People Centric - Business Process
It’s heartening to see business application vendors take notice of the importance of integrating their applications with desktop productivity tools like Microsoft Office!!
When I interact with users of our applications, I find that they are information workers who today are using a myriad set of applications, communications and productivity tools to get their work done. We can broadly segment them into three groups: (i) predominant biz app users who while spending most of their time in applications, also need to use communication and desktop productivity tools (ii) business owners and decision makers who spend their time with productivity and communication tools, but need information from biz apps, and (iii) users who fall in between these two categories, having equal need for biz app functionality and productivity tools for different classes of tasks. We believe that the platform infrastructure, communication and productivity tools, and business applications need to blend together to uniquely serve each of the users in these categories.
Some think that mere linking of a transactional self service app from within Office will suffice to deliver the productivity and ease of use gains. We don’t.
For us at Microsoft, the interoperability does not stop at point to point integration of one software silo with another, but expands to providing individualized experience for each of the users where they have all the tools and applications available to them across the realm of biz apps, Office, and communication tools, oblivious to software boundaries. It is this common notion of software interoperability that drives the traffic between our building and that of our colleagues in Office, Sharepoint, Real Time Communication, Mobile Devices, Servers and Tools. The melting pot of these technologies can enable a lot of cool and useful customer scenarios.
For each of the personas in our Customer Model, our engineers have created interaction models detailing how personas interact with various applications and tools on their desktop. It is just amazing to see the improvement in ease of use and productivity that result from integration of business process applications and end user tools (process+people).
You can see the reflection of these efforts in our existing releases. Microsoft CRM 1.2 integration with Outlook and Exchange Server is a good example of blending business applications with communication tools and infrastructure in the context of business process (sales, marketing, service). The integration of MS-CRM and Office – Information Worker Bridge Framework (IBF) extends the reach of MS-CRM business process and data to rest of Office tools beyond Outlook. In Great Plains 8.0 and Navision 4.0 you can see contextual integration with Word, Excel, and Outlook; in the forms where it makes most sense for the users. Similarly, you can see the marriage of portal technologies with biz apps reflected in terms of ease of creation of portals from within Navision and Great Plains thus exposing app functionality and data in intranets and extranets for both self service transactional use and business analysis and insight.
Going forward, we have more exciting things cooking with chefs from various applications and tools participating in the process. It is the ability to pass context behind the scenes from one application to another (process integration), one user to another (collaboration) that makes the integration more end user friendly and productive. A few examples of what we are working on - business alerts that carry context of business process when delivered as notifications; enabling in context query, retrieval and drill back capabilities to business transactions from any Office application; integrated search across structured (business transactions) and unstructured information (email, documents). Delivering of this type of innovation requires that we start with a broader understanding of business process (structured transactions, unstructured communications, exception handling) and tie it back to individual work and breaking down of software silos that impede productivity (role based user experiences). All this rich funtionality needs to be enabled keeping in mind that it needs to be highly adaptable (integrated meta data) and also the server infrastruture should not add extra cost.
So what do I think of the SAP announcement today with regards to Microsoft Office integration? I welcome it. We in MBS have more depth and breadth of Office integration today and we will keep this lead going forward. With this announcement SAP customers and prospects now have the choice of MBS solutions as richer, more adaptable and lower cost alternatives to SAP (Affordable Adaptability).
Satya Nadella is corporate vice president responsible for leading the Product Group within Microsoft Business Solutions.
Nadella joined Microsoft in 1992 and has held a variety of marketing, product development and general management roles. Before taking on his current role, Nadella was responsible for launching and leading Microsoft bCentral, the leading Internet service providing Web presence, communications, customer marketing and e-commerce tools to small businesses. Nadella became part of Business Solutions when the division was formed by combining the bCentral, Great Plains and Navision a/s groups.
Before that, he was general manager for the Commerce Platforms Group and led the development efforts for Microsoft Commerce Server and Microsoft BizTalk Server. Nadella was also a key member of several advanced technology incubation efforts inside Microsoft, including interactive television (ITV) and digital rights management (DRM). Nadellas first assignment at Microsoft was in the Windows Developer Relations group, where he was a program manager.
Before joining Microsoft, Nadella was a member of the technology staff at Sun Microsystems Inc.
Nadella has a masters degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin and a masters degree in business administration from the University of Chicago.
