Helping people connect and collaborate is the key to innovation
Updated: April 4, 2006
By Peter Haapaniemi
From Microsoft Windows Vista and Groove to the Microsoft Dynamics business software suites, new application technology is bringing people—and their ideas—together with data synchronization.
In summary:
| • | A new Microsoft collaboration platform helps people inside and outside your company walls work with each other in a real-time virtual workspace, with ongoing data synchronization in the background. |
| • | The next version of Microsoft's desktop operating system will help you better synchronize your data and files on various devices and machines. |
| • | Upcoming versions of Microsoft enterprise resource planning systems will incorporate role-based functionality so that your people will have access to only the features, applications, and data that best match their job role. |
Decades ago, management expert Peter Drucker pointed out that innovation was not about science and research but rather "a change in the behavior of customers, of teachers, of farmers, of eye surgeons—of people in general."
In short, the human element is the key to innovation—and that fact has not changed since Drucker wrote those words. What has changed, however, is the way people work as they pursue innovation. Today, employees work at home, on the road, and at customer sites, as well as at the office. They need to cooperate across company boundaries. They have to use and share a growing amount of information that is vital but often overwhelming. And with the ever-accelerating pace of innovation, they have to work as quickly and as productively as possible.
Increasingly, information technology (IT) managers at midsize businesses are called upon to help their organizations meet those challenges by finding ways to help people connect and collaborate—and ultimately innovate—while paying close attention to costs.
Mobility, collaboration, and teamwork
Today, the evolution of Microsoft products is focused on the new realities facing geographically dispersed knowledge workers. A number of forthcoming products can help midsize businesses link their people and share information and ideas while bringing increased efficiency to IT processes.
For example, the Microsoft Windows Vista operating system (scheduled for release in January 2007) has a number of features that can help mobile workers stay in touch. With the Windows Mobility Center, for example, employees can easily change their systems to adapt to new locations, networks, and activities, using configuration settings organized in a central location.
Windows Vista also provides a single user interface called SyncManager for handling data synchronization on various devices. That means users can better manage calendar and e-mail information on personal digital assistants (PDAs), contact information on mobile phones, and files on networked computers and file servers.
On another front, Microsoft acquired Beverly, Mass.-based Groove Networks last year and is integrating Groove's collaboration software with Microsoft Office and Windows SharePoint Services. Groove software lets users quickly create collaborative workspaces and bring teams together around data, files, messages, forms, meetings, calendars, and so forth.
The Groove software runs on users' computers and uses peer-to-peer technology to automatically keep files on each team member's computer up to date. "You just launch the application and all your workspaces are sitting there like folders on the hard drive," says Ryan Hoppe, marketing manager at Groove Networks.
"The software makes sure that when you make a change, it gets out to each team member's copy of the workspace," he adds. When a team member goes offline, the system stores updates on a server that acts as a relay. As soon as that individual returns to the network, the changes are automatically pushed down from the server to his or her computer. Smaller companies that don't want to manage a relay server can subscribe to a relay managed by Microsoft.
Groove and Windows SharePoint Services are complementary, which makes the integration of the two especially important. "SharePoint is a great environment for a larger team, while Groove is for relatively small teams that need to work together on a known project and get something done very quickly," Hoppe says.
For example, if the marketing team wanted to produce new collateral material for a product, team members could go to the SharePoint site and find the best practices and templates for that collateral and bring them into the Groove workspace. There, in-house content experts and brand teams could work with outside writers and designers to create the piece. The team could then send the completed collateral back up to the SharePoint site to make it available across the company.
To reduce bandwidth usage—a key concern for IT departments working with peer-to-peer technology—Groove shares only the changes made to files, rather than the entire files, over the network.
To help ensure that these distributed systems comply with IT policies, Microsoft provides Groove Server Manager software, which gives IT professionals a range of central control tools. "The IT department can create accounts for each Groove user in the organization and set policies based on the account and the actual PC," says Hoppe.
Innovation and the front line
Increasingly, innovative ideas come from the front lines of the business—in particular, from the people who are in close touch with customers and processes. As a result, many midsize businesses want to help those employees make the best use of enterprise data and link them more effectively with the organization as a whole.
To that end, the Microsoft Dynamics family of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems is moving toward the delivery of content based on the user's role in the organization. Microsoft has identified about 50 roles, such as salesperson or consultant. "When someone signs on, the system will recognize that person, and based on their role it will give them a unique and personalized user interface," explains Peter Darling, product marketing manager with the Microsoft Dynamics AX (formerly Microsoft Business Solutions–Axapta) group in Vedbaek, Denmark. That means that users end up with relevant, easy-to-use information and tools rather than a flood of content to manage.
Predetermined roles make the IT department's job easier as well. Assigning user rights and functionality for numerous individual clients "can be a nightmare for the IT staff," Darling says. Still, companies can customize roles to meet specific needs, using the pre-built role as a foundation.
Microsoft Dynamics is also bringing sophisticated analytics tools to frontline users. Traditionally, when new types of reports were required, the IT department had to create them. "So you had to take your talented IT people away from what they were doing and have them take two weeks building a report," says Darling. Microsoft Dynamics solutions, on the other hand, allow for a query infrastructure in which somebody at the user level—not an IT person—can create their own queries with minimal support, in just a few hours.
"If you can empower people at the user level to make their own queries and find new ways of digging into the company's data, that is a huge paradigm shift in the way that people are working with information," Darling says.
Peter Haapaniemi is a Farmington, Mich.-based writer and a contributor to the Microsoft Midsize Business Center.
