Traditional information technology was developed to support transactional business by providing direct connections to siloed applications providing specific services and information.  This infrastructure was not designed to support the complex needs of information workers.  While in the physical confines of the enterprise, they need robust access to multiple line-of-business applications, web resources, and document stores from their office desktops, as well as other’s offices, conference rooms - even the cafeteria.  They are more often away from the office – working from home, hotels, and at customer and partner facilities.  They have to work on planes, trains, and automobiles, in restaurants, cafes and waiting rooms.  Their business intelligence needs are equally complex.  They need structured and unstructured data from multiple reporting systems, applications, web sites, and documents – as well as information from other people’s desktops, applications, documents, or in their heads.  Information is as likely as not to reside within the enterprise.  Collaboration for these information workers is dynamic, unstructured, unlimited and business-driven by people, problems, ideas, customers, partners, or issues.

The constraints of the traditional infrastructure is a source of frustration for both the information workers whose performance is limited by their ability to access, use, and share information in meeting goals and objectives and for the IT organizations who want to provide the information and services that will enable their people to be successful.  The systems component driving the increases in productivity for transactional workers was ERP by providing a unified database, a common user interface, and single set of controls to in supporting a broad array of business.  Where ERP systems fail is when they are relied upon to support the needs of information workers.  The Microsoft Business Productivity Infrastructure provides the benefits of an ERP solution tailored to the special needs of information workers and acts as a platform for solution development supporting their business processes.

The Microsoft Business Productivity Infrastructure, based on SharePoint, provides a single point of access for employees, customers and partners to get the information and services they need to drive and support the business and an integrated way for IT organizations to provide these services and manage these systems.  Rather than deploying new applications providing various capabilities and supporting different business processes, the Information Worker Infrastructure allows organizations to provide common capabilities addressing multiple processes through a standard interface and tools that information workers already use – the Microsoft Office Suite and your organization websites.