Doug and Jonathan from Microsoft, plus Chan from Provoke Solutions, presented a session entitled “Creating Business Value through Collaboration”.

After the introductory video about Parks Canada and its embrace of Office 2007, Jonathan discussed the changing nature of work. Eg, from individual productivity to collaborative team productivity, from work inj the office to being more mobile, from work inside the business to collaboration across boundaries, from one computer to a proliferation of mobile devices, etc.

The vision of Microsoft around collaboration: Providing software and services to deliver pervasive capabilities to enable people to work together more effectively. In delivering on this, Microsoft Office offers base services (identity, presence, rights management, anywhere access), and then collaborative services on top (eg, I’m, email, workspaces, etc.)

The three gave a demonstration of “a day in the life” using various tools, eg, Outlook 2007, Communicator 2007, federated services with MSN, a direct link from an Outlook Calendar invite to a Live Meeting (and promoting invited parties to presenters, and access control / policy settings for meetings), Groove meeting spaces for sharing files and documents, a person’s MySite for information all about them, and more.

Chan showed the Litware demonstration portal, for content signoff within a SharePoint document library. This involved opening a new document based on a template, and then associating it with one of the pre-defined workflows.

Some of the local NZ firms using this technology stack are Foodstuffs, Vodafone, MorganStanley, CAA, Ministry of Transport, FlyBuys, BP and more.

The session ended with a video of RoundTable, showing an example of how it could be used.