Microsoft partners to take Digital Dashboard from concept to product
In what proved to be much more than just another announcement of a little software company aligning itself with the Redmond giant, Microsoft announced a partnership with InfoImage to deliver Digital Dashboard solutions. Included in the deal is about $10 million from Microsoft to develop the necessary new features in the Freedom corporate portal (version 2.0 pending) as well as the services required to transform a portal product into a DD solution.
Microsoft, which unveiled the concept of a DD this spring, has refined it in a way that jives with “portal,” but has refrained from considering the two the same. At KMWorld’99 Charles Stevens, VP of Microsoft’s Business Solutions Group, spoke of a DD as something a company could develop using existing technology (Microsoft and partners). The DD would be the knowledge workers workplace, with the ability to view all pertinent and updating information from disparate data sources, including corporate databases, enterprise resource planning systems, personal mail and calendaring, and the Internet. Without leaving that workspace ( a homepage of sorts), the knowledge worker could collaborate via E-mail and do things like view reports, with the option to delve into them further by launching the application directly from the DD.
What results from partnership is the “first commercially available Digital Dashboard,” said Randy Eckel, CEO of InfoImage. It’s more than just access to information, there is collaboration about that information and the ability to act quickly.
Microsoft and InfoImage both acknowledge that a DD is a combination of a portal product, which InfoImage has marketed with Freedom for just under two years, and the services built around it. Eckel and Jeff Raikes, group VP of worldwide sales and support at Microsoft, said during a press conference that there is a certain amount of upfront service work needed to find out what links each individual knowledge worker needs. During that first phase of installation, the cost of developing a portal might be 4 times the service compared to product. However, to develop a DD, InfoImage predicts a per user cost of about $1500 including the consulting and services