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|Overview | | |“We deployed the 2007 Microsoft Office release companywide, with very minimal adjustment from either |

|Country or Region: United States | | |the IT or end-user perspective.… We found that there was no increase in help-desk calls.” |

|Industry: Manufacturing—High technology | | |Ray Rivera, Chief Information Officer, TASER International |

| | | | |

|Customer Profile | | | |

|TASER International, based in Scottsdale, | | | |

|Arizona, manufactures advanced electronic | | | |

|control devices used by law enforcement, | | | |

|medical, military, and security professionals| | | |

|and consumers. It employs 500 people. | | | |

| | | | |

|Business Situation | | | |

|In response to tripling its staff in two | | | |

|years, TASER needed to streamline internal | | | |

|information flow and business processes, as | | | |

|well as improve its collaboration tools. | | | |

| | | | |

|Solution | | | |

|TASER upgraded to Microsoft® Office | | | |

|Professional Plus 2007 and engaged Avanade to| | | |

|develop a new intranet, based on Microsoft | | | |

|Office SharePoint® Server 2007, which | | | |

|includes workflow and collaboration. | | | |

| | | | |

|Benefits | | | |

|Increased agility | | | |

|Faster time-to-market | | | |

|Reduced development time | | | |

| | | |When its staff quadrupled in two years, TASER International needed more efficient ways to collaborate|

| | | |than face-to-face meetings and lengthy e-mail strings. TASER also wanted to empower its information |

| | | |workers to manage intranet content without IT assistance. TASER deployed Microsoft® Office |

| | | |Professional Plus 2007 and engaged Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Avanade to develop an intranet |

| | | |based on Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007. The integration between Office SharePoint Server |

| | | |2007 and the programs in Office Professional Plus 2007 makes it easy for TASER employees to access |

| | | |real-time business process information that helps them make better decisions, increase agility, and |

| | | |shorten time-to-market. The built-in workflow and search functionality and business intelligence |

| | | |tools in the 2007 Microsoft Office system helped cut development time for the project by more than |

| | | |half. |

| | | | |

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Situation

In 1993, brothers Rick and Tom Smith of Scottsdale, Arizona, set out to reduce violence by developing a more effective and safer method for citizens and law enforcement professionals to protect themselves. That same year, the Smith brothers began working with the original TASER® inventor, Jack Cover, to develop the first of many nonfirearm TASER electronic control devices (ECDs) and incorporated under the name AIR TASER. The company grew globally and changed its name to TASER International in 1998. By 2005, TASER had 95 employees, and two years later it had more than quadrupled to over 500 employees—a trend that continues.

With such dramatic growth, the company faced new challenges. The first was how to collaborate efficiently. “As we grew, we found that people were on the road more and new people were joining us, making it increasingly difficult for everybody to work together,” says Ray Rivera, Chief Information Officer at TASER International. E-mail no longer adequately supported collaboration needs because the sheer volume of messages and responses to messages made it difficult to get to the relevant information. TASER had an open source intranet, but that didn’t provide collaboration functionality and was so hard to use that few people did. Plus, TASER did not have a usable content management system.

“Once you found the latest version of a document, you might not even have access to it,” says Sunny Chowdhury, Project Manager for TASER International. “We wanted to be able to make information available to the appropriate people to enhance productivity within our environment.”

Improving Communications and Collaboration

TASER was looking for a solution that consolidated information about projects, employees, and business processes in one area. “We wanted to improve communication throughout the company and allow authorized members of each department to see all the information they need to do their jobs, without having to read through a long string of e-mail responses to the same message,” says Rivera. “We also wanted to give employees the tools to work with that information easily, without having to learn a new system.”

Some of the specific collaboration capabilities that TASER was looking for included:

■ Integration with the Microsoft® Office system so that users could access and work directly with information from within their familiar desktop programs.

■ A project workspace where cross-functional teams could work on tasks and collaborate on projects.

■ Meeting workplaces to manage information about weekly meetings and drive accountability for action items.

■ Version control of documents so that information workers wouldn’t have to search through countless e-mail attachments to find the latest version of a document.

Solution

For its new collaboration solution, the TASER IT group informally considered a few open source applications—Rainbow and DotNetNuke—as well as Lotus. The open source choices didn’t scale to the enterprise, and deploying Lotus would have required a great deal of work to integrate it into TASER’s back-end systems.

The company had some experience with creating team sites with Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 and felt that the server software would meet its requirements for a companywide collaboration portal. However, when TASER requested a proposal from Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Avanade, the partner recommended a solution based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

“Avanade showed us the workflow capacity of Office SharePoint Server 2007 and how those workflows could be tailored to our business processes, which were very compelling benefits,” says Rivera. “They also showed us how its tight integration with the programs in Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007 would minimize the need for customization and would make it much easier for workers to use all the new workflow capabilities and business intelligence tools. We chose Avanade because its people had the resources and skill sets that we needed, and the ability to bring those resources to our project on a very timely basis.”

The solution from Avanade included advanced integration between Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the programs in Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007. For example, with the tasking interface in the 2007 Office release, TASER information workers can collaborate, manage workflow, and search for documents all from within a single interface and work together on documents in meeting workspaces. In addition, tools such as the ability to overlay calendars to quickly find free time among multiple meeting attendees streamline scheduling. And multiple TASER employees can work on the same Office PowerPoint® presentation simultaneously, whether they are working in the Office PowerPoint 2007 presentation graphics program or SharePoint Server 2007.

Building the Intranet

The intranet project was launched at the end of June 2006. The first month was spent analyzing business processes and gathering requirements from business users across the TASER organization. Avanade then mapped out the solution architecture and developed a prototype of the portal based on the beta version of Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Avanade created predefined page templates for the intranet, which TASER workers can easily populate using Microsoft Office Word 2007 without requiring help from the IT department. Workers can access the TASER intranet from virtually anywhere, using desktop or portable computers or Windows Mobile® powered devices.

The intranet includes a document control system with workflow processes. The TASER technical writing team used the workflow functionality in the Office Business Application (OBA) Services built into the 2007 Office system to create a document control application, which helps TASER maintain ISO (International Organization for Standardization) certification. OBAs add enterprise-specific features to applications and documents and integrate line-of-business applications with the Microsoft Office system. Each TASER department writes and reviews documents within its own departmental workspace. Then the departments use the document control application to submit documents to the quality assurance department for approval and then automatically route the documents to a controlled document repository, where users can access them in read-only mode.

In addition, members of the company’s configuration management group in the Research and Development department created an Engineering Change Control and management system OBA using the Microsoft Office Open XML Formats, and the Microsoft Office InfoPath® 2007 information-gathering program. This system uses an InfoPath-based forms library to track internal and external change requests related to TASER product lines and engineering processes.

TASER also uses the audience-targeting capabilities and business intelligence tools in Office SharePoint Server 2007 to present key performance indicators (KPIs) to the appropriate users. And the company uses the dashboard, scorecard, and other Web Parts technologies in SharePoint Server to provide additional production and operations information to department managers.

“Our intent this year is to interface a lot of our back-end systems into the Web Parts that are already available for the business intelligence models included in Office SharePoint Server 2007,” Rivera explains.

Optimizing the Desktop

TASER had planned to upgrade to Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007 by the end of 2007, but the intranet project accelerated that upgrade. “We upgraded to Office Professional Plus 2007 in parallel with the intranet project, so we would be able to take advantage of the suite’s tight integration with Office SharePoint Server 2007,” says Chowdhury. “Now users can see and access all their tasks, e-mail, and files whether they’re in SharePoint Server 2007 or another program in the 2007 Office release.”

TASER first deployed a beta version of Office Professional Plus 2007 to the IT group in August 2006. Then it deployed a later beta version to its 12-member executive group in December 2006. “We rolled it out to the executives first so they could actually see the integration between the programs in Office Professional Plus and SharePoint Server, which saved them from having to go to 10 different places to get information or to collaborate on projects,” says Rivera. “We deployed Office Professional Plus 2007 on their desktops and presented a four-minute overview training video for the executives, and they didn’t need any additional help from us. That told me that the suite is stable, reliable, and easy to use.”

TASER executives tested Office Professional Plus 2007 through January 2007, and then the IT group rolled it out to the rest of the company’s 350 desktop and portable computers. “We deployed the 2007 Microsoft Office release companywide, with very minimal adjustment from either the IT or end-user perspective,” says Rivera. “We paid particular attention to support calls during the pilot and the companywide rollout, but we found that there was no increase in help-desk calls.”

TASER plans to deploy Office InfoPath 2007 toward the end of 2007, to integrate with the new workflow processes provided by Office SharePoint Server.

Minimal Training

The TASER IT department handled the training for the SharePoint-based portal and Office Professional Plus 2007. For the portal, TASER started by training power users who own content on the intranet for their departments. “We showed each person the process of provisioning the site, populating information, and assigning permissions,” Chowdhury says. After that, the trainers worked with each department, showing how to assign contributor rights. “A lot of people already were familiar with SharePoint Portal Server 2003. Their roles didn’t really change; it was just a different interface,” says Chowdhury.

In addition, TASER created video segments demonstrating basic tasks and then stored the videos on the intranet for users to refer to at any time to refresh their memories. To train users on Office Professional Plus 2007, TASER simply presented the same overview training video that it had used with the executives and purchased Microsoft E-Learning courses from Microsoft Learning. Users can access the courses through the SharePoint portal and follow the courses at their own pace as needed.

“Switching to the 2007 Office system was fairly simple following the overview training,” says Steve Tuttle, Vice President of Communications at TASER. “The quick demonstrations showed improved shortcuts and formatting capabilities in Office Word and Office Excel®, which were vast improvements in terms of reducing key strokes and helping us work more productively.”

Benefits

Deploying Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007 and implementing Office SharePoint Server 2007 for its intranet has helped TASER improve decision making, increase agility, and reduce IT development time.

Increased Agility

Having an intranet built on Office SharePoint Server 2007 helps TASER adhere to lean manufacturing principles. The workflows built into the department-level SharePoint sites help standardize processes. In turn, they are linked to KPIs that constantly present managers with a real-time, high-level view of whether a project is on schedule or behind schedule. “We didn’t have real-time information about a project’s status before,” says Rivera. “We have a very fast-moving environment, and SharePoint Server 2007 is dynamic enough and extensible enough to meet our business challenges and help us streamline our business processes.”

And because the programs in Office Professional Plus 2007 and SharePoint Server 2007 work together and share a user interface, workers can access all internal and external information through a single interface, which helped increase adoption of the new intranet and maintain productivity. “In deploying Office Professional Plus 2007, we experienced no loss of productivity and in fact increased productivity in some areas,” says Rivera. “For example, we do a lot of PowerPoint presentations, and the ability for staff to collaborate on a single version of a PowerPoint presentation, and not have to send huge files through e-mail, saves a lot of time and storage space, resulting in about a 10 percent savings on hard-disk costs.”

In coming months, TASER plans to automate more of its production processes and feed that data as appropriate to dashboards for specific departments. Such dashboards will provide managers with detailed, real-time views of the staging point of each product and when processes are finished.

Faster Time-to-Market

Because TASER workers can now access all the information and intranet tools they need to do their jobs through the familiar, easy-to-use interface in the 2007 Office release, they are able to work much more efficiently. That increased efficiency has been demonstrated in several recent product releases.

“Using the new intranet capabilities, we launched a new product in approximately 8 months compared to the 24 months it took previously,” says Rivera. “We’ve successfully launched eight additional projects using the new solution. And while the projects have increased in complexity, the significantly improved collaboration has reduced time-to-delivery.”

Reduced Development Time

The built-in functionality in Office SharePoint Server 2007 and its tight integration with the programs in Office Professional Plus 2007 helped TASER software developers work more efficiently as well. “In the development process, we were able to use a lot of SharePoint Server 2007 capabilities, like search, the workflow engine, and SharePoint lists. And the built-in integration with the rest of the programs in the 2007 Office release saved us from having to design a custom database to store information or a custom user interface,” says Elmer Morales, Avanade Project Manager on the TASER project.

“The built-in Web Parts components, such as dashboards, flow charts, and KPIs, minimized development efforts and helped us complete the project rapidly,” says Morales. “If we had had to develop the intranet solution from scratch, it would have taken about a year. With SharePoint Server 2007, we completed the project—from defining requirements to deployment—in less than five months.”

Microsoft Office System

The Microsoft Office system is the business world’s chosen environment for information work, providing the programs, servers, and services that help you succeed by transforming information into impact.

For more information about the Microsoft Office system, go to:

office

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| |Software and Services

■ Microsoft Office

− Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007

− Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

■ Microsoft Server Product Portfolio

− Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Enterprise Edition

|Solutions

− Office Business Application Services

Hardware

■ Dell PowerEdge servers

■ HTC Windows Mobile powered devices | |

“We upgraded to Office Professional Plus 2007 in parallel with the intranet project, so we would be able to take advantage of the suite’s tight integration with Office SharePoint Server 2007.”

Sunny Chowdhury, Project Manager, TASER International

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This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published January 2008 | | |

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:

For more information about Avanade products and services, call (206) 239-5600 or visit the Web site at:

For more information about TASER International products and services, call (480) 905-2000 or visit the Web site at:

Using the workflow functionality in OBA Services, TASER created a document control application that helps it maintain ISO certification.

“If we had had to develop the intranet solution from scratch, it would have taken about a year. With SharePoint Server 2007, we completed the project—from defining requirements to deployment—in less than five months.”

Elmer Morales, Project Manager, Avanade

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