Microsoft BackOffice Server

Knowledge Management Solutions

Microsoft BackOffice Server 4.5 provides a fully integrated foundation for building document, collaboration, and data analysis driven business solutions for branch offices, departments, and mid-sized organizations with the use of Microsoft Office 2000. The Team Productivity Update extends BackOffice Server 4.5 integration and ease of use by helping create knowledge management solutions for teams who need a central, structured location for group information.

Microsoft Exchange Server

Collaboration
The core component of Microsoft's collaboration platform is Exchange Server, and, in particular, Exchange Public Folders. Public Folders are storage areas held on Exchange servers where information can be grouped according to criteria and then shared among an organization's users. This information can take many forms, from e-mail messages to graphics and sound bites. Also, Public Folders can contain custom forms that serve as a base for creating applications such as bulletin boards, discussion forums, customer tracking, and electronic help desks.

Users can organize and control their views of a Public Folder according to their individual needs. By sorting and grouping specific characteristics of a Public Folder's contents, users have direct access to the precise types of information they require. Users can also provide a quick and easy way to access their information by adding frequently used folders to their list of Public Folder favorites.

OFFICE 2000

Knowledge Desktop

Microsoft Office 2000 is now available to help you share knowledge in valuable new ways. Office 2000 helps teams improve collaboration by giving them a familiar set of tools for working with any information on intranets or the Internet. This allows users to create and manage any type of knowledge asset, no matter where it is stored. Office provides many of the knowledge-management capabilities a team or department needs—from document-based collaboration to sophisticated business applications built with Microsoft Access 2000 and Microsoft SQL Server 7.0.

SQL Server

Transforming Business Data into Knowledge

SQL Server 7.0 offers broad functionality in support of the data-warehousing process. Organizations seeking to improve their decision-making ability can be overwhelmed by the sheer volume and complexity of data available from their varied operational and production systems. Making this data accessible is one of the most significant challenges for today's IT professionals. In response to this, many organizations choose to build a data warehouse as an integrated store of information collected from other systems that becomes the foundation for decision support and data analysis.

Microsoft Site Server

Locating and Distributing Knowledge

Today, people often spend too much time searching for content when they could be working with that content. This is because information is scattered across multiple structured and unstructured data stores and because it is often not organized into clear categories. Searching can be the last resort and it typically returns too many results to be useful. Microsoft Site Server 3.0 is designed to help remedy this by providing a set of powerful tools for locating and distributing knowledge across an organization.

Knowledge Management Tools

Key Product or Technology / Windows Distributed interNet Architecture
Scenario / Office2000 / BackOffice / Point of Integration
Knowledge Management: providing access to business-critical information so individuals can make informed decisions
Publish and Search / Word, FrontPage / Windows NT Server with Internet Information Server (IIS), Site Server / Office Server Extensions, Extensible Markup Language (XML) tags, universal HTML file formats
Data Analysis / Excel / SQL Server™ / OLE DB for OLAP
Tracking and Workflow / Access, Outlook / SQL Server, Exchange Server / Data Access Pages, Access Projects, Routing Objects, Scripting Agent
Collaboration / Outlook, FrontPage / Exchange Server / MAPI, CDO
Business Operations: making business processes faster, more efficient and more reliable
Line-of-Business, Mission-Critical Applications / Office Web Components (OWC), FrontPage / SQL Server, SNA Server / Visual Basic for Applications, Visual Basic, Visual Basic Scripting Edition
Commerce: enabling business-to-business and business-to-customer interaction
Electronic Commerce / OWC, Data Access Pages, FrontPage / Site Server Commerce Edition, SQL Server, SNA Server / Cut and paste HTML pages into Microsoft Office2000

BackOffice Suite

BackOffice
WindowsNT Server / Server operating system, providing services for file and print, applications, communications, and Web applications.
Exchange Server / Enterprise messaging, collaboration, and workflow services.
SQL Server / Enterprise database, online analytical processing (OLAP), and data warehouse services.
Systems Management Server / Windows desktop and server management.
SNA Server / Access to a larger amount of company data, including databases residing on mainframes and AS/400 systems.
Proxy Server / Secure and high-performance Internet access.
Site Server / Analyze, search, and deploy Web sites and content.

Office2000 Suite

Office2000
Word / Word-processing for highly efficient online communication and collaboration.
Excel / Powerful spreadsheets, charts, tables, and PivotTable dynamic views, as well as a robust front end to corporate data, such as SQL Server databases.
PowerPoint® presentation graphics program / Organize, illustrate, and present your ideas and information.
Access / High-powered personal relational database-management, forms-based applications and corporate data access, and powerful SQL Server management tools.
Outlook / E-mail, scheduling, and desktop information-management.
FrontPage® Web site creation and management tool / Creation and management of outstanding Web sites—with no programming required.