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Choose the right tools for the job

Choosing the right business technology is more important than ever. You need to manage large amounts of financial information, and you need to be confident that it is accurate and up to date. You also need to make sure that everyone who works with the data — including people outside the finance department — can do so easily.

The Microsoft Office System builds on programs that people already know to provide an integrated solution for a broad array of financial data management needs.

Challenge: Define, communicate, and manage the budget process

The finance group creates budgets and other financial data to help managers plan strategically for the coming year. Microsoft Office System programs can help you organize process documentation, financial data, schedules, and other information in one place where team members can find and work with it throughout the budget process.

Meet the challenge

Use Microsoft Office Visio® Professional 2003 and Microsoft Office SharePoint™ Portal Server 2003 to:

• Replace complex instruction documents with Visio diagrams of the budget process.
• Circulate Visio diagrams and collect comments, and then update the Visio diagrams to better reflect the budget process.
• Update and distribute budget-related documents in a "shared documents" area of a SharePoint site.
• Post budget-related announcements, documents, links, task lists, and calendars to the SharePoint site for easy access by team members.

Document and post your processes

Microsoft Office Visio Professional 2003 is a program in the Microsoft Office System. You can use Visio Professional to set up a budget-creation process and post it internally on a SharePoint site.

SharePoint Portal Server extends the capabilities of Microsoft Windows® SharePoint™ Services, providing organizational and management tools for SharePoint sites for medium-sized and large organizations. You can use familiar tools found in Microsoft Office System programs, such as drop-down boxes and drag-and-drop tools, to customize SharePoint site content and layout and publish information to your organization. SharePoint Portal Server technologies can help your internal teams collaborate on documents, track versions, and monitor progress on various projects.

SharePoint Portal Server can be used with one personal computer or in a server farm.

Collaborate efficiently

Everyone involved in the budget process can work together efficiently.

• Visual diagrams help team members understand the budget process and deadlines.
• Team members can find everything related to the budget process in one place.

Challenge: Provide a monthly executive scorecard

A recurring task for financial professionals is creating a monthly executive scorecard. This scorecard summarizes sales closed, revenues to date, actual P&L against budget, sales funnel opportunities, and average days to close. Although gathering the data for the scorecard can be time-consuming, the CFO needs it to review monthly executive performance.

Solution: Excel 2003

Use a Microsoft Office Excel 2003 smart document to gather data and use a SharePoint site to share and distribute it.

• Access data from sources such as sales, human resources, and accounting databases, and from Excel 2003 summary documents.
• Automatically pull data from your line-of-business systems, increasing data reliability.
• Display information in color-coded, multi-dimensional graphs and tables.
• Analyze and view your information in an effective format.
• Post the scorecard on a SharePoint site for review by the CFO and executives, who can then ask and answer questions through Microsoft Windows Messenger.

Pull data together with XML

You can use XML to pull data from a variety of sources into documents, databases, presentations, and spreadsheets. With XML, you can easily select and use enterprise data. The open, Internet-based standards of XML and XML Web services enable different systems to communicate even when they use different data sources, are written in different languages, or reside on different computers. An IT specialist or developer at your company can help you build spreadsheets, documents, or line-of-business programs to select and retrieve the right data.

XML documents are structured, platform-independent, text-based files that can be opened and modified in Microsoft Office System programs like Excel 2003. You can then use tools such as the Chart Wizard in Excel to analyze and display information.

Find and use current information

Management can quickly find and use the latest information. When you use XML to gather information, you:

• Eliminate many time-consuming, error-prone tasks often associated with creating and updating documents.
• Can provide verifiable, objective analysis.

Challenge: Respond to ad hoc finance report requests

Management uses financial information — often on an ad hoc basis — to make critical business decisions, so you need to be ready and able to provide accurate, up-to-date financial information on request. When you receive a request for an ad hoc report, you need to collaborate efficiently with other managers and analysts to gather information.

Efficient collaboration at a moment's notice

Collaborate on a Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Meeting Workspace site.

• Set up a Meeting Workspace site that includes agendas, objectives, and tasks for participants.
• Add team member e-mail addresses and invite them to join the Meeting Workspace site.
• Create and assign tasks on the site during your meeting, making sure that everyone knows how to use the task list and update their progress.

Meeting Workspace sites

A SharePoint Meeting Workspace site — a subsite of a parent SharePoint site — can help track member participation, agendas, objectives, and tasks.

If you use an instant messaging program compatible with Windows SharePoint Services, such as Microsoft Windows Messenger or Microsoft MSN® Messenger, you can communicate with other attendees on the Attendees list in the Meeting Workspace site. If an attendee is online, you can ask him or her to go to the site so you can work together.

Quick, simple, and effective

Using a SharePoint site to plan ad hoc reports for management is faster and easier.

• With team member expectations set in advance, meetings are more efficient and effective.
• Tasks and progress can easily be tracked and made available to everyone on the team, improving accuracy and accountability.

 Note   

Persons and organizations depicted and named herein are fictitious and provided for illustration purposes only. The scenarios described herein assume that licenses have been acquired for:

• Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003
• Microsoft Office Visio Professional 2003
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003, and one of the following:
  • Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 Standard Edition
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Web Edition
• Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.0 or later (Windows Server 2003 uses IIS 6.0)
• Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 Standard Edition, SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition or MSDE 2000
• Microsoft XML Core Services

Detailed system requirement information

Implementing Visio 2003

Implementing SharePoint Portal Server 2003