Roughly 6.8 million people were already using Office 2010 and related products when Microsoft Corp. launched Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 to the business market on May 12, according to Microsoft Canada Inc.
At a Canadian launch event in Toronto, hosted by Microsoft Canada, the Edmonton Oilers Hockey Club and a Canadian Harley-Davidson (H-D) retailer had a lot to say about their experiences with pre-release versions of the products.
SharePoint 2010 helps the Oilers scout for the NHL draft
The Edmonton Oilers implemented a pre-release version of SharePoint 2010 in their scouting department early this year, with help from Vancouver-based Habanero Consulting Group, for Web-based remote collaboration.
It’s a powerful tool for amateur scouts looking at prospective draft players, said Sean Draper, director of research, analysis and software development for the Edmonton Oilers Hockey Club.
Scouting is particularly important for the Oilers this year. The team will have first pick in the National Hockey League (NHL) entry draft in Los Angeles, Calif. next month. While the team has won five Stanley Cups since it joined the NHL in 1979, they have fallen to the bottom of the list in recent years and ranked 30th in 2009.
The Web-based system focuses largely on video, allowing scouts to not only view videos of prospects but also tag specific players and add comments with time markers. Other scouts can then join in the debate by adding their own comments and replies.
Scouts have pretty developed ideas about what a particular player brings to the table and this tool lets them highlight their ideas with examples and share them among themselves in real time, said Draper. The interaction between scouts is mostly arguments, he said.
But this is a good thing, he added, because by the time they get together for a meeting, they’ve already hashed out their ideas. “It really gives them the preparedness to into the meeting knowing it is going to be war over some players,” he said.
The most useful parts of SharePoint 2010, according to Draper, are its collaborative aspects and presence capabilities. “I want my scouts to know when someone else is online so I can start to immediately share my information with them,” he said.
The ability to tag videos with time markers is also key, said Draper. Video capabilities were available in SharePoint 2007, but they required buying a third party add-on and didn’t allow users to breakdown videos in detail, he said.
Roughly 20 people are using the SharePoint 2010 tool, which was developed in partnership with Habanero for the scouting department. The rest of the Hockey Club is on SharePoint 2007, said Alfred Ng, director of IT for the Edmonton Oilers Hockey Club.
Ng said he would like to expand the use of SharePoint 2010 to the rest of the company for purposes like the intranet, BI, workflow and business process management.
There is a lot of other functionality that the Hockey Club isn’t leveraging and SharePoint 2010 does it easier and better than SharePoint 2007, he said. The new version is also a lot more intuitive and doesn’t require a lot of time for end user training, he said.
The solution was very easy to implement, said Ng. Some of the hockey scouts are ex-players and they aren’t tech savvy, so for them to pick it up immediately and start using the system was “a huge thing for us,” he said.
Finding a partner to implement a SharePoint 2010 solution with is also key, said Ng. “SharePoint is one of those types of software where your imagination is your limitation. So if you can imagine a solution, with the right partner, they can make it happen for you,” he said.
The SharePoint 2010 system is currently restricted to scouts, but Draper said he would love to see it used for crowd sourcing. He would even go as far as opening parts of the system to the general public so scouting fans could contribute their opinions.
Office 2010 helps Jacox H-D forecast bike sales and weather patterns
With 70 H-D retailers across Canada, and not all of them exclusive to the H-D brand, some of the “cookie-cutter” reports supplied by Harley-Davidson Canada’s internal system just don’t work, said Marshall Horner, partner at Jacox Harley-Davidson in Mississauga, Ont.
Jacox H-D is the largest exclusive H-D dealership in Canada and an eight-figure retailer in sales, said Horner. He uses Excel extensively to create the annual financial budget and factor in all the “what if” scenarios, like the weather.
“Weather has a 110 per cent affect on all aspects of our business,” said Horner.
Jacox H-D can sell 30 to 40 bikes a month in the summer, but a winter month might see less than 10 bike sales, he said. Sales traditionally slow down in the winter because people can’t ride and don’t want to accept delivery of their motorcycle until they can ride it, he said.
“With regard to things like service, people will make a service appointment, and if it rains, they just don’t show up … a wet summer will also affect your sales,” he said.
Horner keeps track of past sales and weather patterns using Excel. “Excel allows us to chart that and it will give us a backup to why we are doing certain things – why we plan on selling maybe 10 bikes in December and 45 bikes in May or June,” he said.
Jacox H-D uses a top-down model, he said. “We sit down with every type of bike we are going to order and do a forecast of sales of what we are going to sell by model and then take that and tie it back into the parts or accessories,” he said.
There are five bike families – Sportster, Dyna, Softtail, Touring, and V-Rod – and three or four models in each family, he said. The bike sales affect everything else, such as service levels, inventory levels and carrying costs, he said.
Horner has been using Office 2010 for the last month. The new version of Excel is better and faster, he said. “Instead of your worksheets being lined up across the bottom, now you can lay them out. So I can jump from worksheet one to worksheet two to worksheet three … it makes it that much easier, that much quicker,” he said.
The new Excel is also easy to learn, he said. It took Horner 45 minutes to build his first chart. On his second try, he built two charts in 10 minutes. “It’s not complicated, but most small businessmen are not complicated either. They want to get on with running their business,” he said.
Horner said he plans to roll out Office 2010 to the rest of the management group.
The consumer versions of Microsoft Office 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint 2010 will become available in June. A specific Canadian launch date is not yet available from Microsoft Canada.
