When it began in New Zealand in 1992, the Aotearoa Mature Employment Service Trust (AMES) had a relatively simple goal: to help a handful of senior executives who were made redundant find new jobs. Since then, AMES—now known as AMES Training and Resource Centre—has dramatically evolved along with New Zealand’s job market. AMES now trains about 500 students annually—from ages 16 to 65—to meet the needs of the modern workplace, using its unique certification curriculum built around teaching tools and certification programs offered through the Microsoft® IT Academy program.

Keeping large or long-term projects on track can often be a frustrating exercise for the people charged with supervising them. ActionThis, a solution provider based in New Zealand, saw a market opportunity for project management software that would offer the best of a Web-based solution, including easy deployment and scalability, along with the richness of locally installed software. Using Microsoft® products and technologies, ActionThis created a software-plus-services solution that scales to address the needs of a wide range of businesses, from small operations to large departments within major corporations. Easy to use and affordable, the solution helps users drive projects to completion more efficiently, and it has opened a huge global market for ActionThis.

Implementation and training for a store-by-store rollout of Microsoft Dynamics GP. The implementation used an innovative ‘template-based’ model that enabled trained Orb staff to complete most of the roll-out in-house.

The Baumatic Group has branches based in a number of countries around the world and previously used a number of local information systems to manage its financial, business and warehouse operations. With the help of Microsoft Dynamics NAV, it has gathered these information systems under one roof and has seen effective results. As well as this, the system paid for itself within a matter months.

Today’s information workers demand the flexibility to work wherever they want, whenever they want. As business priorities change, managers need the ability to organise staff into new teams and to enable them to work across organisational boundaries. The Treasury deployed a combination of tablet and desktop computers installed with Microsoft Vista Enterprise and Office Enterprise 2007. The new platform was deployed throughout the organisation over a period of three months with staff attending a two hour training course.

Founded in 2000, SilverStripe is an open source web development company, delivering content management systems (CMS) and development services to businesses throughout Australasia, Europe and the USA. A growing number of developers were choosing to run its PHP based CMS application in a Microsoft® Windows® environment, but were confronted by problems installing and running the software. The significant demand for a Windows compatible version of the CMS soon made it clear that greater interoperability with the Microsoft platform would encourage broader adoption of the software. The successful addition of Windows support to SilverStripe CMS has expanded the potential market for the technology, creating additional opportunities for service revenue growth.

Using Microsoft Financing, ABE’S® Real Bagels has been able to deploy flexible and powerful Enterprise Resource Planning system Microsoft Dynamics® AX when it was needed most, enabling the business to capitalise on growth opportunities and better manage production and accounting processes.

The New Zealand Health IT Cluster is a collaborative industry grouping of healthcare software developers, consultants, government agencies, and healthcare providers. Faced with the challenges of rising demands on healthcare resources, fragmented health information collection and exchange, and the need to empower patients to take control of their health, the Health IT Cluster looked to information technology to mitigate these complexities. In September 2007, the Health IT Cluster partnered with Microsoft New Zealand to develop an innovative online health portal that empowers people to manage their health in an online environment and enables connected healthcare information systems to exchange data smoothly. The Consumer Health Portal (CHP) was built on a Microsoft platform, with the objective of bringing significant benefits to the healthcare sector, through reduced medical expenditure.

Lion Nathan is a leading producer, marketer, and distributor of premium alcoholic beverages in Australia and New Zealand. Because employees at Lion Nathan frequently work from home or in one of its many locations across Australia and New Zealand, employees depend heavily on audio and Web conferencing to collaborate and manage projects. To help create a seamless experience for its users, the company agreed to take part in the Rapid Deployment Program (RDP) for Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 R2. Lion Nathan expects that with new audio conferencing capabilities, it will be able to reduce its dependency on external conferencing vendors. Lion Nathan also expects that with new desktop sharing and Group Chat capabilities, employees will be able to identify and resolve issues faster by increasing communication and collaboration between support teams and the business.

St Kent’s, with IT partner Fujitsu, deployed Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007® to meet three key IT needs: an electronic school calendaring system, an electronic workflow and information management system and an effective user-driven information communication system.