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Information Worker Solutions

Specialise - and capitalise. The Information Worker Solutions competency can help you demonstrate proficiency and maximise revenue potential for Microsoft information worker technologies.

Having achieved this competency, Readify is better equipped to address key customer challenges by developing solutions and deploying services based on the 2007 Microsoft Office system and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.

Microsoft aligned market opportunities with nine specialisations within the Information Worker Solutions competency:

Search
According to IDC, over the next several years enterprise search solutions are expected to constitute the fastest-growing segment of the information-management software market. This presents a tremendous opportunity for partners that design, implement and support solutions featuring Microsoft search technologies. The Search specialisation is designed to help you capitalise on the huge growth centred on improving the search experience across the desktop, network, business data and the web. There are significant opportunities for you to:

• Solve basic search needs for documents or websites with a new server solution.
• Help existing SharePoint Portal customers better leverage their intranets and other sites through more-effective search and document indexing.
• Enhance customers' information-management projects (business intelligence, portals, enterprise project management) with advanced search functionality, analytics and behaviour tracking.
• Deploy search for external-facing websites to allow visitors to search more robustly.

Data Visualisation
The vast amount of business data your customers collect is often complex, presented in difficult-to-comprehend tabular or text formats and not accessible in a context that promotes understanding. The Data Visualisation specialisation can help you capitalise on these challenges through the creation, implementation and customisation of solutions that help your customers display and analyse information visually, bringing clarity and understanding to rich sets of underlying data.

Your customers may have already made a significant investment in capturing enterprise data. However, your data visualisation solution can help them leverage that investment by making the data more accessible and actionable.

Integrate Microsoft technologies to deliver a diverse set of line-of-business solutions that can help deliver more information and richer data across a broad set of businesses and industries, including real estate planning and sales, mobile sales and service management, asset protection management, financial services compliance and claims management, fleet tracking and management and supply-chain management.

There are many opportunities for partner services in the data visualisation specialisation, including:

• Installing and deploying Office Visio 2007, the Virtual Earth platform and MapPoint 2006 to enable customers to view and analyse information visually.
• Training customers and implementing support services.
• Licensing software.
• Customising data visualisation solutions for vertical industries.

Enterprise Project Management
Organisations are constantly seeking to improve their ability to manage and align projects, allocate and balance resources, and track and report on projects and tasks. The Enterprise Project Management (EPM) specialisation is designed to help you capitalise on this growing market with solutions based on Microsoft Office Project Server 2007, Project Portfolio Server 2007 and Project Professional 2007.

An EPM solution based on the 2007 Microsoft Office system delivers immediate, out-of-the-box value that drives opportunity for project-management training and business consulting.

Other EPM opportunities include:

• Upgrading customers from legacy products.
• Integrating EPM with back-office, line-of-business and enterprise resource planning applications.
• Building custom solutions in areas such as IT governance, product life-cycle management and quality management.

Portals and Collaboration
In today’s corporate environments, organisational growth and complexity contribute directly to the increasing volume of business information - and to the difficulty of managing data and resources efficiently. To gain visibility and control across the enterprise, your customers need to integrate their business processes and information through intranet and extranet portals. Organisations will require proven solution providers who can help them simplify infrastructure, and provide a more unified environment to collaborate, communicate and make better business decisions.

Whether it's through development and deployment of workspaces that enable ad hoc and structured team collaboration or via extension of existing portal solutions, there are many opportunities across the complete 2007 Microsoft Office system, particularly:

• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
• Windows SharePoint Services
• Microsoft Office Groove 2007
• Microsoft Office Groove Server 2007

In addition, a portals and collaboration solution can often open the door to other, related opportunities, including enterprise content management and unified communications.

Office Solutions Development
Customer demand for increased access to key corporate services and information has driven the evolution of the 2007 Microsoft Office system from an application suite to a comprehensive development platform. As a result, related partner solutions using XML, web services and Visual Studio 2005 Tools are in high demand. The Office Solutions Development specialisation provides helpful tools, resources and valuable support to help you plan and build your 2007 Office system solutions and move them to market faster and more cost-effectively.

Many organisations face a large separation between people, data and systems. This gap presents a huge opportunity to deliver solutions that users need but that the customer's existing infrastructure does not allow.

Use the resources and support offered within the Office Solutions Development specialisation to:

• Build solutions across industries and scenarios that incorporate business intelligence, content management, collaboration and project management.
• Put enterprise and line-of-business information at people's fingertips through the already familiar Microsoft Office system.
• Streamline processes and information connectivity by using the 2007 Office system server infrastructure to host workflows and custom applications.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Forms
When business information is disorganised or inaccessible, the impact on routine and critical decisions alike can be costly. Increasingly, enterprises need to efficiently manage vast stores of content, including financial reports, customer records, email and web pages. This creates a significant opportunity for partners to capitalise by offering effective content-management solutions.

Increasing demand for solutions that can help enterprise customers manage documents, simplify compliance efforts and keep business information more secure offers opportunity to offer services based on the following products:

• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
• Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007
• Windows SharePoint Services
• SQL Server 2005
• Exchange Server 2007

Office Systems Deployment
Take advantage of the Office Deployment specialisation to help you sharpen your expertise in providing desktop deployment solutions to customers upgrading to the 2007 Microsoft Office system. Multiple revenue-growth opportunities exist in the life-cycle services that result from upgrades - including desktop deployment planning, integration, support, security, outsourcing and training.

The 400 million existing Microsoft Office customers worldwide represent a wealth of opportunities surrounding the 2007 release, including:

• New PCs and hardware upgrades 
• Deployment and ongoing maintenance services 
• Business value consultancy
• Asset management services
• Application compatibility services
• Microsoft Office Access 2007 and 2007 Microsoft Office system conversion and migration services 
• Security services 
• Support and remote management 
• Mobile and wireless solutions 
• Value-added products and services for the 2007 Microsoft Office system 
• Network solutions

Reference: https://partner.microsoft.com/Australia/program/competencies/iwsolutions