Microsoft Aligns to Revive Digital Dashboard - Company Business and Marketing

ENT, June 14, 2000 by Alicia Cdstanza

Microsoft Corp.'s digital dashboard alliance with InfoImage Inc. is starting to deliver. And what the companies are delivering is freedom - freedom 2 to be more precise.

In October 1999, Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) and InfoImage (www.infoimage.com) unveiled a joint effort to release freedom 2, a product composed of both companies' technology.

Microsoft's digital dashboard technology, a fancy name for a knowledge-management platform, was the basis on which freedom 2 was built. Freedom 2 is a decision portal that simplifies the task of finding, accessing, analyzing, and sharing information with other workers. The product comes in two flavors: the freedom 2 B2E server offers intemal users access to corporate data via an intranet portal, and a B2B edition that provides information to external users and suppliers via an extranet.

By consolidating information from data sources - such as databases, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and the Internet - from 2 offers users a unified view of data in the portal. "Users can access information from any part of the company, giving them the ability to collaborate with other parties and get advice, and giving them the ability to take action," says Jon Michaels, chief marketing officer and co-founder of InfoImage.

There are a lot of portals out there, but InfoImage believes it is freedom 2's features that will set it apart. One example is its collaboration capability that enables users to work within other applications without leaving the portal.

Another ability is knowledge maps, which lets users navigate in and out of folders because they hierarchically categorize an organization's data. Users can do searches without realizing they are performing complex ad hoc queries. "Knowledge maps help you find what you want in the portal," Michaels says.

One difference is that freedom 2 is based on Microsoft technology. "One of the reasons our customers have chosen us is because we are Microsoft-centric, and we can scale to a large distributed environment. Our competitors can't do this," Michaels says.

Freedom 2 allows users to view data in a Web browser. Additionally, freedom 2, includes server applications and Office 2000 software. "[Freedom 2] - really shows off Office 2000. The partnership helps us execute our digital dashboard strategies and helps our customers by bringing to the table the experience that InfoImage has," says David Holladay, lead product manager at Microsoft.

But Microsoft may also have been interested in InfoImage for another reason. "Because we run on the Microsoft platform, we drive a lot of license sales for them." Michaels says. "And we only run on the Microsoft platform."