Microsoft memo: 'New world of work'

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teams that work across the hall or around the globe. Meetings will be recorded with sophisticated cameras that can detect and focus on speakers around the room. Notes taken on a whiteboard will automatically be captured and emailed to participants, and attached to the video of the meeting. They will also serve as lasting repositories for institutional knowledge, so teams won't have to "reinvent the wheel" and work with limited knowledge of the company's past experience.

Optimizing supply chains: XML and rich Web services are increasingly making it possible for businesses to seamlessly share information and processes with partners, and build supply chains that stretch across multiple organizations but work as a unified whole. But there's still plenty of friction that can be removed from the way companies work together. Employees shouldn't have to manually match purchase orders with invoices. They shouldn't need to print and mail bills that could easily be sent in electronic form. Expanding the reach of Web services can help optimize and reduce the amount of unnecessary manual work and make these supply chains vastly more efficient.

Finding the right information: A new layer of context-sensitive services will give you flexible and intuitive ways to manage information that go beyond the "file and folder" metaphor of today. You shouldn't have to "think like a database" and formulate search queries to ask for the information you need. Pattern recognition can help tag and organize information automatically, as well as extract meaning from documents and enable them to be queried in more natural and intuitive ways.

Spotting trends for business intelligence: Sophisticated algorithms will be able to sort through millions of gigabytes of data to identify trends that human analysts might miss. Software should be able to find meaningful connections in mountains of data and present them to experts--or even automated processes--that can act on them. Software can ensure that actions which result in changes to other work processes will automatically ripple through the system, making the entire business more agile and responsive to information that affects the bottom line. Over time, software will "learn" what information people use--and what they don't--and will adjust its behavior accordingly.

Insights and structured workflow: Software should take a more holistic view of workflow, providing data and metrics on specific activities to make it easier and faster to spot inefficiencies and points of failure. Smarter workflow tools will use pattern recognition and logic to find problems such as repeated customer complaints or inventory problems, and route them to the right person for resolution. This will go a long way towards reducing frustration, lost time and errors that result from broken or inefficient processes.

A New Generation of Productivity Software
In a new world of work, where collaboration, business intelligence and prioritizing scarce time and attention are critical factors for success, the tools that information workers use must evolve in ways that do not add new complexity for people who already feel the pressure of an "always-on" world and ever-rising expectations for productivity.

We believe that the way out of this maze is through integration, simplification, and a new breed of software applications and services that manage complexity in the background, and extend human capabilities by automating low-value tasks and helping people make sense of complex data.

We aim to make this happen through a next-generation productivity platform that builds on the solid foundation of today's Microsoft Office system of programs and services. We will enable people to create more effective professional documents, access work information from anywhere, and better manage personal, team and project tasks. We're investing in a secure infrastructure that makes it easy for anyone to securely collaborate on documents and work processes. We're offering better data visualization and analysis tools that bring out the trends and patterns buried in mountains of data. We're making it easier for businesses to create, track, manage and distribute content both within and across organizational boundaries. And we're offering open XML standards and rapid development tools so corporate developers can build and extend applications that specifically target their needs.

Microsoft has been innovating for the information worker for more than two decades--and in many ways we've only just begun to scratch the surface of how software can help people realize their full potential.

Bill Gates