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Life Squared - Microsoft's high-tech soap opera

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16th Feb 2006
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Down by Chelsea Harbour, next to a growing Thames-side residential complex, is a software demonstration centre designed to show how Microsoft will help people live and work in the near future.

Called Life Squared, the installation has been housed for the past four months at the former site of the Chelsea College of Art and Design. Understated Microsoft-blue signs and gates are the only hint that something interesting might be taking place behind the red brick walls. Entering the compound, the visitor encounters two buildings set across each other by a small patch of tarmac, with just a hint of Albert Square about it.

Approaching Life Squared as a software soap opera is quite appropriate. If you are willing to suspend your sense of disbelief, the characters and their tools and toys have a compelling story to tell - even if it's all make-believe.

After coffee and buns, our small group is greeted by Rick Marsh, the chilled-out, sandy-haired proprietor of Marsh Marine, a reseller and installer of deck furniture - winches, anchors, portholes and the like, he explains.

The studio-like office is light and airy, with minimalist furnishings and a few marine components strewn around the shelves. Rick stands by a desk crammed with a PC, a high-end mobile phone and a Psion laptop in its cradle as he fills us in on the company background.

"The business was started 35 years ago by my father," Rick explains. "Dad couldn't delegate and he was a tough act to follow. I took over in 1995 and was daunted." Where Marsh senior was a technophobe, Rick was keen to look at technologies that could make the company easier to run. "I fancied getting home earlier," he quips.

Guided by Marsh Marine's biggest supplier - Lewmar, a Microsoft Navision user in real life - Marsh decided it would be sensible to go the same way. On the desk in front of him, the PC screens display a web page featuring a big 3D trend graph and a collection of links to underlying reports and data sources.

"It looks like a weather forecast, but this scorecard is what drives the business," says Marsh. On the left hand side of the screen, he can access measures under three headings: financial, customer and sales. Clicking on the finance heading expands the selection out to a further seven sections, illustrated with traffic light signals. The indicator for aged debtors is red, which Rick explains shows that outstanding invoices have exceeded £100,000. Clicking on the associated hyperlink shows a listing of all the outstanding debtors - including a big outstanding bill for Royal Ocean.

"An engineer will pick up a check when he visits them this afternoon," Marsh says. "I can be confident because I always know where I stand and don't have to wait until the end of the month before I find out."

The scorecard was created using Microsoft's new Balanced Scorecard Manager and the web pages it feeds can be accessed from tablet PCs engineers take out with them and by sales and staff from the Psions they take on the road. The Psions, Marsh explains, are relatively low cost and "task specific" so they don't get clogged up with games and music.

Using the laptops, Marsh Marine salespeople can connect to the office server via wireless internet and call up an interactive Navision order form. The order template has a look-up box to find the client, with further fields for the sales person to enter the delivery address. Selecting an £800 bow thruster from the stock catalogue, Marsh assigns a discount to the order for a regular client and hits enter. Even with his explanations, the process takes just a couple of minutes.

When such an order reaches Marsh's server, it will be forwarded automatically to Lewmar, which will return an email order confirmation and a promised delivery date.

Navision can draw data from the company's Microsoft CRM software to ensure manuals and paperwork match the client's requirements so that ultimately the component will reach the client packaged with Marsh's own documentation, even though it never went near the company's premises.

The CRM system is also used to book engineers appointments, Marsh explains. Field engineers are each assigned their tasks by the company receptionist on Monday morning and rarely have to visit the office. They can consult each other and share technical tips using the One Note collaborative environment on their tablet PCs. To show us how it done, Rick gets chief engineer Kevin Riley - who's in another office across the yard - to show us where to lubricate a winch assembly by cutting and pasting a graphic from the product manual into One Note. A few strokes of Kevin's electronic blue pen later, the visitors are ready to do some winch greasing.

"I was concerned that the family nature of our business would dissolve as people got teched up," Marsh says. But the opposite happened. "Our team spends most of their time on the road, but the communications and scorecards allow them to see the results of the work they're doing. It helps strengthen their bond with the business."

After meeting Kevin and Rick's wife Jenni over coffee, we headed to the Marsh's home, which is conveniently located in the building across from the office. Here, in an expansive, open plan lounge/kitchen/dining room with stylish tiling and a bright red SMEG fridge in the corner, the fun really started as she put their Microsoft-powered home media centre through its paces.

From the large high definition flat-screen TV, Jenni can control the lighting and heating systems and even lock and unlock both the home and office doors. She can record programmes by keyword searches (she typed in "desperate") or selecting them from a menu of the next fortnight's TV schedule. Coming soon, she says, will be Microsoft TV, delivered over the internet. If watching TV doesn't interest Jenni or her kids, they can play with their X-Box systems on the screens, while she goes and dabbles with her digital photography on the kids' PC - perhaps burning a slideshow with accompanying soundtrack on to a DVD.

With all the distractions, it's hard to see how Jenni ever finds any time work done, but she actually works from home three days a week for the finance team at the single parent charity Gingerbread. Just like her husband, Jenni's office PC displays a home page with her Outlook email in-box and the now-familiar scorecard, in this case showing cashflow indicators extracted from the office Great Plains accounts system.

Logging into the office network by way of an electronic sensor, Jenni can get access to a store of shared documents, donor contact lists and a management reports viewer. The flexibility provided by technology means that she is able to do productive, meaningful work while tending to the needs of her children and the family business, she says.

It's an entertaining way to spend a spring morning and refreshing to see Microsoft doing its bit to provide employment for West London actors. But there's clearly a reason Microsoft spent all that money on the Life Squared project.

On many occasions in the past, AccountingWEB has noted that while Microsoft has a collection of technologies that could dramatically alter business (and consumer) processes, practical implementations are extremely hard to find in the wider world. Unless people can see for themselves how the different tools and technologies fit together, they are going to be reluctant to buy into the vision. Life Squared may be little more than a live yuppie "infomercial", but it achieves that goal.

Sadly, Life Squared is not open to the public - it's more for Microsoft business partners and media hangers-on. Next month, the Marshes will be moving out and the developers will move in, which is a pity. So comfortable and alluring are the Life Squared buildings and lifestyle that I'd consider moving back to London to live there - especially if they leave the X-box and TVs behind.

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