customers through the Internet.
TAkING A ROLE-BASED APPROACH

Our customers are increasingly looking to a role-based approach to empower their people, moving away from traditional onesize-fits-all systems to drive increased productivity and a competitive advantage for their businesses. In fact, according to a recent Forrester survey of 260 IT decision makers in the United States and the United Kingdom, 84 percent consider dynamic delivery of content and collaboration tools based on role either a somewhat important or an extremely important priority for information workplaces.5 Through role-based software design and delivery that merges business systems with personal and team productivity tools, organizations can unlock their data and enable seamless, efficient technology interactions that no longer require people to manually connect information and data from disparate systems. At Microsoft, we are committed to enabling role-based productivity, and we know that in order to build software that is tailored to the work done by specific people and companies, we need to have an in-depth understanding of todays businesses
Erica Driver, Information Workplaces Must Deliver Context To Both Workers and Customers, Forrester Research, Inc., July 2007
and their employees. We invest significantly in understanding our customers and designing and building software that meets their needs. Through two years of hands-on research into the specific roles that people perform within companies of various sizes and types, we have identified the business capabilities that we believe are central to enabling people to drive business outcomes. These capabilities include being able to find the information that they need, when they need it; being able to work together and with partners, suppliers, and customers effectively regardless of where they are located; and having the tools to gain real insight into the business. We have used these capabilities to define our focus in delivering business productivity and application software that empowers people with tools that fit seamlessly into their everyday work. Our priorities directly support our customers top business priorities. Reporting on the results of the annual Gartner survey of 1,400 CIOs, Mark McDonald, Group Vice President, Gartner, Inc., notes that business priorities for 2007 include the need to improve processes, improve workforce performance, and attract new customers.6 At Microsoft, we believe that the key to achieving these business priorities is putting people at the center, empowered by technology that enables them to drive business process productivity, work more effectively while mobile, and build better connections with their customers. We also focus on helping our customers improve their compliance and get better insight into their businesss performance, which can directly contribute to a businesss competitiveness and growth, two additional top business priorities.
CIO Survey: Top Business and Technology Priorities in 2007 Top Business and Technology Priorities in 2007
Top 10 Business Priorities
1. Business process improvement 2. Control enterprise-wide operating costs 3. Attract, retain, and grow customer relationships 4. Improve the effectiveness of the enterprise workforce 5. Revenue growth 6. Improve competitiveness 7. Use intelligence in products and services 8. Deploy new business capabilities to meet strategic goals 9. Enter new markets, new products, or new services 10. Faster innovation
CIO Survey:
Top 10 Technology Priorities

1. Business intelligence applications 2. Enterprise applications (ERP , CRM, and others) 3. Legacy application modernization 4. Networking, voice, and data communications 5. Servers and storage technologies (virtualization) 6. Security technologies 7. Service-oriented architectures 8. Technical infrastructure management 9. Document management 10. Collaboration technologies
Source: Gartner EXP Survey of More than 1,400 CIOs Shows CIOs Must Create Leverage to Remain Relevant to the Business, Gartner, Inc., February 2007
The key to our approach is helping you enable people throughout your organization, regardless of role, to contribute to the business and achieve your business priorities. We do this by delivering foundational tools that make it easier for people to work together, to share and manage content, to find the information that they need to be responsive to customer needs, to streamline processes so that they can be as efficient as possible, and to gain real insight into the business.
MAKING ROLE-BASED PRODUCTIVITY REAL ultimately to a leading solution that refines,

Defining business imperatives for the key roles in your organization is essential to identifying the people, processes, and technology solutions that can enable the highest level of productivity from people in each role. Our research shows that taking a phased approach to designing and delivering technology solutions is often the most effective way to enable role-based productivity throughout the organization. This enables the design to evolve from a fundamental solution addressing key requirements, to a comprehensive solution that encompasses all requirements, and integrates, and streamlines the solution to maximize value and achieve competitive differentiation for your business.
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We are actively developing role-specific solutions guidance for many common roles, such as marketing, sales, finance, customer service, operations, and sourcing. When paired with your business imperatives, this guidance can help form the basis for an evolutionary solutions approach encompassing software from Microsoft and our partners.
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Gartner EXP Survey of More than 1,400 CIOs Shows CIOs Must Create Leverage to Remain Relevant to the Business, Gartner, Inc., February 2007 (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=501189)
Example of Role-Based Productivity: Optimizing Sales Force Productivity

An effective sales force plays a vital role in the success of any business. Unfortunately, the hurdles facing sales teams to make the most of every opportunity and develop profitable customer relationships can be significant. Sales teams are less productive and responsive when they cannot access the information that they needincluding proposal templates, current product information, past proposals related to a current opportunity, product experts, and insight on customer needs, history, and preferencesat any time, from any location. This also affects how easily and quickly they can evaluate sales opportunities. Collaboration challenges can make it difficult to work effectively with internal and external sales team members, as well as across distributed sales teams without traveling. And sales executives often struggle to gain visibility into sales activities across distributed sales teams and to ensure customer relationship management (CRM) system usage compliance. Our customers tell us that their sales teams need tools that make it easy for them to work together, regardless of where they are located; that provide them with convenient, ready access to information and expertise, when they need it; and that enable better insight into their sales performance. Six key business imperatives that we believe are fundamental to maximizing sales force productivity and revenue include: h Increase time available for selling Make it easier for your sales representatives to find critical information, regardless of their location, and manage the increasing burden of e-mail, tasks, and meeting requests so that they can focus their time on your most valuable customers.
h Create high-impact sales proposals Automate the proposal review and approval process and enable your sales professionals to easily find current information, connect with experts across organizations and geographies, and work on customer information offline to help drive sales wins by producing more accurate, timely, and compelling sales proposals. h Enable distributed team selling Help your distributed sales teams collaborate more easily, gain visibility into sales activities being conducted by the extended team in customer accounts, and share information and communicate more simply and securely to more effectively drive the sales pipeline. h Increase sales force productivity Support your sales representatives with team portals and unified communications capabilities to help them share information, collaborate, and respond to customer communications more effectively. h Reduce training and travel costs Provide more online options for distributed team meetings and training events and simplify access to business applications and information company-wide to help drive down the cost of sales. h Enhance the value of CRM applications Make it easier for sales professionals to use your CRM system through a simpler interface and by enabling mobile access, helping improve CRM system adoption and subsequently the completeness (and therefore value) of the data that it contains. The diagram on the following page provides a high-level overview of how addressing these business imperatives through fundamental, comprehensive, and leading solution phases can empower your sales force and help optimize sales productivity. Defining solutions by business imperative using these three solution phases can also help you identify the underlying technology required to implement them.
10
FUNDAMENTAL
INCREASE TIME AVAILABLE FOR SELLING
f Enable sharing of customer/market and product/ service information across selling teams, accessible offline, through collaborative workspaces f Improve responsiveness of sales to communications from clients with access to e-mail and calendars from mobile devices f Improve responsiveness to sales with highly secure instant messaging (IM)
COMPREHENSIVE
f Streamline sales team and sales support processes with workflow automation using a collaborative workspace infrastructure f Simplify access to data in enterprise applications by sales teams, partners, and customers with basic composite applications and extranet capabilities using a collaborative workspace infrastructure f Enable better customer insight and focus on highvalue customers and opportunities with self-service reporting and analysis of transaction data from data mart(s) f Improve responsiveness to customers and generate more accurate proposals with direct access to current product/service data f Discover and make the most of opportunities to pursue niche markets with self-service reporting and analysis of transaction data from a data mart f Improve collaboration with partners and customers to generate accurate, compelling proposals, through highly secure external collaboration with an information-protection infrastructure
LEADING
f Improve efficiency in and frequency of use of CRM and other enterprise applications with sophisticated composite, personalized front-end applications using a workspace infrastructure f Streamline access to transactions, customer, opportunity, and product data with enterprise search of data mart(s) f Enable seamless collaboration with selected customers/partners in collaborative workspaces federated across customer/partner infrastructure f Streamline access to product/service information through enterprise search f Improve discovery of niche markets with data mining tools connected to data marts f Improve focused execution in niche markets with automated tools for budgeting, planning, and forecasting programs f Enhance sales ability to use past proposals and find relevant experts to support sales opportunities with enterprise search f Streamline proposal generation with auto-population of XML proposal templates
CREATE HIGH-IMPACT SALES PROPOSALS
f Improve quality and reduce cycle times for the generation of sales proposals with collaborative workspaces that contain customer/market information, product/service information, proposal templates, and collaborative authoring capabilities f Improve quality and reduce cycle times for the generation of sales proposals with enterprise search for product/service information and relevant past proposals that may be used as a starting point
ENABLE DISTRIBUTED TEAM SELLING
f Enable better collaboration and coordination of sales activities across distributed sales teams with collaborative workspaces for customer/market information and sales activity tracking f Improve sales team focus on performance with timely and consistent delivery of (manual) sales performance reports f Enable better communication across distributed sales teams with highly secure IM and Web conferencing
f Improve collaboration across sales teams and partners to share information and coordinate sales activities through ad hoc external collaborative workspaces and/or an extranet for partners/customers using a workspace infrastructure f More precisely and accurately track sales activities across distributed sales teams through data mart reports and analysis tools f Help protect sensitive data shared with partners and clients through highly secure external collaboration tools and an information-protection infrastructure f Drive a consistent focus on specific performance across sales teams with automated team performance scorecards
f Enable seamless collaboration with selected partners and/or customers with collaborative workspaces federated across customer/partner infrastructure f Provide consistent, streamlined access to transaction, customer, opportunity, and product information across the sales team through enterprise search of CRM and transaction data f Drive consistency in structured account module/ market planning, execution, and tracking through automated tools for budgeting, planning, and forecasting
INCREASE SALES FORCE PRODUCTIVITY
f Enable better coordination of sales activities and customer/market communications through collaborative workspaces f Improve responsiveness of sales to communications from clients with access to e-mail and calendars from mobile devices
f Improve responsiveness to client communications through a unified inbox for e-mail, fax, voicemail, etc. f Increase team focus on performance with self-service reporting and analysis of sales performance data f Better prioritize and manage work across opportunities through role-based collaborative workspaces f Streamline sales processes with workflow automation that uses collaborative workspaces f Simplify access to data in enterprise applications by sales teams, partners, and customers with basic composite applications and extranet capabilities using a collaborative workspace infrastructure
f Improve efficiency in and frequency of use of CRM and other enterprise applications with sophisticated composite, personalized front-end applications using workspace infrastructure f Drive a persistent focus on critical areas of individual performance with personalized performance scorecards
REDUCE TRAINING AND TRAVEL COSTS
f Facilitate collaboration with collaborative workspaces f Improve responsiveness and help reduce travel costs with virtual meetings (for example, customer, internal, and training) through IM and Web conferences
f Improve access to and effectiveness of virtual meetings and training with searchable recordings of Web conference meetings and training f Simplify access to and use of data in enterprise applications with familiar tools for composite and reporting/analysis applications
f Minimize the training required for use of CRM and other enterprise applications through composite, personalized applications and/or desktop productivity interfaces to CRM and enterprise applications f Enhance the accessibility of and communication among distributed team members with presenceenabled enterprise applications f Enable enterprise search of data in CRM applications f Improve efficiency in and frequency of use of CRM and other enterprise applications with sophisticated composite, personalized front-end applications using a workspace infrastructure f Effectively apply customer/market insight contained in CRM and other systems f Enable seamless customer collaboration around selected CRM information by giving customers highly secure extranet access to collaborative workspaces
ENHANCE THE VALUE OF CRM APPLICATIONS
f Facilitate anywhere and offline access to CRM reports f Supplement CRM collaboration with collaborative workspaces that have document, collaboration, and work management tools
f Streamline and drive sales processes structured around CRM information with workflow automation and basic composite applications that supplement CRM systems f Improve insight into customer/market transactions with sales performance and historical transaction data integrated with CRM in data marts for reporting and analysis
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BUSINESS SOLUTIONS
Over the last decade, the way business is conducted has changed significantly. Boundaries between offices and organizations, between cultures and geographies are dissolving. Good service means being available to your customers, partners, and suppliers 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and great service means that they have multiple options for reaching you. Businesses are under increasing scrutiny and need to be more transparent in their operations, ensuring accountability, security, and privacy within and across organizations. To respond to the pressures of this global marketplace, our customers are looking for new strategies to improve efficiency and productivity across their businesses. Their people need tools that simplify how they work together. They need to be able to better secure and manage content. And they need to be able to find and make sense of an explosion of information to get better insight into the business. When we speak with business leaders at our most successful enterprise customers, one thing is clear: they are focused on driving their business forward, and they are looking for the right technology to support them in doing this. The priorities for these business leaders varyincreasing the effectiveness of their marketing, more accurately tracking sales forecasts, improving customer satisfaction through better customer service, delivering products and services more efficiently, or ensuring that budgets align with business strategy. However, regardless of their immediate priorities, many are realizing that their current business application investments are not fully delivering on their promised potential. While these applications have excelled at automating business processes, they only represent a portion of the actual work that the people in these organizations do. As a result, their people work in two distinct systemsthe two worlds of business process automation and personal/team productivity software that we discussed earlierwhich inevitably has a direct impact on their productivity. At Microsoft, we believe that business systems need to put people at the center to help them gain insight, collaborate to make decisions, and take actions that will help the business succeed. Our Microsoft Dynamics line of business applications provides a good example of how we are working to deliver role-based productivity. We develop business applications using five key tenets: h Familiar, tailored user experience By blending traditional business applications with personal/team productivity tools such as Microsoft Office, we deliver a user experience that is immediately familiar to your people, helping increase their productivity and reduce training costs for your organization. h Service-oriented architecture (SOA) Our SOA approach creates greater flexibility in our business applications and delivers three key benefits: greater agility to help your organization more easily adapt to the rapidly changing business world, the ability to more easily unlock investments in existing systems, and a broader choice of deployment options including outsourcing and hosting models.
h Rapid development composition Composite applications are solutions that tie together functionality from several different sources, using industry-standard Web services to span the boundaries of structured and unstructured data while tying together formal processes with ad hoc workflow. We design our business applications to enable software developers to easily and quickly compose new solutions from multiple partswhich can help increase your businesss agility through solutions that map to your immediate, real-world requirements. h Integrated collaboration Building on technology such as Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, our business applications deliver powerful collaboration tools, enabling a transparent organization that provides employees, partners, and suppliers with access to data at all times in a securityenhanced and appropriate manner. h Immediately insightful Good decision making sets great people and organizations apart. With tools such as Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, your users can be automatically presented with information that gives them business insight relevant to their role, which helps them make immediate business decisions with clarity and confidence. Ultimately, to improve productivity and increase their competitiveness, our customers are looking to streamline how their people do business. To help you enable role-based productivity, we focus on five key areas with our partners using our business applications and business productivity platform technology: h Enterprise resource planning (ERP) Drive business success by helping increase individual productivity across your organization with familiar, easy-to-use, accessible financial and supply chain management solutions. Financial management focus areas include budgeting and reporting, compliance, and corporate reporting and divestiture. Supply chain management focus areas include automating order processing, improving forecasting accuracy, and streamlining performance management. h Customer relationship management (CRM) Help improve the effectiveness of your marketing, sales, and service staff to develop more profitable customer relationships by enabling them to connect better with colleagues, partners, and customers. h Business performance management Empower people throughout your enterprise to measure and optimize operational performance with the processes and tools to gain insighthelping them to plan more effectively, align with strategic initiatives, and make better business decisions.
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h Governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) Reduce the complexity of your compliance solutions and improve control of financial, regulatory, and operational processes through familiar and easy-to-use applications that help you protect, secure, and manage your corporate content and assets while also complying with regulations.
h Mobility Better support your mobile workforce and enable your people to more effectively communicate, collaborate, and work while on the go by extending the tools that they rely on every day beyond the boundaries of the office. In the sections that follow, we provide a detailed look at why we believe these areas are so important and the opportunity that they represent to empower your people to drive better productivity.
ENHANCING PRODUCTIVITY WITH OFFICE BUSINESS APPLICATIONS

Finance, sales, marketing, customer service, or operationsregardless of role, for many people in enterprise organizations, Microsoft Office applications are relied on for dayto-day tasks including corresponding by e-mail, preparing presentations, creating reports and proposals, collaborating on projects, and completing data analysis. A fundamental component of our role-based productivity approach is an emerging type of application that takes full advantage of the business capabilities and benefits built into the Microsoft Office system. Using the Office Business Platform (the clients, servers, services, and tools that comprise the 2007 Microsoft Office system), Office Business Applications (OBAs) help businesses unlock the value of their line-of-business (LOB) systems by seamlessly integrating them with the familiar Microsoft Office programs. By linking backoffice systems to front-end Microsoft Office applications, OBAs help make the LOB systems more accessible and connect formal business processes with the informal work that people actually perform, whether collaborating with other people by phone or e-mail, accessing information from multiple sources in the form of documents and spreadsheets, or switching between online and offline modes for meetings and business trips. By mirroring the actual ad hoc work practices that your people employ in their daily work and creating a unified business platform, an OBA can help your people overcome the inefficiency of duplicated work and the poor decisions that can result from making assumptions when they do not have the relevant data at hand.
OBAs offer value to people in roles across enterprise organizationsessentially, to any role that would find value in simplified access to LOB systems. Consider the following two examples of how an OBA can simplify processes to help your teams work more productively: h Budget monitoring Managers often find it difficult to gain insight into their budget information. They frequently track budgets using separate spreadsheets and, lacking access to enterprise systems, either work with out-of-date printed reports or wait for the finance department to provide information from their enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. This lack of timely budget information can result in poor spending decisions and budget variances. An OBA could help your organization overcome these challenges by giving managers the means to track, analyze, and act on budgeting data from within Microsoft Office. For example, an OBA could enable you to schedule regular reports or submit ad hoc report requests and then access the reports offline, drill into the analytic and source data within them, and distribute them to other individuals. Furthermore, an OBA could enable you to set and receive proactive alerts to time-critical information within Office Outlook, such as a notification that spending is nearing a budget limit. h Sales management Every sales organization faces a similar set of challengeshow to shorten the sales cycle and minimize the overall cost per sale. A sales force can be hampered by a lack of insight into sales performance, and sales professionals often are looking for
tools to improve visibility into customer account activity. An OBA could provide online and offline access to your existing customer relationship management (CRM) application functionality from within Office Outlook, often the preferred tool for managing sales contacts. By integrating with existing CRM systems and delivering contextual sales information, an OBA could provide your sales professionals with better insight into their accounts, leading to more effective sales engagements and more accurate sales forecasts. A key example of a powerful OBA that is now available for organizations using SAP is the Duet for Microsoft Office and SAP application, a joint SAP and Microsoft offering that turns Microsoft Office into the user interface for SAP, making it convenient and easy for information workers to use. For more information on Duet, please visit http://www. office.microsoft.com/duet. To find more information on OBAs generally, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/office/ oba. Microsoft partners also deliver a wide range of OBAs. To find a solution that fits your businesss needs, please visit https://www. obacentral.com.
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ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING
BUSINESS SCENARIOS
The following scenarios highlight how you can integrate business process capabilities across your organization and help increase user productivity by implementing a business management solution that works like and with Microsoft Office.
Finance
A major challenge that finance executives tell us they have to contend with is 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 growthboth internally and through acquisitions leads to the need to account for new areas of the organization. For maximum efficiency and insight, accounting and finance 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.
Facing globalization, increasing competition, and customer demands for better service, faster delivery, and more innovative products, the modern organization has no room for inefficiency. 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, and a lack of operational efficiency. They have difficulty balancing customer demands with cost pressures and must contend with fierce and emerging competition and complex regulatory compliance requirements. These challenges are further amplified by a dependence on the two very distinct worlds of software: business process automation software (which automates processes in areas such as accounting and production) and personal productivity software (including e-mail, word-processing, and spreadsheet software, as well as Internet browsers). Furthermore, too often investments in enterprise resource planning (ERP) systemsincluding financial management and supply chain management (SCM)fail to deliver because they are overly complex and require specialized training. Moreover, in many organizations ERP systems are licensed for only a small percentage of employees to use. Merging these two worlds of software can simplify your peoples access to ERP systems and empower them to combat inefficiencies, improve visibility, and drive processes that will help the business succeed. Whether your people are ensuring that budgets are aligned with business strategy or seeking operational excellence by 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.
Operations
In a world of tight margins, increasing customer expectations, and global competition, organizations cannot afford to have an inefficient supply chain. A top priority for many enterprise organizations is to improve how their organization shares information with suppliers and partners to help ensure the timely and cost-effective delivery of products. When people have access to each step in the order and delivery cycle, they can help ensure accurate, on-time product delivery. Furthermore, 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 chainwhether 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 integrated SCM solution 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
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incentives and make more informed decisions as a result of more accurate data and a better understanding of customer demands. Ultimately, it will help them gain a better understanding of what customers want and need, helping improve product development, delivery times, and customer satisfaction.
business process automation software and personal productivity software. Microsoft Dynamics financial management and SCM software 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 and overall business efficiency. Microsoft software for integrated ERP solutions includes: h Microsoft Dynamics h Microsoft Office Enterprise h Microsoft Office SharePoint Server h Microsoft Windows Mobile software h SQL Server h Microsoft BizTalk Server To find more information on driving real-world business processes, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/business/ peopleready/process.
SUPPORTING MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGIES

At Microsoft, our 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 peoples working styles and needshelping 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 usability and research studies as well as 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:
STREAMLINING FORECAST-TO-CASH PROCESSES IN MANUFACTURING

Shinko Electric Industries deployed Microsoft Dynamics AX to consolidate and streamline forecast, quote, sales, and order processes (with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Fullscope). Key benefits include: h An accelerated return on investment (saving almost 390 hours per month by receiving automated transactions) h Improved business processes h Support for future growth h Improved management and service
ESTABLISHING WORLD-CLASS BUSINESS PRACTICES IN HEALTH

The General Authority for Health Services (GAHS) Emirate of Abu Dhabi deployed Microsoft Dynamics GP to help integrate and manage financials, purchasing, billing, human resources, and payroll. Key benefits include: h Consolidated purchasing h Coordinated billing h Streamlined payroll and human resource management h Improved access to information h Scalability to meet growing needs
CUTTING ADMINISTRATION TIME IN RETAIL

Petro-Canada deployed a solution based on Microsoft Dynamics AX combined with BizTalk Server and a Web-based user interface to update its aging legacy inventory and financial systems (with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Ideaca Knowledge Services). Key benefits include: h Real-time efficiency h A faster reporting process h Easier system-wide upgrades h An accelerated training process
Find more information on these and other examples of Microsoft and Microsoft partner business solutions at http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies.
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CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
enable your company to better manage costs and improve your products and services.
BUSINESS SCENARIOS
Integrated CRM solutions that support collaboration at specific points in the customer value chain can help customer-facing professionals to work better together, find the information that they need, and create value for customers by connecting with partners. The following scenarios highlight a few areas that we believe are particularly important.
Marketing
Marketing executives are often faced with two simultaneous problems: shrinking market share and a lack of effective marketing tools to help generate new business. Without the ability to gain a single view of the customer or adequately support marketing and sales collaboration on launches, marketing execution can be disconnected from sales activities. Furthermore, without the right tools, finding and analyzing customer data to identify and focus on high-value opportunities is complex. Teams can struggle to coordinate marketing plans and campaign activities with key partners and field sales teams. Our customers are looking for a solution to help their marketing teams drive new business opportunities. They want a single system to simplify sales prospecting and cultivation, accelerate product launches, and improve campaign execution. At the same time, they want the system to make it easier to share market intelligence, create consistent messaging across the enterprise, and capture and manage structured and unstructured customer data within a single system for a complete view of prospects and customers. They also want a solution that can help them manage marketing costs by enabling them to improve customer targeting, streamline content development, and increase field and partner effectiveness.
While organizations have long known that customer experiences influence customer loyalty, it is becoming increasingly clear just how important those experiences are. According to a recent survey conducted by CustomerThink Corporation, high-quality interactions with people and systems and superior product[s] or service[s] are the two most important drivers of customer loyalty.7 At 78 percent and 77 percent of survey responses, respectively, each ranks significantly higher than lowest price or cost of ownership (31 percent) as a factor driving customer loyalty. Given the high cost of attracting new customers, it is no surprise that improving customer service and retention is a priority for executives.8 Although customer centricity is a priority in the modern enterprise, it can be surprisingly difficult to achieve. The existing customer relationship management (CRM) solutions in many organizations do not provide the technical capabilities needed to truly connect with customers. Too often, CRM projects are focused on one-sizefits-all applications. And the CRM business processes are hard to adopt across the enterprise and do not allow people to work the way their jobs and customers require. Many of our customers are re-evaluating and improving their approach to interacting with their customers. The result is that customer experience and expectations are driving their plans for CRM investments as part of a wider communications and collaboration technology solution. Collaborationinternally, across the extended enterprise, and with customerscan give your people tools and information to help them improve communications, increase their personal impact, and work more securely across organizational boundaries. Combined with broadly integrated analytics that help improve customer understanding and deepen the customer relationship, these tools can enable your people to enrich each customers experience, helping to generate increased loyalty and demand. They can also
Sales
The top priorities for many sales leaders are overcoming lost revenue and addressing both the shrinking sales win rates and the rising cost of sales. Too often, a lack of timely sales and customer data complicates decision making about where to invest resources. With inadequate access to customer information and without the tools to collaborate across distances, it is difficult for sales teams to share competitive intelligence, develop winning proposals, and react quickly to sales opportunities. An underused CRM system also results in inadequate visibility into customer information, further hampering sales. An integrated, easy-to-use CRM and collaboration solution can help your sales staff improve their success rates. It can accelerate the sales pipeline with more qualified sales leads; track important associations across partners, customers, and pending sales opportunities; enable distributed
7 8
Bob Thompson, Customer Experience Management: Accelerating Business Performance, CustomerThink Corporation, June 2006 Seizing the BI Opportunity, BusinessWeek Research Services, May 2006
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team selling; make it easier to create high-impact sales proposals; and free up more time to focus on selling. An integrated solution can also automate and improve the accuracy of sales forecasting through dashboard views of key sales metrics and snapshot views of critical business indicators. Such automation of routine tasks helps reduce the cost of sales, increase your sales forces productivity, and reduce training and travel costs.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM business software is a complete CRM solution that includes the tools and technologies required to help marketing, sales, services, and other customer-facing employees to be effective in todays business world. With realtime access to up-to-date sales information and customer data, your people will be able to shorten turnaround timeshelping improve customer satisfactionand close more deals, faster and more easily. Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides your people with access to comprehensive customer information through a single, familiar interface that is a natural extension of Microsoft Office and Office Outlook. Based on the scalable and securityenhanced .NET platform, Microsoft Dynamics CRM can be used to connect decentralized business units and departments to a wider, centralized CRM system, enabling the sharing of customer information organization-wide. Microsoft Dynamics CRM gives you the power of choice in how you license, deploy, and use CRM. Customers can choose to deploy Microsoft Dynamics CRM on premise or have it hosted by a partner or Microsoft, and its flexibility makes it easy to migrate data as your business evolves. You can also choose online or offline usage. Microsoft Dynamics CRM is also designed to integrate with Microsoft collaboration technologies delivered through the Microsoft Office system. Collaboration features in the Office Enterprise 2007 suite provide a comprehensive toolset to help your people work together more effectively. The integration of Exchange Server 2007 with the 2007 Microsoft Office system enhances this collaboration toolset, making calendaring simpler
Customer Service
Customer service managers need to address an increasing churn of high-value customers and lost sales opportunities. Without easy access to customer information and the tools to collaborate with other teams, customer service representatives can struggle to deliver responsive, effective service. Service representatives also can find it difficult to connect with customers when they do not have the tools to communicate with them in real time. Solutions that deliver a single view of each customer coupled with integrated, easy-to-use collaboration tools can help service staff to deliver more responsive service, improve knowledge sharing, and provide proactive customer support. Integrated solutions help businesses retain customers, enable a higher level of customer service, give customers a single point of contact regardless of the communication channel, and help reduce costs through efficient scheduling and dispatching. These solutions help further contain service costs by improving contact center productivity, reducing issue resolution time, and enabling service delivery through the Web and mobile services. When customer-facing teams are able to identify, collaborate on, and resolve critical customer issues, your organization is in a better position to increase customer retention, satisfaction, and loyalty.
STREAMLINING SALES PROPOSAL BOOSTING CUSTOMER CARE IN GENERATION IN PROFESSIONAL SERVICES TELECOMMUNICATIONS
CGI Insurance Business Services implemented a document workflow solution using Office SharePoint Server and Microsoft Office Professional Plus to streamline an already successful proposal-generation process. Key benefits include: h Reduced cost of proposal development h Reduced annual cost of complying with the CGI corporate-mandated framework h Improved proposal quality h An increased win rate BT Germany implemented an integrated call center solution using the Customer Care Framework to provide a single view of the customer and streamline communications. Key benefits include: h Fast, cost-effective development h Enhanced customer care h Time savings of 80 percent h Increased productivity for call center agents h A new focus on non-standard problem resolution
SUPPORTING A NEW LINE OF BUSINESS IN RETAIL

Best Buy for Business implemented Microsoft Dynamics CRM to better support its outside sales force and help customers improve their business insight. Key benefits include: h An expanded solutions and services portfolio h Support for a complex sales cycle h The establishment of a foundation for growth
Find more information on these and other examples of Microsoft and Microsoft partner CRM and collaboration solutions at http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies.
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and enabling remote access to shared resources on SharePoint sites. 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. Finally, to help transform the service experience for the end customer, the Microsoft Customer Care Framework unifies and streamlines access to the systems that contact center agents and self-serve channels use to resolve customer issuesincluding billing, CRM, and order management systems. By linking your customer service agents desktops to these multiple systems, you can help alleviate slow problem resolution, reduce high customer wait times, and improve low customer satisfaction. The Customer Care Framework also supports multiple communication channelsincluding e-mail, chat, interactive voice response (IVR), automatic call distribution, and customer self-serve Web portalsgiving your customers a choice in how they access support functions. Microsoft technology can be used in a variety of ways to get more value out of your customer relationships. Organizations without a CRM application or that have outgrown their current application can build a flexible CRM solution that uses our familiar technology. This enables employees to concentrate on customers and not on navigating complex applications. Organizations with a partially deployed CRM application that is not widely adopted
can use Microsoft software to extend the current system and accelerate CRM adoption. Microsoft technologies can also provide people with the tools to work better across geographic and organizational boundaries. For those organizations with a widely deployed CRM application, Microsoft technology can enhance the current system with unified communications and collaboration capabilities. Microsoft software for managing customer relationships includes: h Microsoft Dynamics CRM h Microsoft Dynamics Snap applications h Office Enterprise h Office SharePoint Server h Customer Care Framework h Exchange Server h Office Communications Server h Microsoft Office Live Meeting h Windows Mobile h Microsoft Windows Rights Management Services Find more information on building customer connections at http://www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/ customerconnections.
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BUSINESS PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
the overall company strategy, including delivering consistent, timely, and aligned metrics to improve strategic decision making, boost revenue, drive profitable growth, and improve operational efficiencies throughout the value chain.
BUSINESS SCENARIOS
The following are typical scenarios in which a holistic performance management solution can help enterprises realize immediate benefits.
Finance
Finance executives frequently tell us that they are frustrated by slow laborious processes, an overwhelming amount of data that obscures important information, and poor visibility into their current financial position and the causes of financial results. Their budgeting processeswhich are typically separated from performance management and forecastingcan be time consuming, costly, and labor intensive. It can take analysts a long time to create reports, and they often need to get input from IT to do so. In addition, with multiple sources for financial data, they have difficulty getting a unified view and as a result often do not trust the data that they must rely on. Your organization can help overcome these challenges by enabling highly secure, automated processes for budget development, implementing auditability and control for all business process data, and replacing static annual budgeting processes with rolling forecasts. A business performance management solution that incorporates these elements can help your finance executives reduce the time and cost of corporate budgeting and planning processes, improve their visibility into financial information to better understand present business conditions, and more accurately identify and forecast market trends and business opportunities.
Business decision makers know that how quickly they manage and act on information and how well they measure and improve results can determine their businesss ongoing competitive and market position. This is fueling a need for business intelligence and performance management processes that give everyone in the organizationfrom the executive team on downvisibility, empowerment, and accountability. Business intelligence is a key component of a performance management solution and one that is of critical interest for our enterprise customers: according to Mark McDonald, Group Vice President, Gartner, Inc., in our 2007 survey of more than 1,400 CIOs, business intelligence applications were their top technology priority.9 However, many companies find that although they are collecting more information than ever before in their enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other line-of-business systems, decision makers at all levels have difficulty finding, using, and acting on this information. Specialized skills are required to access the data, and reports often reflect information that is hours, if not days, old. In addition, reports often need to be consolidated and reformatted before they can be used easily by decision makers, and they may lack the detail or context to provide the necessary insight. An effective performance management solution can be framed as a consistent, closed-loop process (from budgeting and planning to consolidation, analysis, and reporting) that delivers the insight to achieve three fundamental goals: drive effective planning, ensure alignment across the organization, and enable more effective decision making at all levels. A solution that has been designed based on these principles can help your organization link business processes into a coherent system that supports
Marketing
In many enterprise organizations, marketing teams struggle to get visibility into customer preferences and buying patterns and often lack insight into drivers of customer behavior. They do not have the means to access and analyze customer information to get a good understanding of market segments, regions, and demographics. Furthermore, because they cannot measure the results of customer service programs and other initiatives, they are not able to identify key profitability factors for most of their products, services, or customers. Marketing teams need quick access to customer data, easily generated role-specific campaign and product performance reports, and scorecards with drill-down navigation to enable better analysis and insight. A performance management solution that delivers these features with user-friendly tools and applications can help improve your organizations return on marketing investments. And with a more complete, more holistic view of your customers, your marketing teams can gain a deeper understanding of customer needs and market opportunities.
Gartner EXP Survey of More than 1,400 CIOs Shows CIOs Must Create Leverage to Remain Relevant to the Business, Gartner, Inc., February 2007 (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=501189)
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Sales
Common challenges for sales executives include managing, measuring, and analyzing performance, from the pipeline to overall revenue achievement. For many of our customers, their sales managers cannot see or measure business drivers and do not have a convenient way to segment and analyze sales results and quotas. They get conflicting performance data from different sources, leading to difficulty making informed decisions. They cannot easily identify the best cross-sell or up-sell opportunities with their customers. Furthermore, they find it difficult to communicate changes in sales strategies or key performance measures across sales teams. A holistic business performance management solution can give your sales managers up-to-theminute access to sales results, easy-to-use tools for data analysis, and the ability to share insights and decisions efficiently with widely dispersed teams. And by expanding the reach of analytics throughout your sales teams, you can support informed, timely decision making and improved understanding of drivers for business results and customer behavior.
Operations
Operations executives often tell us that they lack the tools to effectively monitor and optimize business activities and costs. When operational dataincluding historical, current, analytical, and process informationis spread across the organization, it is difficult to get a single complete view. Managers struggle to keep inventory buffers at an ideal level. They cannot see the effects of operational decisions on the bottom line. They are challenged to ensure that project and resource investments align with the businesss strategic objectives. They find it difficult to monitor and analyze operational performance against objectives and cannot adequately predict the effect of specific decisions or actions. A holistic performance management solution can help address these challenges. Operations executives can gain full insight into the business with a solution that embeds analysis steps directly into business processes, provides scorecards with data-driven alerts and reports with drill-down capabilities, and centrally manages business insight and content management capabilities. With integrated tools that provide easy access to real-time information from across your organization, your operations managers will be empowered to understand root causes and take decisive action, make fact-based decisions, and ensure that project prioritization and resource allocation are in alignment with corporate strategy.
IMPROVING MANAGEMENT REPORTING IN FINANCIAL SERVICES

Fortis Group built a performance management system to streamline performance management and reporting across the group, compare data across business lines and departments more effectively, and make better, faster management decisions (with Microsoft Gold Certified Partners Accenture and Avanade). Key benefits include: h Reduced risk of data input errors h Flexibility to respond quickly to market trends h Presentation of integrated management data across the group h A familiar user interface h Enhanced business decision making
IMPROVING PLANNING AND FORECASTING IN MANUFACTURING

Skanska USA Building built a performance management solution to enhance data usability and improve both the timeliness and the accuracy of forecasting, planning, and budgeting using Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server business intelligence software. Key benefits include: h Quick, easy access to accurate, consistent data h The ability to create a wide variety of reports that enable flexible, in-depth analysis h The ability to better plan, budget, and forecast for the future as well as monitor, analyze, and report on current activities
DRIVING BETTER MANAGEMENT DECISION MAKING IN HOSPITALITY

Muckleshoot Indian Casino deployed a reporting solution based on Office SharePoint Server to provide managers with structured, timely, and high-quality data. They also deployed the Windows Vista operating system to provide a scalable and robust infrastructure for the casino as it grows (with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Resolute). Key benefits include: h Increased quality and efficiency of reporting processes h Faster availability of reports enabling quicker response to issues h Improved effectiveness of management reports h Streamlined desktop deployment and reduced maintenance costs
Find more information on these and other examples of Microsoft and Microsoft partner business performance solutions at http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies.
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Microsofts vision for business performance management solutions is to deliver insight to decision makers at all levelsthrough immediate access to up-to-date corporate data and with the analytical tools that they need to plan their business, accelerate strategy implementation, and get immediate feedback on the businesss performance. Microsoft business intelligence capabilities can help people throughout your organization gain insight into the business, improve operations, and reduce costs using familiar, easy-to-use tools that work the way they do. The unique value of Microsoft business intelligence and business performance management solutions is the full integration of enterprise data management with the easy usability of the Microsoft Office system. Microsoft technologies can also integrate with and extend existing business intelligence investments to make them more accessible to users at all levels. By bringing these powerful solutions directly into familiar desktop applications, everyone in your organization is empowered with accessible business intelligence and performance management capabilitieshelping to build a smarter, more agile, and more competitive business. 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 your business. Microsoft Office Excel 2007 spreadsheet software can support analytical tasks in every department across your organization, including providing enhanced visualization and analysis tools that help quantify and compare trends. Furthermore, Office Excel Services (running on Office SharePoint Server 2007) can help improve your organizations operational reporting with real-time, interactive Office Excel spreadsheets accessed from a Web browser, providing a single, central, upto-date version for your employees while helping to protect any proprietary information, such as financial models, that is embedded in documents. Microsoft software for business performance management includes: h Office Professional Plus h Office SharePoint Server h SQL Server h Office PerformancePoint Server, including Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager and Microsoft ProClarity Analytics Find more information on driving business performance at http://www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/performance.
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GOVERNANCE, RISk MANAGEMENT, AND COMPLIANCE
more efficiently. While technology alone cannot solve compliance issues, it can certainly streamline and facilitate the processes behind them. The challenge is that the technology must be easy to use to ensure that it actually gets adopted. It must be able to work with existing systems, including different compliance-related technologies already in place. And it must be flexible enough to be configurable to a variety of different GRC scenarios, including changes to new and existing regulations. A well-designed GRC system does more than just support compliance. It can help you deliver measurable results and gain a competitive advantage through more efficient business processes, better product and service quality, a more secure information environment, better visibility into operations, increased trust and improved reputation with customers and suppliers, and better preparation (and reduced costs) for records retrieval, legal discovery, and audits.
Compliance is a topic that few companies can ignore. Organizations around the world are faced with an increasing number of governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) challenges. While compliance is commonly associated with financial reporting regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), Japans Financial Instruments and Exchange Law (known as J-SOX), Basel II, or the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), the compliance environment is complicated by a raft of other requirements, including industry regulations, product quality standards, risk management requirements, government records mandates, and security policies. Failure to meet compliance requirements can lead not only to financial penalties but also to loss of license to trade, ongoing scrutiny, criminal prosecution, adverse publicity, loss of reputation, and more. When you factor in both the difficulty of achieving and maintaining compliance and the consequences of non-compliance, it is no wonder that GRC strategies have become a top priority within enterprises today. In fact, AMR Research estimates that total spending on GRC in 2007 will reach U.S.$29.9 billion, an increase of 8.5 percent from last year.10 Despite this, many of our customers struggle to understand how to respond holistically to the regulatory requirements that affect them. Efforts to meet GRC challenges have left many companies with a disjointed collection of specialized applications and processes, some of which are expensive to maintain and hard to use. Furthermore, these narrow solutions face limitations because they cannot scale to address new or changing requirements and do not integrate well with existing infrastructure. For a compliance program to be successful, it should address people, process, and technology. People need to be properly trained and committed to leading compliance planning and execution. Processes need to map to regulations, frameworks, and internal business objectives. And the supporting technology needs to be designed to enable people to adhere to processes
BUSINESS SCENARIOS
While compliance requirements have implications throughout an organization, they can have the greatest impact on the finance department as well as those in operational roles. The following scenarios highlight opportunities to support these functions while improving processes and gaining business value through a holistic compliance solution.
Finance
Following the corporate scandals at global corporations including Enron, WorldCom, Parmalat, and a number of other companies, regulations such as SOX and Basel II have been enacted requiring publicly traded companies to have much stronger and auditable controls over the processes that accrue to the integrity of financial risk management and reporting. However, while finance leaders are responsible for the integrity of financial statements and getting documented board of director approval for them, many lack clear visibility into enterprise-wide performance and the controls and workflow necessary to achieve this. These executives need systems that give them better insight into and control of financial statements. A holistic compliance strategy can help your finance leaders ensure regulatory compliance and sustainable corporate governance by automating controls and enhancing visibility into these processes.
Operations
Some organizations are realizing the value of looking beyond their financial systems when building their compliance infrastructure to avoid duplication of compliance controls. While not all operational compliance mandates carry the same urgency as financial regulations, they often provide the greatest business optimization opportunities. For example, management
10 John Hagerty and Eric Klein, Compliance Is Still a Priority: Total GRC Spending Approaches $30B in 2007 and Growing, AMR Research, February 2007
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may require that when recording a customer product return, employees also record the reason for the return. Although capturing this data adds additional steps for the receiving department initially, in the long run knowing why an item was returned can help management in making adjustments across the companyincluding marketing, sales, production, quality control, purchasing, and shippinghelping reduce returns. By building a compliance infrastructure that extends beyond financial regulations, you can address issues that represent high risk and/ or high value to your organizationsuch as environmental impact from operations or product spoilage caused by equipment failure.
h Ready-to-use compliance tools Out of the box, the 2007 Microsoft Office system provides many of the fundamental components required to support compliance regulations. Office Enterprise 2007 provides a complete enterprise content management system for creating, managing, and storing documents, spreadsheets, e-mail, and records. 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. h A simplified user experience Settings such as access rights, routing, indexing, document holds/expiries, and other controls can now be built directly into familiar applications such as Microsoft Office Word and Office Excel document templates, automating much of the work needed for compliance and helping you reduce errors and improve adherence to regulatory policies. h Integrated security management With the Microsoft Forefront family of security products, you can provide your IT managers with a more integrated set of tools that can help them better identify and manage viruses, spyware, and other threatsbefore they pose a more serious threat

Microsofts vision for GRC solutions is to put people at the center of processes and information and embed compliance capabilities as part of the broader integrated IT platform rather than delivering tactical solutions focused on specific regulations. Microsoft offers familiar tools and technologies that can be integrated to create simpler, more flexible solutions, enabling companies to address a wide range of GRC challenges more efficiently. Benefits of the Microsoft platform in developing flexible, holistic compliance solutions include:
IMPROVING RISK ANALYSIS AND REPORTING IN FINANCIAL SERVICES

Sasfin Bank deployed a Microsoft enterprise content management and business intelligence solution based on the 2007 Microsoft Office system to create a single view of the customer for risk analysis and compliance reporting. Key benefits include: h An increase in the availability of customer data required for compliance reports by 80 percent h A decrease in the time to create compliance reports by 10 business days h A reduction in the costs to create compliance reports by 20 percent h A decreased number of errors in the credit data system and compliance reports
STREAMLINING CONTENT MANAGEMENT IMPLEMENTING SECURITY AND SYSTEMS IN PROFESSIONAL SERVICES MANAGEMENT IN HEALTH
TUV NORD Group implemented an enterprise content management workflow and forms solution based on the 2007 Microsoft Office system to help streamline the audit and certification process. Key benefits include: h An expected 20 percent improvement in certification process efficiency h Increased revenue per employee due to improved case productivity h A decreased number of incorrect audits h Enhanced customer satisfaction Childrens Hospital Boston deployed Microsoft Active Directory Application Mode as an integrated directory service and Microsoft Identity Integration Server to update users identity information across applications. Key benefits include: h Increased security, supporting compliance with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) related to personal health information security and patient privacy h Enhanced password management, enabling users to access 90 percent of hospital applications with their Windows user name and password h New workflow capabilities that enhance operational efficiency h A 75 percent reduction in the time previously required to manage users in the directory
Find more information on these and other examples of Microsoft and Microsoft partner compliance solutions at http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies.
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to your network. A unified security console enables IT staff to apply security settings more efficiently across complex IT infrastructures for more centralized and efficient management of compliance policies. h More efficient system monitoring Many regulations and IT governance policies require detailed tracking of changes and other processes within your IT infrastructure. Microsoft System Center captures, aggregates, and logs this information, making it easier for your IT staff to compile the necessary reports. h An extensible platform The compliance-related controls that customers build into their Microsoft platform can be extended to other systems within the organization, so you can maintain previous systems, if required, and gain more effective control of them. h Specialized partner solutions Supported by our own best practices and technical support services, our worldwide network of partners is ready to deliver compliance solutions on the latest Microsoft technologies and address a wide range of regulations and internal policies. The Microsoft Enterprise CAL (Client Access License) provides a comprehensive suite of components to build compliance solutions.
Microsoft software for GRC includes: Enterprise Data Management h Office Enterprise h Office SharePoint Server h Exchange Server h SQL Server h Windows Vista h Microsoft Dynamics Security and Systems Management h Windows Vista Enterprise h Forefront h System Center h Windows Rights Management Services Auditing, Monitoring, and Reporting h Office PerformancePoint Server h Office SharePoint Server h SQL Server Reporting Services h Microsoft Office Project Server and Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server h Microsoft Office Visio drawing and diagramming software h System Center h Microsoft Dynamics To find more information on improving compliance, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/compliance.
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MOBILITY
solution are to improve or enhance worker productivity, provide ease of information access, and improve field/customer service response time.13
BUSINESS SCENARIOS
The following scenarios highlight typical opportunities for a mobility solution that could yield immediate business results by enhancing productivity, increasing customer responsiveness, and enabling greater adaptability.
Sales
When sales staff cannot respond to customer inquiries in a timely fashion because they cannot get the information that they need when they need it, their customer interactions are less effective and they risk missing business opportunities. Even worse, this can give competitors that do have the necessary mobile technologies a market advantage. The right mobility tools can enable your sales representatives to be available to your customers at any time, anywhere. In addition, access to up-to-date corporate data during sales calls can help them improve customer interactions and deliver presentations with more impact. Mobile solutions can also give your sales teams the means to update sales data and customer information immediately following customer meetings, minimizing the chance of errors or inaccuracies. Mobility enables timeliness and responsiveness, which in turn can help accelerate sales transactions. It can also enable your sales teams to turn dead time between sales calls into productive time, making for a differentiated level of customer service and helping improve customer satisfaction and sales.
A growing constituency of todays 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. Recognition of the value of mobility is reflected by the percentage of workers who are now mobile, a number that is sizeable and growing steadily. In the United States alone, there are 55 million mobile workers, representing 43 percent of the U.S. workforce.11 Furthermore, Gartner predicts that by 2012, more than 80% of mobile knowledge workers will create and review information on notebook PCs and non-PC mobile devices, such as handsets.12 Ultimately, our customers tell us that without an effective mobile workforce, they run the risk of their competitors gaining a 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. 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 is 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 that the top three reasons for deploying a mobile
Customer Service
Poor service standards can result when service and support teams cannot access customer and product/service data from a customers site or face delays in getting the information that they need. Also, customer documentation entered after leaving a customer site can be inaccurate or outdated. Mobile technology can enable your service teams to access key customer, product, or part information while in the field. 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. Ultimately, mobile solutions can enable your service teams to respond to customer needs in real time, helping resolve issues more quickly and effectively.
Sourcing
Many people in sourcing roles struggle with slow and inefficient business processes due to paper-based forms, a lack of visibility and ineffective communication with suppliers and partners, and an inability to integrate the organizations processes and
11 Yankee Group, October 2007 12 Nick Jones, Mobile Collaboration Will Be Driven by Consumer Technologies and Behaviors, Gartner, Inc., December 2006 13 Diana Hwang, Mobilizing the Enterprise in 2006: The Long and Winding Road, IDC, Doc #204717, December 2006
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data across partners, suppliers, and vendors. Furthermore, our customers tell us that outdated technology slows their decisionmaking processes. Mobility solutions can enable people in sourcing roles to access real-time inventory and supplier data from anywhere and at anytime, leading to greater visibility across all parts of the supply chain. Mobile technology can also help improve communicationand therefore relationshipswith suppliers and partners. With informational alerts for new data, such as financial updates or shop floor reports, your sourcing teams can be sure that they are always working with up-to-date information. Finally, mobility solutions can enable business-tobusiness (B2B) integration between suppliers and customers through mobile data sharing.
transaction information. Building on the Microsoft mobile platform, our partners today deliver vertical solutions in the retail, education, health, government, professional services, manufacturing, and financial services 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. 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. Windows Mobile 6 with Office Outlook Mobile 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. It also makes it easy to extend other Microsoft technologies to mobile workers; for example, with Exchange Server 2007, Windows Mobile 6 enables e-mail searches of Exchange Server mailboxes and access to SharePoint files through e-mail links. In combination with Microsoft Office Mobile, Windows Mobile also brings the genuine Microsoft Office environment to devices, providing on-the-go access to spreadsheets, presentations, and documents through Microsoft Office Word Mobile, Office Excel Mobile, and Office PowerPoint Mobile. 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: Windows BitLocker Drive Encryption in Windows Vista Ultimate and Windows Vista Enterprise 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.

Microsoft mobile technology can enable you to transition from deploying point solutions today to robust and strategic mobile solutions that meet your demands tomorrow. We will work with you to define the solution that fits best with your current needsusing a phased approach, from fundamental to comprehensive to leadingand that can evolve as your businesss requirements change (for more information on taking a phased approach to solution design, please see the introduction to the Role-Based Productivity: Realizing Business Value section earlier in this guide). Our mobile technologies provide customers with a consistent platformwhether connecting though an application or a browser on a device or a mobile PC. Our vision is to bring the familiarity of your peoples everyday tools to them while they are out of the office. 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
ENABLING YOUR MOBILE WORKFORCE

FUNDAMENTAL
f Empowers mobile workers with adaptable infrastructure and departmental applications f Enables mobile access to data f Provides efficient data management and integrated search capabilities to mobile devices
COMPREHENSIVE
f Extends mobile access to communication and collaboration tools f Enhances process participation away from the desk f Improves mobile access to data reporting and analysis tools
LEADING
f Streamlines mobile access to corporate data f Enables seamless communication and collaboration with external partners from mobile devices f Enables mobile access to enterprise-wide reporting and analysis tools
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Microsoft software for mobility solutions includes: h Windows Mobile h Windows Vista h Exchange Server with Office Outlook, Office Outlook Web Access, or Office Outlook Mobile h Microsoft Office Mobile with Office Word Mobile, Office Excel Mobile, and Office PowerPoint Mobile h Office Communications Server with Office Communicator, Office Communicator Web Access, or Office Communicator Mobile h Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile h Office Enterprise h Microsoft Office Groove software To find more information on enabling your mobile workforce, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/ mobility.
SPEEDING UP THE DECISION-MAKING PROCESS IN GOVERNMENT

Inland Revenue Board of Malaysia implemented a messaging system based on Exchange Server 2007 to provide Web and wireless e-mail access, as well as push e-mail, to keep its mobile workforce connected. Key benefits include: h Mobile connectivity h Unified communications h Highly secure access h Enhanced productivity
TRANSFORMING OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY IN MANUFACTURING

Formosa Plastics Group deployed Exchange Server and Windows Mobile to provide a highly secure, integrated Web-based mobile platform that gives its engineers real-time access to enterprise resource planning (ERP) data. Key benefits include: h Lowered IT costs h Increased speed and access h Increased security h Enhanced productivity
IMPROVING MOBILE ACCESS TO E-MAIL IN TELECOMMUNICATIONS

BASE replaced Lotus Notes with a new e-mail messaging architecture built on Exchange Server to support mobile and home working (with Microsoft partner HostBasket and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Integrated Network Solutions). Key benefits include: h Access from any PC or mobile device h A new potential for home working h Increased control over the IT budget h A low-impact migration over a weekend h Options to market new communications architecture
Find more information on these and other examples of Microsoft and Microsoft partner mobility solutions at http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies.
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OUR COMMITMENT TO INDUSTRY
Microsoft has invested in building extensive knowledge of industries in which we believe our platform, products and technologies can help deliver business value to our customers and their business processes and in which we have built strong relationships with partners that provide IT services and solutions. As our industry knowledge deepens, we are also increasingly channeling the industry-specific feedback and perspectives that we hear from our customers to our software development teams to ensure that our platform and products are increasingly relevant to our customers business needs and opportunities.
vision of the futurea future in which citizens and communities are more secure, more connected, and empowered to thrive in a 21st-century world. For more information on GEEP, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/industry/publicsector/government/ programs/default.mspx. Microsoft partners are fundamental to our industry approach, and together we are committed to delivering the technology and solutions in these areas to help our customers realize the peopleready 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 following sections provide an overview of our comprehensive approach to industry solutions by sharing our key focus areas for each prioritized industry. For detailed information on each of these industries, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/business/ industry.mspx.
FINANCIAL SERVICES
The financial services industry, an industry long known for predictable business practices and measured evolution, is facing sweeping, unprecedented change. Our financial services customers are contending with mega-mergers, decreasing margins, a more challenging regulatory environment, and fierce competition. These and other new realities mean that financial services firms must constantly seek a competitive edge and identify a path for long-term profitability. In the past, IT investments within financial services firms 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. At the same time, our customers are seeking to use their technology investments to amplify the impact of their people and help them drive business success. Together with our partners, we provide technology and solutions in banking, capital markets/securities, and insurance across the globe, within a few industry-specific areas in which we believe that we can truly deliver business value, to help our financial services customers deliver the essential capabilities for a peopleready business: h Investment Management Supporting your front-, middle-, and back-office activities with technology solutions in the areas of algorithmic trading, high-performance computing, compliance, desktop management, and trade services h Advisor Platform Helping your financial advisors to work more effectively and efficiently across information sources and distribution channels to better service clients with a more holistic view of the customer and a better chance to successfully cross-sell
For each of our 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 to ensure a deep understanding of the drivers and priorities for the industry to maximize our contribution to solving business and technology challenges, now and into the future. Within these prioritized industries, we have identified key focus areas that we believe represent the most critical customer business needs, issues, or problem areas. These focus areas are where we and our partners can deliver exceptional value by tailoring the solutions discussed in the Business Solutions section of this guide to meet the distinct needs of individual industries. 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 the health, government, and education industries. Through our broad range of Government and Education Engagement Programs (GEEP), we also partner with policy makers, governments, and educators in more than 120 countries to help achieve a shared
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SOLUTIONS IN FINANCIAL SERVICES Investment Management Advisor Platform

f Investment Analytics f Trade Compliance f Advisor Desktop/Portal f f f f Branch (Teller & Seller) Customer Knowledge Loan Origination Mobile
MANUFACTURING
In a rapidly changing global market, todays manufacturers face formidable challenges. Companies have to meet ongoing demand for innovative new products while still increasing operational productivity and reducing product unit cost. At the same time, they have to partner within a global supply chain while fending off competitive pressure to meet high customer expectations. Together with our partners, we help our manufacturing customers deliver the essential capabilities for a people-ready business across a number of areas: h Innovation Management and Product Lifecycle Management Helping you manage innovation and new product development projects, capture design intent, and protect intellectual property, thereby helping accelerate time to market at a reduced cost h Sales, Marketing, & Service Helping your people attract, sell to, and service customers and partners across channels to build and maintain successful customer relationships h Supply Chain Management Helping you get real-time visibility and agility across the global value chain to support
SOLUTIONS IN MANUFACTURING
DRIVE INNOVATION
DEVELOP CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS
Channel Renewal
Insurance Value Chain

BUILD PARTNER CONNECTIONS
f Channel Sales & Service f Claims Processing f Lending Systems f Document Management & Records Retention f Audit & Controls f Payments Services Factory f Treasury & Cash Management
Core Banking Risk Management & Compliance
IMPROVE OPERATIONS
Payments
h Channel Renewal Helping you make an investment in renewing one channel a potential investment in all channels by focusing on renewing channels such as automated teller machines (ATMs), call centers, teller systems, or in-branch seller, specialist, or advisor systems with reusable business components that set the stage for cross-channel consistency h Insurance Value Chain Developing global and industry standardsbased solutions that link disconnected systems and processes to create a seamless link between your employees, agents, and brokers and their customers h Core Banking Helping you renew core systems in a phased strategic manner to help reduce risk and take advantage of component-based architecture h Risk Management & Compliance Aligning IT and business processes to support risk and compliance while helping your people achieve critical business objectives, including improved customer satisfaction, greater operational efficiency, and enhanced competitiveness h Payments Helping set the direction for the future of payments through a more modern, integrated, and competitive payments platform to meet todays demands while also enabling your people to identify new services for new revenue sources For more information on Microsofts approach for the financial services industry, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/ industry/financialservices.
DRIVE INNOVATION
Innovation Management and Product Lifecycle Management
f Innovation Process Management f Collaborative Product Development f Product Portfolio Management f Product Data Management f f f f Sales Effectiveness Marketing Effectiveness Service Effectiveness Customer Care Framework (CCF)
Sales, Marketing, & Service
Supply Chain Management
f Demand and Supply Planning f Supply Chain Visibility and Performance f Supply Chain Collaboration f Supply Chain Execution f Manufacturing ERP f Manufacturing Visibility f Manufacturing Execution f Manufacturing Control Systems
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

IMPROVE OPERATIONS
Manufacturing Operations
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proactive decision making and coordinate a complex range of activities among many partners in a high-speed business environment including global regulatory compliance h Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Helping you manage the enterprise including finance, human resources, orders, and procurement h Manufacturing Operations Helping you to streamline and transform your production operations from a push-based, forecast-driven model to a pull-based, on-demand model, with enterprise-wide visibility into manufacturing plant operations, refinery operations, and power-generation operations For more information on Microsofts approach for the manufacturing industry, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/ industry/manufacturing.
SOLUTIONS IN RETAIL
DRIVE INNOVATION DEVELOP CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS BUILD PARTNER CONNECTIONS IMPROVE OPERATIONS f Point of Service f Store Operations Management f Ordering & Inventory Management f Real-Time Analytics f Space Planning f Pricing and Promotions f Assortment Planning
Store Systems
Enterprise Performance Management Merchandise Management
RETAIL
The retail industry is heavily influenced by the state of the economy, consumer confidence, government regulation, and globalization. Using innovative technologies, retailers 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 each customers expectations. Our focus with our partners is to help you achieve competitive advantage through an enhanced customer experience, improved employee productivity, and efficient operations by better connecting information, systems, and people. Working with our partners and industry experts, we provide the technical solutions to help your people work more innovatively, collaboratively, and effectively to help increase your organizations competitive edge. Together with our partners, we help our retail customers deliver the essential capabilities for a people-ready business across three areas: h Store Systems Delivering innovative in-store solutions through our connected store vision to help you provide a better customer experience, enable your store managers and employees to spend more time on the sales floor connecting with customers, reduce operational costs, and improve employee productivity h Enterprise Performance Management Delivering real-time analytics solutions that better connect information, processes, systems, and people to help you measure the effectiveness of store brand promotions, your assortment plan, and price changes in real time; improve overall responsiveness to consumer demands; gain operational efficiencies; and deliver the right product at the right place, on time for the right customer h Merchandise Management Providing a set of applications that provide the capabilities necessary for managing all attributes of your product range, including pricing, allocation, and selection
For more information on Microsofts approach for the retail industry, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/industry/retail.
HOSPITALITY
Our hospitality customers around the world face wide-ranging issues including market globalization, nonbrand-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. Working with our partners and industry experts, we 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 organizations success, whether by delivering superior guest services and amenities, driving efficient business processes, or enabling your guests to personalize their experiences. Together with our partners, we help our hospitality customers deliver the essential capabilities for a people-ready business across two areas:
SOLUTIONS IN HOSPITALITY
DRIVE INNOVATION DEVELOP CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS BUILD PARTNER CONNECTIONS IMPROVE OPERATIONS
Sales, Marketing, & Service
f Service Effectiveness f Customer Care Framework (CCF) f Property Operation Management f Business Insight & Intelligence f Guest Experience
Hospitality Business Enablement
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h Sales, Marketing, & Service Helping you improve your organizations service effectiveness by pulling together customer information from multiple systems, enabling you to 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 h Hospitality Business Enablement Supporting the full range of hospitality business unit operations: enabling the integration, management, and orchestration of your mission-critical lineof-business (LOB) hospitality industry applications to support efficient control of business operations; empowering people across your business to make effective and accurate decisions by taking advantage of the information and data captured within your LOB applications; and using technology to help drive more satisfying guest experiences across the full range of interactions that your guests have with your business For more information on Microsofts approach for the hospitality industry, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/industry/ hospitality.
SOLUTIONS IN PROFESSIONAL SERVICES

f f f f Client Acceptance Proposal Management Team Workspaces Enterprise Content Management
DRIVE INNOVATION DEVELOP CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS BUILD PARTNER CONNECTIONS
Service Delivery Management
Client Experience Management
f Client Extranets f Data Exchange f Survey and Response
IMPROVE OPERATIONS
Practice Performance Management
f Talent Management f Knowledge Management f Client Relationship Management f Practice Management
PROFESSIONAL SERVICES
Differentiation through subject matter expertise and client service is key to professional services firms. Our most successful professional services customers convey market leadership by investing in best practice developments that showcase firm knowhow and service excellence. 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 meet market demands as an organization, 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, client experience management, and practice performance management. With this framework, Microsoft and our partners deliver solutions using Microsofts integrated infrastructure to help your organization achieve operational excellence, control risk, leverage your assets, achieve alignment and drive execution of business strategy, build client satisfaction, and differentiate your services. Together with our partners, we help our professional services customers deliver the essential capabilities for a people-ready business across three areas: h Service Delivery Management Enabling your professionals to collaborate effectively to deliver high-quality client service with greater efficiency, speed, and risk control
h Client Experience Management Enabling your professionals to use technology to help grow revenue, manage risk, and stand out in the marketplace h Practice Performance Management Equipping your professionals with the performance management tools that they need to capitalize on your firms human, intellectual, and client assets and to drive business growth For more information on Microsofts approach for the professional services industry, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/ industry/professionalservices.
HEALTH
To help improve health around the world, we have developed our vision for Knowledge Driven Health, an initiative that brings together Microsoft technologies, products, and services with partner solutions to enable and support advances in world health. Through Knowledge Driven Health, we help health organizations provide people with the knowledge that they need when they need it. Using innovative approaches and flexible technology tools from Microsoft and our partners, these solutions can help health professionals provide safer, higher-quality, more accessible care that is patient centric, evidence based, and time and cost efficient. Furthermore, because these solutions are fast to implement and intuitive to use, they can help organizations realize improved business and clinical outcomes quickly. Microsoft and our partners work with three types of organizations in the health industry: healthcare providers, health and social services, and health plans. (For information on our work in life sciences, please see the manufacturing industry section.) With healthcare providers, we focus on delivering cost-effective solutions that provide true patient-centered care, helping reduce
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medical errors, increase efficiency, and streamline administration, leading to cost savings. We help health and social services organizations achieve seamless service delivery with solutions designed to improve efficiency, such as through workflow, knowledge management, and collaboration tools; we also deliver solutions to support case management and disease surveillance. Finally, in the United States we help our health plan customers transform their organizations into consumer-focused, knowledgedriven, and highly collaborative organizations with information and collaboration management technologies.
h Delivery Transformation Helping you increase the speed and quality of decision making within and across departments by automating data analysis processes that were previously manual and enabling more highly evolved integrated healthcare delivery systems (IHDS); enabling you to integrate the full range of provider and payer services while helping improve productivity, care services, quality, safety, and cost management h Care Management Enabling the extension of light clinical and patient information to multiple government bodies including the social services agencies to create the link between health and social services with both real-time collaboration and asynchronous communication modalities h Health Information Using clinical portals to enable you to consolidate personal, team, organizational, and external information with flexible access from any device and to enable the transfer and aggregation of clinical data between caregivers; health information networks bridge the health information gap between and inside organizations using open architectures and standards h Public Health Delivering solutions that focus on preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting health in areas such as disease surveillance and geospatial data manipulation; in addition, providing solutions that engage citizens to help strengthen the capacity of health systems, agencies, and state and local governments to monitor and respond to disease outbreaks and monitor and promote health issues h Health Back Office Enabling meaningful business intelligence and decision support through business scorecards and indicators from multiple back-end applications with associated data, while also providing administrators and clinicians with access to clinical as well as financial key performance indicators (KPIs) For more information on Microsofts approach for the health industry, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/industry/ healthcare.
Together with our partners, we help our health customers deliver the essential capabilities for a people-ready business across a number of areas: h Connected Health Platform Delivering solutions that combine Microsoft technology offerings, the prescriptive architectural guidance of our Architecture and Design Blueprint, key reference implementations, and additional specific guidelines that enable the development of open and extensible e-health solutions that take advantage of pervasive technologies and serve the broadest range of needs; the Connected Health Platform is at the heart of our Knowledge Driven Health initiative
SOLUTIONS IN HEALTHCARE Connected Health Platform

DRIVE INNOVATION
Delivery Transformation Care Management
f Patient Experience f Case Management f Caregiver Collaboration f Long-Term Condition Management f Electronic Health Records f Health Portals f Health Information Networks f Imaging Solutions f Disease Surveillance f Vaccination and Immunization Tracking f Healthcare Analytics f Decision Support f Patient Administration Systems f Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) f Shared Services
Health Information
GOVERNMENT
Governments 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 to reach citizens, improve collaboration between organizations, accurately report to supervising authorities, and maximize your technology investments.
Public Health
IMPROVE OPERATIONS
Health Back Office
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SOLUTIONS IN GOVERNMENT Command & Control

DRIVE INNOVATION f Situational Awareness f Military Messaging f Cross-Domain Sharing f Coordinated Emergency Response f Secured eMailbox f Portals f Financial Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) f Compliance Improvement f Administration f Case Management Customer Relationship Management (CRM) f Collaboration and Enterprise Document and Records Management (EDRM) f eID f eForms f Enterprise Revenue System f System Components
Network-Centric Operations Crisis Management ePostal Services
h Network-Centric Operations Enabling network-centric capabilities and warfare operations at all levels, including tactical, operational, and strategic, for defense/military organizations and agencies supporting the development, planning, implementation, and operation of IT systems h Crisis Management Helping government or nongovernment organizations (NGOs) prepare for and respond to disasters (either natural or man-made) h ePostal Services Enabling all postal services that posts can deliver online to customers h Citizen Service Delivery Helping you deliver digital services to citizens, taxpayers, businesses, beneficiaries, and visitors online, through interactive voice response (IVR), through mobile devices, or through multiple combinations of these h Personnel Management Delivering solutions to help you manage your personnel, including position authority, position numbers, budgets, financial management, job descriptions, performance management, skills assessments, databanks, and other solutions related to management h International Collaboration Developing solutions that support worldwide collaboration activities between tax administrators and the private sector to help improve taxpayer compliance h Government and Administrative Solutions Delivering solutions that support your administrative and management processes h Efficiency and Effectiveness Helping you significantly improve revenue business operations by improving the effectiveness and efficiency of your core systems For more information on Microsofts approach for the government industry, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/ worldwidegovernment.
Citizen Service Delivery Personnel Management International Collaboration
Government and Administrative Solutions
IMPROVE OPERATIONS
Efficiency and Effectiveness
To help government customers plan for and respond to these challenging circumstances, Microsoft has developed the Connected Government Framework. The Connected Government Framework is based on an open, extensible, and agile serviceoriented 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. Together with our partners, we help our government customers deliver the essential capabilities for a people-ready business across a number of areas: h Command & Control Delivering solutions designed for defense/military organizations and agencies that support or contribute to tactical, operational, and strategic decisionmaking and command functions
EDUCATION
Education in the 21st century needs to be fundamentally different from 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 and student centered, uses a range of media, and focuses on critical thinking and informed decision making. Working closely with worldwide education communities, we have 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
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SOLUTIONS IN EDUCATION
DRIVE INNOVATION DEVELOP CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS BUILD PARTNER CONNECTIONS
TELECOMMUNICATIONS
In the telecommunications industry, we focus on partnering with service providersincluding wireline, mobile, and cable operatorsto enable them to create and deliver compelling new services to their subscribers, build customer loyalty, and generate new revenue streams. In addition to the screens, services, and service delivery platform solutions that help service providers enhance their product portfolios, we also provide a range of solutions that support the business infrastructure for telecommunications companies, such as customer care and business intelligence. For instance, to help streamline operations and improve customer service, we provide the Microsoft Customer Care Framework (CCF), an enterprise software solution for contact centers. CCF delivers a unified agent desktop, consolidating data from core business systems such as billing, customer relationship management (CRM), and order management to the customer service agent desktop. This solution can significantly improve the ability of 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. We are also working with service providers in the area of business intelligence. In todays highly competitive telecommunications industry, transforming data into knowledge with business insight and predictive analytics can provide key strategic business advantages. Business intelligence solutions based on Microsoft technologies can help service providers improve bottom-line results by giving them the tools and insight that they need to plan more effectively, align more closely with strategic initiatives, and make better business decisions. Together with our partners, we help service providers deliver the essential capabilities for a people-ready business across a number of different areas:
Teaching and Learning Connecting Learning Community Managing the Institution
f Learning-Centered PCs f The Digital Classroom f Learning Gateway f Managing the Business of Education f Managing Education IT
IMPROVE OPERATIONS
continuing education, museums, and libraries, together with our partners we are committed to enabling educators, students, and educational institutions to realize their full potential. We do this through a model that we refer to as the Connected Education Framework. This framework is based on an extensible architecture and underpinned by architectural blueprints for teaching and learning, connecting people and information, and managing the business of educational institutions. Our solutions are intended to enable every student and teacher to access PCs and other connected devices as part of an information-rich, personalized, student-centered environment that encourages exploration and collaboration and provides support for critical thinking. Together with our partners, we help our education customers deliver the essential capabilities for a people-ready business across a number of areas: h Teaching and Learning Helping your educators, your students, and the wider community use technology, communication, and collaboration creatively to develop skills, maximize opportunities, and prepare for the changing demands of the 21st century h Connected Learning Community Using the Microsoft Learning Gateway to build on your existing systems, connecting your students with institutional and community resources h Managing the Institution Delivering solutions that encompass technology, tools, blueprints, and products to help your administrators and IT managers easily, efficiently, and effectively design and manage a dynamic 21st-century connected learning environment that benefits from enhanced business processes and higher productivitywhere students are engaged, parents are connected, administrators are empowered, and teachers are inspired For more information on Microsofts approach for the education industry, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/education.
SOLUTIONS IN TELECOMMUNICATIONS
DRIVE INNOVATION DEVELOP CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS BUILD PARTNER CONNECTIONS f Unified Communications f Hosted Messaging and Collaboration f Microsoft TV f Live Services f Billing f Business Intelligence f Next-Generation Customer Care f Business Process Routing f Infrastructure Optimization
Service Network
Business Support Systems
IMPROVE OPERATIONS
Operations
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h Service Network Enabling you to create, aggregate, and manage services to attract new customers and build new revenue streams h Business Support Systems Helping you improve the customer experience and increase overall efficiencies in terms of provisioning, billing, planning, sales, and customer care h Operations Helping you improve business processes, maximize infrastructure investments, and improve overall operational efficiencies For more information on Microsofts approach for the telecommunications industry, please visit http://www.microsoft. com/serviceproviders.
DRIVE INNOVATION
SOLUTIONS IN MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT Content Management and Production Content Distribution
f Media Collaboration f Digital Asset Management f Secure Distribution f Multi-channel Distribution f Business Intelligence f Digital Process Integration f Enterprise Resource Planning/Supply Chain Management f Infrastructure Optimization
Business Infrastructure
MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT

Media and entertainment companies today face unprecedented opportunities in the markets that they serve. Advertising, broadcasting, film, music, and publishing companies may employ different business models and pursue different goals, but they share several critical concerns. The rapid, continuing shift from analog to digital creation, management, and distribution of content has opened many doors but presents new challenges as well. For instance, consumers want personalized content tailored to their specific interests and lifestyles. They want to receive that content on their preferred devicestelevisions, computers, mobile phones, and portable digital playersand they want to be able to view the content anytime, anywhere. In addition, they are looking for an exciting, enriching experience, and they want the ability to easily distribute and share content that they themselves create. At the same time, markets are more fragmented than ever. Consumers can choose from many different content sources and media channels. Organizations that create and distribute content are challenged with delivering that content to the right audience in the most effective manner. Furthermore, media companies must protect their digital assets and intellectual property and safeguard their content and communications from unauthorized access. Together with our partners, we help our media and entertainment customers deliver the essential capabilities for a people-ready business across a number of different areas: h Content Management and Production Providing technologies and solutions to enable efficient and collaborative environments for content creation and management h Content Distribution Helping you efficiently manage and distribute digital content and derive more value from that content by repurposing it across multiple devices and channels h Business Infrastructure Enabling you to optimize and realign your business infrastructure, including order management, scheduling, customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management
IMPROVE OPERATIONS
For more information on Microsofts approach for the media and entertainment industry, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/ media.
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Companies today are realizing that there has never been a greater need for IT to becomeand be seen asa true strategic corporate asset that delivers ongoing business value. This section provides a detailed look at our Dynamic IT strategy and how an optimized infrastructure can help your IT organization drive business results.
THE CHANGING ROLE OF IT

In an increasingly global marketplace, our customers are looking for every opportunity to gain a competitive advantage and simultaneously grow revenue, profits, and customer loyalty. At the same time, new regulatory requirements, competitive pressures brought on by a connected global economy, and technologies that level the playing field are making it increasingly difficult for companies of all sizes to differentiate themselves. In this challenging business environment, companies need to be able to respond quickly and effectively to new opportunities: as Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David C. Robertson with the Harvard Business School observe, Business agility is becoming a strategic necessity. Greater globalization, increasing regulation, and faster cycle times all demand an ability to quickly change organizational processes.14 Organizations are looking more and more to IT to deliver this agility, to not only support but actually drive innovation and profitability for the business. This changing agenda is evident by looking at what CIOs and IT leaders defined as their top priorities for 2007. According to Mark McDonald, Group Vice President, Gartner, Inc., in our 2007 worldwide survey of 1,400 CIOs, their technology priorities included areas such as business intelligence applications, enterprise applications, and communications and collaboration technologies.15 These IT priorities align with some of the most pressing business concerns that our enterprise customers are discussing with us. At the same time, CIOs are prioritizing areas that help build greater agility and flexibility into their IT infrastructure, so that IT can continue to meet business needs in the future: according to McDonald, legacy application modernization, virtualization, and service-oriented architectures also make the list for CIO technology priorities. (For the full list of CIO priorities from the Gartner survey, please see the beginning of the Role-Based Productivity: Realizing Business Value section of this guide.) The State of the CIO study has produced similar findings. In the 2007 survey, 64 percent of respondents felt that IT should proactively envision business possibilities and initiate them with technology, versus the remaining 36 percent who felt that IT should only support and enable predefined business initiatives.16
Perhaps of even greater note is that when the respondents were asked what impact they expected IT to have in the coming year, at the top of the list was enabling business innovation. This study likewise affirms the strong focus that CIOs are placing on aligning business and IT priorities, which ranked as the number one most frequently cited management priority for 2007, and with good reason: more aligned than unaligned CIOs reported that they had used IT to create competitive advantage and that IT had enabled a new revenue stream for their business.17
Value of CIOBusiness Alignment

40%
Value of CIOBusiness Alignment
30%
CIOs aligned with the business CIOs not aligned with the business
20%
10%
0%
IT has created competitive advantage for the business
IT has enabled a new revenue stream
Source: The State of the CIO 2007, CIO Magazine, 2007
A recent study by Keystone Strategy, Inc., sponsored by Microsoft, has likewise demonstrated a compelling business case for investing in technology that supports business objectives. The study correlates IT capabilities with business performance and answers the question does IT matter? It was conducted under the direction of Professor Marco Iansiti of the Harvard Business School and focused on manufacturing companies, looking 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.
14 Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David C. Robertson, Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution, Harvard Business School Press, 2006 15 Gartner EXP Survey of More than 1,400 CIOs Shows CIOs Must Create Leverage to Remain Relevant to the Business, Gartner, Inc., February 2007 (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=501189) 16 The State of the CIO 2007, CIO Magazine, 2007 17 The ROI of Alignment, CIO Magazine, January 2007
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2. Companies in the top quarter of IT capabilities had 23 percent higher revenue per employee than the lowest quarter of their peers.18
can do to better equip your IT professionals and developers with the tools, technology, and information that they need to maximize their impact. Based on these conversations, we have made four promises to help you enable your IT and development teams across the IT life cycle: 1. Manage complexity, achieve agility 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 computersnot peopleto handle more of the management load and free up your IT staff to focus on adding new value. 2. Protect information, control access 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. Advance the business with IT solutions 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. Amplify the impact of your people 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.
IT IT Drives Growth Drives Growth IT Leader
3.5% Faster Growth
IT Laggard
3.3% Slower Growth
Source: Information Technology (IT) Drives Growth, Keystone Strategy, Inc., 2006
The business processes that this study focuses on align closely with the people-ready business outcomes discussed earlier and highlight a direct connection between a businesss 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. The research is clear: businesses are looking to IT as a critical strategic driver of their business. To deliver critical business capabilities and to enable their organizations to respond to rapidly changing business requirements, our customers need a flexible, agile infrastructure that is at the same time cost effective and highly secure, helping free their IT staff to enable business growth. 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.
OUR PROMISES TO IT
Manage complexity, achieve agility Protect information, control access Advance the business with IT solutions Amplify the impact of your people
OUR DYNAMIC IT STRATEGY

At Microsoft, we are committed to providing our customers with the tools necessary to support technical innovation to make their IT and development organizations more strategic to the business. Our software plus services approach can help you increase the speed with which you can 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
Unified & virtualized
Process-led, model-driven
Serviceenabled
Userfocused
MICROSOFT DYNAMIC IT INVESTMENTS
18 Information Technology (IT) Drives Growth, Keystone Strategy, Inc., 2006
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We understand that for too many organizations, the cost of maintaining existing systems is too high and the process of building new solutions is too complex. We are focused on bringing together a cohesive, dynamic, integrated solution set of software and services that enables our customers to both reduce their ongoing maintenance costs and simplify the process of new application development. Our Dynamic IT for the People-Ready Business (Dynamic IT) strategy focuses on four areas of technical innovationspanning infrastructure, applications, and business processesthat enable enterprise organizations to address todays challenges and to determine the best strategy to achieve more dynamic environments: h Unified and virtualized h Process-led, model-driven h Service-enabled h User-focused
Process-Led, Model-Driven
A fundamental problem facing most organizations as they develop custom applications is that their development and IT departments operate in two separate silos. Because they function independently, initial development efforts may not take into account the IT processes that the application must comply with, leading to conflicts and requiring resource- and time-intensive testing and modificationa costly model. The development scenario is a clear example where modeling capabilities have the potential to significantly improve processes, efficiency, and business value. Dynamic IT takes advantage of ongoing advances in modeling capabilities to capture organizational knowledge and IT processes, which can help your organization to automate procedures, reduce complexity, and improve responsiveness to business demands. The process of running the business of IT can be enhanced as well by connecting project management, operations, and development teams with tools and technologies to facilitate information flow, reporting, governance, and project visibility. Modeling capabilities help improve organizational agility and help IT to optimize how systems and people work together. Modeling capabilities can also make it much faster for development teams to deploy new applications and services, which ultimately helps drive the business. At Microsoft, we are at the forefront in the industry in embracing the use of models that represent the knowledge and capabilities of software, hardware, and other resources.
In the following sections, we provide an overview of our approach in these areas. For more information on our Dynamic IT strategy, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/DynamicIT.
Unified and Virtualized

In our experience, most enterprise IT organizations operate in a static, physically oriented environment. As their business requirements evolve and they need to change their IT environment to support the new requirements, they struggle with laborious processes and high overhead costs. The implications of this lack of agility reach far beyond the direct costs incurred todays businesses need to be able to respond quickly to new opportunities to remain competitive. By separating the physical environment from the logical environment through virtualization, your organization can realize significant gains in agility. A comprehensive and unified approach to virtualization enables IT to be more flexible, cost effective, and productive. At Microsoft, our approach to virtualization extends beyond servers, spanning hardware, operating systems, applications, and servers with powerful and intuitive frontend technologies. Unified and virtualized environments can be managed comprehensively and consistently across a wide range of scenarios. The benefits include reduced costs, increased availability, and better responsiveness to changing computing needs within an existing infrastructure. Integration is a critical factor, and we are focused on building solutions that combine core business capabilities and scenarios (such as business intelligence, enterprise content management, search, and voice over Internet Protocol [VoIP]) with core IT infrastructure technologies (including security, management, and the development environment). Greater integration and manageability mean that your organization can use more time and resources for higher value-add activities.
Service-Enabled
In the traditional design approach for IT infrastructurewith business rules and processes hardcoded as an integral part of the infrastructureeffecting change to accommodate new rules or processes requires a major overhaul or replacement, typically at great cost and with a significant outlay of resources and time. Competitive businesses of today know that they need to keep up with the rapidly changing world of business and are increasingly looking for a more agile and flexible IT infrastructure to support this. At the same time, most organizations have made significant investments in their existing code and want to reuse it. Dynamic IT provides a powerful way for your company to enhance and extend your existing environment to support new business scenarios based on software services. As the role of software expands, businesses are rethinking their IT strategy and addressing current technology trends including service-oriented architectures (SOAs), software as a service (SaaS), and how to deliver nextgeneration Web experiences to customers. Our software plus services approach offers an ideal balance between the advantages of the connection between people, devices, and information that the Internet provides and the rich interactivity and high performance that can be achieved only by traditional software.
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This blended software plus services approach helps IT connect existing and new system investments in ways that enhance key business differentiators and makes it easier to create agile servicebased solutions that enable new business scenarios that ultimately help drive business results. At the same time, a key benefit for our customers is enabling them to transform their existing array of heterogeneous, distributed, and often inflexible IT systems into a set of more connected, simplified, and adaptable ones that can better support the business. For more information on our software plus services approach, please see The Role of Software Is Expanding, earlier in this guide.
partners, we are helping our customers break the reactive IT cycle and move toward a vision of self-managing, self-healing dynamic systems and applications. Fundamental to this process is our Infrastructure Optimization approach, which helps enterprises realize the full value of their IT infrastructure to drive business results, to support organizational agility, and ultimately to help advance rather than impede the business.
Application Platform Optimization Model
User Experience Business Intelligence SOA and Business Process Data Management Development BASIC STANDARDIZED DYNAMIC ADVANCED
User-Focused
User experience can have a direct impact on areas such as productivity, customer loyalty, and corporate image, yet many development efforts fail to meet even the most basic user experience requirements. We see our customers struggling with two key challenges when it comes to designing and building applications for their businesses: (1) building applications and capabilities that people in the business will actually use, and (2) enabling people to make the most of the extensive information and data available in the business. Not successfully addressing these challenges can lead to a poor return on application development investments: too often, development is abandoned partway through or completed applications are not used because they do not fit into the natural workflow for the people of the business. These organizations are looking for tools to enable their IT and development departments to build or modify applications that fit users workflows and that weave in the data that they need to support decision making on a regular basis. Dynamic IT provides technologies that can enable your development teams to more easily build applications that your people will like to use and that will connect them to the information that they need. At Microsoft, we take an end-toend approach focused on delivering a toolset that enables developers to more easily connect critical back-end technologies (such as business intelligence solutions) with powerful front-end technologiesincluding the familiar Microsoft Office interface and cutting-edge online technologies such as Silverlightthat help designers and developers create rich, immersive applications.
IT and Security Process
Business Productivity Infrastructure Optimization Model

Unified Communications Collaboration Enterprise Content Management Enterprise Search Business Intelligence BASIC BASIC STANDARDIZED STANDARDIZED RATIONALIZED RATIONALIZED
DYNAMIC
Core Infrastructure Optimization Model

Identity and Access Management Desktop, Device and Server Mgmt Security and Networking Data Protection and Recovery
BUILDING A DYNAMIC INFRASTRUCTURE

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 IT infrastructure requires taking a longer term strategic view of IT infrastructure advancement and linking these capability improvements to business needs and overall business strategy. Together with our
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. It also enables you to extend infrastructure solutions to business partners and deliver tightly integrated next-generation Web experiences to customers. Infrastructure Optimizationcentered on using your organizations IT assets to support and help grow the businesscan help you drive cost reduction as well as security and productivity gains. An optimized infrastructure can also help free your IT staff to focus on driving innovation and business priorities. A sizeable portion of the typical IT budget today is consumed by resources dedicated to operations and maintenancethe more advanced your infrastructure, the more resources your organization will have to drive the business forward. Beginning with foundational work by Gartner (Infrastructure Maturity Model) and MIT (Architectural Maturity Model) and augmenting this knowledge with profiles of over 11,000 business and non-profit organizations worldwide, Microsoft has developed three modelsfocusing on core infrastructure, business productivity infrastructure, and the application platformthat
DYNAMIC
39
outline a progression through four levels of 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. h Basic At the Basic level of optimization, IT is a cost center with uncoordinated and manual processes. IT operations are inefficient and costly, and service levels and agility are low to average. h Standardized At the Standardized level, IT is essentially a more efficient cost center, with lower IT costs than Basic organizations but with similar service levels and agility. Organizations at this level typically use some of the easier-toimplement best practices. h Rationalized At the Rationalized level, IT has become a business enabler. IT labor costs are significantly lower, and service levels and agility are improved compared with Basic and Standardized organizations. At this level, organizations use many IT best practices and automate and standardize wherever possible. h Dynamic At the Dynamic level, IT has become a strategic asset for the business and is focused on enabling the business with optimal service levels and agility rather than cost reductions. Organizations at this level 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.
Infrastructure Optimization Drives IT Cost Savings
Infrastructure Optimization Drives IT Cost Savings Analysis of 141 U.S.-based organizations Analysis of 141 U.S.-based organizations with 1,000-20,000 PCs 1,000-20,000 PCs with
$1,500 Basic
Average per-PC cost for each Infrastructure Optimization stage
$1,000
$500
Standardized Rationalized
Source: Optimizing Infrastructure: The Relationship Between IT Labor Costs and Best Practices for Managing the Windows Desktop, IDC, Doc #203482, October 2006
IDC recently completed a study of the relationship between the use of best practices and IT labor costs, service levels, and business agility.19 The study focused on 141 for-profit enterprises in the United States with 1,00020,000 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. Organizations that progress to the 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). Based on this research, IDC has published a series of white papers focused on the following specific areas and best practices that they identified: h Managing desktops running Windows (1) using centrally managed PC settings and configuration; (2) having a standard desktop strategy; and (3) having comprehensive PC security. h Identity and access management with Active Directory (1) PCs managed by Group Policy objects (GPOs); (2) comprehensive directory solution; (3) reduction of third-party application directories; and (4) automated user provisioning. h Optimizing Windows PC management with Microsoft Systems Management Server (1) using automated packaging tools and software distribution; (2) using a single systems management tool; and (3) centrally managing PC applications. For more information on this study and its findings, please download the white papers at http://www.microsoft.com/io.
Value of thethe Infrastructure Optimization Model Value of Infrastructure Optimization Model

Uncoordinated, Managed IT Managed and Fully manual infrastructure consolidated IT automated infrastructure; with limited infrastructure management; knowledge not automation with extensive dynamic captured and knowledge automation; resource usage; capture knowledge business-linked captured and service level reused agreements; knowledge capture and use automated
Cost Center
More Efficient Cost Center Standardized
Business Enabler Rationalized
Strategic Asset
Basic
Dynamic
19 IDC white paper sponsored by Microsoft; Optimizing Infrastructure: The Relationship Between IT Labor Costs and Best Practices for Managing the Windows Desktop, IDC, Doc #203482, October 2006
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Using the Microsoft Infrastructure Optimization models, you can gauge the current stage of 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 capabilitiesacross all functional rolesand consolidate them into a rationalized portfolio, with priorities based on the potential value, ease and speed of implementation, budget, and urgency of the outcome. In the Role-Based Productivity: Realizing Business Value section earlier in this guide, we introduce three phases of business solutionsfundamental, comprehensive, and leadingthat can help you envision and develop solutions to support your business priorities and enable role-based productivity based on your businesss unique circumstances. Because this solution phase approach establishes a defined list of needed capabilities based on your businesss objectives, it provides an ideal foundation to begin the process of mapping business needs to technical capabilities. In combination with the Infrastructure Optimization process, this can help you define IT initiatives that directly align with your business priorities. And by adopting a platform approach, you can support multiple solutions and add additional, lower priority, and future solution applications with minimal additional investment. Ultimately, by linking your business priorities to technical capabilities using the 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.
The following sections provide you with detailed information on how optimizing your underlying infrastructure in three areas can help you transform IT into a strategic asset in your organization: h Core Infrastructure Optimization Understand and subsequently improve the current state of your underlying IT infrastructure and what that means in terms of cost, security, risk, and operational agility h Business Productivity Infrastructure Optimization Streamline the management and control of content, data, and processes across all areas of your business h Application Platform Optimization Drive your business forward by quickly delivering connected, flexible, and highly secure applications In addition to the information that we present in this guide, we have prepared several resources to help you learn more about the benefits of optimization, including: h Three resource guides that explain the IT capabilities necessary to advance through the Core Infrastructure Optimization model: (1) from Basic to Standardized, (2) from Standardized to Rationalized, and (3) from Rationalized to Dynamic. To access these resources, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/io. h A series of self-assessment tools that can help you evaluate how optimized your infrastructure is and identify opportunities to advance your IT capabilities for strategic advantage. To access these resources, please visit http:// www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/assessment/ default.mspx.
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CORE INFRASTRUCTURE OPTIMIZATION
reliability gains, leading Red Hat Enterprise Linux with nearly 20% more annual uptime in similar deployment scenarios.21 Based on the criteria of real-world deployments, many organizations have found that Windows Server offers greater business value and lower long-term costs than competing platforms, while at the same time delivering the reliability, security, and manageability that enterprises demand. For more information on how the Windows Server platform compares with Linux, please visit http:// www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/compare. To help our customers build a more secure, well-managed, and dynamic core IT infrastructure, we have developed the Microsoft Core Infrastructure Optimization model. This model maps advancing levels of Infrastructure Optimization to an enterprises 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:
h Security threats are manageable and condition monitoring helps prevent disruption. h Major software deployments are streamlined and applications and systems are kept current. Today, many of our enterprise customers struggle with system complexity and outdated, labor-intensive processes. In these organizations, too often the IT infrastructure cannot keep up with changing business needs, IT is consumed with routine tasks and putting out fires, deployments are protracted or avoided altogether, and the businesss compliance with security and governance policies is inconsistent. To overcome these challenges, our customers are focusing on transforming their core IT infrastructure to help control costs and improve service levels and agility. As IT organizations make server operating system platform decisions, they often evaluate Windows Server and Linux as two viable alternatives. As part of this decision-making process, IT organizations often rank total cost of ownership (TCO), reliability, and security as key criteria and look to us to provide clear, fact-based information that demonstrates how Windows Server compares with Linux against these criteria. While hardware acquisition and software licensing costs are top of mind, the reality is that software acquisition costs represent a small fraction of overall TCOonly 7 percent over a three-year period, according to IDC.20 In contrast, the two largest cost contributors to TCO are the costs of ongoing management/maintenance and downtimetogether these costs represent 75 percent of TCO. Windows Server includes many features that help improve productivity and reduce the costs of ongoing management and maintenance, such as Active Directory, that are not included with competing platforms. With downtime representing such a significant portion of server TCO, reliability is also an important consideration. According to the 2006 Yankee Group Global Server Reliability Survey, Windows Server 2003 shows the highest h Business units see IT as a valued partner. h IT becomes a strategic enabler and source of competitive advantage.
CAPABILITIES
Based on our work with our customers, we have identified five key capabilities that collectively can have the greatest impact on your core infrastructure.
Identity and Access Management Desktop, Device, and Server Management Security and Networking Data Protection and Recovery
Basic Standardized Rationalized Dynamic
Identity and Access Management

Identity and access 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.
20 Randy Perry and Al Gillen, Demonstrating Business Value: Selling to Your C-Level Executives, IDC, Doc #206363, April 2007 21 Yankee Group Finds All Mainstream Server OS Platforms Exhibit a High Degree of Reliability, Yankee Group, June 2006
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Multiple departments, locations, and software choices can result in a proliferation of database, directory service, and applicationspecific identity stores. By advancing your organizations identity and access 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.

Since technology alone cannot create a secure and well-managed infrastructure, it is also important to implement effective 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.
Desktop, Device, and Server Management

Many of our enterprise customers with only a basic desktop, device, and server 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. Optimization can include automated patch management across desktops, the establishment of a primary desktop operating system version, use of server virtualization, automated asset management and tracking, and certificate provisioning and authorization for mobile devices. By optimizing this capability, you can reduce the burden on your IT department and help make management of the core infrastructure more efficient and cost effective.
SUPPORTING MICROSOFT SOLUTIONS AND TECHNOLOGIES

By working with Microsoft and our partners and using the Core 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 optimize your enterprises core infrastructure. Microsoft has developed the following four solution areas that help you drive the optimization of your core IT infrastructure. These solutions identify both proven best practices for reducing complexity and improving effectiveness and the Microsoft products that enable these best practices.
Security and Networking

The 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 optimize their core infrastructure, they begin adding features to make their systems not only more secure such as with wireless networking and remote accessbut also more efficientfor example, implementing wide area network (WAN) optimization and using delta-driven data replication for branch offices.
Desktop Infrastructure Optimization

With growing complexity in enterprise desktop management, IT departments face a number of challenges in ensuring performance, connectivity, and mobility. Application compatibility, multiple software images, and large-scale migration complexity complicate deployment scenarios. Management is made more difficult by inconsistent configurations, unpredictable downtime, and decentralized PC management. And security concerns around security patching, malware and viruses, license compliance, and data protection are widespread and growing. Optimizing your desktop infrastructure using the following best practices can enable your organization to reduce desktop complexity to help speed deployments, streamline management, and increase security: h Standardize PCs and minimize images h Implement comprehensive security and compliance h Automate software distribution h Virtualize applications h Centrally manage PCs
Data Protection and Recovery

The 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.
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These best practices can help you reduce your total cost of ownership, improve service levels, and drive business agility. In addition, they can help make software deployment easier, maximize system uptime, and maximize IT governance. Microsoft software for optimizing your desktop infrastructure includes: h Windows Vista Enterprise h Office Enterprise h Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack for Software Assurance h System Center h Forefront Client Security
h Microsoft Identity Lifecycle Manager h Windows Rights Management Services
Remote Infrastructure Optimization

For many of our customers, their remote infrastructurethe IT network of distributed sites representing the front line of their business such as stores, bank branches, medical facilities, hotels, restaurants, factories, schools, utility sites, and local officesis the critical point of customer interface where business is won or lost. Optimizing your remote infrastructure using the following best practices can help your organization control costs, improve security, and drive agility: h Centralize remote infrastructure management h Automate central backup h Establish comprehensive integrated security h Integrate remote hardware infrastructure The cost benefits of an optimized remote infrastructure are realized through reduced on-site support, simplified backup and restore procedures, and more efficient use of hardware and bandwidth. Furthermore, by optimizing your remote infrastructure, your organization can enable highly secure remote data and access, help protect your systems, and provide highly secure connectivity. Finally, adopting these best practices will help your organization drive agility by building on your existing infrastructure to deliver new capabilities quickly and establish a platform for the future. Microsoft software for optimizing your remote infrastructure includes: h Forefront h Windows Server h System Center
Server Infrastructure Optimization

Businesses are demanding more processing power to succeed in todays digital marketplace. At the same time, server technology is going through rapid transformation with innovations in virtualization, clustering, and server consolidation. In the environment of system complexity that very often results from these changes, IT managers running datacenters or workgroup servers can be challenged to control costs while improving compliance, security, and business agility. Optimizing your server infrastructure can help you simplify, automate, and centralize IT operations to optimize resource utilization; help ensure business continuity by enhancing IT infrastructure security and compliance; and adapt your IT infrastructure rapidly according to changing business needs. Key best practices to help achieve these results include: h Deploy end-to-end service management tools h Implement defense-in-depth security h Enable comprehensive disaster recovery capabilities h Deploy enterprise-wide identity management h Consolidate servers through virtualization These best practices can enable your organization to manage large-scale server networks, improve security and compliance, and streamline deployment. With integrated solutions for server management, security, and identity management, your organization can help reduce downtime, reduce overhead, and lower your management costs. Microsoft software for optimizing your server infrastructure includes: h Windows Server h Active Directory h Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services h System Center h Forefront
Virtualization
Virtualized computing resources provide the flexibility to quickly add a new capability when the business demands it while improving business continuity and supporting a robust disaster recovery failover plan. While virtualization is commonly associated with server consolidation, applying virtualization technologies broadly across your IT infrastructureincluding server virtualization, presentation virtualization, application virtualization, and desktop virtualizationcan yield important improvements in efficiency, flexibility, continuity, and agility. Key principles of developing a virtualization strategy include: h Use a holistic approach when deploying virtual server infrastructure, including servers, infrastructure, applications, and desktops
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h Integrate the management of virtual servers with physical servers, employing centralized policy-based management to automate maintenance h Take advantage of advanced security, continuity, and recovery opportunities to maximize business availability h Drive the necessary cultural changes for effectively managing resources in a virtual environment Microsoft and our partners offer a rich set of technologies and guidance to enable comprehensive virtualization across server workloads and desktop applications, enabling your IT staff to manage virtual and physical servers in a familiar, common environment that helps reduce system complexity and improve operating efficiency. An IT infrastructure built with Microsoft virtualization and management technologies can enable your organization to dynamically assign server resources and provision workloads through streamlined processes, improve business
availability during planned and unplanned downtime events, help ensure a robust disaster recovery process, and drive optimal resource utilization. Microsoft virtualization software includes: h System Center h Windows Server h Microsoft Virtual Server h Microsoft Terminal Services h Microsoft SoftGrid Application Virtualization h Microsoft Virtual PC Find more information on optimizing your core infrastructure at http://www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/coreinfra.
OPTIMIZING THE DESKTOP INFRASTRUCTURE AT HSBC MEXICO

HSBC Mexico used Microsoft solutions to take control of a decentralized IT environment and automate deployment of critical software applications and security updates following a major acquisition. Key benefits include: h Reduced costs and time to market through remote management h A shift to a proactive rather than reactive IT environment h Support of business growth with better system management h Establishment of the infrastructure to support up to a 30 percent increase in the number of employees h Establishment of a foundation for continuous progress
OPTIMIZING THE REMOTE INFRASTRUCTURE AT 7-ELEVEN

7-Eleven upgraded its strategic distributed retail information system to the Microsoft Windows Server System integrated server system to help lower costs and improve customer service (with Microsoft partner Intel). Key benefits include: h A 20 percent lower total cost of ownership h The ability to deliver new capabilities 50 percent faster h Reduced risk to business continuity
IMPLEMENTING VIRTUALIZATION AT ALAMANCE REGIONAL MEDICAL CENTER

Alamance Regional Medical Center implemented a SoftGrid Application Virtualization and dynamic streaming solution to speed complex application deployments and upgrades while helping reduce costs. Key benefits include: h More than U.S.$1.5 million in savings in application management costs over a three-year period h Time-to-payback in 5.4 months h Elimination of over 200 hours of regression testing h Deployment of new applications in onetenth the time; application upgrades in four hours instead of eight days h Elimination of 5,000 hours of annual enduser downtime, saving U.S.$100,000 in lost productivity h A decrease in help-desk call volume by 30 percent while resolving issues in half the time
Find more information on these and other examples of Microsoft and Microsoft partner core infrastructure solutions at http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies.
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BUSINESS PRODUCTIVITY INFRASTRUCTURE OPTIMIZATION
access to and management of these disparate repositories.23 As another example, business intelligence is a top priority for enterprise organizations, with total spending for business intelligence/performance management predicted to reach nearly U.S.$23.8 billion in 2007.24 However, a recent survey has found that in most companies, fewer than 10 percent of employees have access to Performance Management software on a regular basis.25 As IDC analyst Dan Vesset points out, business intelligence applications have concentrated on delivering information to analysts and managersa vast population exists whose business intelligence requirements have not been met to their potential.26 To streamline the management and control of content, data, and processes across all areas of their business, many organizations are now choosing to implement a unified business productivity infrastructure. Customers running legacy solutions are increasingly transitioning to Microsoft to realize the benefits of a comprehensive approach that delivers business-enabling capabilities, is familiar to help accelerate widespread adoption and impact, and provides an interoperable platform that will connect and integrate with their existing software and device investments. In addition, with a single infrastructure, they benefit from more effective management of security, deployments, and ongoing operations to help reduce IT cost and complexity. In a commissioned study of 240 business and IT decision makers, Forrester Consulting found that 78 percent of respondents anticipate the convergence of ECM, enterprise communication and collaboration, and business intelligence in their organizations.27 At Microsoft, we believe that enterprise search will also be part of this convergence, as businesses need to successfully locate and apply information to make better, faster, more relevant, more localized, and more effective decisions. The Microsoft Business Productivity Infrastructure Optimization model can help you assess the current state of your organizations business productivity infrastructure, focusing on capabilities that can help you streamline communications, simplify how your people work together, make processes and content management more efficient, empower your people to find information and expertise anywhere in the organization, and improve the quality of business insight.
Todays 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. In this changing workplace, people need to be able to work more effectively across boundaries, they must digest an overload of information, and they must manage an increasingly complicated environment of compliance and risk. At the same time, businesses are under pressure to manage IT cost and complexitythey need to maximize the value of their lineof-business (LOB) systems, rationalize redundant investments, and improve overall operational efficiency. Business productivity software solutions are critical in empowering people in this changing workplace. Traditionally, businesses have deployed solutions to deliver business productivity capabilities in isolationand in many cases, these implementations have achieved limited adoption and experienced a low success rate. As one example, at a conservative estimate, 50 percent of enterprise content management (ECM) implementations in large organizations fail.22 Interestingly, one survey found that 34% of end users at large organizations believe that there are more than 25 discrete information repositories in their organization and that 73% of end users have a business need to unify
22 23 24 25
ECM as a Shared Service: The New Frontier, Doculabs, 2006 AIIM Industry Watch From Plans to Projects: How ECM Technologies Get Implemented, AIIM The Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Association (http://www.aiim.org), August 2005 John Hagerty and Eric Klein, Market Demand for Business Intelligence and Performance Management (BI/PM), 2007, AMR Research, March 2007 Beyond Business Intelligence: Turning Information into Business Performance, sponsored by Cognos and published in cooperation with the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG), March 2007; produced by Unisphere Research, publishers of Database Trends & Applications and 5 Minute Briefing: Data Integration e-mail newsletter 26 Dan Vesset, The Next Wave of Business Intelligence, IDC, Doc #lcUS20380506, September 2006 27 A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Microsoft; IT Decision Makers Get Information Workplace Platforms But Strategies And Implementations Are Just Beginning To Break Silos, Forrester Research, Inc., December 2006
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CAPABILITIES
Based on our work with our customers, we have identified five key capabilities that can have the greatest impact on your business productivity infrastructure.
Collaboration
As our customers focus on innovation and improving their market responsiveness, they are looking for ways to streamline how their people can collaborate with other employees, partners, suppliers, and customers. However, in many cases they struggle with the rising cost and complexity associated with a proliferation of disparate collaboration tools, including workspaces, portals, wikis, blogs, and document management systems. These organizations can transform the way their people work together by implementing a collaboration solution that delivers familiar, pervasive, best-of-breed capabilities and that easily integrates with desktop productivity tools as part of a broader business productivity infrastructure. By advancing their collaboration capabilities, our customers empower their teams through collaborative workspaces, connect people throughout the organization and beyond with robust portals, and enable communities with social computing tools. At the same time, they help reduce cost and complexity for IT by taking advantage of an integrated infrastructure, existing investments, and an extensible architectural platform.
Unified Communications Collaboration Enterprise Content Management Enterprise Search Business Intelligence
Basic Standardized Rationalized Dynamic
Unified Communications
For many information workers, the sheer volume of communications in the modern workplace is overwhelming. Many of our customers tell us that they are battling information fragmentation as a result of media and device proliferation, which is also proving to be a management challenge for their IT departments. Furthermore, too often incompatible systems and a lack of application integration mean that organizations have a limited ability to share directory, calendar, and instant messaging (IM) capabilities beyond the firewall. These challenges are compounded by increasing pressure to manage security risks and compliance across their communications systems. Microsofts vision is to use software to streamline communications between people and organizationsregardless of medium, platform, device, or locationthrough a comprehensive set of clients, servers, services, and devices that deliver e-mail/calendaring, mobile messaging and device management, unified messaging, presence/IM, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) call management, and audio/video/Web conferencing. By empowering end users with a familiar set of tools, built on an enterprise-ready, scalable, and easily managed software-powered architecture, these technologies can break down communication silos and extend existing communications investments while enabling business process innovation.
Enterprise Content Management

Across industries, enterprises are faced with exponential growth in information as well as ever-increasing regulations about how that information is stored and managed. In our experience, 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 manage the end-to-end life cycle of a wide range of content and better streamline collaborative business processes. Some of the key benefits of optimizing ECM systems include being able to extend content management to every information worker, reducing the risk of non-compliance, and helping control IT deployment and management costs. Advancing your organizations ECM capabilitiesthrough 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.
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Enterprise Search
With the growing number and complexity of information sources, it is no surprise that searching for and finding information has become a major challenge in enterprise organizations. In fact, according to a recent IDC study, the number of hours each week that workersranging from programmers to line-ofbusiness employees to the CEOspend seeking information has increased significantly in the last five years: from an average of six hours per week in 2001 to an average of 10 hours per week in 2006.28 Our customers tell us that, in many instances, this inefficiency comes down to poor integration of search across file types and applications, which means that users must log in to different systems and use different techniques to drill down for information. Furthermore, different user interfaces present data differently, creating inconsistencies and confusion. By advancing your organizations search capabilities, you can empower your people by making it easy for them to find and act on information and expertise from anywhere in the organization. Users have a single point of entry to the content that they need from across the entire business, no matter where or how it is stored. They can also check the content in or out of content libraries, collaborate on it, and easily extract important excerpts, all within the context of the search results. With an optimized enterprise search capability, your IT professionals have tools that give them the right balance of control and simplicity to help secure and manage your search solution deployment. And an optimized enterprise search solution can also grow as your organizations needs change and extend to connect to a diverse set of information systems.
building a single, complete system, you can contain costs by relieving your IT professionals of the need to maintain disparate business intelligence systems. With a flexible, integrated platform that enables you to simply connect back-end systems and that provides easy-to-use tools that give your people rich, actionable insights, you can maximize the business value of your data. Note: The business intelligence capability is a shared capability between the Business Productivity Infrastructure Optimization and the Application Platform Optimization models. For business productivity infrastructure, it is focused on how information is accessed by users.

Microsofts 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 full range of business application capabilities including workflow, search, the Business Data Catalog, an extensible user interface, Office Open XML File Formats, and the Web Site and Security Framework (portal). To provide you with more choice in how you build and manage your business productivity infrastructure, in addition to traditional onpremise solutions we also offer services including conferencing services through Office Live Meeting, collaboration services through Microsoft Office Groove Enterprise Services, and four distinct managed e-mail services through Exchange Hosted Services, complementing both on-premise and outsourced e-mail solutions: h Microsoft Exchange Hosted Filtering helps protect against e-mailborne malicious software (malware). h Microsoft Exchange Hosted Archive helps satisfy retention requirements for compliance. h Microsoft Exchange Hosted Continuity helps preserve access to e-mail during and after emergency situations. h Microsoft Exchange Hosted Encryption encrypts data to help preserve confidentiality. In addition, through our Forefront family of business security products we offer premium services to help protect your business productivity environment. Microsoft Forefront Security for Exchange Server integrates multiple scan engines from industry-leading security firms into a comprehensive, layered solution, helping you protect your Exchange Server messaging environment from viruses, worms, spam, and inappropriate content. Microsoft Forefront Security for SharePoint manages and integrates industry-leading antivirus scan engines to help provide comprehensive protection against the latest threats, inappropriate
Business Intelligence
Business intelligence is all about helping people at all levels of an organization to get the information that they need to make faster, better decisions that drive the business forward. Its importance is clear: according to Mark McDonald, Group Vice President, Gartner, Inc., business intelligence applications ranked as the top technology priority for CIOs in our 2007 survey.29 Traditionally, business intelligence has been the domain of IT and business analysts; typically it has been delivered through specialized business intelligence tools (which often require specialist training) and implemented through numerous department-specific point solutions. Microsofts vision for business intelligence is to enable everyone in your organizationfrom business users and executives to developers, IT professionals, and information workersto have access to critical business data across a diverse set of devices and applications. By optimizing your business intelligence capability, your organization can benefit from improved decision making, integrated performance management, and more efficient data management. Timely access to real-time information, reporting, and analyticspersonalized by rolecan empower your information workers to take informed actions that reflect and achieve your corporate goals. In addition, by
28 Susan Feldman and Jonathan Severance, Information@Work: Finding and Buying Information in the 21st Century, IDC, Doc #205276, January 2007 29 Gartner EXP Survey of More than 1,400 CIOs Shows CIOs Must Create Leverage to Remain Relevant to the Business, Gartner, Inc., February 2007 (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=501189)
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content, and disclosure of confidential informationhelping ensure that your documents are safe before they are saved to or retrieved from your SharePoint document library. Microsoft business productivity infrastructure software includes: h Office Enterprise and Office Professional Plus h Office SharePoint Server h Exchange Server h Office Communications Server h Office PerformancePoint Server h SQL Server Find more information on optimizing your business productivity infrastructure at http://www.microsoft.com/business/ peopleready/bizinfra. To learn more about Microsoft Enterprise Search solutions, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/ enterprisesearch.
INCREASING IT VALUE WITH A SIMPLIFIED INFRASTRUCTURE AT DEL MONTE FOODS

Del Monte Foods consolidated its IT infrastructure based on Microsoft servers and technologies and transformed the way that IT and business users collaborate, communicate, share business insights, and manage data within the company (with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner K2). Key benefits include: h Simplified IT management and enhanced security h A shift of 10 percent of IT staff from providing IT support to higher value tasks h An increase in IT service levels with nearly 100 percent Exchange Server reliability and increased overall system uptime h Realization of significant savings in licensing fees
CONSOLIDATING RESOURCES WITH NEW ARCHITECTURE AT BREMBO

Brembo deployed a range of Microsoft solutions to consolidate and standardize its infrastructure and provide increased, unrestricted access to information. Key benefits include: h Increased productivity with company-wide file sharing h Reduced maintenance costs h Improved development environment h Reduced risk of errors with automated infrastructure
PROVIDING FAST, COMPREHENSIVE ACCESS TO PROJECT DATA AT NOVARTIS

The Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research developed a robust portfolio management solution using an array of Microsoft technology including Office SharePoint Server. Key benefits include: h Fast, collaborative access to data h Better business insight h Streamlined research and development processes h Low cost for solution development
Find more information on these and other examples of Microsoft and Microsoft partner business productivity infrastructure solutions at http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies.
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APPLICATION PLATFORM OPTIMIZATION
one level to the next in the model, they drive more efficiency, collaboration, and agility across the IT life cycle: h Developers become part of more efficient and collaborative development teams. h IT professionals use familiar tools to manage and deliver applications more effectively. h Business users can manipulate reports, optimize business processes, and share information. An optimized application platform can enable your IT department to provide a scalable and flexible data and business intelligence foundation; connect systems across the company and enable interoperability; enable 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.
CAPABILITIES
Based on our work with our customers, we have identified five key capabilities that can have the greatest impact on your application platform.
Software has evolved beyond just helping people create documents and read e-mail messages: it now connects people with the information and business processes needed to make better decisions. The supporting infrastructure needs to be flexible, connected, and able to evolve with business needs. However, an increasingly complex IT landscape can make this difficult to achieve. The recent explosion in form factors to support remote availability and the need for constant connectivity, the increase in global software development outsourcing, the need to connect with legacy systems, and growing interest in service orientation are challenging for many of our customers. This is further complicated by continually advancing business needs: demand for business-to-business (B2B) connectivity, business-to-consumer (B2C) experiences, companywide business intelligence, and ongoing innovation and business change add to the pressure on IT and developers. Advancing your organizations application platform can help you meet these needs and overcome challenges with system availability, user satisfaction and productivity, information visibility, and application development backlogs. Powerful, dynamic applications enable your business to compete more effectively by delivering company-wide capabilities, information, and insights that enable employees to forge stronger customer connections and improve operational performance. Furthermore, with an adaptive, scalable application platform, your business is empowered for the future, able to adjust to changing market dynamics, capitalize on new opportunities, and deliver top-line results. The Application Platform Optimization model has been designed specifically for organizations looking to analyze, understand, and evolve their application platform capabilities. As organizations move from
User Experience Business Intelligence SOA and Business Process Data Management Development
Basic Standardized Advanced Dynamic
User Experience
User experience is frequently a late consideration in application design, and yet our customers tell us that it is increasingly important to driving business success. They need to deliver rich, interactive applications. They are looking to differentiate their services through richer access to content and innovative experiences. To be productive, their people need easy-touse tools that are specifically designed to help them achieve their goals. Consistent, appealing, and highly intuitive user experiences encourage fast adoption, improve productivity, and increase satisfaction for both customers and employees while helping reduce support costs and maximize IT effectiveness. By optimizing the user experience capability in your organization,
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you can achieve far-reaching benefits. Dynamic and customized information delivery enhances decision making to help boost agility. Rich, interactive services and cost-effective self-service options can directly improve customer loyaltya quantifiable IT contribution to the business. A consistent, integrated application development environment and powerful development tools can boost developer productivity and help reduce cost. And tools that make it much easier to develop prototypes through a standardsbased, highly interoperable platform can enable your business to respond quickly to changing conditions.
SOA and Business Process

Many of our enterprise customers have incrementally added information systems to keep up with increasing customer demands, new business opportunities, and expanding government regulations, as well as through mergers and acquisitions. This has produced a complex, distributed IT environmentand, too frequently, the existing IT portfolio does not adequately meet specific business needs, is costly to manage and maintain, and is inflexible in the face of business growth and change. A service-oriented architecture (SOA) can enable your business to make the most of these existing IT investments while supporting your overall organizational goals effectively. Optimizing your SOA and business process capability can help you increase your customers access to company resources and information and help improve customer retention through faster sales and more efficient services. It can help you improve regulatory compliance through better process control, regulation, and monitoring while reducing the risk of data errors and security breaches. Efficiencies across organizational boundaries also improve through better visibility, control, automation, and integration. And by creating new and reusable SOA components as well as composite applications that integrate with your existing applications, you can use your IT assets more efficiently. A SOA provides a platform for a far more agile IT environment by enabling your IT professionals to design flexible systems that can be adapted rapidly to meet your companys changing business needs and priorities, help you build stronger connections with your customers and suppliers, enhance decision making, and drive greater employee productivity.
Business Intelligence
Business intelligence is all about helping people at all levels of an organization to get the business information that they need to make faster, better decisions that drive the business forward. Its importance is clear: according to Mark McDonald, Group Vice President, Gartner, Inc., business intelligence applications ranked as the top technology priority for CIOs in our 2007 survey.30 Traditionally, business intelligence has been the domain of IT and business analysts; typically it has been delivered through specialized business intelligence tools (which often require specialist training) and implemented through numerous department-specific point solutions. Microsofts vision for business intelligence is to enable everyone in your organizationfrom business users and executives to developers, IT professionals, and information workersto have access to critical business data across a diverse set of devices and applications. By optimizing your business intelligence capability, your organization can benefit from improved decision making, integrated performance management, and more efficient data management. Timely access to real-time information, reporting, and analyticspersonalized by rolecan empower your information workers to take informed actions that reflect and achieve your corporate goals. In addition, by building a single, complete system, you can contain costs by relieving your IT professionals of the need to maintain disparate business intelligence systems. With a flexible, integrated platform that enables you to simply connect back-end systems and that provides easy-to-use tools that give your people rich, actionable insights, you can maximize the business value of your data. Note: The business intelligence capability is a shared capability between the Business Productivity Infrastructure Optimization and the Application Platform Optimization models. For the application platform, it is focused on how information is managed and processed and how business logic is centrally managed.
Data Management
In todays connected world, data is paramount. Unfortunately, all too often company information is stored in diverse silos, making it time consuming and cumbersome to access using different interfaces, passwords, and commands. More importantly, the true value of company information is never realized, because staff cannot see a single view of all data relating to a customer, transaction, product, or event. A disparate environment also makes security compliance difficult and is costly to manage and hard to scale. Optimizing your data management capability can help you maximize information access, significantly reduce IT complexity and costs, and efficiently manage information stored in heterogeneous data environments. A comprehensive and integrated data management and analysis solution that delivers scalability, availability, manageability, and built-in business intelligence delivers a number of benefits. It can help you and your people increase productivity for faster business results. It can also enable you to gain deeper insight into your business with integrated, comprehensive analysis and reporting. Ultimately, when your staff have timely access to important information from your organizations vast array of applications, systems, and tools, they can be more responsive to business opportunities.
30 Gartner EXP Survey of More than 1,400 CIOs Shows CIOs Must Create Leverage to Remain Relevant to the Business, Gartner, Inc., February 2007 (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=501189)
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Development
Application backlogs, increasing pressure to support the needs of the business, lack of user and stakeholder engagement, inferior development software, and low productivity caused by ineffective collaboration, communication, and project management within an organizationall of these factors can challenge development teams and lead to a low project success rate. Our customers are looking for tools to help their developers improve project success rates and rapidly deliver high-quality, highly secure solutions and dynamic data-driven applications. An integrated software development platform that interoperates within your existing environment can help increase your developers ability to meet project deadlines and deliver high-quality software while making the most of their existing skills. The business benefits of optimizing your development capability include increased productivity and quality through integrated and familiar tools and gaining the ability to develop, test, and secure your critical Web applications and infrastructure. In addition, optimizing your development capability can help you reduce costs through better visibility into your development process and achieve better predictability and planning through integrated process and methodology support.

Microsofts research and development (R&D) investments in the application platform are wide in scope, spanning clients, servers, and devices. In all aspects, we are committed to three fundamental considerations to drive business success: h Helping you more easily build connected and adaptable systems Making it easier to connect your systems, processes, people, and information in a heterogeneous and increasingly service-oriented environment; creating adaptable solutions that are built with process and business change in mindincluding enterprise-ready scalability to meet future business needs; and providing cohesive technologies and processes across the life cycle (covering security, development, deployment, and management) h 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
OPTIMIZING USER EXPERIENCE AT BP

BP created a data-visualization solution using real-time weather data along with Microsoft Virtual Earth mapping software, SQL Server, and SharePoint Portal Server. Key benefits include: h Greater understanding and decision making enabled through visualization of data h Reduction in hours for emergency response h Broader use for other needs enabled through extensibility
OPTIMIZING DEVELOPMENT AT EMIRATES AIRLINES

Emirates Airlines integrated Web and smartclient versions of its frequent flyer program solution and provided greater scalability and functionality with the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET development system and the Microsoft .NET Framework. Key benefits include: h Reduction in development time and budget by 50 percent h The ability to write once, deploy many times h A 100 percent performance gain
OPTIMIZING DATA MANAGEMENT AT BARNES AND NOBLE

Barnes and Noble deployed a new data warehouse to extract more business intelligence from its operational systems using SQL Server, SQL Server Integration Services, and hardware from HP and Intel (with Microsoft partners HP, Intel, ProClarity Corporation, and Quest Software, Inc.). Key benefits include: h Valuable transactional information available to employees much faster than before h Improved business decision making with enhanced reporting and analysis h Improved customer service because employees are better informed
Find more information on these and other examples of Microsoft and Microsoft partner application platform solutions at http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies.
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h Providing the tools, technologies, and business choices to fit your needs Giving you the flexibility to choose the right combination of on-premise and hosted software services; 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 The Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) 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 realworld experience.
Microsoft application platform software includes: User Experience h .NET Framework (including Windows Presentation Framework) h Visual Studio h Microsoft Expression Studio h Microsoft Office system h Office SharePoint Server h Silverlight Business Intelligence h SQL Server h Office PerformancePoint Server h Office Excel h Office SharePoint Server
SOA and Business Process h BizTalk Server (including BizTalk Services, a hosted Internet Service Bus [ISB]) h Office SharePoint Server h .NET Framework Data Management h SQL Server Development h Visual Studio h Visual Studio Team System Find more information on optimizing your application platform at http://www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/appplat.
53
WHY MICROSOFT?
At Microsoft, we are dedicated to helping you empower your people to drive your business forward. From the start, our goal has been to deliver software that enables people to harness their creativity, imagination, and intellect. Over the years, we have expanded this vision beyond individuals working in isolation to delivering optimized productivity solutions for dynamic teams and a geographically distributed workforce. With our latest wave of innovation, we believe that now is the ideal time to re-evaluate how software can best be used in the enterprise. Through our software plus services strategy, we remain committed to helping you realize the most value out of your IT investments and drive growth and new opportunities for your business. The value that Microsoft offers your business has as much to do with Microsoft as a company as it does with the software that we deliver. As a company, we understand how software is used, we are committed to building strong relationships with our customers and partners, we believe strongly in interoperability, and we take a long-term approach. These attributes translate directly into the software that we deliversoftware that is familiar and easy for your people to use, widely used and supported around the world, easy to integrate and connect with what you already have, and innovative and continually evolving to meet your needs.
WE UNDERSTAND HOW SOFTWARE IS USED

h Our software is familiar and easy to use
Every day, in every department, we dedicate ourselves to thinking about and understanding how people use software and then applying this knowledge to build software that is familiar and easy to use. One of our goals is to make sure that peoples experiences are consistent from application to application. Microsoft Office is an example of this: from the start, a key design principle was to ensure that the programs within Microsoft Office worked similarly. We have applied the same approach to our server and developer platforms. Our System Center solutions are designed to work with the systems that you already have in place and give your IT professionals tools that make them more productive by simplifying customization tasks and making it easy for them to manage software assets throughout your organization, all from within a familiar environment. For your developers, we know that mixed-language programming is a reality today and so through Visual Studio we provide an integrated development environment that enables them to work in multiple languages more easily by pulling together the tools that they need into a single common interface. Because we understand how an information worker works with software, how a system administrator manages systems, and how a developer develops new applications and solutions, we build tools that will fit with the way that your people work and deliver a consistent, familiar experience to help them work more productively. We know how important it is to understand our customers needs so that we can design software that will maximize the potential of people. To validate that we are taking the right approach, we also invest heavily in usability research. Through our Usability Labs, our usability engineers are integrated into the product development process from beginning to end. We also recruit people from outside the company to work with our products during development, to help us ensure that we are building the most useful and easy-to-use software. Our product groups work hard to understand the needs of people in different rolesa great example is our Microsoft Dynamics Customer Model, through which we have created more than 60 personas, or detailed profiles of different roles that typically use our Microsoft Dynamics software. Our goal is to empower all people with our software, and we invest significantly in designing for accessibility to make computers easier to use for those with a wide array of disabilities; for example, Windows Vista introduces state-of-the-art speech recognition and magnification capabilities as well as the Ease of
WHY MICROSOFT?
Microsoft the Company

We understand how software is used.
Microsoft Software
is familiar and easy to use.
We build strong relationships.
is widely used and supported.
We believe in interoperability.
is easy to integrate and connect with what you have. is innovative and continually evolves to meet your needs.
We have a long-term approach.
In the sections that follow, we look at how we believe each of these attributesof our company and our softwarecan help you deliver the tools and infrastructure to empower your people to achieve their best and help your business succeed. Beyond simply providing the right platform of innovative software and services, we are committed to building the right relationships with you and your partners and delivering the right solutions for your business. We will work closely with you to make sure that we understand your unique business objectives and requirements. And we will stand behind our solutions and offer you support every step of the way.
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Access Center, which provides a centralized location where people can quickly and easily adjust accessibility settings and manage assistive technology programs. And to help us continue to make computers easier to use and better able to understand people, our Microsoft Research labs focus on inventing more intuitive, productive ways of interacting with computerssuch as through research into machine learning, natural language processing and speech recognition, vision technology, and telepresence. To learn more about our investments in usability research, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/usability.
Microsoft Services
WE BUILD STRONG RELATIONSHIPS

h Our software is widely used and supported
We are committed to building close relationships with our enterprise customers. Our account teams and executives invest in understanding your unique business needs by learning as much as possible about your organization and strategic objectives. By building a strong relationship and deep knowledge of your business, we are better able to work with you to optimize your technology investments to achieve your business imperatives. Microsoft Services engagements foster an even deeper relationship between our companies and can help you get the most value out of your IT investments while minimizing your risk. At the same time, we understand the value in diversity, and we have built close relationships with an extensive network of technology partners, developers, and support professionals around the world who offer a breadth of expertise and experience with our software. As we have built these relationships, we have used feedback from our customers and partners to evolve our business from a desktop company into a true enterprise company to better and more comprehensively meet your needs. And we will continue to listen to your feedback as we develop as a business to help you take advantage of the latest in technology innovation through our software plus services approach. Our commitment to building close relationships with our customers and partners is evident in how widely used and supported our software isenabling you to have confidence in solutions that have been proven in enterprise settings and are backed up by the specialized expertise of Microsoft Services and our partner organizations.
We understand how important the right product choices and effective planning are to helping you reduce cost and time for your project and minimize risk for your business. Through Microsoft Services, we offer you a full range of services covering the complete IT life cycle, from initial architecture and planning services, to effective project delivery, to ongoing support. With deep expertise, knowledge, and experience with Microsoft software and close relationships with the Microsoft product groups, our advisors focus on the innovative use of Microsoft technology in solutions that generate rapid, meaningful, and measurable results. Our goal is to help you successfully implement mission-critical enterprise solutions based on Microsoft technology while reducing your risk, accelerating the time to deployment, and optimizing your solutions to help you achieve maximum value. Once your solution has been implemented, we will continue to work with you and your partners to ensure that it meets your expectations and to help you run it effectively. We are also committed to working with other technology providers on Microsoft Services engagements. In fact, over 80 percent of our largest technology consulting projects include a partner. To help ensure that our partners have the resources and services expertise needed for successful engagements, Microsoft invested over U.S.$30 million in fiscal year 2007 in a skill-building partner certification program. Together with our partners, we create and share best practices and offer you comprehensive technological expertise with resources for every stage of the Microsoft IT life cycle. To help ensure that we deliver services in line with our enterprise customers priorities, we have established the service lines described on the following page. 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.
WHY MICROSOFT?
55
MICROSOFT SERVICES: CONSULTING AND SUPPORT SERVICES

ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING Through our Architecture and Planning services (formerly called Enterprise Strategy and Consulting, or ESC), we help you align IT to organizational strategies and initiatives and make IT decisions that can help reduce risk and maximize value. TECHNOLOGY CONSULTING Core Infrastructure ENTERPRISE SUPPORT Through our Enterprise Support services, we provide you with customized and pre-packaged supportincluding proactive services to improve IT health, reactive services for when things go wrong, and various levels of support account management: h Premier Support This personalized support relationship offers 247 problem resolution support, as well as training and workshops to help keep your IT staff up to date. Because it is a customizable service offering, Premier Support gives you the flexibility to choose the support options that best fit your organization. In addition, you receive a direct, priority route to Microsoft technical experts, helping lower the risk to your IT infrastructure, improve productivity, and maximize the benefits from your existing IT investments. h Essential Support This family of attractively priced, pre-packaged support offerings includes 247 problem resolution support, pooled remote support account management, answers to how to questions, and access to Microsoft Premier Online, our online customer portal with an extended partner-level knowledgebase. h Professional Support Our Professional Support offerings provide phone- and Web-based technical support options for your developers, IT professionals, and partners.
Through our core infrastructure optimization services, we help you achieve efficient resource usage, eliminate unnecessary cost and complexity, minimize unauthorized access to resources and vulnerabilities to viruses, and ensure that the business is always up and running. We offer consulting competencies in three capabilities: identity and access management; desktop, h In our Architecture and Planning device, and server management; and security and networking. Advisor offering, our advisors can help equip you and your Business Productivity Infrastructure team to mitigate risk and solve Through our business productivity services, we can business challenges using their help you streamline the management and control deep experience, an extensive of content, data, and processes across all areas of and proven toolkit, and a set of methods based on best practices your business. Our business productivity offerings encompass unified communications, enterprise search, from hundreds of successful collaboration, enterprise content management, and engagements worldwide. business intelligence capabilities. h Our Architecture Transformation offering provides proven Application Platform architecture design services that can help you mitigate Through our application platform services, we can help architectural risk and drive your IT organization deliver connected, flexible, and increased business alignment highly secure applications with tools and processes and value from your Microsoft in the user experience, development, business platform. intelligence, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process, and data management capabilities. h Our Platform Rationalization offering can help you reduce Business Solutions IT complexity while freeing up capital for innovation, Through our business solutions services, we provide a empowering your IT set of practices and guidelines based on our Microsoft organization to deliver Dynamics Sure Step methodology for implementing measurable business value. Microsoft Dynamics enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, as well as support services. Industry We provide industry-oriented services, offerings, and support to help you enhance productivity by integrating people, processes, and information to run your business more efficiently, more flexibly, and with greater ease of use. Our services include implementing industryspecific solutions based on the Microsoft Customer Care Framework and the option to add a dedicated support engineer with a specific industry background to your Premier Support agreement.
WHY MICROSOFT?
56
Microsoft Partners
We have invested heavily in building a broad ecosystem of partners to better meet the needs of our enterprise customers. We know that every business has its own requirements and challenges as it responds to industry and technology changesour extensive partner network enables you to adapt more readily with access to expertise that fits your unique needs. With extensive experience, specialized knowledge in building people-ready solutions based on Microsoft technologies, and industry and business expertise, Microsoft partners can support you in designing and deploying enterprise-class solutions for your people. Our partners offer you value through: h Delivery assurance Microsoft partners work cooperatively with Microsoft to test, support, and improve Microsoft software, giving you assurance that their technology solutions will help your people to perform at their best. h Specialized innovation Microsoft partners understand 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. h 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 peoples impact. h 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.
WE BELIEVE IN INTEROPERABILITY
h Our software is easy to integrate and connect with what you have
We deliver interoperability by design. At its most basic level, this means connecting people, data, and diverse systems. Microsoft is increasingly being recognized as a leader in enterprise platform software. In fact, according to a recent IDC survey of 500 North American organizations, the Windows Server operating system is the most popular platform for running mission-critical applications (excluding e-mail applications) in the enterprise.31 The respondents also reported that they expect to use Windows Server more than any other operating system as their primary server operating system for mission-critical applications over the next two years. Furthermore, they identified Microsoft .NET as the application technology platform that they expect to use the most for developing mission-critical applications over the next two years.
80% 70%
Server operating systems used to run Server operating systems used mission-critical applications* to run mission-critical applications*
WHY MICROSOFT?
60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%
Windows Server
(including Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, HP-UX and Linux)
UNIX
z/Series
iSeries
Other
Dont know
Source: 2007 Mission Critical North American Application Platform Study, IDC, August 2007 * Percentages total more than 100 as the survey allowed for multiple responses.
31 IDC study sponsored by Microsoft; 2007 Mission Critical North American Application Platform Study, IDC, August 2007
57
While the Microsoft platform is the most widely used for missioncritical applications, we recognize the importance of constantly innovating to deliver software that meets our customers needs and we are committed to ensuring that our software is easy to integrate and connect with the software and devices that you and your business partners use, today and tomorrow. Customers have told us that interoperability is just as important as reliability and security. For this reason we take a holistic approach to interoperability in order to best achieve it, enabling a balance between competitive innovation and a commitment to enabling you to control your data and connect to diverse systems. Our goal is to deliver greater out-of-the-box connectivity through our interoperability by design approach: h Engineering interoperability into our products and technologies h Working with communities of customers, developers, partners, and competitors to build bridges and coexist h Providing access to our intellectual property through licensing and translation tools h Participating in standards bodies and supporting standards in products to foster interoperability One recent example of our commitment to interoperability is the Office Open XML File Format specification for electronic documents, which Microsoft developed in close collaboration with more than 20 other companies. This is now the default file format for documents created in the 2007 Microsoft Office system and is currently being considered as an international standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). This proposed standard will help ensure backward compatibility with earlier document formats, make it much easier to integrate business information with documents, and can be implemented across multiple different applications and platforms, now and into the future. Another way that we are supporting interoperability in the industry and with Microsoft software is through the Interop Vendor Alliance, a global, cross-industry group of software and hardware vendors that work together to identify opportunities for enhancing interoperability with Microsoft systems on behalf of their customers. Through this alliance, we work proactively with our partners and competitors alike to help increase customers return on investment in their IT solutions while helping reduce the cost and risk associated with integrating diverse systems. More information on the Interop Vendor Alliance is available from http://interopvendoralliance.org. To learn more about our approach to interoperability by design, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/interop.
WE HAVE A LONG-TERM APPROACH

h Our software is innovative and continually evolves to meet your needs
We know how important it is to your business to plan effectively for the future and ensure that you are able to make the most of technology innovation to advance your competitiveness. We have a long-term approach that enables us to deliver software that is innovative and continually evolves to meet your needs. Our approach begins with the extensive investments in research & development (R&D) that we make each year. This has helped to put us at the forefront of cutting-edge software development and it reflects our motivation to continue to advance technology and better support the way that your people work, live, and play. We have also fostered one of the worlds largest communities of software developers. Today, our MSDN developer program works with a community of more than 6 million professional developers. By not only transferring our ideas from the laboratory into our own products but also extending them through the publication process and our licensing program, we promote continued innovation in the software industry. For example, we are making elements of the user interface in the 2007 Microsoft Office releaserepresenting a massive R&D investmentavailable to qualified developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) through a new royalty-free licensing agreement. By enabling developers to build applications that have the look and feel of the 2007 Microsoft Office system applications, we are extending our innovation in a way that will ultimately benefit users by offering them a consistent experience. In addition to the innovation that we deliver through our longterm approach to research and software development, we also commit to working with you to ensure that you get maximum value from your investment in Microsoft technologyboth at the time of your initial investment and into the future. We can work with you to build a Microsoft software roadmap for your organization, helping you plan for future deployments and refreshes. In addition, our Enterprise Agreement licensing options enable you to gain the benefits of volume licensing for your current software investments while providing you with both the flexibility to evolve as your business needs change and the opportunity to take advantage of upgrade rights for our latest software releases.
WHY MICROSOFT?
58
Microsoft Research
Microsoft Research is at the heart of our technology research and benefits directly from our dedicated R&D spending, which we increase by an average of 20 percent each year. The Microsoft Research organization dates back to 1991, when 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 researchresearch that is not bound by product cyclesso that future generations would have new foundations and technology breakthroughs to build on. 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. As part of our commitment to building on our prior research investments and continuing to evolve and innovate into the future, our R&D investments each year lead into our software roadmap for the following year. We have a dedicated technology transfer team that enables our researchers to work closely with our product development groups to transfer research technology into our products. By bridging our long-range research and nearterm product development functions, we can fulfill on our shared visionseeing our innovative work reflected in improved software products for our customers. To learn more about Microsoft Research, please visit http://research.microsoft.com.
Microsoft Enterprise Agreement

Our Enterprise Agreement program offers a flexible, cost-effective way to acquire the software needed to build the infrastructure for a people-ready business. Our customers are increasingly expecting software to play a broader role in empowering their people, and the latest releases of our client and server software have been designed to help you deliver a richer set of capabilities to enable role-based productivity and help you build a more dynamic IT infrastructure. An Enterprise Agreement simplifies your organizations access to these technologies and enables you to extend foundational capabilitiessuch as business intelligence, collaboration, and enterprise searchto people across your organization, regardless of role, helping them to make better connections with your customers, drive innovation, improve operations, and build strong relationships with your partners and suppliers. Designed for customers that want to implement enterprise-wide standards, the Enterprise Agreement provides a framework for making software license acquisitions and management easier, helping you reduce the cost of IT and get the most out of your software investments. By licensing your software through an Enterprise Agreement, you get: h Volume pricing on the latest Microsoft software
WHY MICROSOFT?
h 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. h The ability to license exclusive technology, such as the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) for Software Assurance, which is available only to customers that have licensed Windows Vista through an Enterprise Agreement. An Enterprise Agreement gives you the choice and flexibility to purchase the options that are right for your organization today and can grow as your business needs evolve. With the upgrade rights included with Software Assurance, your organization will also benefit from our continuing innovation, with access to the latest software releases over the term of your agreement. For more information on the value of Microsoft Enterprise Agreements, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/ programs/ent.
Software Roadmap
We understand that visibility into our software release timeline is important to your IT strategic planning. Your Microsoft account team can work with you to stay up to date on planned releases of Microsoft software that can help you meet your current and future technology requirements. As we work together to identify solutions that enable role-based productivity and build an optimized, dynamic IT infrastructure, an awareness of our software roadmap can help you understand technology dependencies and help you make better purchasing and deployment decisions. To learn more about building a Microsoft software roadmap for your organization, please speak with your Microsoft account manager.
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EXECUTIVE RESOURCES
The 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.
EXECUTIVE BRIEFING CENTERS

Microsoft has established several Executive Briefing Centers around the world to support and host Executive Briefing programs with enterprise customers to highlight the business value of our 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.
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.
MICROSOFT SOLUTION SHOWCASE FOR THE MICROSOFT OFFICE SYSTEM

The Solution Showcase presents a sample of scenariosorganized into both industry and departmental categoriesthat highlight how the Microsoft Office system can help you 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. 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.
MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGY CENTERS

In 16 locations around the world, Microsoft Technology Centers (MTCs) enable enterprise and independent software vendor (ISV) customers to envision, architect, and prove highly secure, customized solutions based on Microsoft and partner technologies. The dynamic collection of resources within each MTC enables you to make technology decisions with confidence by removing traditional barriers. Drawing on the integrated innovation of Microsoft products and technologies, the MTC can be a powerful resource for your organization and can help shorten your solution development time and reduce the total cost of solution acquisition. The three unique offerings delivered by MTC dedicated staff include Strategy Briefings, Architecture Design Sessions, and Proof-of-Concept Workshops. For more information on how to engage with an MTC, please contact your Microsoft account manager. For additional information on MTCs, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/mtc.
WHY MICROSOFT?
LOCAL MICROSOFT EVENTS

Together with our partners, we host a variety of events, such as executive roundtables, 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 enabling role-based productivity and building a dynamic IT environment 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.
RAPID ECONOMIC JUSTIFICATION

The 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 organizations 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
LOCAL MICROSOFT OFFICES

If 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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WHY MICROSOFT?
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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, BitLocker, BizTalk, Excel, Expression, Forefront, Groove, Hotmail, Microsoft Dynamics, MSDN, MSN, the Office logo, Outlook, PerformancePoint, PowerPoint, SharePoint, Silverlight, SoftGrid, Virtual Earth, Visio, Visual Studio, Windows, Windows Mobile, Windows Server, Windows Server System, Windows Vista, and Your Potential. Our Passion. are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. Microsoft Corporation One Microsoft Way Redmond, WA 98052-6399 USA Microsoft Part Number 098-108866

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2008

IS YOUR BUSINESS PEOPLE-READY?

THE ROLE OF SOFTWARE IS EXPANDING

ROLE-BASED PRODUCTIVITY: REALIZING BUSINESS VALUE

DYNAMIC IT: TRANSFORMING IT INTO A STRATEGIC ASSET

MICROSOFT IN THE ENTERPRISE

Microsoft Dynamics SOLUTIONS

XX, XX, XX XXXX 7, 17-18, 23-24, 26-27, 48-49 XX, XX

19-21 16-18 14-15 22-24 25-27

Interoperability Microsoft Enterprise Agreement Microsoft Partners Microsoft Services

Welcome to the 2008 guide to Microsoft in the enterprise

Simon Witts Corporate Vice President Enterprise & Partner Group

IS YOUR BUSINESS PEOPLE-READY?

SOFTWARE IS THE FOUNDATION FOR THE PEOPLE-READY BUSINESS

PEOPLE DRIVE BUSINESS OUTCOMES

IS YOUR BUSINESS PEOPLE-READY?

Develop Customer Relationships

People Drive Business Outcomes

Build Partner Connections

THE ROLE OF SOFTWARE IS EXPANDING

THE ROLE OF SOFTWARE IS EXPANDING

THE ROLE OF SOFTWARE IS EXPANDING

Next-Generation Web Experiences

OUR APPROACH: SOFTWARE PLUS SERVICES

THE ROLE OF SOFTWARE IS EXPANDING

Combining Reach and Richness

THE ROLE OF SOFTWARE IS EXPANDING

Continuing Our Innovation

CHOICE OF USER EXPERIENCE

SERVICES FOR MESSAGING, SECURITY, AND MANAGEMENT

ROLE-BASED PRODUCTIVITY: REALIZING BUSINESS VALUE

ROLE-BASED PRODUCTIVITY: REALIZING BUSINESS VALUE

THE NEXT LEVEL OF PRODUCTIVITY

TAkING A ROLE-BASED APPROACH

Top 10 Technology Priorities

ROLE-BASED PRODUCTIVITY: REALIZING BUSINESS VALUE

MAKING ROLE-BASED PRODUCTIVITY REAL ultimately to a leading solution that refines,

ess Im pe rat ive

Example of Role-Based Productivity: Optimizing Sales Force Productivity

ROLE-BASED PRODUCTIVITY: REALIZING BUSINESS VALUE

CREATE HIGH-IMPACT SALES PROPOSALS

ROLE-BASED PRODUCTIVITY: REALIZING BUSINESS VALUE

ENABLE DISTRIBUTED TEAM SELLING

INCREASE SALES FORCE PRODUCTIVITY

REDUCE TRAINING AND TRAVEL COSTS

ENHANCE THE VALUE OF CRM APPLICATIONS

ROLE-BASED PRODUCTIVITY: REALIZING BUSINESS VALUE

ROLE-BASED PRODUCTIVITY: REALIZING BUSINESS VALUE

ENHANCING PRODUCTIVITY WITH OFFICE BUSINESS APPLICATIONS

ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING

ROLE-BASED PRODUCTIVITY: REALIZING BUSINESS VALUE

SUPPORTING MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGIES

ROLE-BASED PRODUCTIVITY: REALIZING BUSINESS VALUE

STREAMLINING FORECAST-TO-CASH PROCESSES IN MANUFACTURING

ESTABLISHING WORLD-CLASS BUSINESS PRACTICES IN HEALTH

CUTTING ADMINISTRATION TIME IN RETAIL

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

ROLE-BASED PRODUCTIVITY: REALIZING BUSINESS VALUE

SUPPORTING MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGIES

ROLE-BASED PRODUCTIVITY: REALIZING BUSINESS VALUE

SUPPORTING A NEW LINE OF BUSINESS IN RETAIL

ROLE-BASED PRODUCTIVITY: REALIZING BUSINESS VALUE

BUSINESS PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT