The IW Center

Later this week, I'll be interviewing a special guest for IW Talk...this will be a prodcast that you won't want to miss!!! (more about that very very soon) For the upcoming mystery guest, we'll be discussing the future of productivity tools and the direction of Microsoft information worker solutions. To set the stage for the upcoming session, I thought I would re-post my interview with Chris Capossela, who gave a great overview of the value of the 2007 Office System. Prior to the 2007 Office System launch, I was fortunate to sit down with Chris, who is the Vice President in charge of the Information Worker business here at Microsoft.

In this prodcast, Chris highlights the various trends that we're seeing in the business world and how productivity tools such as Office, SharePoint and our Unified Communications products are changing how people work together.

I hope you enjoy this discussion and stay tuned next week when I reveal the identity of my latest executive prodcast.

Click the links below to play audio (41:56)

WMA Audio
MP3 Audio

For more information on Microsoft Office 2007, please visit the Microsoft website.

I've received a lot of feedback on my blog over the past year.  Sometimes people send me emails saying my content is great! Others have had "constructive criticism" about what I'm doing.  For example, I added MP3 and iTunes feeds based on the feedback that not everybody listened to WMA file formats.

However, the question that I get asked the most is "Why can't you spell podcast right?" and a close second is "Do you know you have a typo...it's spelled PODCAST without the "R"?.  To explain why I call my sessions "prodcasts", I need to take a step back and give you some background.

Internally at Microsoft, we have these monthly windows media audio recordings called "Drive Time" which allows us to learn about our products while in the car or on a plane.  They've been around for years...basically it was podcasting way before podcasting became popular.  So I always thought we should provide similar materials to our customers, giving them another medium to explore our products and solutions.  However, our internal materials aren't really suited for external consumption and the Drive Time team didn't have a charter to create customer-ready versions of their content.

So I decided to create my own audio sessions for customers to hear overviews of our products.  When I started this initiative last year, I wanted to come up with a catchy name for the project.  My goal was to provide content around the products that I personally cover in the personal productivity space...Office, SharePoint, Exchange, LCS, etc.   Somehow I came up with "Productivity Broadcasts" or "prodcasts" for short.  The name worked well for me, because my content wasn't exclusive to iPod's so Podcast didn't quite fit.  And this was well before Microsoft's Zune player came out (Zunecast doesn't quite have the same ring to it).

In my eyes, this project has been very successful. To date, I've recorded over 50 interviews with product and program managers covering the numerous products Microsoft has in the information worker division.  I get roughly 30,000 visitors a day (that's visitors, not hits) and now that my materials on the Microsoft.Com website, my traffic is steadily increasing.  I've even gotten the opportunity to interview Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Chris Capossela.

Anyway, that's why I call my sessions "Prodcasts".  If you'd like to provide feedback or ask me a question, you can always email me directly at TheIWC at Microsoft.Com

Thanks for listening.

Shawn

A couple of weeks ago, I traveled to Redmond for a customer briefing.  While I was out there, I got the rare opportunity to interview Bill Gates, company co-founder and Chairman of Microsoft.  As you might imagine, his time is closely guarded, so I was ecstatic when I got 30 minutes on his calendar.  We sat down in Bill's personal office, where I asked him questions focused around the information worker space. 

During our session, Bill discusses the future of business productivity applications and how they are being influenced by consumer focused technologies like blogs and wikis.  He also explores how the workers from this next generation (digital natives) have different expectations for the tools they will use to collaborate and get their work done.  Bill also gives some insight into the next wave of innovation for the Office System, highlighting the work that we'll do in "Office 14" and beyond.  Finally, he talks about his transition to "part-time" at Microsoft and what types of projects he'll be working on in the future.

It truly was a thrill to be given the time to talk to Bill Gates.  I hope you enjoy the prodcast as much as I enjoyed recording it.   For those of you who prefer to read rather than listen, I'll be posting a transcript of the interview as soon as I get time to type it up.

Click the links below to play audio (20:41)

WMA Version
MP3 Version

For more information about Bill Gates, please see his website on Microsoft.com.