Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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One of the things I've felt guilty about for a while, as the Office Reference Guide on an IT site, is the lack of connection on my part to enterprise related issues.

As a sole proprietor and writer, I have had some experience with larger network installations to be sure. Among other things, in my past, I participated in a number of mass upgrades from proprietary word processors to personal PCs and eventually to Windows and Office. This experience gave rise to a recent rant on what is going on with Vista and Office 2007 in terms of pulling the rug out from under information workers.

A lot of the problems I encountered when first working with Vista involved security related issues; i.e., for my own good I was prevented from doing things or seeing files and folders unless I reset or removed a setting.

So I went out the other day and attended a Microsoft Momentum Event for IT professionals to see how large and even mid-scale operations are planning future deployments and some of their issues, primarily to see how they relate to Office.

It's possible and probably even likely that many of you know more about this world than I do — since this is an IT web site my guess is that many of you live mainly in this world and travel down to the Office area for specifics on how to use those programs.

Therefore it was particularly interesting to see how deployment issues for IT are presented by Microsoft at this session with a series of scenarios that use Office extensively.

The main focus here is collaboration using Office SharePoint Server, which is a portal, enable team collaboration. I've written a bit about SharePoint, mainly about connecting and using a team web site. The interesting thing about the latest version to me is that all members get their own MySite, and the use of blogging, as described in another recent update.

At the IT session we were shown several scenarios of how enterprises could use the functionality of SharePoint and Office to communicate easily with colleagues and clients. For example, a CEO of Contoso (you've heard of the Mythical Microsoft sample company) sits in on a sales call and needs to get a resource document to answer an objection by the prospect.

In the scenario, he searches for People in the portal with specific expertise in this area, finds the right person, accesses her document library, finds the relevant material in a table, and updates a PowerPoint file with the table.

Key to this scenario is the update process where that updated document, or as the speaker called it "the single [latest] version of the truth," is now posted in a location where it becomes available to all who need it in its most useful (updated) form.

What was amazing to me was the complexity of the network environment and relationship between components of the Enterprise that it takes to make this work.

For example, there is a suite of security services called Forefront to enable security for an enterprise wide network that can support this technology. The Forefront system works beyond the client (where I've been mainly working) along with server technology and "Edge" — where your network meets the big bad Internet. Administrators working with Forefront can enable up to five scanning programs (from multiple vendors including Computer Associates, McAfee and others) to protect the network.

This solution also needs to work with Active Directory, the identity management tool that verifies the permissions of various people when they access, for example, a SharePoint site.

To help coordinate the implementation of servers, security and other components Microsoft offers IT pros some comprehensive solutions, like System Center Essentials. According to Microsoft, "System Center solutions are tuned to simplify management of the systems and applications your company already has implemented, including Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange Server, the Microsoft Office system, and the Microsoft .NET Framework. In addition, System Center solutions interoperate with third-party management tools so you can make the most of your existing investments and build on the System Center foundation with confidence. Already used by the majority of Fortune 500 companies, System Center solutions provide the reliability, scalability, and security required to manage the most mission-critical IT systems, applications, and services."

Note the mention of Fortune 500 companies. There are obviously different tiers of structured solutions for different sized enterprises.

What Microsoft offers to businesses contemplating an upgrade, implementation or growth of IT infrastructure is a four tier description of where an organization may find itself in terms of being an asset or liability (cost center) to the overall corporation.

Basic — Cost Center — Uncoordinated manual infrastructure
Standardized — More Efficient Cost Center — Managed IT infrastructure with limited automation
Rationalized — Business Enabler — Managed and Consolidated IT with extensive automation — knowledge captured and reused
Dynamic — Strategic Asset — Fully automated management – dynamic resource usage.

Where does your enterprise fit on this scale? Funny you should ask but Microsoft offers an assessment survey to help you determine just that. There are three separate assessments for IT Pros at this link.

Again, the purpose of this update is not as a sales promotion for Microsoft but rather, for me and for you, to put the relationship of Office features (and SharePoint) into perspective in the overall scheme of the enterprise.

To further familiarize yourself with these issue, I suggest you download the slides for the Momentum CoreIO and BPIO seminar that same link.

For me, watching the various scenarios was quite amazing because what I had taken for granted in a limited environment, and struggled with during my upgrade, had a level of complexity exponentially higher (obviously) at the enterprise level.

Not only do you have to coordinate a multitude of programs and services, but you have to see where they fit together and learn Microsoft's terminology and acronyms.

My guess is that if you take the assessment you can locate your own enterprise somewhere within this model and make a rational decision as to what to implement for your business needs.

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