Your business productivity infrastructure helps streamline the management and control of content, data, and processes across all areas of your organization. With an optimized infrastructure, you can simplify how people communicate and share expertise, make processes and content management more efficient, and improve the quality of business insight, while enabling your IT department to increase responsiveness and have a strategic impact on the organization.
Enterprise productivity can also be greatly improved as you make enhancements to your systems. For example, by replacing silos of communications such as IM, voice mail, video conferencing, email, and calendars with one unified communications platform, you streamline your organization’s communications, increase efficiency and flexibility, and strengthen protection and control.
Following are the key business productivity capabilities and ways to optimize them.All IT directors have a vision of collaboration: teams working together seamlessly with the latest content, streamlined communication, and projects humming along with effective resourcing. IT steps back and watches as productivity soars and employee and customer satisfaction booms. This productive team environment includes collaborative workspaces, robust portals, social networks, and well-managed projects. Whether deployed on-premises or as a hosted service, Microsoft’s solutions give you integrated collaboration capabilities that allow you to cut training and maintenance costs and increase IT productivity, all within a governable and compliant platform.
There are many reasons to consolidate your collaboration solutions:
- Reduce IT costs and complexity by consolidating multiple product investments into a single infrastructure and by getting all your enterprise solutions under a single product license.
- Reduce development costs by using comprehensive out-of-the-box components, taking advantage of built-in integration with Microsoft Office and using the .NET Framework object models to reduce learning curves and development time.
- Simplify management and training by providing a single, easy-to-use interface for end users and for IT administration and governance.
Technologies change, and communications technologies evolve as rapidly as any. But when your systems are unified, they continue to work together - now and into the future. That integration means more than keeping up with the pace of change. It means simplified management, reduced costs, and organized, effective employees.
Microsoft Unified Communications encompasses your messaging, IM and presence, conferencing, and voice - in other words, the capabilities that give you the greatest headaches and that have the most visibility both within your organization and without. With Microsoft Unified Communications, everything works together in one streamlined solution; because of its integrated products and their familiar user and administrative interfaces, your entire organization is literally on the same page. Microsoft Unified Communications is provided by Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Office Communications Server, which can be deployed in-house, as an externally hosted solution, or as a combination of the two approaches, depending on your organization’s needs.
Imagine saving up to $5 million for every 1,000 employees.
Beyond productivity gains, arguably the greatest benefit of a unified communications solution is the cost savings. Imagine your entire organization’s costs for travel, conferencing, telephony, cellular service, and voice mail. Now imagine saving up to US$5 million for every 1,000 employees. How?
- Reduce your travel expenses up to 40% by replacing in-person meetings with immersive web, video, and audio conferencing.
- Lower messaging costs up to 40% by minimizing storage costs and consolidating costly third-party solutions like mobility, archiving, backup, and more.
- Shrink telephony and audio conferencing charges up to 40% using built-in VoIP and unified conferencing capabilities.
- Lower real estate and facilities costs up to 40% by freeing employees from fixed desks or offices and increasing occupancy density in buildings.
- Trim the cost of communications systems up to 50% by consolidating separate legacy voice mail with Exchange, and expensive private branch exchange, IM, and audio/video/web conferencing systems with Office Communications Server.[1]
Much of enterprise data is unstructured, unmanaged content. Reams of documents, email messages, videos, instant messages, and web pages clutter workspaces and hamper employee effectiveness. This state of disorder can prevent your organization from properly using valuable assets for better knowledge sharing, improved customer communications, and increased process efficiency.
Enterprise Content Management from Microsoft can help you capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content across the enterprise. Using Microsoft Office SharePoint, Enterprise Content Management easily extends content management to all of your employees through integration with familiar tools such as the Microsoft Office system. You can consolidate content from multiple file shares and personal drives into a centrally managed repository with consistent categorization. You’ll satisfy compliance and legal requirements. Your employees can more efficiently publish web content with an easy-to-use authoring tool and approval process. And you’ll streamline your business processes with tools that manage the entire life cycle of unstructured content, from creation to expiration, on a single, unified platform.
Most reporting solutions give you just one thing: a view of your data. Microsoft believes the true value of reporting lies in the ability to analyze and manipulate that data.
Microsoft’s comprehensive reporting and analysis tools take you that extra step, providing easy-to-use information directly where your employees work, collaborate, and make decisions. Now you can find the information you need across both structured assets (such as reports, spreadsheets, and analytical systems) and the growing number of assets held in unstructured sources (such as blogs, wikis, presentations, and documents). But that’s not all. With self-service access to information, employees can create reports to share with colleagues, make rich digital dashboards across a variety of topics, and analyze information to identify business opportunities and respond to market drivers -- all with one-click access to information, using only a browser.
Envision your teams expressing their great ideas visually, using video, audio, and rich creatives. Seamlessly using the information in line-of-business systems in the tools they use every day. Being always on and always connected wherever they are -- at work, at home, or on the go. You now have an organization where ideas evolve to impact the business, IT maximizes investment in line-of-business systems, and employees feel productive and enabled whenever and wherever they choose to.
With Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010, we efficiently empower the transformation of ideas into rich, open, and reusable content. We enable people to work anywhere with a consistent user experience, with optimized performance for different tasks and data integrity. We help create content in open-standard formats and protocols that simplify data integration and consumption by other systems. And finally, we help meet compliance requirements and standards for accessible tools and content for people with disabilities.
A Forrester Consulting study[2] has concluded that a typical organization with 7,000 employees can achieve a three-year net present value (NPV) of over $7 million (risk-adjusted net benefits) as a result of deploying Microsoft Office 2010. In the study, the payback period was a very quick five months and the average NPV per information worker was $1,483 over three years. These three-year savings can be achieved through:
- Co-authoring productivity benefits of over $3 million in a sales and business development group.
- OneNote productivity benefits of nearly $1 million for 40 discrete project teams.
- Elimination of third-party photo/video editing tools at a cost savings of over $34,000.
- Productivity gains associated with Office 2010 of nearly $7 million from features such as the enhanced ribbon, Microsoft Office backstage view, protected view, paste preview, conversation view, calendar preview, and others.
[1]Data based on sample customers and “The Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft Unified Communications Products and Services,” a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Microsoft, October 2007, Jeffrey North (Project Director).
[2] “The Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft Office 2010,” a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Microsoft, May 2010.