Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Microsoft Managers use Portal for Seamless Event Management and Boost Event Ratings
Overview
Countryor Region:United States
Industry:Computing
Customer Profile
The Microsoft Enterprise Specialist Sales group manages the Envision conference where thousands of technical pre-sales individuals learn about new Microsoft technologies.
Business Situation
The Envision team wanted to simplify Envision management and provide a user-friendly forum for sharing information and event announcements.
Solution
The team deployed a collaboration portal built with Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 and Microsoft Office InfoPath® 2003.
Benefits
Simplified event management
Increased evaluation returns from 323 to 5,565
Enabled seamless communication
Provided better attendee service
Provided showcase of Microsoftusing its products to boost productivity / “The biggest success was that 3,000 people saw how Office Professional Enterprise Edition 2003 and XML can support powerful, customizable collaboration portals. Now they are telling our customers.”
Patti Solaski, Envision 2005 Conference Lead Microsoft Corporation
Every year, the Enterprise Specialist Sales group at Microsoft hosts Envision, an educational event for technical pre-sales individuals. The Envision team wanted to automate manual processes for event organization and to broadcast schedule changes and communicate with attendees and other stakeholders while allowing attendees to use the same productivity tools locally that they use everyday. It deployed a collaboration portal to showcase the XML capabilities in Microsoft® Office Professional Enterprise Edition 2003 and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003. Attendees, organizers, and speakers communicated in near real-time through the portal, resulting in a better organized, more effective event. More than 3,000 Enterprise Specialist Sales individuals saw Microsoft portal and productivity technologies in action, making them better advocates of Microsoft Office-based technology.
Situation
Technology solution professionals (TSPs) from around the world attend a popular annual event called Envision at Microsoft corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. A gathering of TSPs, solution specialist professionals, and account technology specialists from the field, Envision is a five-day forum where representatives from product groups can share news about the latest Microsoft® software releases and features, as well as plans for future technologies. The event is handled by the Enterprise Specialist Sales group within the Enterprise and Partner Group.
Envision is organized along different categories that conform to areas in which the TSPs specialize. For example, the Database Track focuses on products like Microsoft SQL ServerTM 2005 and SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services. Each product group chooses a track owner to act as a coordinator for all the speakers, sessions, and labs within a particular track.
The direct connection between the product groups and their audiences—the professionals working in the field of technical presales—contributes to the event’s tremendous success. In January 2005, with participation reaching a record-setting 3,000 participants, Envision organizers feared that next year it would outgrow the conference center. Plans for next year are that Envision will be transformed into a larger technical conference for technical roles company-wide, called TechReady.
Although growing numbers of attendees testify to the event’s popularity, they also served to highlight for event organizers areas that needed improvement. All event management processes for Envision were paper-based. Upon arriving, attendees received printed agendas, which contained printed evaluation forms. During Envision, unscheduled program changes occurred several times a day. They were handled by the event organizers, who had to work with the speakers and track owners in person to verify the new information. The result was a bottleneck in effective communications among attendees, speakers, track owners, and event managers. Event managers tried to communicate the changes to attendees over TV screens at the conference center, but there was no way of knowing who actually saw the announcements. Nightly e-mail briefings grew longer as the conference went on, and it was difficult to verify whether anyone actually read them. Track owners couldn’t monitor evaluations or session data until the event was over, and speakers could only interact with attendees during a short question-and-answer session at the end of their presentations.
“Without effective communication among speakers, track owners, and event organizers, we were forced to react to issues as they arose, instead of planning for possible situations,” says Patti Solaski, Envision 2005 Conference Lead at Microsoft. “For example, we had no way of estimating the demand for particular sessions so that we could choose a room of the appropriate size.
“Attendees had a bound folder, which they had to flip through to work out a schedule for themselves,” she continues. “The folder didn’t reflect real-time schedule changes. It was annoying to have to rip out, complete, and hand in the evaluation forms for every session. Last year, we had 2,000 people attend and 323 evaluation forms were handed in. After the event, it took six weeks for attendees to receive a DVD containing the PowerPoint® presentations.”
Solaski and her colleagues wanted a better experience for the various groups of stakeholders—attendees, event organizers, speakers, and track owners—and they began thinking about ways to connect these people with one another and with the information they need before, during, and after the Envision event. “This year, we wanted to make it easy for people to access and share information through a seamless, online communication platform that they could tailor to their needs,” says Solaski. “We also wanted to be a fine example of using Microsoft technologies, and it made sense to take advantage of the communication and collaboration capabilities of the Microsoft Office System to achieve our goals.”
The Envision planning team identified the following key strategic objectives for the solution:
To provide a better user experience and greater opportunity for collaboration
To improve event management capabilities
To disseminate event information in real time
To collect and report on information received from the field to increase the value of future events
Solution
The Envision team turned to potential conference attendees for their suggestions about how to use the connected productivity technologies in the Microsoft Office System to improve the attendees’ experience at Envision. Solaski already had a wish list of features from event organizers, so she next gathered requirements from track owners and speakers. “We outlined our main requirements and submitted requests for proposals for a user-friendly, low-maintenance portal that we would use to manage Envision 2005. We had a very strict solution deadline of 40 days.”
Choosing a Partner
The Envision team chose Microsoft Certified Gold Partner Covansys to build the portal. Called MyEnvision, the solution features Microsoft Office Professional Enterprise Edition 2003, the Microsoft Office InfoPath® 2003 information-gathering program, the Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 messaging and collaboration client, Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser, and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003. The portal runs on the Internet Information Services version 6.0 feature in the Microsoft Windows ServerTM 2003 operating system, the foundation of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software.
“The people at Covansys came back with a very thorough response that demonstrated how much they had thought about the issues,” says Solaski. “They obviously understood what we hoped to get from our solution and made valuable suggestions to improve it.”
Once Covansys discussed and detailed the requirements with Microsoft stakeholders, a project team worked with Microsoft to design a solution whose architecture provided ease of use and the ability to share data with other external systems. Following the design phase, a different team constructed the solution and tested it exhaustively. Finally, the portal was backed up and then restored in the production environment.
In January 2005, the solution performed flawlessly during the five-day event, supporting around 4,000 hits per day. (See Figure 1.) Because it was built on familiar technologies in the Microsoft Office System, no training was required. “One of the greatest values of this solution is that it meant people could manage their Envision experience with the Microsoft Office tools they use everyday,” says Jesse Bornfreund, Enterprise Technical Architect at Microsoft, who worked with Covansys to build the solution. “For example, attendee feedback indicates that being able to integrate and manage their Envision agendas within Office Outlook 2003 was extremely valuable and drove significant satisfaction for all attendees and participants.”
Using XML to Build Connected Solutions
Using SharePoint Portal Server 2003, Covansys created personalized views or “experiences” of the MyEnvision portal that align with participants’ roles as event organizers, track owners, speakers, or attendees. The portal also facilitates online, near real-time communication among the stakeholder groups. It does this by taking advantage of the ability of the core programs in Office Professional Enterprise Edition 2003 to capture user input in XML. The universal language for data exchange, XML enables the creation of collaborative solutions because it allows data to be archived, searched, extracted, and reused for other purposes. The portal also allows captured data to be stored as XML in the Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 database associated with the portal, where it’s available for reporting in other programs, such as Microsoft Office Excel 2003.
Covansys also took advantage of the XML support in the Microsoft Office System to improve the session evaluation process. Covansys used Office InfoPath 2003 to create evaluation forms that were attached to each session’s information page. (See Figure 2.) Attendees could fill the forms out immediately after a session or later, offline. In both cases, completed evaluation forms were sent to a special e-mail account from which SharePoint Portal Server 2003 picked up the forms in XML format. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is also synchronized with Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, so that if an attendee didn’t fill out an evaluation form right after a session, an e-mail reminder was automatically sent out that evening. Evaluation form data is stored as XML in SQL Server 2000, where it’s available for import into Excel 2003 for reporting. SQL Server 2000, like Exchange Server 2003 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003, is part of Windows Server System integrated server software.
“Microsoft communication and collaboration software come with integration capabilities and support for XML,” says Ravishankar Rao, Global Alliance Manager, Covansys. “SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and InfoPath 2003 are easily customized to fit the information needs of different audiences using the portal, and InfoPath 2003 has a rich object model development environment that we used to enrich the user interface. These capabilities, and the Microsoft Solutions Framework, which provides an adaptable framework for successfully delivering solutions in a rapid application development environment, helped us meet the 40-day deadline set by the Envision team.”
Benefits
This year saw the highest attendance levels ever recorded at Envision. Nearly 3,000 people from 75 countries participated in 356 break-out sessions, and 578 speakers presented during the five-day event. “From an organizational standpoint, MyEnvision was the highlight of the event,” says Solaski. “We replaced paper-based workflow and cut down on administrative costs. Near real-time feedback enabled speakers to adjust and refine their content for more effective presentations. The biggest success was that 3,000 people saw how Office Professional Enterprise Edition 2003 and XML can support powerful, customizable collaboration portals. Now they are telling our customers.”
“By exposing our technical sales staff to this solution and giving them first-hand experience in using it, we’ve made them more effective advocates of selling Office-based XML technology,” says Bornfreund. “Since the Envision event in January 2005, the Envision team has received more than 300 e-mail requests for the servers to continue to host the event portal, because many prospective customers are interested in seeing the solution in action. The Envision team is creating a MyEnvision demo that will be distributed to the field on the Technical Agility Network DVDs.”
Improved Event Management
Despite the large number of participants, organizers using the MyEnvision communication and collaboration portal reduced the time and effort required to keep the event running smoothly. The Envision team also saved money by not producing paper-based evaluation forms and agendas. Envision team members used the MyEnvision portal to publish the agenda and content about each session, broadcast changes to the schedule or any other announcements, manage evaluation templates, track and report on evaluations, and manage the lists of frequently asked questions.
Track owners benefited from being able to manage their own session data and view evaluation reports as they came in, prompting one track owner to say how much easier it was to follow the status of his track on a daily basis.
“Having InfoPath 2003 forms for our survey tool generated huge returns,” says Solaski. “We went from receiving 323 survey responses in the previous year to 5,565 this year—up by 1,600 percent. Event organizers, speakers, and track owners could extract data in Excel 2003 and track how sessions were doing in real time. We had a friendly competition going among the track owners to see who would get the highest scores every day.”
With a wealth of relevant evaluation information available at their fingertips, conference organizers can better plan future events that follow up on TSPs suggestions and requests. Better informed TSPs in the field can deliver added value to their clients, enhancing productivity and sales.
MyEnvision empowered event organizers and track owners to manage their portions of the site themselves, which reduced the number of bottlenecks in communicating to the field.
For example, track owners and coordinators could make last-minute changes to the speaker, time, or room number listed in the agenda and post the updates themselves with virtually no interaction from event staff. “Organizers used MyEnvision to post more than 100 speaker changes in less than one week—with no paper and no pain!” says Bornfreund.
“This was really helpful because it took the burden of making changes off the event organizers, yet we could still see that the change had been made,” adds Solaski.
In fact, any changes made to the portal were reflected in appropriate areas throughout MyEnvision, thereby providing timely and accurate information to the attendees. “With MyEnvision, our problems in broadcasting news to the attendees disappeared,” says Solaski. “Everyone has the latest information, and stakeholders moved from a reactive to a proactive management mode.”
Event organizers could watch as online registration grew for different sessions and prepare the appropriate room with the right number of chairs. “Capacity planning was a bonus benefit we hadn’t planned on,” says Bornfreund. “Being able to see how many attendees had “added” sessions to their calendars, we were able to adjust venues to accommodate anticipated attendance. For example, if 200 people had a session in their calendars that was scheduled for a room that would hold 50 we could change the room with a minimal impact.”
Better Experiences for Attendees and Speakers
Attendees used the MyEnvision collaboration portal to search sessions by track, speaker, or lab. They could then build a personal agenda, which they could export to their Outlook 2003 calendar with a single click, or view on the portal at My Agenda. Any changes made to the agenda were automatically updated in both places.
Because InfoPath 2003 evaluation forms were readily available online and prepopulated with speaker name, session number, and other key information, it was simple for attendees to fill out and submit evaluations. Speakers also appreciated that the evaluation forms facilitated a quick response that generated a high response rate. They could track the attendance rates for their sessions as well as the returned evaluation forms to fine-tune their presentations.
In addition, speakers were able to post the presentations that they had created in the Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 presentation graphics program on MyEnvision, so that attendees could download the presentation right after the session.
Both attendees and speakers enjoyed the improved exchange of information made possible by an open discussion board, to which attendees could post questions ahead of the session and the speaker could respond at will. “We wanted the field to submit questions for a special guest speaker, so we posted an announcement that they could pose their questions on MyEnvision,” says Solaski. “We passed the questions along to the speaker so he could address them, and it was a great finale to the whole event.”
Microsoft collaborative technologies rose to the challenge of providing a scalable and stable communication and collaboration portal that increased event organizers’ productivity and improved the attendees’ experience at Envision 2005. “The free flow of information among participants in real time made organizers’ lives easier and contributed to a valuable exchange of ideas, which supports the very nature of Envision,” says Solaski. “Now we have an archive of evaluation data. Identifying issues and best practices in the field allows Microsoft to gain insight into our customers’ requirements and how to satisfy those requirements to build better relationships.”