Alistair Speirs, a Technology Specialist with Microsoft Australia, is speaking to the topic of “Better business systems with Office and SharePoint”.

Business organizations have a very diverse spectrum of needs … from ad-hoc, fluid and narrow reach collaboration (where personal productivity is important), up to structured and stable and broad reach requirements (where enterprise processes are important). There needs to be a balanced approach to delivering this, with empowerment of users on one hand, and governance on the other.

The approach taken by Microsoft is handled under the idea of the business productivity infrastructure, including unified communications, business intelligence, enterprise content management, collaboration, and enterprise search, built on familiar interfaces, on top of core infrastructure. See Microsoft.

The Office Client
Microsoft has made changes to the Office client in the 2007 edition.
– From the Word 1.0 (1989) release through to the 2003 edition, there were many changes, and much added complexity
– Needed to make it easier. Collected 3 billion data sessions from Office users, that being about 2 million sessions a day. Tracking 6000 commands in Office applications.
– Put the data into a spreadsheet … (a) which commands do people use the most?, (b) how are commands commonly sequenced together, and more.
– Then did 20,000 hours of video analysis of people using different mockups. Used gaze tracking to see what people were looking at.
– “The Myth of the Ideal Organization” … look at all of the things in the “Tools” menu of Office 2003. Say what? Eg, where’s the commonality between these things?

Microsoft Office Servers
Microsoft offers a number of servers for collaboration and business. Alistair is going to talk most about SharePoint.
– There are two products that comprise SharePoint: Windows SharePoint Services (the core platform and collaboration pieces, in Windows Server), and Office SharePoint Server (all the rest).
– There is a range of needs from collaboration tools, so Microsoft offers the Collaboration Selection Guide.