Date: November 19, 2009
Event Start Time: 11:00 AM Pacific Standard Time (UTC - 8 hours)
Duration: 1 hour
This is the first of a series of webinars on Migration. This one will introduce the different onboarding strategies used to get directory and mail content into Microsoft Online Services and will provide an overview of some of the tools we have available to get you there. The rest of this series will dig into the details of specific migration scenarios.
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER
SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool
Planning a Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS) installation or a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) installation for a large enterprise can be a very complex undertaking. Determining the most cost-effective topology, hardware, and bandwidth requirements is not a trivial task and involves selecting from a variety of configuration options. In choosing the option that best fits your organization’s needs, you need to answer the following questions:
- What is the minimum hardware you need to deploy?
- Where and how should you deploy the hardware?
- How can you optimize your deployment to meet your organization’s requirements for availability and performance?
- How will growing capacity needs affect the topology?
The SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool, now available as a free download on the Microsoft Download Center, helps you effectively answer these questions, and helps you balance your organization’s needs for capacity and performance with its need to keep costs under control. This new tool extends Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner 2007 so that you can use Capacity Planner’s analysis and simulation features to plan your WSS or MOSS deployment.
Downloadable book: Planning and architecture for Office SharePoint Server 2007
This book provides information and guidelines to lead a team through the steps of planning the deployment of a solution based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. The audiences for this book are business application specialists, line-of-business specialists, information architects, IT generalists, program managers, and infrastructure specialists who are planning a solution based on Office SharePoint Server 2007. This book also includes links to planning worksheets for recording information related to your planning and deployment activities.
The New Store Opening application template helps a team manage the opening of new store locations or re-modeling of existing store location. The site provides a single location to manage tasks, issues, and documents for all store opening processes, enabling end users to view relevant information and providing project managers insight across the entire project.
Download the template from TEMPLATE
Windows SharePoint Services is a versatile technology that organizations and business units of all sizes can use to increase the efficiency of business processes and improve team productivity. With tools for collaboration that help people stay connected across organizational and geographic boundaries, Windows SharePoint Services gives people access to information they need.
Download Windows Sharepoint Services Via: LINK
More information about Windows Sharepoint Services
![Bb735122.image001(en-us,TechNet.10)[1]](http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/shishirs/WindowsLiveWriter/CentralizingandSharingBusinessIntelligen_A2BF/Bb735122.image001(en-us,TechNet.10)%5B1%5D_3.jpg "Bb735122.image001(en-us,TechNet.10)[1]")
This technical white paper features the Microsoft CBI (Consolidated Business Intelligence) portal as the context to discuss how Microsoft IT uses Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Microsoft business intelligence products to help business units within Microsoft to make better and faster decisions. Although Microsoft CBI is an internal Microsoft solution, the underlying technologies and products are publicly available to customers who seek to achieve similar results. These results include improving business insight, accelerating shared business processes, and connecting people with business-critical information in one central location through a standardized user interface that is customizable according to personal preferences.
The Microsoft CBI portal gives Microsoft employees and decision makers a single, personalized location with one enterprise report catalog to access standard and ad hoc reports, scorecards, and other business intelligence components. The Microsoft CBI portal enables business units within Microsoft to streamline reporting and decision-making processes as well as share business intelligence across the company in a more secure and efficient way. Additionally, it enables close collaboration with business partners and vendors that work with Microsoft on strategic and business-critical projects worldwide.
Download the technical Whitepaper at: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb735122.aspx
Excellent demo of a fully Hosted Customer Interaction Management Platform from Clarity Consulting: http://connect.claritycon.com/
In today's competitive global market, businesses need technology that cost-effectively enables flexibility and adds value to their organization.
Business Productivity Online Standard Suite delivers hosted communication and collaboration tools that feature:
- High availability
- Comprehensive security
- Simplified IT management
I noticed an interesting Webinar scheduled for October 28th on migrating from your Notes environment to hosted solutions using Microsoft Online Services. The webinar is organized by Cloud Strategies LLC and Binary Tree.
CLICK HERE TO SEE DETAILS AND REGISTER
![overview_HowItWorks[1]](http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/shishirs/WindowsLiveWriter/MovingfromNotestoMicrosoftOnline_B034/overview_HowItWorks%5B1%5D_3.jpg "overview_HowItWorks[1]")
Microsoft Online Services provides dedicated, enterprise-level hosted solutions for e-mail, collaboration, instant messaging and Web conferencing. Services are delivered from a highly reliable network of Microsoft data centers on servers systems dedicated to individual customer—enabling customers to use the latest productivity applications while reducing IT overhead.
The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard Compliance Planning Guide version 1.2 is targeted for merchants that accept payment cards, financial institutions that process payment card transactions, and service providers—third-party companies that provide payment card processing or data storage services. IT solutions for each of these groups must meet all PCI DSS requirements. The guide is intended to augment the IT Compliance Management Guide, which introduces a framework-based approach to creating IT controls as part of your efforts to comply with multiple regulations and standards. This guide also describes Microsoft products and technology solutions that you can use to implement a series of IT controls to help meet PCI DSS requirements, and many other regulatory obligations.
DOWNLOAD THE GUIDE
![R2_SSBI[1]](http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/shishirs/WindowsLiveWriter/SelfServiceBIinRetail_C732/R2_SSBI%5B1%5D_3.jpg "R2_SSBI[1]")
I've been in several meetings with retailers where business users and IT have been at odds with each other over business intelligence and reporting. At many of the retailers, I have noticed that business groups tend to own a large part of the Business Intelligence Applications and IT has very little control over it. A healthy balance is when IT has governance and control over the environment and at the same time, the business groups have the ability to generate their own content and reporting. This is where managed self service BI comes in.
SQL Server 2008 R2 is the next generation of the Microsoft SQL Server database platform, planned for release in the first half of calendar year 2010. Self-Service BI is one of the capabilities in the new release. SQL Server 2008 R2 provides both end-users and IT with powerful tools to create, analyze and model, share and manage business intelligence data in a secure and streamlined way.
Self-service analysis tools allow end-users to quickly create solutions from disparate data sources within a familiar Microsoft Office Excel user interface. By publishing these solutions in SharePoint Server, users can easily share them with others. IT gains management and oversight so they can help ensure the reliability, performance, and security of data-driven assets across the enterprise while also gaining better visibility into how people are using their data.
These new tools will empower retailers to extend the benefits of BI across the company with minimal dependence on IT to help drive smarter, quicker decision-making, free up IT staff for more valuable activities, and dramatically drive down deployment costs.
The merchandizing planners pull together budget for the year based on data from the previous year or season. They can access the historic data from their reporting databases but are often challenged with analyzing the data against trends and demographic information obtained from third party sources(possibly in an Excel Spreadsheet). Using traditional BI systems, this can be a challenge that requires the merchandizing planners to work with IT to help integrate the third party data into the reporting system. With Project Gemini, the merchandizing Planners are empowered with self-service analysis capabilities. The in-memory BI capabilities deployed as an add-in for Excel enables merchandizing managers to quickly analyze data and gain new insights into customer behavior and trends.
In the merchandize planning process, buyers, category and department managers need to make decisions and plans around what merchandize to sell at what store on a week by week basis. At the same time they also have to meet the target set in the budget. Events, Promotions and other external factors have an impact on these decisions and they need additional data to help get better insights during this process. Self-service analytical applications can empower people to make quicker and better decisions without having to involve IT. Excel Data-Mining Add ins enable users to access the powerful analytics engine from SQL Server to quickly analyze information to assist in pricing, allocation of inventory to stores and space allotted to each item in each stores display.
Retailers can benefit in streamlining and improving the demand planning processes around campaigns, promotions, reconciling the demand forecast, including seasonal and regional variations, product introductions and retirements, and planned promotional activity with the supply plan using self-service BI. Microsoft’s BI solution spans Microsoft Office Excel and other Office applications for individual BI, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server for team BI and Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server for organizationwide BI, with SQL Server as the data platform. This seamlessly interoperable, end-to-end lineup uniquely positions the retailer to deliver on the promise of ubiquitous BI by offering organizations compelling benefits designed to include these:
- Lower TCO. Ability to utilize existing investments in SQL Server, SharePoint and Office and drive end-user adoption to dramatically bring down per-user costs and generate unprecedented economies
- Rapid deployment and faster time-to-benefits. Easy onramp to powerful BI capabilities embedded within the everyday productivity tools employees already use, promoting wide end-user adoption
- Freeing up IT to act as a true strategic differentiator. Empowering information workers to quickly access information and perform their own analysis with minimal hand-holding from IT enables IT staff to concentrate their efforts where they can have the most strategic value for the business.
- Powerful synergies with other Microsoft applications. Ability to deploy the unified communications capabilities within Office Communications Server, for example, to nimbly act on BI-generated insights and “spread the wealth” with co-workers, customers, partners and suppliers
Look for my article on how retailers can leverage social media on page 41. I would love any feedback, thoughts or potential collaboration on other articles that I am working on around social media and retail.
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The Infosys-Microsoft Supply Chain Center of Excellence aims to build an active community of supply chain decision makers, professionals and experts. The Center envisions a forum where the community shares supply chain trends, issues, and ideas. Engage with Infosys and Microsoft experts and industry thought leaders to leverage their business process expertise and technology capabilities for insights and ideas on supply chain issues.
Check out the Microsoft-Infosys Supply Chain Solutions at : http://www.nextgenerationsupplychains.com/
Jamba Juice—a leading provider of healthy, on-the-go food and beverages—viewed the economic slowdown as an opportunity to assess its operations and improve efficiencies. The company decided to invest in integrated technology tools that would help its stores run more efficiently and streamline communication. Therefore, Jamba Juice signed a Microsoft® Enterprise Client Access License Suite agreement, saving 50 percent in software costs, and deployed products such as Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 and Microsoft Office PerformancePoint® Server 2007. The company already has seen improvements in its productivity, and it expects to enhance its business intelligence capabilities for better decision making. Overall, Jamba Juice anticipates that its use of Microsoft products will result in increased profitability due to a better ability to serve customers and decreased operational costs.
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New Belgium Brewing, one of the most innovative and fastest-growing craft brewers in the United States, has long used information technology to help meet its commitments to environmental stewardship, employee empowerment, and the bottom line. To help keep a close eye on inventory sales and costs, New Belgium has extended the reach of its Microsoft Dynamics® GP business management solution and has incorporated Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 to increase access to information and enhance communication and collaboration across the company. New Belgium credits its information technology solutions with helping it manage sustainable growth as it expands into new markets and introduces new products
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With over 5,500 employees at its corporate head office and 475 retail outlets nationwide, Canadian Tire was looking to refresh its Intranet site known as inTIREnet. The pre-existing site, hosted on a Lotus platform, was visually cluttered and staff complained of poor search functions. Canadian Tire teamed up with Microsoft® technology partner Envision IT to move its entire Intranet to a SharePoint® collaboration and document-management platform. Now, employees using the SharePoint-supported Intranet can easily search documents and share information across the network and receive daily corporate news updates. The solution helps Canadian Tire extend communication between employees in the corporate office, also known as the Home Office, while offering greater security measures and access to internal documents.
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