My hotel, the Redmond Town Center Marriott, is about 10 minutes from the Microsoft Campus. The hotel itself is very well presented and I was particularly happy to find that they have free wired Internet Access. Most impressive are the staff who literally bent over backwards to help me when I found that I’d brought two European travel adaptors instead of a US one. I’m now the proud user of a AC adaptor which came out of the ‘tub of left behind stuff’. There must have been 25 AC adaptors in there for al manner of phones and even a Toshiba laptop. Awesome.
Redmond Town Center is a development that feels very shiny and new but has been around for about 10 years so the receptionist told me. It even has a store that sells Macs just around the corner from my hotel.
Well at about 2pm I got a cab over to Building 36. The Redmond Campus is actually quite nice, surrounded by trees and giving the impression that there are many decent brains here. Everyone seems to be carrying either a laptop or a baseball bat. (The latter because they’ve been playing baseball rather than beating people about with it).
Building 36 is fairly non-descript, but it’s here that one of Microsoft’s flagship products is designed. It’s here that they design Microsoft Office. From when I last posted about Office 14 it seems that the list of what to build is becoming more concrete. Three tenets shape what Microsoft are designing for: Easy - building on their consumer experiences to create a great usability experience; Enterprise - making sure that the products scale to cope with the demands of large enterprise; and the third tenet which is so secret that I would be forced to be erased from Time if I were to mention it.
My statements centred around creating a journey to take users on. They will typically always revert to the path of least resistance - which for most is a File Share - when it comes to doing things like Document Management. So I talked about how when someone drives a car they can typically get into and drive another car without having to relearn the controls. This is currently the case with document management systems, each have their own take. I want Microsoft to use their skill in this area to create something that is as easy to use as a file share but provides the rigour and discipline necessary to be a compliant document store. Microsoft know that most people don’t start from scratch when creating a document. They use the PowerPoint that they used last time and simply change the pieces they need to change. This real world working is what the current solutions lack. Putting new features in is not the thing here, it’s about raising the profile of those useful features that make someone’s job more straightforward. If they see the value in using the system then they wont go back to using a file share. However, the likes of Microsoft and Novell ‘invented’ electronic document management by creating the file share for most companies. It’s the way people have worked for 15 years. It’s hard to unlearn that way of working.
Tomorrow I’m back there again. This time a bus is coming for me at 7am. Ouch..