Roland DGA outs colour in collaboration with Microsoft rollout

Bob Castle, CIO at Roland DGA, explains that the company needed to upgrade its infrastructure because legacy systems were straining its ability to provide integrated business tools for its employees and nearly 400 partners. His new solution is a combination of Microsoft Dynamics GP, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. “We have limited interaction with our customers, so it’s critical that we give our partners the tools to communicate proficiently as our company representative,” says Castle. “For example, we are now able to automate the delivery of customer enquiries from our web site to the most appropriate dealer, with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. This improves the time it takes for customers to get a response to their questions.” Meanwhile, to strengthen communication between employees and partners, Roland DGA has also consolidated its various databases into a single one supported by SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. This, says Castle, has removed the need for employees to enter data into two separate systems and has given the company the ability to control portal user rights for each partner directly from Dynamics CRM. In addition, working with Microsoft partner speakTECH, Roland DGA has been able to improve collaboration between employees, customers and dealers by developing internal and external team sites through SharePoint Server. “The flexibility for our employees to set up team sites using SharePoint and invite channel partners to participate in the conversation has spread across the entire organization, boosting productivity,” says Castle. “We have three team sites for our primary management groups, a site for our Canadian and Latin American dealers, more than 20 employee sites, and our external customer-facing web site. These sites have drastically improved the way our employees and dealers communicate. They are now able to share documents in real time and access them from any Internet-connected computer.” Later this year, he says the company will be implementing a social computing platform consisting of wikis and blogs. Essentially an open platform for user-generated dialogue, he says it will also be supported by SharePoint and will seamlessly integrate into employees’ and partners’ Microsoft Office suites. The integration of Microsoft SharePoint Server and Microsoft Office will enable employees to work from their existing Office applications or directly from SharePoint Server to create wikis and blogs.