Microsoft’s People-Ready Business marketing slogan, representing the idea of making software designed around the way people work, is informing Dynamics’ development around the core concept of role-based interfaces.
Although role-based interfaces are not a new idea, the people-ready program is a broader, umbrella concept that describes efforts to create bridges between business processes and business practices. Microsoft hopes to capitalize on its position in personal productivity with Office, with Dynamics, and with Microsoft’s internet and consumer market footprint.
That combination of focus is very, very important, it’s very powerful, and I think it really uniquely positions Microsoft to be the best company to be able to meet your needs, said Jeff Raikes, president of the business applications division, in his keynote speech.
The vision is based on the idea that when people are provided with the right software, they become the key to driving business success. The convergence of business systems with personal productivity software tailored for specific employee roles will enable this people-ready business, according to Microsoft.
An implementation of this vision would comprise existing products and products Microsoft plans to bring to market over the next year. It would be enabled by integration across Windows Vista, Office 2007, Windows Mobile, the next version of Exchange, and infrastructure offerings such as Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2005.
The initiative is designed to explain how Microsoft’s various offerings relate to each other, and to show that Microsoft is serious about enterprise applications. It has another job too, encouraging the company’s user base to upgrade Office and other Microsoft software, and to buy into its enterprise applications on strategic, rather than tactical, grounds.
Gates, in a keynote speech yesterday, outlined five technology areas that are behind the development of role-based productivity across enterprise and desktop applications. First, the need to provide a familiar interface modelled on the specific role of the user, via new Vista-based user interfaces.
The next Office, expected for enterprises in October and through retail in the new year, will play a critical part in connecting business applications and personal productivity tools, acting as the familiar interface.
Last year we talked about the user interface. This year we see the user interface advancing in Windows with the Vista operating system, said Gates. For the vision to advance the user interface has to change, which could undermine the familiarity argument. However, according to Gates, once users a feel for the new interfaces they will not want go back.
The forthcoming Office interface, with its acres of welcome white space, does away with hierarchical drop-down menus and introduces the concept of context-sensitive ribbons to navigate through processes, and transparent glass panes so users can see how they got to their current page without cluttering the screen with multiple windows.
The second area of development focuses on delivering service-oriented applications. The Dynamics applications are gradually moving towards the service-based .NET architecture, as part of Microsoft’s overall goal to deliver a unified code base embracing currently disparate applications.
Gates warned of some dangers, cautioning that SOA in the consumer world, delivered over the internet, has been over-simplified and can be lacking in the areas of security, reliability and scalability, so it was important to design SOA for a business-class environment.
Collaboration is also an important component and here Windows SharePoint Services will provide the foundation to enable a transparent organization where employees, partners and suppliers can access data at all times in a secure manner. The aim is to go beyond basic data sharing through SharePoint’s ability to understand and support workflows.
In practice Gates believes SOA and collaboration developments will be important in crossing the boundary between structured applications and human based communications, which is where business transactions go awry.
About 80% to 90% of business transactions go smoothly and remain within the structured transactional system, he said, but the remaining 10% to 20% cross the boundary into the world of unstructured communications. The problem is the world of unstructured person to person communications and structured applications don’t interface well he believes.
Consequently it is important to be able to plug workflow capability into applications and SharePoint plays a critical role here. Gates said that last year the company talked a lot about SharePoint and its ability to take disparate catagories of software and collapse them into a low price, pervasive, high volume piece of software like Office on the client. The connection to applications is very strong.
The fourth technology pillar is business intelligence and the need to make it available beyond the traditional group of specialists and here tools like the previously announced SQL Server Reporting Services are key enablers, allowing users to be automatically presented with information relevant to their role.
Finally the ability to rapidly develop composite applications is driving design and will play an important role in spanning the boundaries between structured and unstructured data while also tying together formal processes with ad hoc workflow.
Microsoft is aiming to deliver tools that will enable software developers to rapidly compose and manage web service based composite applications, based around the Windows Communications Framework (previously known as Indigo).
As always Microsoft has a big, highly integrated vision and it is one that resonated among the customers attending Convergence. Its weakness is that it relies on a broad and deep application and infrastructure stack that Microsoft is struggling to deliver, as illustrated by the most recent Vista and Office 2007 delays.
It approach is heavily role-based but that should not be taken to mean that it is just looking at superficial screen-based integration or presenting Office as an alternative to a portal; its integration strategy goes deep into the stack and across the applications.
