I am constantly amazed at how effortlessly my son uses technology. By the time he was 3, he was already programming our TIVO. By the time he was 5, he was playing games on my smartphone. Now he’s 8, and he knows his way around my Windows Phone 7 better than I do. He prefers text messaging to talking on the phone, and he is always showing me the latest apps and features he’s discovered.

Having grown up surrounded by technology, it’s as if he was born knowing how to use it.  Watching my son, it’s fascinating for me to think how business will change as people of his generation – the so-called Generation Z – enter the workforce.

Already, enterprises are hiring thousands of recent grads who grew up with the Internet. In the decade from 2007 to 2016, 12.8 million young workers are expected to join the U.S. workforce, all of whom were raised in a world of consumer and social technologies. As this new generation of professionals enters the workforce, we’re seeing a push to incorporate more consumer technology than ever before.

It’s critical that enterprises meet these young workers’ technology demands by incorporating social computing technologies into the day-to-day business world. Why? For one, embracing social computing will help organizations to attract and retain the young talent they need to remain competitive. Young workers are used to social technologies, and want to use them both in their personal and professional lives. Second, social technologies enable enterprises to be more productive. They provide managers with a clear vision into team dynamics. And they give knowledge workers easy, natural ways to share insights and collaborate.

Meeting those evolving needs is one of the cornerstones of our productivity platform. It is designed to help enterprises embrace social computing in a way that’s secure and easy to manage. For example, SharePoint 2010 includes social computing tools such as My Sites, which enables users to easily share information about themselves and their work. This sharing of information encourages collaboration, and builds and promotes expertise. It also includes social content technologies such as blogs, wikis, and team sites that give employees the freedom to work together in flexible, natural ways based on their preference and the work context.

Another key social computing application in the Microsoft productivity platform is Lync 2010, which provides a single interface that unites voice communications, IM, audio, video, and web conferencing. Employees can hold video and audio conferences with other workers no matter where they’re located. They can also connect with their co-workers from virtually any device, making interactions more collaborative, engaging, and accessible.

It’s exciting to see how enterprises are using these tools, and the energized collaboration environment they’re creating.  For example, employees at Sony use the My Sites tool within SharePoint to see who’s online, find the people they need to work with, and exchange ideas. By collaborating this way, they have gotten projects to market faster, while reducing costs. Likewise, employees at TELUS have been using SharePoint 2010 to improve business intelligence and encourage collaboration across departments. In doing so, they’ve created an atmosphere in which all employees are encouraged to chip in and express their thoughts and ideas. To learn more about how Sony and TELUS are using social computing technologies, please see our SharePoint 2010 Communities video. 

What social computing technologies is your organization embracing? What results have you seen? Please take a minute to leave your comment.  

Every time I climb into my car, I’m stunned to observe the increased sprawl across the Seattle area. Seattle has always been a city of freeways. But over time, more roads have been built and more highways widened to accommodate the city’s non-stop growth. To the south, traffic jams now often stretch 35 miles all the way to the city of Tacoma. To the east, I-90 is often jammed from the early afternoon and well into the evening. I recently read in our local newspaper that the cost of congestion, which includes time loss and money spent on excess fuel, amounts to $1,056 per commuter.

As I slog through stop-and-go traffic on my way to work, it often occurs to me that our road system is a lot like the IT infrastructure of a large enterprise. As organizations have grown, their infrastructures have become increasingly costly and complex to manage. Business units are moving an ever-growing number of mission-critical systems applications into the data center and demanding that these applications be up and running around the clock. At the same time, social media, search engines, and mobile devices are contributing floods of new data for businesses to analyze.  Energy prices are rising, while regulatory compliance requirements are multiplying. To keep up, administrators are adding ever more servers, data storage, and networking devices, and then struggling to manage the “server sprawl” that ensues.

All of these pressures add up to increased costs at a time when the economy is slowing and many organizations are leaning on IT departments to tighten their budgets. Consider these facts:

• Knowledge workers waste 25 percent of their time battling information overload, costing U.S. companies $900 billion a year.
• Approximately 70 percent of IT budgets are spent maintaining siloed data centers.
• Data centers will outpace the airline industry in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Managing an increasingly complex infrastructure is a daunting challenge for nearly every IT leader, especially during a down economy. Yet the good news is that there is help.  Whether your company wants to improve efficiency by moving your data center to a private cloud, by migrating all of your workloads to a public cloud, or a little of both, we can design a cloud solution that meets your specific business needs. Because our solutions are built to work together—not as an isolated set of applications—they’ll help you make the most of your assets, while eliminating costly redundancies.

Imagine if we could rethink the last 50 years of highway development and design a more efficient infrastructure that leverages today’s transportation options. Given the money that’s already been invested, a complete redesign isn’t likely.  Yet we have a chance to plan smarter moving forward.  The cloud offers a similar opportunity for enterprises. Most will want to leverage their existing investments while utilizing today’s cutting-edge technology to plan a more efficient infrastructure for the future.  As Marc Silvester, senior vice president and Global CTO of Fujitsu puts it, “The challenge that customers face today is: how do I get an appropriate level of IT – of process and innovation – and how do I apply that to business today, and how do I make some money tomorrow?”

What factors have increased the cost and complexity of your infrastructure? And what measures has your organization taken to address these issues?  Please share your comments. Also, check out:  “Today’s cloud – on your terms, for your enterprise.”  It’s a short white paper that discusses Microsoft’s full range of cloud offerings.

Welcome to another round of featured news items from around the web. Each week, we handpick articles for our community related to cloud and enterprise technology. We welcome your suggestions for next week’s round-up—share your links in the comments section or tweet a link to us at @msproductivity. 

Here are 3 links focusing on different ways the Enterprise can leverage the cloud:

Office 365 Jump Start: Office 365 Deployment for Enterprise Overview

During this session, Chuck Pyle and Adam Carter discuss the key aspects of planning, preparing, and migrating to Office 365 for enterprises. 

Atlanta Hospital Looks to Cloud for Email Fix

The problem, though, didn't involve the healthcare staff or medical equipment. It was email, which had become a nightmare for the doctors, nurses and administrators at Grady Health System, a 1,000-bed hospital in Atlanta that also runs seven neighborhood clinics, along with an infectious disease clinic.

Real World with Microsoft Online Services: Interview with Kevin Yearick, Grady Health System 

As part of the Real World with Microsoft Online Services series, we spoke to Kevin Yearick, Director of Network Services at Grady Health System, about why, after evaluating several cloud-based solutions, Grady chose the Business Productivity Online Standard Suite from Microsoft Online Services to manage its messaging and collaboration environment. Here’s what he had to say:

BONUS: Windows Azure Announcement: 

Free Ingress for All Windows Azure Customers starting July 1st, 2011

Today we’re pleased to announce a change in pricing for the Windows Azure platform that will provide significant cost savings for customers whose cloud applications experience substantial inbound traffic, and customers interested in migrating large quantities of existing data to the cloud. For billing periods that begin on or after July 1, 2011, all inbound data transfers for both peak and off-peak times will be free.

Microsoft to Make Inbound Data Transfer Free on Windows Azure Cloud

Microsoft plans to tweak its Windows Azure pricing, come July 1, to make the platform more attractive to users who want to migrate lots of data to the cloud.

Welcome to another round of featured news items from around the web. Each week, we handpick articles for our community related to cloud and enterprise technology. We welcome your suggestions for next week’s round-up—share your links in the comments section or tweet a link to us at @msproductivity. 

Four links addressing the challenges of moving to the cloud. 

CIO Australia and Microsoft Present: Embracing the Cloud for Competitive Advantage

The Cloud is often touted as the next big thing to hit the IT industry, but conservative decision making, vendor lock in and unrealistic expectations of Cloud computing are still big issues plaguing thought leaders in the enterprise.

Today's Data Center: More Cloud, Less Mainframe

The association surveyed 358 data center managers from around the world to find out how data centers are adapting to the ever-evolving IT environment. Their top three concerns? Physical space, energy efficiency and security. “In an environment where change is an accepted part of day-to-day life, it is important to recognize how data center managers are adapting to the new technologies and directions emerging in the industry,” said Jill Eckhaus, CEO, AFCOM. 

Coca-Cola Amatil turns Microsoft, Won't Look Back

The company ultimately shifted some 9000 seats away from its ageing Lotus installation to the BPOS platform hosted by Microsoft out of its Singapore data centres. It was a tight, six-month migration. By September 2010, at the end of the cycle, each of the new accounts provided five gigabytes of storage — up from 300 megabytes — and relieved the company of maintenance duties for 69 servers once hosting IBM’s e-mail platform.

Tampa General Hospital Moves Communication to the Cloud, Frees IT to focus on Healthcare 

The hospital’s IT staff was eager to help TGH reorient itself from a purely “bricks and mortar” healthcare delivery model to adopt new ideas, including home healthcare, community-based care delivery, and services such as sending mobile phone messages to remind patients to take their medicine.

If you have any doubt about just how dramatically today’s workforce is changing, think about this: just two years from now, one-third of the world’s workforce will be mobile. That’s nearly 1.2 billion people working outside of the office by 2013 – whether it be from their homes, cafés, hotels, customer sites, or conference rooms.

Let me be blunt about it: Enterprises that don’t adequately serve their mobile workers will be at a major disadvantage. To remain competitive in the new business landscape, technology leaders need to find a way to keep these workers as productive as if they were sitting in the cube next to them. Workers need to access information, work on documents, and collaborate with colleagues just as easily from their smart phone, PDA, or laptop as from their desktop computer. Anything less means lost productivity and ultimately lost revenue for the company.  

A key advantage of the Microsoft productivity platform is that it adapts to changing work styles and organizational models, making it a great choice for an increasingly mobile workforce. With Microsoft Office 365, employees can work anywhere with the most productive, familiar experience across the PC, phone, and browser. With Windows Azure, IT can develop innovative cloud-based services for their mobile workers that extend the organization’s productivity even further. Moreover, employees working in the cloud can connect seamlessly with workers using Microsoft Office 2010 and other productivity applications on premises.

As enterprises strive to improve the productivity of their mobile populations, it’s critical that they do so without compromising security and infrastructure reliability. They need to manage the identities of workers logging into to the system from a wide variety of devices. And they need to keep the infrastructure up and running in an increasingly complex environment.

The Microsoft productivity platform provides solutions to these challenges as well. The platform simplifies management by integrating all workers into a single, unified system.  Back-end processes like security and identity management extend from the core enterprise platform to the mobile workforce without requiring an entirely new infrastructure.

In the coming years, enterprises will gear up their support for mobile workers. According to a study by Juniper Research, the number of enterprise workers using mobile cloud-based applications will rise to more than 130 million by 2014.

Already, some of the innovations are truly ground-breaking. Take Xerox, for example. An industry leader in managed print services, Xerox saw the difficulty employees had printing documents on the go. Mobile workers had to wait until they returned to their laptop or desktop computer to print, route documents to a colleague’s computer for printing, or simply go without printing. Xerox addressed this need by developing a cloud-based service on the Windows Azure platform that lets workers route documents from their mobile devices to the nearest available public printer.  

The service, called Xerox Cloud Print, solves one of the fundamental challenges of mobile computing. It’s the kind of innovation that brings energy and excitement to the evolving business landscape. To learn more, please check out the case study at: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=4000008986.

How important are mobile workers to your organization? And what are you doing to improve their productivity? Please share your thoughts and ideas with us.