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Collaborate and Communicate

AT A GLANCE

Microsoft productivity products

  • Microsoft Office 365

  • Microsoft Office Professional Plus

  • Microsoft Exchange Server 2010

  • Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010

  • Microsoft Lync Server 2010

How do your people collaborate across locations in real time?

First, you need to assess where your company is right now with just a few questions:

  • How common is it for your people to work from home or on the road? Is that a challenge?

  • How do employees from different locations work with each other?

  • How do you find the right employee for the right task?

  • How much does your company spend on travel?

  • How much is your company spending on conferencing and telecom?

Bring everyone together.

Keep the lines open.

Now it's easier than ever to communicate, collaborate, and co-author documents from virtually anywhere. Home, office, on the road—it's all one connected office. Your people can continue to work on a shared document, even when offline. When it's time for a quick collaboration, colleagues can quickly and easily brainstorm together.

Stay more secure and super flexible.

Minimize the interruptions. Help your workforce easily initiate more secure communications right from within Microsoft Office applications.

With the right information available, your teams can make better, faster decisions by keeping track of each other's presence and finding the right person by skill or responsibility. If social networking is part of the company plan, people can connect directly to LinkedIn, Facebook, and SharePoint right from Microsoft Outlook.

If savings are on your mind, look no further. You'll see how communicating with both audio and video via PCs can help lower your telecom, conference, and travel costs.

Case Study: Sprint Nextel

Publication Date:

  • 12/22/2009

Industries:

  • Telecommunications Industry

Country/Region:

  • United States

Software and Services:

  • Microsoft Office Outlook 2007

  • Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2

  • Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2

  • Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Enterprise Edition

Sprint Nextel

Telecommunications Firm Increases Mobility, Reduces Environmental Impact with Unified Solution

Sprint Nextel is committed to providing the latest mobile tools and technology for employees, as well as reducing the amount of real estate—and costs, both economic and environmental—to house them. As part of its corporate responsibility efforts, it launched Sprint Mobile Workforce in 2005, which resulted in reducing Sprint's IT carbon footprint by almost 10,300 metric tons annually, through retiring and redeploying equipment, phasing out non-essential applications, and reducing data center capacity. In 2008, as part of an ongoing effort to reduce its environmental impact and improve employee productivity and satisfaction, Sprint deployed a Microsoft unified communications solution. With increased mobility, employees can work virtually anywhere, virtually anytime, further reducing the need for costly real estate and long employee commutes—and reducing the environmental impact from both.

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Case Study: Creation Technologies

Publication Date:

  • 3/22/2010

Industries:

  • High Tech and Electronics Manufacturing

Country/Region:

  • Canada

Software and Services:

  • Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2

  • Microsoft Office 2010 Suites

  • Microsoft Sharepoint Server 2010

Creation Technologies

Executives Reduce Time Managing Documents by 75 Percent with Integrated Solution

Canada-based Creation Technologies is a leading electronics manufacturing services provider with 2,100 employees. Executives at Creation are frequently away from the office, traveling to customer sites and to the company's thirteen locations around the world. To stay connected and make strategic decisions, the Executive Leadership Team meets three times per month and depends on updates to critical management documents. Executives frequently spent valuable time trying to manage document revisions and consolidate individual edits. To resolve these issues, Creation deployed the Microsoft Office 2010 suites and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 to take advantage of co-authoring, offline access to documents, and other collaboration capabilities. Executives expect to reduce the time spent reconciling changes to documents by 75 percent so that they can devote more time to customer relationships.

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Case Study: Mediterranean Shipping Company

Publication Date:

  • 5/12/2010

Industries:

  • Transportation and Logistics Industry

Country/Region:

  • Switzerland

  • United States

Software and Services:

  • Windows 7

  • Microsoft SQL Server 2008

  • Microsoft Excel 2010

  • Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010

  • Microsoft Outlook 2010

  • Microsoft Sharepoint Server 2010

Mediterranean Shipping Company

Shipper Boosts Productivity, Gets Better Data Insights Faster with Software Upgrade

Ever wonder how cotton from the southern United States makes it to the interior of Turkey? It is likely shipped by Mediterranean Shipping Company, the second-largest shipper in the world. With so much of the world's precious cargo on board, Mediterranean Shipping strives for efficiency in all aspects of its business. The company recently conducted a pilot deployment of Microsoft Office 2010 and discovered great benefits. From the robust data analysis tools, which help employees complete complex calculations faster, to enhanced e-mail management tools and online access to spreadsheets to help make working together simpler, Mediterranean Shipping has found a lot to be excited about. The software has helped boost productivity, improve business insight, achieve higher IT efficiency, and minimize operations costs.

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Forrester Report

Prepared for Microsoft Corporation
November 2009


The Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Exchange 2010


Project Director: Amit Diddee

The Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Exchange 2010

Forrester study shows $82 per user per year cost reduction of extending mobility.

In October 2009, Microsoft commissioned Forrester Consulting to examine the total economic impact and potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying Microsoft Exchange 2010. Microsoft Exchange 2010 is the newest release of Microsoft's messaging and collaborative server software solution featuring email, voicemail, calendaring, contacts, and tasks; support for mobile and Web-based access to information; and support for data storage. This study illustrates the financial impact of deploying Microsoft Exchange 2010 for a retail and distribution organization of 1,500 employees and $450 million in annual revenue.

In conducting in-depth interviews with nine existing customers, Forrester found that these companies achieved cost avoidance of storage, reduced cost of high availability, cost avoidance in voicemail, savings in backup systems, fewer help desk calls, cost avoidance of mobility, enhanced communication security, and simplified compliance and legal discovery, among other benefits.

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Forrester Report

Prepared for Microsoft Corporation
May 2010


The Total Economic Impact Of Implementing Microsoft's Productivity Platform


Project Director: Michelle S. Bishop, Senior Consultant

The Total Economic Impact Of Implementing Microsoft's Productivity Platform

Forrester study shows travel savings and cost avoidance of separate conferencing and voice mail solutions.

Decades of investment in process automation and business applications have increased profit and raised the revenue per employee by automating rote processes, streamlining workflows, and giving people better tools to complete tasks. But businesses haven't yet systematically tackled the productivity of information workers. There is no "chief productivity officer," no executive focused on identifying where individual work and team work can be improved. Yet this is where the biggest business gains in information work lie. It's left to employees themselves or to the IT organization to introduce new tools that make information workers and teams, particularly distributed and multi-company teams, more productive.

In February 2010, Microsoft commissioned Forrester Consulting to examine the Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) and potential return on investment (ROI) on the integrated value or "better together" impact that enterprises may realize by deploying Microsoft Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Exchange 2010 and Office Communications Server 2007 R2 together. To understand the financial impact of investing in the latest version of these products, Forrester conducted in-depth interviews with 12 Microsoft customers that have started using these products and compiled their results and forward-looking expectations into a composite case study of a life sciences organization with 3,000 information workers.

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Solutions: Collaborate and Communicate

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Find the right people.

Lync 2010 will help your people find whomever they need to connect with, view their presence, and then choose the most effective way to communicate with them, either by voice, video, or by sharing an application. With Skill Search powered by SharePoint, users are also able to search for others based on skills, expertise, and group information. Native Active Directory integration can help keep IT costs low, and integration with Microsoft Office makes uptake high.

Connect directly from applications.

Communicating with context keeps the work moving. Lync 2010 works with Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, and Office applications, so people can easily collaborate by knowing each other's presence and connecting with click-to-call options. The new Contact Card brings together contacts and presence with easy actions from anywhere presence is available.

Work with email and voice mail as one.

Master your inbox. Conversation View, Clean Up, and Ignore in Microsoft Outlook 2010 remove duplicate information and act like a "mute button" for your inbox. Also, MailTips can be configured by IT to send notices before messages are sent to avoid information being leaked outside the company domain or messages being accidentally sent to large distribution lists.

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Work with consistent commands

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Work with consistent commands

  • Work easily with common features across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and SharePoint.

  • Click to communicate from Backstage View.

  • View all information with a click.

Connect like never before

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Connect like never before

  • Stay connected with applications that work together.

  • Receive and play voice mail in Outlook.

  • Read text previews of voice mail messages.

  • Choose how to connect with the new Contact Card.

Choose your device

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Choose your device

  • Access messages through a PC, a mobile device, or the web.

  • Connect using IM, voice mail, and email.

Take control

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Take control

  • Work more efficiently with new shortcuts and views in Outlook 2010.

  • Use Conversation View, Clean Up, and Ignore to save time.

  • Rely on Mail Tips for notifications when your email is addressed to someone outside of the organization or to a large distribution list.

Share applications

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Share applications

  • Work together with the same application within Office 2010 applications and Lync Server 2010.

  • Start sharing directly within applications.

  • Share easily with contacts.

  • Follow attendees clearly.

Work offline

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Work offline

  • Work with SharePoint documents and lists from anywhere.

  • Easily select content to take offline.

  • Find documents quickly with desktop search integration.

  • Sync only changes, not entire document, for efficiency.

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Video: Collaborate and communicate

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Korean Education Firm Increases Productivity By More Than 150 Percent With Office 2010

In 2010, Office Tutor became a success story in work productivity innovation when it built a mobile office environment for telecommuting. Office Tutor attempted various business management innovations including collaboration since the early 2000s but it failed to achieve its goal of the mobile office. Now, the convenience of wireless Internet access as well as reasonable Smartphone charges and a new version of Office has made it possible to realize this goal. By providing a flexible work environment, Office Tutor has improved productivity and work satisfaction.

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Commonwealth Bank of Australia

"The bank got one platform that we run all of our applications on. Putting Lync into that platform, it just worked. We're able to link it with Office, SharePoint, and with our .NET applications. We're able to use presence across all of those applications to be able to allow our people to collaborate on whatever piece of work that they're working on at that point of time" – Mark Griffith, Head of Workplace Technologies, Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

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