This week Steve Ballmer and Jeff Raikes launched the Microsoft's People-Ready vision. At the core of this is the idea that software that empowers people will help businesses achieves next level of productivity gains.

My first post from last March was about putting “people” at the center of our design. One of the core themes for our Dynamics Wave 1 releases is around “roles based” user experience. Our User Experience teams has done some amazing work in doing the deep anthropological research for each of the roles within business and this context is what is influencing the significant investments we are making in delivering user experiences that transcend both Dynamics and Office “personalized” for the specific role.

A good example perhaps is to look at how a business using CRM and GP together. You have sales people living in Outlook and still getting to the price list from GP and a Finance Manager using the GP Sharepoint portal can get at pipeline data for forecasting and other functions. We are going to be releasing the integration between GP and CRM at Convergence next week and this will set the standard for real seamless integration even at the user experience level.

Also at Convergence our User Experience team will be hosting a UX launge where you will get an opportunity to test and give us feedback on all our “roles based” UX work. Also you can expect to hear more about “People ready Business” and role Dynamics plays (no pun intended) from Jeff Raikes and Bill Gates.