CLOUD SOLUTIONS
Cloud represents a game changer for the Media & Cable industry. The low cost, scalability and flexibility of cloud content delivery platforms offers the possibility of meeting growing consumer demand for digital content at a reasonable cost, and try out new business models without huge upfront investments. Migrating their business and content management systems to the cloud helps media companies to lower cost of infrastructure and operations, while at the same time enabling the collaboration across teams, sites, organizations, and geographies in content creation which is key for staying competitive in a globalized media market. Leveraging cloud marketplaces, like the Windows Marketplace, will help media companies to reach their audiences, and cloud consumer services like Windows Live will help to leverage the power of social media for establishing brands and businesses.
With the right technology in place, you can provide your organization with instant access to data and collaboration tools from almost anywhere. Microsoft cloud services make greater productivity possible with applications you already know and assets you have today.
With decades of experience serving businesses large and small – now 20 million in the cloud – Microsoft understands the value of technology that is scalable and familiar from day one for you and your employees. We offer the most complete set of cloud-based solutions and around-the-clock support to ensure we get it right together.
Windows Azure
Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage web applications on the internet through Microsoft datacenters.
Windows Azure is a flexible platform that supports multiple languages and integrates with your existing on-premises environment. To build applications and services on Windows Azure, developers can use their existing Microsoft Visual Studio expertise. In addition, Windows Azure supports popular standards and protocols.
Benefits
Below are a few of the benefits offered by Windows Azure for media companies:
- Bring your ideas to market faster and pay as you go.
- Reduce costs of building and extending on-premises resources.
- Reduce the effort and costs of IT management.
- Respond quickly to changes in your business and customer needs.
- Choose an on-premises or off-premises deployment model that best suits your needs.
DIGITAL CONTENT MANAGEMENT
Enabling media companies to manage and streamline workflows.
The Media and Cable industry is facing new opportunities and challenges as it works to meet consumer demand for access to high-quality content through multiple devices. New revenue opportunities are arising with new ways to deliver content, but media companies need solutions for acquiring, tracking, managing, and delivering content digitally. Digital Content Management solutions from Microsoft and Microsoft partners enable media companies to ingest, track, manage, and deliver digital assets such as images, audio, documents, and video, while managing the related metadata and business processes.
DCM solutions are primarily based on Microsoft SharePoint Server to provide workflow, collaboration, and user experience. Microsoft BizTalk Server can be included for deep integration with third-party LOB applications. Microsoft Silverlight can also be used in conjunction with SharePoint Server to provide a rich, "casual" interface and enhance cross-platform compatibility.
Benefits
Below are the high-level benefits offered by a digital content management solution from Microsoft:
- Enabling new services quickly while being flexible enough to integrate new and existing applications.
- Streamline and automate the workflow experience while reducing costs across the digital media value chain.
- Increase flexibility by adapting to market trends quickly by making dynamic changes to business processes and models while working with existing metadata structures.
- Lower TCO by using a single development environment and leveraging existing investments.
EDITORIAL COLLABORATION AND MOBILE JOURNALISM
Microsoft solutions for Editorial Collaboration and Mobile Journalism build on or integrate with Microsoft Office System to enable a collaborative, story-centric, mobile work style for editors, journalists, and correspondents in remote locations. Leveraging Microsoft Office System as a set of familiar and powerful content authoring tools, and as an environment for effective collaboration and unified communications, these solutions complement the functionality offered by print publishing systems, TV and radio newsroom systems, and Web content management systems, putting the latest business productivity tools to work for a news media organization’s creative workforce.
The available Microsoft Solution Framework for Editorial Collaboration and Mobile Journalism is an application template for Microsoft Office System. It helps uses to:
- share story ideas
- plan event coverage
- request, find, and allocate resources
- search for relevant content and people
- gather content
- plan output across channels
- track content and workflow status
- support workflows like review and approval
The first release of this solution framework, based on Office System 2007, has been published on Codeplex, an open source platform, in January 2010. An updated version built around Office System 2010 will be published soon after Office System 2010 is generally available.