A new Office Solution Showcase Web site signals broad change in Microsoft's strategy for promoting the Office System as a development platform. In particular, the company will no longer develop Office Solution Accelerators, supported packages of software and documentation for tasks such as preparing sales proposals. Instead, it will promote solutions from partners. For both partners and Microsoft, the new strategy could reach more customers by promoting solutions that are directly relevant to more kinds of businesses. However, the strategy also means less software and support from Microsoft for the Office solutions it promotes.

Office Solution Accelerators Ended

The Solution Showcase represents a shift in Microsoft's efforts to promote Office System products—Office, Project, SharePoint Portal Server (SPS), and other products from its Information Worker division—as platforms for vertical applications and other kinds of custom solutions. For example, customers might use a custom solution based on Outlook and SPS to track resolution of customer complaints, rather than using a custom CRM client or a browser-based application. Microsoft contends that such Office solutions benefit users: they can automate important tasks, but also let users keep working with familiar applications that they used to use to do the tasks manually.

Microsoft has promoted Office solutions by building nearly complete solution templates (called Office Solution Accelerators) for specific tasks, including preparing sales proposals, managing job interviews, and documenting Sarbanes-Oxley financial controls. Each Microsoft accelerator included software (e.g., Windows SharePoint Services components for documenting financial control structures), Office templates, and deployment documentation. While each accelerator still required customization by the customer or a service partner, Microsoft supported its accelerators and maintained them.

Microsoft has now ended this development effort. The company says that the accelerators were good at promoting Office System products and showing customers what kinds of solutions were possible. However, few customers deployed Microsoft's accelerators, so the effort Microsoft expended in developing, testing, and supporting accelerators did not pay off. Moreover, the amount of effort that was necessary to prepare an accelerator meant Microsoft could release only a few (seven since the program was launched in 2003), so many customers had no Office accelerator that applied to them.

Consequently, the Information Worker New Markets group, which developed Microsoft's Office Solution Accelerators, will now focus on promoting partner-developed solutions, hoping to reach more customers with a larger number of solutions. This decision does not affect solution accelerator development outside of the Information Worker division.

(Peter Rinearson, who headed the Information Worker New Markets group, has left Microsoft after two years in the position.)

Broader Reach, Bigger Partner Role

The new Office Solution Showcase Web site is the most visible new step to promote Office partner solutions. A predecessor of the site in Dec. 2004 listed a huge number of Office solutions, for tasks such as the following:

• Managing responses to formal information requests in government agencies
• Entering and tracking clinical data for healthcare organizations
• Auditing and controlling instant messaging use in organizations.

Entries link to the partner, and many provide white papers, case studies, or Flash-based demos of the solutions. The site leverages Microsoft's existing directory of partners, managed by the Microsoft Partner Program.

Partners are responsible for delivering and supporting solutions listed on the site. Partners will also be responsible for supporting Microsoft's Office Solution Accelerators after summer 2005, when Microsoft's support will wind up for most of them. Specifically, four accelerators (Sarbanes-Oxley, Six Sigma, Recruiting, and Proposals) will be added to the Solution Showcase along with their source code. Support, binary code, and localized versions will no longer be available from Microsoft for these accelerators.

However, Microsoft will keep the code from two of its accelerators: the Office Solution Accelerator for Balanced Scorecards and the Office Solution Accelerator for Excel Reporting. Both accelerators were fairly general purpose, so they might reappear as features or add-ons to products such as SQL Server and Excel.

Resources

The Office solution directory Web site is directory.partners.extranet.microsoft.com.

Partners interested in promoting their Office solutions on the Web site should see www.microsoft.com/office/solutions/directory/apply.mspx.

The Microsoft Partner Program was outlined in "New Partner Program Readied" on page 32 of the July 2004 Update.

Office Solution Accelerators were covered in "Accelerators to Push Office" on page 20 of the Dec. 2003 Update and "Accelerator Aims at Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance" on page 21 of the May 2004 Update.