J.K. Harrison Consulting, LLC

Power on the Desktop

Microsoft Office remains one of the great untapped technology resources. There it sits--on well over 90% of business desktops, with its thousands of programmable objects, unparalleled UI capabilities, world-class development and deployment tools,  collaboration and presentation capabilities, and the ability to seamlessly interact over the web and with other systems.

Information workers are, overwhelmingly, dependent on MS Office to be successful, but the typical worker utilizes less than 10% of Office's capabilities. Furthermore, "more than 80 percent of the enterprise's digitized resources are not accessible to the enterprise as a whole because they reside in individual hard drives and in personal files", according to Gartner, Inc. Let's face it, left to their own devices, information workers typically make poor use of the software tools in which they live.

J.K. Harrison and Office Development

J.K. Harrison creates software that harnesses the power that is sitting on every desktop, that liberates this trapped information and delivers it when and where it is critically needed--organized, stylized, on demand and in a form that can be further crunched. 

Eric Birnbaum was an early adaptor of this software approach, developing Office apps before there was officially a Microsoft Office, pioneering techniques for integrating Word and Excel that were highlighted at the original launch of Office. Over the years, Eric has been at the forefront of Office development, delivering dozens of successful applications across all the Office products as well as other Microsoft technologies. He is an expert in data-driven publishing techniques and document/presentation automation, and has presented often on these topics at Microsoft-sponsored events.

Office Business Applications

Office applications have a nearly 20-year-long track record of achieving high value return at a relatively low cost, quick development cycles which yield software that consistently satisfies always-evolving objectives. The technical advances that Microsoft has constantly made to Office as a development platform, most importantly the ability to communicate over the internet via web services and XML, has enabled a new class of application that Microsoft is calling Office Business Applications.

Current-generation technologies that now exist in the Office platform, more than ever makes Office the ideal smart-client application platform.

Super Rich UI Features

Charts, tables, document features, presentations, graphics, appointments, email, project schedules--the results of hundreds of millions of Microsoft R&D dollars, all programmable, customizable, and available (at no additional cost) for your User Interface. This is an astoundingly richer UI than what can be accomplished in a browser at a fraction of the cost. And, familiarity of the MS Office user interface makes it easier for users to use new applications built on the Office platform, resulting in a shorter, flatter and less expensive learning curve.

 

SharePoint: A Game Changer?

In much the same way the Facebook has re-defined how young people interact socially, SharePoint has the potential to redefine how workers interact with information and with each other. While past attempts at collaboration features in Office have been underwhelming, incorporating SharePoint into an Office Business Application can instantly liberate that data previously "locked in users' hard drives" and bring workgroup productivity to a new level.

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Last modified: 02/20/09