Collaborate to manage business challenges

Find out how three organizations around the world use collaboration technologies to solve business problems and increase productivity.

In summary:

In Australia, Peter Menadue has watched the collaboration tools market evolve over the past 18 months. "Organizations are realizing that they have not been getting the value out of monolithic collaboration applications they have deployed in the past," says Menadue, the general manager for application integration for the Sydney office of Dimension Data, a global systems integrator. "They're beginning to see that these applications don't work in isolation: They have to be integrated with the productivity applications people use every day."

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Consider these examples:

These companies represent innovative and productive uses of collaboration technology; but such success does not come without challenges. For example, you can deploy these collaboration applications without upgrading many associated applications or even a voice-over-IP (VoIP) network. Employees may be disappointed at the lack of certain expected features; however, the flexibility to deploy these technologies in increments, without a huge capital expense, is a benefit few companies can overlook.

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Keeping a global workforce connected to deliver the news

Sociedade Independente de Comunicação (SIC) is part of the increasingly competitive global media industry. Based in a suburb of Lisbon, the television station operates several satellite and cable channels in Portugal and other countries. Its editors work with freelance journalists who must be able to download assignments and upload news reports, photographs, and video clips. SIC deployed Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 with the unified messaging option. This provided each employee with an integrated inbox in which to receive voice mail, faxes, and e-mail messages. With just one place to look for messages, employees know they have the latest information.

As a communications company, it is important that people be able to contact each other quickly, especially when working under tight deadlines.. João Quezada de Almeida IT director Sociedade Independente de Comunicação

"As a communications company, it is important that people be able to contact each other quickly, especially when working under tight deadlines," says João Quezada de Almeida, IT director for SIC. When news editors finish their shifts, he explains, they may have very little time to communicate to their successors the status of current or upcoming stories. With an integrated inbox, correspondents can forward voice mail and e-mail to a single location, which allows them more time to focus on the news.

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Avoiding travel costs

Rautaruukki Corp. is a Helsinki-based supplier of pipes, beams, and façades for the construction industry, with employees in 23 countries and 8 time zones. Employee travel is expensive and time-consuming, so the company looked for a way to make its employees more productive when they worked together and, at the same time, save the company time and money. Rautaruukki also wanted to move to a single system for both internal and external videoconferencing to avoid the training and administration costs associated with two systems.

The company deployed the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, which uses the Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 client application to integrate with the 2007 Microsoft Office system. Using the solution, employees can click a person's name in a document or contact list, and determine if that person is available for a conversation. This capability is called presence. If the person is available, employees can communicate through instant messaging, e-mail, voice, or even through an audio or video conference.

The result: By using Office Communications Server 2007 more frequently, employees can make decisions faster. IT Service Manager Jarmo Hurula notes that the time it takes to make a decision in IT alone has decreased from four weeks to a few days.

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Tracking and forecasting costs

The San Diego Convention Center competes with convention centers across the United States to entice organizations to hold meetings at its facility. To be competitive in their bids, the organization needs the most up-to-date cost information, especially costs relating to labor.

To enable this visibility, Rose Business Solutions, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, deployed a system that downloads data from the convention center's Microsoft Dynamics SL application to Microsoft Office Excel Reporting Services, and then posts it on a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 site. "It's a great forecasting tool," says Lynn Ewing, director of information systems for the convention center. "We know how much an event is costing us in terms of labor because of the integration with our time and attendance tool." With updated information, she adds, officials can better estimate, and bid on, similar events.

"Essentially, SharePoint is the presentation layer to their metrics," says J.J. Hanson, CTO of Rose Business Solutions. "The report is centrally located in SharePoint, but they don't have to log in to an ERP [enterprise resource planning] system to find it."

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Microsoft options for collaboration

Although collaboration tools can affect productivity and efficiency improvements, businesses must assess technology options and their associated costs. For example:

Silicon Valley-based freelancer Howard Baldwin writes regularly for the Microsoft Midsize Business Center. His work has also appeared on AllBusiness.com and in CIO.

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