Vista business release an exercise in corporate collaboration

Stan Beer
Thursday, 30 November 2006 17:53

Your IT - Home IT

As the managing director of Microsoft Australia, Steve Vamos launched Windows Vista and Office 2007, he wasn’t talking to consumers or small business. Most of the event was about collaboration, document management, corporate compliance, the domain of big business.

In fact Vista and Office 2007 were almost shoved into the background, while corporate products such as Exchange Server 2007 and SharePoint Server were heavily touted.

From the outset, it became clear that the event was about case studies of hand picked early adopter corporate customers using the document management features of Office 2007 in conjunction with SharePoint and Exchange Server 2007.

It was very much a presentation for power users and it was very much about ROI for corporations through increased productivity.

There was of course the obligatory demonstration of some of the cool new features of Vista and Office 2007 (already outlined in our previous article) such as desktop search, the flip 3D interface, the To Do list and voice activation of Outlook.

However, in the main the presentation was about proving to corporate customers – the vanguard for spreading Microsoft’s new products throughout the wider community – how much more productive Vista and Office 2007 will make them.

“When I look at what we’re announcing today, it obviously comes at a very, very interesting time for organizations broadly and for individuals that have now become comfortable with using technology to communicate, access information and get things done,” said Microsoft’s Vamos.