Notes on “Office the Interface NOT Office the Island” (Mark Carrol, Microsoft NZ)

Mark Carroll is an Architect for Platform Strategies at Microsoft New Zealand.

– Change management. “You can reduce the pain of change, by reducing the extent of change.” Eg, that’s why Microsoft has extended the Office tools from being standalone to front-end interfaces to back-end systems.
– Microsoft has tried to re-architect its suite into multiple tiers. There are standards that tie the different parts together, so that you can, in theory, use Microsoft tools in a multi-vendor environment.
– Another driver for the change is software-as-a-service … for hosting applications outside of the environment. Allows organizations to reduce internal cost, and to speed deployment, by using external services.
– There are some new development tools from Microsoft to link up the Office applications with back-end systems.

– Some regional examples:
– … Statistics New Zealand … faster dissemination of Regional Statistics (says Mark, “one of the best statistical websites in the world”). Use a business intelligence server on the back-end, run an OLAP-cube, and put Excel on the front-end. Key drivers: faster time-to-market, improved quality, and cost.
– … Quantate … make a risk management product. Offer a style template for taking reporting data and make it look nice for forwarding on as a report. Key drivers: familiar Office experience, better quality (standardized), cost (using what they already have).
– … KiwiBank … using SharePoint 2007 on the Intranet, for collaboration. Ease of accessibility is great, ease of developing workflows is really good.