Connected Experiences for Retail: TechnologyFeatured Microsoft software and servicesYour retail business is constantly looking for a competitive edge, and with Microsoft technologies, you can empower your people in ways that give your organization a big advantage over your competition. These new technologies will help your people work smarter, offering key solutions to problems unique to retail operations. Here's how. View technology for:  Microsoft BizTalk Server is a family of Microsoft server products that supports large-scale implementation and management of enterprise application integration processes. BizTalk Server is used to streamline business processes within a large company's internal network and between business partners over the Internet. BizTalk Server enables the integration of business applications written in different computer languages and running on various operating systems.  Microsoft Office Communications Server delivers instant messaging and presence as part of a scalable, enterprise-grade solution offering enhanced security, seamless integration with other Microsoft products, and an extensible, industry-standard development platform. Organizations can realize cost savings, improve business efficiencies, increase individual productivity, and enhance intellectual property protection with this easy-to-manage, highly available solution.  Microsoft Commerce Server 2007 lets you create Web applications and extend your business across networks. You can integrate your existing e-commerce solutions into Commerce Server 2007. New business management applications help you manage and maintain sites more effectively.  The Microsoft Office 2007 system is a complete set of desktop and server software that can help streamline the way your associates do business. This latest release offers significant new capabilities to help increase personal productivity, simplify how people work together, streamline processes and enterprise content management, and improve the quality of business insight across organizations.  Microsoft Office Excel 2007 is a powerful tool used to analyze, communicate, and manage information to enable more informed decisions. Whether you're publishing a financial forecast for an executive review or providing a business report to an external auditor, Excel 2007 helps communicate the analysis in professional-looking reports and charts with ease.  Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server provides employees with robust monitoring capabilities and powerful visualization and analysis services and enables all users to continuously contribute to and interact with the planning, budgeting, and forecasting processes. This product, working with both SharePoint Server and SQL Server, delivers information on key performance indicators to store employees through a Web interface.  Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, a new server program that is part of the Microsoft Office system, allows the efficient delivery of necessary business information to customers, suppliers, and employees through the Web. Your organization can use Office SharePoint Server to facilitate collaboration, provide content management features, implement business processes, and supply access to information that is essential to organizational goals and processes. You can quickly create SharePoint sites that support specific content publishing, content management, records management, or business intelligence needs. You can also conduct effective searches for people, documents, and data; participate in forms-driven business processes; and access and analyze large amounts of business data. As a single interface for all information, SharePoint Server puts the power of BI into the hands of the organization's business users. It features Excel Services Web-enabled access, which simplifies the user interface by limiting the information users can view and protecting underlying data and models. With this solution, business users can create fully interactive Web-based, data-bound worksheets, including charts, tables, and PivotTable views, without any custom coding. Users can also create rich, interactive dashboards that assemble and display business information from disparate sources.  Microsoft SQL Server is designed to help your people access and format the information they need to do their jobs and provide service to your customers. This next-generation database management and analysis solution delivers increased security, scalability, and availability to enterprise data and analytical applications, while making them easier to build, deploy, and manage. SQL Server can control operational and analytical data at both the store and enterprise levels. Reporting features allow role-based reports that provide the right information to the right person at the right time. With the related SQL client products, SQL Server can cost-effectively store and display data throughout the organization, from a mobile terminal or a point-of-service register to an operational database in the store and all the way to central operational databases and data warehouses.  Microsoft System Center Operations Manager gives your people the ability to view what is happening at each device, including point-of-sale peripheral devices, and with each application, all from a central location. Automated alerts can be created to advise you when events occur, leading to proactive problem resolution. And when IT departments can be proactive rather than reactive, they make more efficient use of their own resources, lowering life-cycle costs while still addressing the needs of store associates, managers, and customers. Microsoft System Center Operations Manager also supports the deployment of software solutions, as well as any software maintenance required in the store.  Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft data centers. Windows Azure reduces barriers to entry to creating reliable and scalable web applications because it is based on and works with familiar Microsoft technology. Windows Azure supports Microsoft Web technologies such as ASP.NET, IIS, and Visual Studio 2008, so developers can use their existing skills to efficiently create, test, deploy, manage & monetize web services. Windows Azure supports standards and protocols including SOAP, REST and XML. Windows Azure welcomes third party tools and languages such as Eclipse, Ruby, PHP, and Python.  Windows Embedded POSReady is the first Microsoft operating system designed specifically for store systems and delivers the functionality that retailers demand for point-of-service systems. Additionally, the product's design enables partners to cost-effectively build and market their POS systems based on the Windows Embedded for POS platform. The POS for .NET implementation of the unified POS device standards provides support for all peripherals required to run a store's POS operation.  Windows Mobile enables your people to stay connected and improve customer responsiveness by allowing stores and central operations to move wherever information needs to be entered or accessed. Microsoft Windows Mobile-powered handheld devices enable store personnel to take business functionality to the customer. Windows Mobile also allows the customer to connect to the store directly, using a mobile phone to make payment or obtain information on retail items.  Microsoft Windows Server delivers the most flexibility of any server platform. It allows customers to deploy only the functionality they need on each server, which translates into fewer patches, increased uptime, and decreased risk. Customers can deploy a server foundation with a small number of optimized server roles, resulting in appliance-like cost of ownership.
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