The release of the 2007 Microsoft® Office system marks the most significant advancements to Microsoft Office in more than a decade. Between a redesigned desktop experience and new server innovations, the 2007 Microsoft Office system puts the information people need to drive business success at their fingertips.

 

Having logged thousands of hours designing and implementing hundreds of Microsoft Office deployments, consultants at The Henson Group, Inc. (THG) can help execute a deployment project that will make an immediate impact on multiple facets of your business.

 

THG approaches your project by first ascertaining what your company’s specific business needs are, and then architecting a deployment strategy that leverages the functionality of the various applications in the Office 2007 suite.

 

MICROSOFT DESKTOP DEPLOYMENT CREDENTIALS

 

• Experience:  Specializing in both small- and large-scale Microsoft desktop deployments
• Microsoft Certified:  Microsoft Certified Systems Engineers (MCSE), many former Microsoft employees.
• Dedicated Desktop Deployment Practice:  Specializing in Staging, Tuning, Testing, and Configuration Services; Planning, Architecting, Creating, Maintaining, and Testing Corporate Images; and Provisioning Images to New Users and Machines. THG offers consultants that are experts at leveraging the Microsoft Accelerator for Business Desktop Deployment (BDD), providing clients with end-to-end solutions that include commercially available software, customized scripts, deployment planning guides, best practices, sample document templates, and analysis tools. This expertise includes:

Windows Vista Architecture & Deployment
Upgrading to Office 2007         
BDD Project, Process, and Team Guidance
Architectural Design Sessions
Zero Touch Installation (ZTI)
Infrastructure Compatibility Remediation
Application Compatibility Remediation 
Deployment
Planning
Improving Security of the Desktop
User State Migration
Core and Supplemental Application Packaging
Computer Systems Imaging

• Independently Ranked: Highly ranked among US Microsoft Gold Certified Partners for Office desktop deployment services on Microsoft’s Resource Directory (http://directory.microsoft.com)
• Official Microsoft Competencies: As a result of its work in this area, THG achieved Microsoft’s Advanced Infrastructure Solutions Competency. In the Partner Program, Microsoft Competencies define areas of specialization. To achieve each competency, THG not only demonstrated its expert-level abilities across multiple technologies, but must maintain a roster of Microsoft Certified Consultants with applicable experience and also produce numerous client references to objectively testify to our abilities. The Henson Group also possess the following competencies: Business Process and Integration Solutions, Custom Development Solutions, Data Management Solutions, Information Worker Solutions, Learning Solutions, Networking Infrastructure Solutions, and Security Solutions.
• DSP PROGRAM: The Henson Group is officially designated a Microsoft Deployment Service Partner (DSP) in two categories: East Region and Enterprise Partner. The Henson Group was invited to join Microsoft’s DSP program based on its proven experience assisting enterprise customers with desktop installation, which involves unpacking, inspecting, and physically connecting a PC to the network infrastructure. The desktop installation services The Henson Group provides also involve elements of staging, tuning, testing, and configuration services; planning, architecting, creating, maintaining, and testing corporate images; and provisioning images to new users and machines.
• DDPS 2007 PROGRAM: The Henson Group is an authorized provider of Desktop Deployment Planning Services (DDPS) assessments, which are funded by the Software Assurance benefits Microsoft customers receive when purchasing product licenses with SA. This primarily involves outlining a practical and well-documented plan for the deployment of Microsoft Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 using predefined offerings based on the zero-touch deployment solution.

MICROSOFT DESKTOP DEPLOYMENT FIELD EXPERIENCE*

This is a partial list. Additional Case Studies available upon request.

 

•   ADP (transaction processing)                                               

•   Berlex (pharmaceuticals)

•   McKinsey & Co. (management consulting)    

•   Hackensack University Medical Center

 

* Read more about deployments performed by THG at www.HensonGroup.com/CaseStudies.

 

MICROSOFT DESKTOP DEPLOYMENT SERVICE DESCRIPTIONS

 

Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) Services: THG provides end-to-end guidance for the efficient planning, building, testing, and deploying Microsoft Office 2007, Windows Vista, and Line-of-Business applications. THG’s approach includes providing ‘Zero-Touch’ deployment capabilities that provide a set of scripts leveraging existing solutions, such as Sysprep, Systems Management Server 2003, Microsoft SQL Server, User State Migration Tool, and the SMS OS Deployment Feature Pack.

 

Deployment Planning: THG determines the optimum scenario for clients deploying Office 2007 and Vista. The issues explored include the geographic distribution of users and the use of a common application base. The information provided by THG to the client also includes a definition of configuration standards, as well as a review of the test lab architecture.

 

Compatibility: THG consultants create an inventory by evaluating the client's hardware and software for compatibility with Office 2007 and Vista. This inventory includes a comprehensive list of the distinctions from previous versions of Office, and provides a blueprint for migrating existing applications.

 

Migration Tools: THG recommends Microsoft and third-party tools that would be useful for the client in deploying Office 2007 and Vista, based on comprehensive research and numerous real-life deployments conducted by THG.

 

Remote Installations: THG provides detailed direction to the client for the planning of automated installations and compatibility testing. This also includes design information for unattended installations, image-based installations, and remote installation services.

 

Interoperability: THG experts document comprehensive instructions for the coexistence of Office 2007 and Vista with all third-party applications, alternative network operating systems, e-mail systems, and proprietary applications.

 

Managing the Desktop: THG provides extensive details on Group Policy Best Practices, in relation to deployment updates, error reporting, security, and user settings.

 

Redefining the Desktop Experience

With the 2007 Microsoft Office system, Microsoft has redefined the desktop experience to help people get better results, faster. Through the new Microsoft Office Fluent™ user interface, better visualization capabilities and improved task management, people can produce more professional-looking content, find and assimilate information more quickly, and better prioritize their time and tasks.

New and enhanced features include the following:

•      Results-oriented Office Fluent user interface. The most significant update to the Microsoft Office system user interface (UI) in more than a decade represents a shift in results-oriented design, enabling people to focus on what they want to do rather than how they do it.

•      Really Simple Syndication (RSS) capabilities. Outlook 2007 has native aggregation support for RSS feeds, allowing users to easily stay abreast of information related to their business, industry, hobbies and personal interests and manage the information in the same way as e-mail: flag them for follow-up, assign them Color Categories or automate how they are processed using the rules engine.

•      SMS (Short Message Service) capabilities. With SMS Link, a service that connects Outlook^® 2007 users with mobile phones using SMS text messaging, users can send and receive SMS text messages and forward e-mail, contacts, tasks and appointments to mobile phones. They can also automatically forward e-mail, Outlook reminders and daily calendar to their mobile phone.

•     SmartArt Graphics. Previously called IGX Graphics, this feature incorporates galleries of graphics and various effects to help users more easily create highly professional-looking documents and presentations.

•     Data visualization tools in Excel 2007. Conditional formatting with rich visualization schemes enables a user to discover and illustrate important trends as well as highlight exceptions in data. Users can apply conditional formatting more easily and identify trends by using colored gradients, data bars and icons.

•     Blog This! New in the 2007 Microsoft Office system, people can now use the familiar Word 2007 application  to create blog posts complete with pictures, rich formatting, spell checking and more, and then quickly publish them to many common blog services.

•     Document Inspector. This feature in Word 2007, Excel^® 2007 and PowerPoint^® 2007 helps users make their documents more secure and professional by detecting and removing confidential or unwanted comments, personally identifiable information, hidden text, or other information from a document before sharing it.

 

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

 

Significant investments in Microsoft Office SharePoint^® Server 2007 — including out-of-the-box integration with the 2007 Microsoft Office system client applications — provide a robust productivity infrastructure for organizations that will help streamline the way people do business.

New and enhanced features include the following:

·         Automated workflows. Users can take advantage of the review and approval workflow capabilities of Office SharePoint Server 2007 directly from within the 2007 release authoring applications, thereby reducing the time required for important document processes. SharePoint Server 2007 includes out-of-the-box workflow templates to make it easier for end users to decide which workflows to apply to their content. In addition, a full workflow history is maintained so both end users and IT administrators can track the steps that occurred in their workflows and future steps in the workflow process.

·         Office PowerPoint 2007 Slide Libraries. Publishing and accessing Slide Libraries via Office SharePoint Server 2007 is now even easier. Users can link slides and related documents to SharePoint Technologies to keep them updated and enable them to be automatically synchronized if desired.

·         Search Center. New search capabilities in SharePoint Server 2007 empower users to index and share information that resides with colleagues and partners, as well as in SharePoint sites across the organization and line-of-business systems and reports.

·         My Site. Significant enhancements to My Site personal sites include Social Networking Web Parts, Privacy Controls, Document and Site aggregation Web Parts, as well as Colleagues and Memberships Web Parts.

 

Optimizing Business and Personal Productivity

 

The combination of enhancements to the server and desktop supports a more people-centric approach to communication and collaboration, business intelligence, and content management. These enhancements increase the impact that people have on business success by simplifying how people work together, helping people manage content and keep it more secure, improving business processes, and helping to enable people to find and gain insight from information. Companies can now simplify the deployment and maintenance of their servers on the back end, while extending the 2007 Microsoft Office system software tools to more employees with minimal training costs.

 

New and enhanced communication and collaboration features include the following:

·         Unified communications. The 2007 Microsoft Office system supports access to voice mail and fax messages; more efficient calendaring; seamless integration of RSS feeds; and call-in messaging and calendar access with speech recognition. It also delivers expanded search tools, bidirectional access to information, deeper support of Web services and standards for extensibility, and new AJAX APIs and Web parts for portal integration.

·         Microsoft Office Groove 2007. This new addition to the Microsoft Office system enables even easier and more flexible collaboration for smaller groups. Deployed together, Groove® 2007 and SharePoint Server 2007 provide an integrated collaboration environment to help teams and organizations work together and share information.

·         Windows SharePoint Services integration. People can now easily connect to documents, calendars, contacts or tasks stored on Windows^® SharePoint Services sites and have full editing capabilities, whether the person is online or offline.

·         Wikis and blogs. Enhanced support for Wikis and blogs on Windows SharePoint Services makes it easy for teams to capture, archive and reuse communal knowledge.