Empower your people to make better decisions and deliver greater business impact by giving them the right tools to quickly find, efficiently use, and effectively share information.

Knowledge is of critical importance to any company, which is why it is vital that the right information reaches the right people. Technology and software can help to sharpen your company's competitive edge by empowering your most important business asset—your people—to deliver greater business impact. You can help them be more productive by connecting them with the right information quickly, so that they can transform business information into insights, and translate insights into organizational knowledge and actions.

The new generation of Microsoft technologies can make it much easier for your people to:

• Find relevant information quickly and securely.
• Use information to drive intelligent decision-making.
• Quickly share knowledge results across the enterprise and beyond.

By enhancing your people's ability to find, use, and share information, your workers will have more time to spend with customers, partners, and suppliers—and more time to solve problems and look for new opportunities.

With the benefits IT has enabled, there are also some emerging challenges. Companies pay a high price for information overload. The International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that information workers spend as much as 30 percent of their time searching for information, at a cost of $18,000 each year per employee in lost productivity. Meanwhile, the University of California, Berkeley, predicts that the volume of digital data we store will nearly double in the next two years.

Faced with the volume of data that is generated every second of every day, how can you empower your people to get the information they need to stay focused on the tasks that are most important and that deliver the greatest value? And how can you give them the tools to use that information as effectively as possible, and share it with teams, partners, and suppliers?

Organizations need more than just better search tools. They need a comprehensive approach to enterprise information management that spans information creation, collection, and use—and that helps ensure they can unlock the full value of their investments in both information and people.

Because Microsoft realizes that search is not enough, it offers a comprehensive platform that includes industry-leading enterprise search solutions complemented with powerful and familiar tools for using and sharing information easily and more securely. In addition to search, your people can use Microsoft SharePoint sites to store and share data with peers, partners, and customers. Microsoft solutions help you to protect your company's intellectual property and simplify regulatory compliance efforts by setting storage, access, and distribution policies for documents and e-mail. These technologies empower your people and organization to make better business decisions, be more productive, and, ultimately, achieve greater business success.

• Find: Improve individual and organizational productivity by quickly, smoothly, and more securely connecting people with the right information, regardless of where it resides—Internet, intranet, line-of-business applications, or a personal computer. Enterprise search solutions reduce the time your people spend looking for information by integrating desktop, corporate network, and Internet business searches into a single interface.
• Use: Effectively apply information to your needs. Your people can use Microsoft Office applications to synthesize business knowledge by quickly creating dynamic and professional presentations and documents.
• Share: Convert business insight into organizational knowledge. Achieve greater business success by enabling your people to communicate and share information with peers, customers, and partners—easily, quickly, and cost-effectively. People and teams can work together more securely over the Internet as if they were in the same physical location. Online meetings reduce travel expenses, and tools in Microsoft Outlook help people more easily filter, prioritize, and take action on an ever-increasing volume of e-mail.