During my recent visit to the Microsoft Technology Center in Waltham, Rich Crane gave me a tour of the facility. It included a room, I think he called the Concept Center. It was a little theatre type of arrangement around a series of work areas or work styles. Microsoft uses the room for demo’s that go WAY beyond some silly PowerPoint slide show. Here are a few pictures I took while I was there.
The whole room.
Another city office. I’m not sure of the location.
A simulated warehouse floor.
The home office. It’s Western Massachusetts.
City office. I think it’s San Francisco
OK, I’m confused. How does this work? Can you give us a bit more of an idea what we’re looking at?
I have no idea how it works. I just got to see the room. I assume they set up some scenario and then show how Microsoft products save your company 55 gazillion dollars.
It looked cool though.
Steve –
I was just there for a demo with my company this week.. Basically they show you how their technology stack can help you out. We were there for SQL BI application design discussions so they showed a scenario with performance point, sharepoint, the integreation, etc. Looking at the devices they can show off unified communication, the entire data stack, sharepoint stack, etc.
They have a tablet device to draw on and xbox and all the fun stuff also.
Scary – that other city location should have looked familiar to you though, eh? Isn’t it Boston?
Is that Boston? I’m not sure. It’s certainly not a view of Boston I’m familiar with.
yeah,it is boston as seen from Cambridge, roguhly around the area of MIT, which explains why Grant is not too familiar with that view.
The room is called “The Envisioning Center”. We have four vignettes: 2 workers (Boston and San Francisco), 1 Home User (Western Massachusetts), and 1 Mobile User (Warehouse Set). It allows us to tell an end-to-end story of a fictitional book publishing company known as Litware. Litware just happens to use Microsoft products to run their business. Everything from their corporate website, inttranet portal, customer relationship management, document management systems, business intelligence systems, application development teams, and much more. If we were to show the storyline end-to-end, it would take 7+ hours. Instead, we ask what the customer is most interested in hearing about and cover that. Typically we spend an hour demonstrating how customers can benefit from using Microsoft products.
Hey Rich,
Thanks for the clarification. It really was a fascinating set-up and I’m glad you took me in and showed me around.
Microsoft Concept Center .Thanks for nice post.I added to my twitter.