Chapter 11: Office Solution Accelerators

Overview

The larger trend away from product features and benefits and toward complete solutions in the IT industry has been under way for several years , but it is really just taking hold at Microsoft. Previously, Microsoft was focused solely on license revenue and was driven by the prospect of selling yet another copy of Office. At this point, however, customers are right to ask why they need another version of Office when the current product is already reasonably mature. Microsoft's answer is to make the new version of Office part of a total solution and not just a product.

The Microsoft Office Solution Accelerators are frameworks for building specific solutions designed to showcase the value of the Microsoft Office System, and are targeted at solution developers and independent software vendors (ISV). The accelerators use many of the products and technologies I have presented ”from Smart Documents to web parts . They are distributed as free downloads available from www.microsoft.com/office/solutions/accelerators/default.mspx and come with a reasonable set of guides and manuals to get started. Not all of the accelerators are available as of this writing. Microsoft is posting the accelerators as they are completed and will eventually produce all of the following:

• Office Solution Accelerator for Recruiting

• Office Solution Accelerator for Proposals

• Office Solution Accelerator for Six Sigma

• Office Solution Accelerator for Sarbanes-Oxley

• Office Solution Accelerator for Extensible Business Reporting Language

• Office Solution Accelerator for Business Scorecards

• Office Solution Accelerator for Excel Reporting

The first two accelerators completed are for recruiting and proposal writing. These accelerators are intended to streamline the recruiting and proposal writing processes within any organization, but they are not meant to be deployed without customization. In fact, most organizations will probably want to use the accelerators only as a starting point for their own solution.

In this chapter, we will examine the proposal and recruiting accelerators in detail. We will look at not only the technology upon which they are founded, but also the processes they embody. Finally, we will discuss how to customize the solutions for your own organization.