By Heidi Tollier-Nigro
Microsoft's seamless data solution

	Think office productivity is limited to the size of your hard drive and the speed of your network connections? Please. Talk to the brainiacs at Microsoft’s research labs and they will tell you that this is just the beginning. Imagine a world in which money is no object and the goal is to stretch technology to its limits.
A world in which technology minimizes distractions and allows you to focus on the task at hand. It knows who you are, what your schedule is, what projects you are working on, and conspires to help you accomplish more in 15 minutes than you dreamed you could do in an hour.

In this world, you come into your office, log onto your computer, and scan your desktop for your morning update. In one corner of the desktop screen is your daily schedule, next to which are all of the new documents that have arrived since you last logged on. Beside that are all of your incoming emails, video mails, and voice mails from both your office and cell phones compiled in one convenient inbox. You even have an urgent notice alerting you to the fact that you are supposed to be in a meeting right now. The urgent alert tells you where the meeting is located, who will be attending, and supposed to take with you. If you can’t attend in computer asks if you want to log in by video cam.

YOUR OWN PERSONAL ASSISTANT

In this world, the various operating systems, platforms, and device requirements are rrelevant. No matter where you are or how you are connecting—via cell phone, laptop, PC, or handheld—the software converts your documents, voice mail, e-mail, and video mail into documents most appropriate for that device. And because all of the devices are connected, wherever you log in—your office, home, car, even abroad an airplane soaring at 30,000 feet—you have full access to all of your data and communications.

It’s like having your own personal assistant. The software even supplies a few extras that you might not have thought of, like when your boss sends you an instant message, the inbox includes your boss’s name, a summary of your last email correspondence with him, where you are in your project schedule, a current project summary, and the fact that you are scheduled to play racquetball with him after work today. It even reminds you of your boss’s lovely wife’s name... just in case. In a nutshell, the software organizes the overload of information and repetitive tasks that siphon your productivity and frees you to focus on the most important tasks in your day.

“In our research, information workers tell us that the biggest challenge they face is information fatigue,” says Thomas Gruver, group marketing manager, business productivity, at Microsoft. “All of us suffer ‘information overload’ from the volume of information that is coming at us—faxes, e-mails, voice mails—from all of our different accounts. Managing across those communications can take up 20 percent of our day. At Microsoft, the question we were asking is: How do we build effective software that cuts through the clutter and uses the power of today’s leading-edge networking, integration, and communications technologies to make people truly more efficient?”

MAKING INFORMATION WORK

The answer to this question can be found at Microsoft’s Center for Information Works, a demonstration center that features many of today’s cutting-edge hardware devices, seamed with Microsoft’s future-looking, prototype software to create the ultimate working environment. Located in the Microsoft’s headquarters building, walking distance from the office of Bill Gates, the Center has been only recently viewed by select corporate executives, political figures, and print and broadcast media.

The Center for Information Works is a Jetsons-like world in which visitors experience Software’s ultimate potential. Using a fictitious business crisis into which politicians, CEOs, directors, and IT managers are plunged the moment they walk in the door, the Center allows participants to experience this potential in a simulated work environment that keeps them in a perpetual state of “Wow.”

When visitors enter the Center, they leave behind their own identities and become employees of Contoso Widgets Corporation. Immediately, they are informed by the Microsoft demonstrator, who has assumed the identity of a Contoso Widgets project manager, that he has received an urgent e-mail that Contoso’s chief competitor, Fabricam, is about to launch a bigger, better, faster widget. Using Microsoft’s powerful prototype software, the Contoso projector manager plays the e-mail, which contains both audio and video components, on a rear-projected flatpanel screen for all the employees to see. Not only is their competitor about to trump them, the email sendee confides, but Contoso management wants to know if they can trump Fabricam’s plan with a project of their own. In fact, the Contoso CEO wants to announce these plans to the press in two hours!

This begins the whirlwind tour using the power of cutting edge devices from Microsoft’s Center for Information Works suppliers, including Sony Electronics, seamed together with Microsoft software.

The Contoso employees assemble in the conference room, where three Sony back-lit screens are stitched together using Microsoft’s BroadBench® software to form a wall of available information. Participants sit with PCs, handhelds, smart cards, and wireless mice, and walk through the process of determining the feasibility of an accelerated launch. Employees share information and collaborate on the project by logging into a dynamic, interactive web page created especially for the meeting. Based on the input from participants during the meeting, the page is updated in real time. The web page is visible on their PCs or overhead on the flat-panel monitors above the presenter’s head.

Throughout the meeting, Contoso employees can share files by dragging and dropping them on the meeting web site; draw on electronic sketch pads that everyone can view; and interact with the charts to see the intersections of data that meet their needs. Mission-critical data such as inventory, supplier schedules, costing, and delivery, along with a variety of relevant background information, is searched and retrieved from all corners of the organization with a few clicks of the mouse. That information is then organized into lists, flow charts, or graphs also at the click of a mouse. Participants can view and comment on these data via the interactive web page, which is continually updated.
From there, participants move into the conference room, where they videoconference with members of the Contoso team around the world. And some participants are sent to various other slice-of-life environments, such as a home, automobile, and airplane, to demonstrate how they can stay connected to the same meeting, no matter how fast they are traveling or how high above the earth they may be.

JUST LIKE HOME, ONLY BETTER

While the Center for Information Works is designed to be campy and fun, it hits all of the major crunch areas that CEOs and their employees face: information overload, availability of data, work/life balance, networking, integration, and project collaboration.

Participants are wowed by the technology’s ability to enhance productivity down to the most exacting level of detail. For example, if the participants need to move from PC to handheld PC, they can do so seamlessly using the same wireless mouse. And phone calls can be made from the built-in phone, with phone numbers read with the same mouse using the sender’s e-mail address book.

Once the meeting is adjourned, all of the information is archived in document form for easy retrieval. If members of the management team not present at the meeting need to be updated on the meeting’s conclusions, the software will create a summary e-mail with the relevant charts, graphs, and text. With a single click, the summary e-mail can be sent to selected members of the user’s address book for retrieval on whatever device they are using at the time—handheld, PC, cell phone, or fax—and the software makes all of the necessary accommodations.

At the conclusion of one recent Center for Information Works demonstration, an executive—now out of his Contoso Widgets persona —turned to his colleague and said, “Has our IT guy seen this? If not, get him over here right away!” Exactly the kind of reaction that Microsoft is looking for.

Thomas Gruver emphasizes, however, the Center’s not about demonstrating hardware or even software. It’s about integration.

“Instead of it being about cool new features, which have driven most companies’ purchase decisions over the last ten to twenty years, Microsoft is looking at the larger context of bringing technology together so that employees can use it to save time, eliminate redundancy, and develop a better work-home balance, which are the major issues we are hearing from information workers,” says Gruver. “Everything we are showing is about how to manage that overload of information to get away from information fatigue.” While the solutions are extraordinarily sophisticated, the idea behind them is extraordinarily simple: connected data. “Companies are running multiple systems from financial ERP to manufacturing processes, to health care, to human resources.

While all are great systems, they are completely disconnected—if not internally, then with partner systems externally,” says Gruver. “We pull that together so that knowledge or information workers can make much more valuable decisions by having that information at hand. We take islands of data and connect them, allowing employees to analyze and utilize data in a more effective way. Where the real power comes is that they don’t have to be IT executives to do it. They just drag and drop between two data queries and the software knows what they are trying to do.”

Some of the technology showcased in the Center for Information Works is currently available. The rest is prototype only. “We want to bridge the gap between products that
are about to ship,” says Gruver. “But for the most part, the exhibit is five years out. It’s easy to create prototypes with conceptual ideas. Where the real cost is making it affordable to the masses, which—fortunately, for us—is not what this is about. We are charged only with looking at what these solutions might be. The software you see looks very little like software you’ve seen from anybody before.”

Indeed, it doesn’t. In fact, the fast-moving Center for Information Works demonstration throws participants into a world they never could have imagined, one that leaves their heads spinning. Joked one meeting participant, “That sure was information overload on how technology can save on information overload!” To this, Gruver’s response sounds a lot like the guy who cheerfully tests cell phone reception in a current, popular Verizon TV commercial: “Goood!”