Speech Transcript – Jeff Raikes, Fusion 2002: “Realizing the Partner Potential of Information Work”

Fusion 2002


Realizing the Partner Potential of Information Work


Remarks by Jeff Raikes, Group Vice President, Productivity and Business Services, Microsoft Corporation

July 13, 2002

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Group Vice President for Productivity and Business Solutions for the Microsoft Corporation, Jeff Raikes. (Applause.)

JEFF RAIKES: Great. Well, it’s great to be here and welcome to all of you. During my 20 years-plus at Microsoft one of the great things about an event like Fusion is the opportunity to get together and focus in on our partnerships but also to renew our friendships.

For me, having previously led our Worldwide Sales, Marketing and Services Group and really focusing for many years on our partner channel, this is an opportunity for me to reconnect with a number of great people that we’ve worked with over the years, people like Randy Schilling of Quilogy. It’s an opportunity to meet new people like Richard Cano of the Immedient Corporation. And really it’s an opportunity for us to get together and discuss where we’re going in terms of the opportunities of this business.

Now, my role at Microsoft today is very much focused in on productivity and business services, and in particular my theme today is the opportunity that we have to realize the potential of information work, to realize that potential in the context of the customer value that it’s going to create and to realize that potential in terms of the opportunity that that provides to you. It’s our opportunity together, Microsoft and you, our partners, that really is going to give us the opportunity to continue to grow our businesses through the value that we create for our customers.

And if you think back, there’s been a couple of decades really of major waves of growth in value for customers, the technology impact on information work. If you look back in the 1980s, that was a decade where personal digital tools came to the forefront, categories were established in order to have a significant wave of value for our customers on their information work.

Today we take a spreadsheet for granted, but in 1979, VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet, was just being introduced. In the late ’80s we introduced presentation graphics as a concept, PowerPoint, which we take for granted today.

And in the 1990s there was another wave of value that was created, and this happened when corporations embraced these personal digital tools and we saw the impact, we saw the effect of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.

The fact that personal computing was becoming very broadly used created the foundation, so to speak, for an explosion in networking, getting all of those digital tools connected together.

An explosion in the Internet, the growth in e-mail, I mean just think back to how much e-mail you received and send every day in 1990 as compared to today. Some people may want to go back to the amount of e-mail they were getting in 1990.

And also during the ’90s there was a tremendous investment in business process, the growth in software for ERP, enterprise resource planning or enterprise resource management, Customer Relationship Management, supply chain management.

So there was a tremendous amount of investment, a lot of value that was created, but one of the things that you typically find is that while you create new value and it has a big impact there are still both challenges that are unfulfilled, opportunities that are unfulfilled and the growth in value that’s been created leads to new challenges, ones that we need to take on.

It’s sort of a glass is half empty-glass is half full type story. If you think about where we are today in terms of information work, in terms of what we would typically call knowledge work, we have a situation where those personal digital tools do not have people as connected to the islands of data within the organization as they need to be. Those digital tools don’t have people as connected to business processes as they would like to be.

And if you think about this last decade where there was a tremendous shift in work culture, where people are much more remote, you have people working in virtual teams across organizational boundaries, across geographic boundaries, across company boundaries, we don’t have people connected together as much as they would like to be.

So if you look at those first three points there’s a very strong theme of getting connected, getting tools and thus the people who use those tools connected to islands of data, to business processes and to each other.

With the growth in digital tools and the use of digital tools we’ve seen a certain sense of information and e-mail fatigue. I mentioned the explosion of e-mail. Equally while the Internet and the intranet has a tremendous amount of resource for us to take advantage of, we frequently find it frustrating, our customers find it frustrating to get the information they need when they need it.

And there’s also been another very important shift. We used to think really of the PC as the platform, but now the platform is really the combination of devices and interfaces that people are using for their productivity, for their organizational productivity, their personal productivity. So the platform is the multiple devices and the way in which we interact with them.

So those are challenges that we can take on during this decade to have a significant impact on the potential of information work.

And we’re quite bullish on the opportunity. At fall COMDEX. Bill said in the decade ahead he could predict very clearly that we’ll provide over twice the productivity improvement as we did during the ’90s in information work. And I’m probably at least that optimistic, if not more so, because of the things that I see coming down the line in terms of technological advances that we together, Microsoft and our partners can take advantage of, for the benefits of our customers.

So what will this next decade be like? How can we have that kind of growth and improvement? I think there are three core points:

Number one, we must serve a broader customer audience. Historically, we’ve thought about knowledge workers. We need to think more broadly. Knowledge workers, as we thought of it, was really the core of our industry, the core of the growth in the desktop.

For the people who are using our tools, for their audience we have to create new customer value through exciting innovation.

And finally and most importantly, in the use of these tools throughout the customer audience we have to help customers realize that business value, which is why your role is so important, so critical in how we are able to achieve this opportunity.

Now, I want to begin with that first point about serving a broader customer audience. Historically in our industry we’ve talked about “the knowledge worker.” We believe the knowledge worker is a very important part of the information value chain within an organization, but I actually think the knowledge worker as we’ve traditionally defined it may be too elitist. It may only be a subset of the opportunity that we have together.

There are probably in the United States 30 or 40 million people who you would say are knowledge workers in the Peter Drucker sense of that definition. But think about an airline CEO or a hospital CEO. If you ask that airline CEO, “Are your pilots knowledge workers,” if you ask that hospital CEO, “Are your nurses knowledge workers,” if they understood the term they might say no, but, in fact, those people are using digital tools as a fundamental part of their work. So the broader audience that we’re serving together is anybody who is an active participant in a business information flow or business information process, and that is our opportunity, and we’re going to have an incredible opportunity to serve that audience through the kinds of advances that are going to occur during this decade.

Now, for us we think a lot about information work and this is kind of a generic model of information work. Obviously, if you’re involved in information work you need to access information, you need to be able to absorb it, you need to be able to collaborate with others, you need to be able to author new information, new content. You’ve got to be able to make decisions, take action, get things done and to communicate very broadly; so a somewhat generic model of information work.

Now, the sub-points though have more underlying thought into them, especially given the consideration of the kinds of advances we’ll see during this decade. Because of the advance in portal technologies I think we’ll see significant improvements in how people access information and people and subscribe to the information that’s most important to them in their information work.

Because of the advances of things like the tablet we’ll see that people will be able to read on screen, they’ll be able to electronically annotate.

Through advances in business intelligence we’ll open up the field of business intelligence to a much broader set of people so that they can take advantage of that information and how they do their job.

Because of advances where the network is converging with audio and video and the phone system we’ll be able to significantly advance collaboration, where tele-meetings will be as simple in the future as it is today to plug in a polycom for a teleconference.

Because of advances in the way in which we can interact with systems, inking and handwriting recognition, voice and speech recognition we’ll be able to advance the way in which we author content and with improvements such as those going on in Microsoft Research we’ll make it much more possible for people to be able to categorize information, to make it possible to open up those insights much more broadly within the organization.

The way in which we take action is relatively underserved from a software standpoint, how people can manage the actions that are underway. And, of course, again because of what I mentioned with the growth in networking and the convergence with audio and video it’s going to open up new opportunities for communication.

So while sometimes we think of what we do in the Office world as spreadsheets and word processors and presentation graphics, in fact, Office and those set of capabilities are simply a foundation for a much broader spectrum of information work that we’re focusing in on. And that’s really the core of our big investments relative to information work: How we can dramatically expand the capabilities of Office.

Take, for example, the developments in XML. Huge advances will occur during this decade and we during the next three to five years will make major advances right within the Office product line, the Office family of products in terms of how you can think of the Office family as smart clients for connecting to systems and services. And that’s an incredibly important concept for what it is that you do for your customers, smart clients connected to systems and services, because our best partners see the opportunity to take advantage of that for the kinds of business value that our customers are looking for.

We’re investing in the Office area in terms of meeting innovation, collaboration. We began that focus in Office 97. We significantly extended it with Office XP and SharePoint Team Services, which Bill Veghte just mentioned, and we continue to advance that and focus that on new opportunities to serve the meetings area.

New form factors like the tablets, new opportunities like software services are going to have an impact on how we do note-taking and how we collect the kind of information that we need to help us author content and knowledge.

And finally there’s a big opportunity and we’re investing very significantly in personal information breakthroughs, what we can do with Microsoft Outlook, used by more than 200 million people in the world. How can we value their time in a way that helps them to get more done, to be able to manage their tasks, their e-mails much more easily?

So recently we announced our excitement about the upcoming availability of Office 11. About a year from now we expect to release Office 11, which is going to be a major step forward in a number of these areas.

There’s a lot of things that I could talk about but given limited time I want to focus in on something that I think is very specific to you, the importance of XML and the smart client concept.

Now, we started that in Office XP with the ability to support XML within Excel and Access, but we’re opening up that dramatically, we’re including here Microsoft Word. You’ll be able to use Microsoft Word as an important client in XML scenarios.

Here you see Office 11, a screenshot with XML and Word, and this is a developer view. So if you look very closely you see the tags and, in fact, placeholder tabs like in the upper center there, “enter the company name here.”

You have over in the task pane on the right the XML structure so that you can see all of the schema that’s associated with this document.

Down below in that task pane you see the available XML tags based on that schema.

And one of the most important points here is that Word, Excel, our other products are supporting arbitrary schema. That means that we can use that schema to validate the document as well as to do transformations that are going to be able to make this content a part of those corporate business systems.

Now, if I move on here this is simply the end-user view of that same document. And what that means is the user doesn’t have to worry about XML. XML is invisible to them. They have all of the tools that they count on for Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel, but with all of the richness of Excel that underlines that.

Over on the right you see a task pane that’s programmable so that you can have task-specific tools and content.

You see this is a regular document, which can be saved either in an XML format or the Word binary format. It can be printed just like a normal document.

And there’s a tremendous benefit in your development. You can have customized XML processes that are built within the Office object model. You can do programmable content sensitive window panes. And you have much simpler deployment. In fact, these documents are smart documents. They know when they need to go and get code or get updates that are part of the scenario.

So those are just a few examples of the kinds of things that we’re doing in Office 11. Office 11 is a very rich release for us. It’s going to touch on what we do in the area of collaboration.

I mentioned earlier the importance of access to information and the growth there. We’re very pleased with the momentum that we’ve seen in the marketplace for our SharePoint technologies, in particularly SharePoint Portal; more than 7 million seats of SharePoint Portal in the last year. And as a solution for Internet it’s being very widely adopted; in fact, there are over 600 solutions now from 300 partners, and in the Microsoft solution offerings our corporate intranet solution is the most popular of all Microsoft solution offerings.

So it’s very important that we work with you and your organizations to ensure that you have the skills to take advance of this opportunity.

Now this kind of momentum is really incredible. If you think back 10 years ago when some of you were getting going with Exchange, in our first year we did a million seats. In our second year we did about four million seats. So in one year we were able to do seven million seats of SharePoint Portal and that gives us an opportunity to get a lot of feedback, feedback that impacts our vision.

We’ve heard very clearly from you the importance of scalability and load balancing, the importance of personalization, and the opportunity to really go and connect the collaboration environment with the portal environment.

I’m going to just give you a sneak preview of what we’re doing with SharePoint technologies, both SharePoint Portal 2.0 and the advances in SharePoint Team Services.

I want you to imagine for a moment that I’m Neil Charney. I’m a sales representative for a pharmaceutical company. And when I get on my system this is my page. This page is specific to me as a member of the Kontosa employee workforce, as a member of the sales organization, with a specific focus in on a new product that I’m learning how to sell, (Pentasell ?).

So when I look at this page I see general information about Kontosa, I see news that’s very relevant to my role within the organization, I see sales information for my region because it knows that I’m a member of the western region, and a set of resources that are specific to my role, large deals that are on the horizon or in particular here something that’s very important to me because I need to come up to speed rapidly on how to sell the (Pentasell ?) products. So I can go right to the (Pentasell ?) product page. That’s an opportunity for me to be able to get access to the information that’s specific to my job.

Now, I mentioned the importance of not only having access to information but having access to people. Here I see that Jim Sellen is one of the key contacts on (Pentasell ?) and I’m able to join in on either an online chat or discussion board and have access to his insights on how to be most successful in my role.

Here are some best bets. With SharePoint Portal in version 2.0 we’re extending our rich search capabilities to include the ability to search on people and the ability to search on collaborative sites, team sites. So here I see some important sites.

I have the ability to take advantage of multimedia. Let’s say, for example, I want to get up to speed quickly. One of the ways that I can do that is to take advantage of some of the training videos that are available.

Now, one of the things that we’re doing with SharePoint technologies is bringing them together, the same rendering framework in SharePoint Team Services and SharePoint Portal 2.0. When I go to the western region’s (Pentasell ?) team site what I’m doing is I’m connecting to a site that’s very specific to our team. This is a site that our team set up so that we could collaborate on our upcoming meetings, so that we could take a look at the presentations that are core to what we’re doing. We can look at sales goals.

And one of the things that you can do for your customers is you can set up templates so that when they want to create a new team site within the organization they can pick one of your templates as a way to very rapidly set up an additional site to help them collaborate.

So that’s a good example, a very brief example of some of the things that we’re doing with SharePoint Team Services and SharePoint Portal Server but that’s all within the spirit of the opportunity to significantly improve how people collaborate and how they access information that’s fundamental to their job.

Now, this is a part of one of the key advances that we’re seeing during this decade that’s going to create opportunity for us. You know, the three main tools that are metaphors for information work, in my opinion, are paper, the screen and the phone. Those are fundamental tools that we work with.

But one of the exciting things is we’re seeing both the advances in each of those areas but also the convergence. Take, for example, this Pocket PC Phone Edition. Windows Pocket PC Phone Edition has the ability of all of your PDA capabilities, your personal digital assistant, with the ability to have your phone integrated.

And you get the sense of better together. When I do a phone call I have a phone log. If I do notes during the phone call it automatically populates the notes form from the contact list and then synchronizes that with Microsoft Outlook so I have those notes available to me.

So that’s an example of one of the ways in which these metaphors are converging to be better together.

But the one in particular that I’m most excited about is how we are working in the industry to bring the screen and paper together, and that’s how I think of the tablet PC. It’s an industry-wide initiative. There are more than 15 hardware manufacturers that are going to be coming out with tablet PCs in the next year.

The reason there’s so much excitement is that it’s a full function mobile business PC. It’s a laptop. In fact, I have here for you one of the key examples of a laptop. So there you see a laptop. It looks like a nice laptop, advanced laptop that we’re seeing coming out, very powerful, the ability to have long battery life. We hope by the end of the year we’re getting in the four to six-hour range in terms of battery life.

Very high-resolution screen: 133 DPI, which improves the on-screen reading. At 133 DPI you begin to get close to what you would see on paper, very, very good reading capabilities. Wireless capability built-in.

But this particular form factor has another nice characteristic. We like to think of this as the convertible. It’s a laptop and I have the ability to rotate the screen and fold it back and now I have a tablet PC. I can carry this with me to any of the meetings that I go to. Maybe I’m keeping track of information within an inventory environment. And what I did there was I just pressed a button and I switched the form factor to be portrait rather than landscape.

So that’s an example of what we mean when we say a full functional mobile PC. It’s going to enable new scenarios. You’ll be able to take it to meetings. You’ll be able to do new scenarios that really involve taking things that were paper based and now making them paperless for the advances that that will have within the environment, the improvements in productivity.

And this is a very powerful platform. It is a complete superset of Windows XP Professional. So you get all of the capabilities of Windows XP Professional. You get to use all of the development tools and all of the user experience, the developer experience that you have within the Windows environment, and it’s extended for digital ink, which really makes this the smartest of our .NET clients.

Now, the best way for me to give you a sense of that is to go ahead and show you a demo. I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to encourage you to kind of look both at the screen and also at the camera, which is going to be over my shoulder.

Now, one of the things that’s very important to understand is that the tablet PC as an extension of the laptop means that what you’re getting is the ability to use all of your existing applications.

So if I pull up Microsoft Word I may be using the pen, and you’ll notice I’m actually not touching the screen, but this is an electromagnetic pen so the cursor senses the electromagnetism and them the cursor moves.

Now, this is an unaltered version of Microsoft Word. This is just the standard Microsoft Word that’s in Office XP. So how am I going to be able to use that when I don’t have the keyboard available? Well, there’s a soft keyboard so I can use the soft keyboard if I wish, or I can go to the writing pad. And I’ll try not to block the view here, but you’ll notice I’m going to use my handwriting, which is a combination of print and cursive, and it goes ahead, it recognizes that and enters in the region as Northwest.

Pretty cool? (Applause.)

But, of course, I’d really like to be able to do more than just use my existing applications. And here’s a good example. With Windows XP Tablet Edition you get an important tool called Windows Journal. As you can see, it’s a note-taking tool and it’s a very rich note-taking tool. You get great inking capability and I have the ability to select an item like Robert Jones and immediately convert that into an Outlook contact, or select something that I want to turn into an Outlook task.

Now, because I know this audience is a little more technical what I want to do is I want to give you a sense of some of the advances that we have going on here.

Why is it possible now to be able to bring the tablet PC to market? Well, one of the things, just as a simple example, is a mouse would sample at about 40 samples per second, so that means you get about 40 data points per second. All of these tablet PCs sample at 133 samples per second and we use advanced computer science techniques like Bezier Splines and anti-aliasing to do simple things or make simple things look great. That’s just ink and it’s that simple, but it looks good, just like the ink that I would do on paper.

Now, I mentioned that this is an electromagnetic pen, which gives me some cool properties and I hope you can see that pen as I flip it around and now I’m going to erase the ink. (Applause.)

It turns out that the pen and our tablet PC work can also be pressure sensitive. So now you’ll notice that when I go light, it’s light, and I’ll press harder, light, harder, light, harder, so you can see that basically it’s a very rich platform. You can take advantage of that pen and ink information as a part of your application. So you could do different things depending upon what the user may have intended.

Now, I want to move on and show you a little bit about what it means from a development environment standpoint.

What we have done is we have given you some great capabilities that will extend the work that you do today in development and make it really, really easy very quick for you to take advantage of the tablet.

Many of you use Rich Edit. Well, here what I have is something that we’ve created, a control we created called Ink Edit. And Ink Edit is a pure superset of Rich Edit so you can simply substitute this control in your application anywhere you would use Rich Edit.

And just to show you how simple and quick it is I’m going to go ahead and run this program. All I’ve done is put one control on a form. And when that form comes up now I have the ability to enter in text. I could use the keyboard or in this particular case I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to use ink.

So since we’re down here in the land of the Anaheim Angels, to suck up to people I might say, “Go Angels.” And you’ll notice it recognizes that and enters in that text.

It also has the ability to use all of the richness of our inking work. So, for example, I can use a gesture to backspace. I can use our correction user interface, which tries to identify alternatives or gives me the appropriate ability to delete Angels. And in this case I’m going to substitute something much more appropriate like “Go Mariners.” (Applause.) There we go. It sounds like we have a few Mariner fans in the audience.

So that gives you an example of some of the things that we can do very simply with the control.

Now I’m going to just go a slight bit more sophisticated, and to save time I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to copy just a couple of lines of code that we’ve written and what I’m going to do is I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to edit the code and it will go right here. And by the way if you can see that there’s a button on the pen. So if I go ahead and I click that button, that is the equivalent of the right click and I just go ahead and paste. So I’ve pasted those two lines of code in and now I’m going to go ahead and run the application.

And now what you’ll see is that I’ve changed the ink attributes to be more like a highlighter and to be red. And so I can say, “Go Ichiro.” And now again it recognizes the text and so again I have all of the capabilities, with ink edit I have all of the capabilities of Rich Edit plus extended for digital ink and all the work that we’re doing there.

So that was very, very simple but what I’d like to do is to show you just with a little bit more time what one of our beta partners was able to do from a forms application standpoint. This partner is working with an insurance company and they’ve created some nice controls, in this particular case a time control, so I’m going to go ahead and insert that time control.

And this is their design view. I switch it over to the form view and when I do that you can kind of the see the richness of what they’ve been able to do. When I hover the pen over an entry area they changed the shading. I can go ahead and just tap and it opens up an input box and I’m just going to enter one, two, three, four, five, six and it goes ahead and it inserts those numbers. I can click on a single number and change that to eight.

So you can see with a little bit of work just how easy it was to create a very rich application for entry.

They’ve also used our capabilities for gestures. Their time selector uses gestures in an analog clock format. So if I gesture to eight, it says 8:00. If I gesture to 20, it says 8:20; a very, very cool, little control that they’ve created. (Applause.)

And we think one of the great scenarios in the tablet environment, one of the things that will really change information work during this decade is the way in which you can do annotation. Here’s the photo of the accident and because I have pen and electronic ink I can add incredibly insightful comments like circling this and suggesting that perhaps we cancel the policy. And there you have it.

Now, building on this we are working with a lot of people who have great ideas that really represent that notion of the metaphor of paper merging with the screen.

What I’m going to do is I’m going to go here. As you may have figured out I’m kind of a baseball fan. In particular, I’m a real fan of the Mariners and what’s happening in the American League West. And you can see we’ve got a great race in the American League West.

Now, if I was looking at a magazine or a newspaper, I might clip that out and send that to one of my friends. What I’m going to do here is I’m going to use a new tool that we call (Snip It). It’s a power toy. It’s going to be up on our Web site when we release the tablet. And with Snip It I can do the kind of thing that I would do on paper. I’m going to circle this information that shows the American League West race for the division and you can see three of the top five records in the American League are right here in the West. And, of course, I can say “Go Seattle. Kick butt.”

Now, I’m going to go ahead and just tap on e-mail.

Now, much in the same way I might cut that out of a newspaper and send that off to one of my friends who might unfortunately for him be an Anaheim Angels fan, what I can do is I can do that electronically and click that and send it off to him in e-mail.

So what I’ve done is I’ve just clipped that and now that’s part of my e-mail message or my Word document or my PowerPoint presentation. (Applause.)

Finally, what I’d like to do is to show you what you can do with great ISV work. We’ve been working very closely with Agilix Labs and FranklinCovey. Now, many of you know FranklinCovey, tremendous recognition for the system to improve your time management, your organization, and of course they have a great paper-based organizer. What they’ve done is they’ve worked with Agilix Labs to produce an application that is great within the context of the tablet.

So what I can do is I’m going to go to a Mariners game and I can do a little view of Safeco Field and make a little mark here and say that I’m going to meet my friend here. So just like I would write on my paper-based organizer I can write in this organizer.

But I have other capabilities. So, for example, if I go to the weekly view you’ll notice that they’re taking advantage of all of our inking work so that it automatically scales the ink up or down depending upon the size of the view, very, very challenging from a computer science standpoint, very, very rich for the user.

Now, let me go ahead and go back to the daily view and I’m going to go to the 13th, today, and you’ll notice I don’t have a lot of work to do today, but yesterday I didn’t get all my work done and I’m going to use within the application the gesture capability. They’ve taken advantage of the gesture so you see this little item here to finalize my slides for this presentation. I can just go ahead and it recognizes that gesture. And when I go to the next day you’ll notice now that has moved that item to the next day.

In addition, they’re taking advantage of a capability that I think will be quite revolutionary for the users within this context. We can search on ink. Now, we know handwriting recognition won’t be perfect. We know that people today do a lot of notes on paper. We think they should be able to continue to do that, only on electronic paper, but with the new capability to search on ink.

So I’m going to write “tablet” into the search window and when I do a search it searches my organizer and finds all of the instances of where I have inked tablet into the organizer. Cool! (Applause.)

So as you can see the tablet PC is an amazing step forward. It’s a complete extension of what you can do with laptops but for new scenarios. Think about information work. Today most people involved in information work may only have access to their computer two hours a day, three hours a day. They’re off. They’re in meetings where they don’t want to come in in front of the customer and type. But now what they’ll be able to do is they’ll be able to come in and ink their notes and then be able to have all of the richness of what you saw as a part of that scenario, be able to do whole new types of application scenarios like Snippet or forms based applications, so very, very exciting advances, a great opportunity for all of you.

And I want to make sure that you notice that you can go to tabletpcdeveloper.com and that’s a community effort where we’re sharing code samples or go to betaplace.com and you can download the Software Development Kit. So betaplace.com to download the Software Development Kit, tabletpcdeveloper.com to see how people are working together to really advance what you can do in the tablet environment.

There’s very exciting work going on from an ISV standpoint. More than 300 ISVs now have downloaded the Software Development Kit and are actively working with Microsoft on the kinds of applications that are going to be exciting in this environment; names that are quite recognizable: Adobe, AutoDesk, WebX, Corel has a really cool application called Coligo, SAP wanting to extend their business application work into the tablet environment.

Now, I want to wrap up the presentation by talking about the importance of business value. As you know, we are trying to shift our company culture to be much more in line with how you work with your customers, integrated campaigns that have us working together, aligning our resources for the market, our sales, marketing and services resources, yours, our product technology work and rallying around those key scenarios for our customers.

Now, I focus in particular in on the business productivity area, intranets and portals, business intelligence, work management, the ability for organizations to manage teams and processes and projects, getting information workers connected to line of business data, securing the information work environment; obviously that is a top concern. And this last point, accelerating deployments and lowering costs, that’s incredibly important. It is to our mutual advantage that our customers are able to put in place Office XP and the Web services toolkit so that you can build solutions with Office as a smart client; Office 11 a year from now, which will advance XML scenarios with arbitrary XML support, those advances in schema support.

So these are the kinds of things that are very important for us to work together on and we are making huge investments on your side of the business as well to improve how we work with you.

For example, I am creating a group called the Information Worker Solution Group where we’re creating solution offerings like the corporate intranet offering, like the enterprise project management offering so that you can more rapidly use our technologies in key solutions for our customers.

I’m also making a huge investment in the field organization, a whole new focus around business productivity, nearly 500 people in the field dedicated to how people can use digital tools within information work. That has been the heart and soul of our industry for the last 20 years and we need to reconnect, at Microsoft we have to reconnect with you and our customers as they are taking advantage of these new advances in these tools.

Now, to really show you how this can work I wanted to bring out a great example. I’m going to have one of our key partners join us, and I’m very, very proud of the work they’ve done. In fact, you’ll be reminded that they won our award for the Project 2002 value campaign. So I hope you will join me in welcoming Richard Cano to the stage, director of enterprise productivity practice for Immedient Corporation. Hey, Richard. (Applause.)

RICHARD CANO : Thanks, Jeff.

JEFF RAIKES: Great to have you.

RICHARD CANO : Absolutely. We’re excited to be talking about Enterprise Project Management today.

I want to give you a quick backdrop on Immedient. We’re a national Gold Certified and Premier Project partner specializing in .NET solutions, wireless mobility and enterprise productivity solutions, which EPM is one of those.

Now, Project Professional and Server have enabled Immedient to effectively and efficiently manage a portfolio of projects and resources across the enterprise and has empowered the information workers, improving profitability, delivery and customer satisfaction across all of our engagements.

Now, the solution I’m going to show you today is our internal Enterprise Project Management solution but we have packaged this as one of our EPM solutions that we offer our clients as well.

Now, what I’m showing you is the Project 2002 Professional application and customers have been looking for a way to improve reuse and consistency by having standards embedded right within the Project Management solution, and Project 2002 Professional has done just that.

With the customized Project guide they have a step-by-step process in planning and managing of projects and so they show you tasks and resources, tracking and reporting, and what Immedient has done is we’ve customized these project guides to show you the ability in working through specific project plans for solutions.

So here we’ve got Enterprise Project Management, SharePoint deployment, .NET development, Active Directory, and you can go into these and then select specific solutions for Enterprise Project Management, so we’ve got getting started or exploring Project 2002, and then by selecting that the template project plan comes up, which is our consistent delivery approach and shows our process for delivering that.

We’ve also looked at the collaboration aspect and have embedded in leveraging the SharePoint Portal Server technology where we can embed our Achieve! Internet. And Achieve! is our solution development methodology for all of our solutions and so now we have access to our intellectual capital, our project templates right within our Project 2002 Professional platform.

What I want to show you now is more about Project 2002 Server and Web Access is one of the components, along with SharePoint Team Services, that’s integrated in this Web site.

Now, SharePoint Team Services allows you to automatically create Project Web sites on the fly and it focuses on document and issue management. So I could go in here and select documents and issues regarding my project plan.

Now, with the customized attributes of a project you can now have a project profile that allows you to manage the portfolio in very effective ways and let me show you what I’m talking about.

So I’m pulling up our project center view and in here you’ll see a portfolio of projects that we have, and we’ve got red, yellow and green indicators and offices and solution groups, but with this project information now I can filter this by branch or solution group or I want to take a vertical slice through these projects, and this enables our executive teams and our project teams to look at the key information based on their areas of responsibility, enabling us to manage work at all levels more effectively, so that’s a very powerful feature within the server application.

In addition, we can leverage the SharePoint Portal technologies in building portal dashboards for the constituents of the project team from the executive down to the team member and what you’re seeing here is an executive dashboard that we’ve built with a customized project dashboard accessing the Project 2002 data directly, which shows us status and percent finished, but also a couple of analysis views that give us in depth information about cost or baseline or actual cost comparisons and work by skill set that gives the executive key information at the touch of their fingertips here.

And, of course, we’ve included our Outlook that integrates mail so I can do my daily work activities as well.

In addition, with the project manager dashboard that shows their view of the world, so we have our project center with their project plan, we’ve got mail again, and then our status reports through all the projects that I manage I can now look at weekly status reports for each of my projects and then, of course, add value to the tasks that I’m completing with my associated projects.

So this is a tremendous business value, being able to look at key project information from multiple sources, look at daily work activities all from one location and we think that’s going to really increase the ability and effectiveness of managing work at the enterprise level.

Now, Immedient is going to benefit. We’ve already seen benefit from improved profitability and really in showing our delivery capabilities and improved customer satisfaction by using Project 2002, and we feel that our customers really get a value from that as well. Having key project information again from the executive down to the team members will really allow them to effectively manage the portfolio.

Now, I think that this is really going to revolutionize the way information workers manage work and collaborate in the enterprise. We’re very excited about it.

JEFF RAIKES: Great. Thank you, Richard.

RICHARD CANO : Thank you, Jeff. (Applause.)

JEFF RAIKES: Super.

RICHARD CONNAUGH: Great.

JEFF RAIKES: So our work with Richard and Immedient Corporation really shows the essence of great solution work; our platform technologies, our technologies like Microsoft Project 2002 underlying a great solution that you can use with your customers not only for IT deployment but also for any kind of an important process within the organization.

Project 2002 is the most exciting launch in our 11-year history of project management. We have tremendous customer excitement, in particular because we’re broadening our approach with the Project Server, which is based on our SQL technologies of single repository that allows people throughout the organization to be able to access the project management data. So we’re really bringing to fore that information worker concept, being able to more broadly connect with the people throughout the organization.

And we have a great partner network. We have grown from about 100 partners now to more than 300 partners that are taking advantage of Project technologies in order to do great project management solutions for their customers.

Well, in closing I think you’d see that during this decade together we have an opportunity to have a significant impact on information work that will create great value for our customer, and that is our opportunity to grow.

I think of this as us pulling together the ecosystem from personal to corporate to the ultimate interconnection of people, process and data.

And this year we build on that foundation. We build the foundation to serve a broader customer audience, to create new customer value, to work closely with you to help customers realize that business value, and we hope a key part of that will be to partner with our business productivity advisers who will both help you identify the skill development that’s necessary as well as the go-to-market opportunities.

We’re very, very thankful to be working with you and your organizations and we wish you the best business success in the years to come.

Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

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