Microsoft Corp has released three toolkits as part of its long-anticipated Digital Dashboard initiative: a starter kit, Outlook 2000 Team Folder Wizards and Team Productivity Update for BackOffice Server 4.5. A digital dashboard is supposed to be a customized Office 2000-based solution able to consolidate personal, team, corporate and external information and to provide single-click access to analytical and collaborative tools. In other words, it’s a reinvention of Office along enterprise information portal lines, much as the June 1999 deal between Lotus Corp and Lycos Inc is a way to do the same thing to Notes.
Microsoft’s starter kit contains five sample dashboards: one each for the vertical industries health-care, insurance and manufacturing; one for sales and one for finance. These samples are supposed to help systems integrators jump-start customization. The Team Folder Wizard should help create shared contact managers, document libraries, calendars, discussion groups and collaborative projects, while the Productivity Update is intended to serve as: a central location for knowledge sharing. The first two toolkits are available for free download from the web, and the third can be ordered from the Microsoft BackOffice Server web site. á
