Do more with less: These products can help
Windows Vista, Microsoft Forefront Client Security, and the 2007 Microsoft Office system can help your business run more efficiently.
In summary:
| • | Microsoft Forefront offers consolidated reporting to enhance visibility across your organization and uses multiple scanning engines to help protect e-mail. |
| • | Windows Vista is now easier to deploy across many computers and can help employees locate information faster with improved desktop search. |
| • | The 2007 Microsoft Office system focuses on bringing more advanced functionality to the average employee. |
Small and midsize businesses around the world often struggle with the challenges of how to allocate few resources, how to equip people with up-to-date technology, and how to realize new business efficiencies without unnecessary upgrades—in short, how to do more with less. Three Microsoft technologies—Microsoft Forefront, Windows Vista, and the 2007 Microsoft Office system—offer new or updated capabilities to help them do just that.
"With the 2007 Microsoft Office system, Microsoft Forefront, and Windows Vista, the main [incentive] we're seeing is to get [businesses] off their older operating systems, improve security, and improve manageability," says David Hanrahan, general manager for Microsoft Solutions in Melbourne, Australia.
Forefront: Increase security, and give IT data it can act on
 | What Forefront does for the growing business is ensure that they don't have to be experts in security. |  | | Ryan McGee
Senior Product Manager for Microsoft Forefront
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Forefront, the Microsoft line of security products for businesses, covers three fundamental areas: client security (desktops and operating systems); protection for server applications, like Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007; and protection for the "edge"—where the network connects with the rest of the world.
Most important for midsize businesses, experts say, are client security and messaging protection using Forefront for Exchange Server 2007. "These are the two places where growing businesses can most easily see benefits from enhancing their security," says Ryan McGee, senior product manager for Microsoft Forefront.
At the same time, Forefront offers consolidated reporting, which allows an IT department to see which computers are at risk or do not have the required antivirus updates. "The IT department can save a lot of time and effort with that visibility," says McGee.
Forefront also helps organizations manage messaging security with less monitoring. "Every midsize business knows and feels the pain of keeping e-mail flowing while rejecting spam and viruses," says McGee. Forefront includes multiple antivirus scanning engines, which can back each other up in case one engine fails. "What Forefront does for the growing business is ensure that they don't have to be experts in security," he says, adding that Forefront also helps save IT departments time. "They don't have to be watching the security on their Exchange Server 24 hours a day."
Windows Vista: Increase reliability, productivity, and return on investment (ROI)
Windows Vista, the newest Microsoft desktop operating system, offers benefits in four key areas: mobility, finding and using information, security and compliance, and desktop optimization and management. The mobility and security enhancements include features like improved power management and better ways to sync mobile computers. For example, a new power state called "Sleep" has replaced the older states of "Standby" and "Hibernate"; sleep mode preserves battery life while saving your work. Windows Vista also eliminates the problem that occasionally occurred with Windows XP, when an open application prevented a PC from shutting down. A new feature called "Sync Center" allows users to manage data synchronization among multiple devices. In addition, Windows Vista offers a lower total cost of ownership on mobile PCs than older operating systems do. These savings come, in part, from self-healing features that reduce calls to the Service Desk.
To address continuing challenges with mobile security, Windows Vista has encryption capabilities designed to protect data if a laptop is stolen, hacked, or falls into the wrong hands. For example, Windows Vista can encrypt the full volume of a computer's C drive, whereas earlier operating systems encrypted only user-level files and folders. "We've seen quite a quick uptake of [Windows] Vista around the security and encryption piece," says Hanrahan.
Another place businesses can realize high ROI is in worker productivity. According to the market research firm IDC, the average information worker spends 9.5 hours each week searching for information and another 6.8 hours each week filing and organizing documents. Windows Vista offers faster search capabilities and better ways to organize and share information through tools like Live Icon and Live Preview, which allow people to see snapshots of the actual documents or applications they're seeking. A feature called Search Folders allows you to create a virtual search folder that updates automatically.
IT departments can reap productivity benefits from Windows Vista by deploying tools that allow the installation of a single operating system image on many machines, as opposed to creating separate images for PCs from different vendors. The same is true for languages: A single image supports multiple languages. "The new deployment tools not only ease the migration to Windows Vista, but provide ongoing cost savings because the new images are easier to maintain, update, and deploy to new users," says Michael Burk, senior product manager on the Windows Vista team.
The 2007 Microsoft Office system: Sophisticated yet familiar
The latest iteration of Microsoft Office brings major changes to how people interact with the software. This will require some training for your workforce, but the long-term benefits of better usability and productivity can be powerful. "The biggest change with [the Microsoft] Office [system] is the user interface," says Monica Robinson, product manager with Microsoft. "We did hours and hours of studies, and we realized that the elements that people needed for everyday productivity were buried in drop-down lists." The 2007 Office system uses a "fluid user interface"—what Microsoft has named the Ribbon—to bring those oft-used capabilities to the surface and to help employees create and change professional-looking documents faster.
Additionally, the new applications in the 2007 release help information workers use sophisticated features more easily. For instance, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 now has a capability called SmartArt that lets a user easily transform data into visuals. Microsoft Office Excel 2007 contains a conditional formatting feature that allows a user to parse columns of data and format them. And Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 includes new capabilities for organizing and merging calendars, tasks, and messages.
The Microsoft collaboration toolset, Office SharePoint Server 2007, offers growing businesses a broad combination of collaboration, portal, and search functionality in one product. It also includes a new enterprise content management tool for managing documents, Web content, records, and workflows. For example, a city council in Queensland, Australia, which was struggling to implement new mobile applications cost-effectively, used SharePoint Server 2007 to push intranet and extranet sites out to mobile workers without added development costs, Hanrahan says.
The decision to implement any one of these three systems can help your organization squeeze more value from its IT funds, but there are advantages to deploying all three at once. "The combination of [the 2007 Microsoft] Office [system], Forefront, and Windows Vista means that [businesses] can leverage an investment in Microsoft licensing and gain the mobility of [the] Office [release], the security of Forefront, and the security and manageability functions of [Windows] Vista," Hanrahan says.
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Meg Mitchell Moore writes about business and technology in Newburyport, Massachusetts.
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