Microsoft's collaboration strategy for professional services
One of the greatest challenges for any business is building an environment where employees can instantly share information and knowledge. Professional services firms are increasingly recognizing the importance of collaboration as a means of creating efficiencies, empowering professionals, and gaining competitive advantage.
Communication and collaboration are essential elements of any successful operation. Beyond the basic data that firms must process every day, clients, professionals, and executives need highly secure, reliable, and cost-effective ways to meet, exchange ideas, and work together.
Challenges
Achieving collaboration's benefits in the professional services industry is affected by several factors, including:
| • | The data-intensive, real-time, geographically dispersed nature of today's organizations. |
| • | The reliance on person-to-person communication. |
| • | The use of ad hoc communication and collaboration software that's hard to manage in a business environment. |
Microsoft understands these challenges and has formulated an enterprise collaboration strategy to provide software and services that deliver pervasive capabilities so people can work together more effectively. This vision is built on four pillars.
The Microsoft enterprise pillars of collaboration
1. Integrated communication: Make communication more productive with Instant Messenger, e-mail, Web conferencing, and telephony applications that enable employees to collaborate through a variety of familiar interfaces.
2. Collaborative work spaces: Give your business easy ways to create, deploy, and manage team sites, store workbenches, and utilize role-based portals that provide a single integrated environment where information can be centrally controlled, deployed, and managed.
3. Access to information and people: Drive organizational productivity and reduce time spent tracking down documents and expertise with technology that brings data, people and systems together in a centrally managed, standards-based environment.
4. People-driven processes: Take control of structured workflow processes by integrating business systems into a single environment, infused with communication and collaboration capabilities that empower workers to rapidly escalate or resolve unexpected issues.
