A New Era of Business Productivity and Innovation
Although it's not mentioned in Steve Ballmer's recent executive e-mail (A New Era of Business Productivity and Innovation), I'm sure you can see how Team System provides "the capabilities that people need in today's fast-changing world of work" by focusing on the same four areas outlined in Steve's e-mail:
Simplifying how people work together: The nature of how we work has changed dramatically since 1995. Today, people work in teams that cross divisional boundaries and span companies. Collaboration with colleagues and customers in different cities, even different continents, is the norm. The workforce is also increasingly mobile. From unified messaging enabled by Exchange Server 2007 to workflow and collaboration in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, the new products revolutionize the way people work in teams.
Finding information and improving business insight: Companies of all sizes struggle with the fundamental paradox of the 21st century: while we generate more and more information every minute of every day our ability to extract useable knowledge from that information grows more and more tenuous all the time. Deep integration of new search technologies and powerful, easy-to-use business intelligence tools will enable employees to find and use information more easily, streamlining the path from idea to execution.
Helping to protect and manage content: Governmental compliance mandates and the growing recognition that simplified business processes and improved information management enable employees to respond to changing business conditions with greater speed and accuracy make organizational transparency one of today's critical business imperatives. Advanced content management and document retention tools combined with features to enhance data confidentiality make content authoring the starting point for automated business processes and regulatory compliance.
Increasing security and reducing IT costs: Secure by design and by default, the new versions of Windows, Office, and Exchange Server deliver breakthrough security features and they streamline deployment and management, helping reduce costs and enabling IT departments to focus on providing new capabilities that deliver strategic advantage.
If not, here's my quick stab at this:
- Simplifying how people work together - Team Foundation Server is at the heart of Team System, but its power lies in the integration that exists throughout Team System to simplify how each member of the development team contributes and collaborates throughout the development life cycle.
- Finding information and improving business insight - By providing a centralized data store of project information, Team Foundation Server provides a consolidated, transparent view into the health of a project and one-stop shopping for source, work items, test results, builds, and more.
- Helping to protect and manage content - By tracking the history of work items, including the ability to associate source changes with work items, organizations can get a better grip on software change management.
- Increasing security and reducing IT costs - As mentioned in my last post, tools such as the source code analysis tools in Team System help identify security issues before deploying software. Using the Distributed System Designers, you can identify deployment challenges before bringing code into a production environment and encountering the need for expensive rework.
Those are just quick examples of how I see Team System contributing to A New Era of Business Productivity and Innovation.
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