Raikes Urges Partners To Share Information Worker Vision

Microsoft's group vice president for Productivity and Business Services challenged solution providers and ISVs during his keynote at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference to invest in at least one solution area underlying the company's Information Worker competency during fiscal year 2005.

Already, there are more than 2,300 collaborative, team and organizational solutions built around the Office 2003 platform, and more than 70,000 partners have been trained on the technology, Raikes said. Areas of concentration he stressed in his keynote included solutions for improved file sharing, better customer service, mobile workforce connectivity and Office System end-user training.

Raikes also pledged $100 million in advertising in the coming year to help communicate scenarios that bring the Information Worker concept to life. In addition, he announced the general availability of the latest Information Worker solution accelerator, the Information Bridge Framework, a tool for connecting line-of-business data from back-office applications like accounting or inventory systems to tools such as Outlook or Excel.

"I like to think of the end-to-end scenarios and how they all work together, even if we don't deliver all of the components," Raikes told CRN in an interview. "I want to make sure that Office is really an extension of the platform for business application systems."

In a videotaped comment, Sandy Sharma, vice president of technology and strategy for Immedient, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Piscataway, N.J., said the company has a $10 million pipeline for enterprise project management work related to the Information Worker competency. Sharma said Immedient chose Microsoft's strategy because its "road map is more compelling than any other company's."

In general, Raikes said, customers want to bring together information from structured process-oriented applications with less-structured, ad hoc tasks. "Maybe you're handling an invoice, there's a Post-It note and maybe an e-mail that's related to that, and so on and so forth," he said. "There are just a huge amount of resources that are, in effect, wasted or just less efficient than they can be, when your unstructured system is not connected to your structured system."

Citing securities regulations, Raikes declined to disclose the number of Office 2003 copies that have been sold since the product's release nine months ago. But he did say that about twice the number of Office 2003 copies have been sold by systems builders and larger retailers than had been shipped for Office XP at this point in its life cycle.

"The thing that's a little bit harder for me to pin down--but we are working to make sure that we get lots of data on this--is the actual deployment within larger organizations," he said.

Indeed, in his keynote, Raikes pointed to deployment services as another area offering partners substantial opportunities during fiscal 2005. Asked later on when Microsoft plans to release tools that ease Office deployments--as the company demonstrated this week for Windows XP--Raikes said this clearly is an area of research for the Office team that will become better defined over the next couple of months.

"I think we're going to find you can do some subsegmentation of deployment behavior on the part of some types of customers," he said. "There are customers that basically say, 'We aren't going to upgrade anything until we upgrade to new PCs.' There are some customers that say, 'Basically, we want to do a sort of core software suite that is not just Office but Windows, that gets deployed to everybody.' There are some that are much more heterogeneous."

Responding to a question about a time frame for the next upgrade of Office, which many assumed would be a release tied to the Longhorn edition of Windows, Raikes demurred. "We never did say whether it was required or not," he said.