ISVs deliver on User Experience

Hi Folks,

My name is Baptiste.  Don’t be surprised by my first name, I am not an evangelist (neither technical nor religious J) but I do manage relationships with leading Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Independent Software Vendors (ISVs).

In earlier blog posts, my colleagues (Karl , Raj and  Persio) talked about how to partner with Microsoft, why Microsoft is interested in partnering with ISVs and how innovation happens through collaboration with ISVs.  I want to talk to you about how ISVs are utilizing Microsoft technologies to explore new user experiences and delivering best in class user interfaces.

Corporate users are also home users and they spend their free time playing games, most of them offering online extensions; as well as listening to their MP3 player or watching movies while traveling. User expectations are higher than ever before and users often seek the same experience at work.  People expect software applications to work the way they do: Office business applications are fulfilling this need.  Today, many ISVs are designing Office business applications (OBAs), allowing process flows to be completed without switching between applications. MS Dynamics CRM, Duet, Cegid, IFS Applications to name a few, are interesting integrations to Office 2007 and Windows Vista.  In addition, mobile workers would like to access customer data offline with the same user experience, Microsoft Office Outlook allows ISVs to extend their solutions as well.

Microsoft is providing new technologies to bring together developers and designers, in order to offer new user experiences to the business user, and the consumer. MIX 2008 gave the opportunity to envision how you can create cool stuff, check this out.  You may also have the opportunity to attend MIX Essentials and ReMIX in a city near you. 

As I attended the GISV EMEA briefing, I was very interested to see examples of applications on premise, as well as those leveraging cloud services. Our technical evangelists are publishing great information about how to do it and sharing best practices among ISVs, check out the blogs from  Jaime, Beat, Arnaud (Virtual Earth) or James to see examples. 

How is that for a first taste of some of the technologies you may consider to deliver best in class user experience?

Best regards, Freundliche Grüße, Met vriendelijke groet, Med vänlig hälsning, Cordialement,

Baptiste Janique

Global Business Development Manager