What To Make from the ODC Keynote
Today is a culmination of some hard work done across a team of FedEx, Microsoft, and Interknowlogy folks. During the Bill Gates keynote at ODC this morning, David Zanka (SVP, E-commerce, FedEx) announced QuickShip and some other possible FedEx direction. I'll note a few below and also point out how FedEx is leading in several innovate ways. Also see John's viewpoint on today's events. Here's my short overview.
FedEx QuickShip
First is QuickShip, a Microsoft Outlook add-on that allows a FedEx customer to work with FedEx shipping services from Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007. As David talked through the capabilities of this application, he had a lovely assistant, John Finney (FedEx IT Manager) work the mouse and keyboard to show a variety of ways that QuickShip leveraged Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) to let FedEx provide interaction to their customer "where they live", i.e. in Outlook. QuickShip allows customers to generate labels, schedule pickups, etc - all from Outlook. Was this rocket science? No, not at all - but it points to some important directions from FedEx.
One point here is that FedEx decided a couple of years ago to expose web services to the Internet. Part of this initiative was to also build the FedEx Developer Resource Center that provided a place where technical implementers can learn how to integrate with FedEx Web Services. The takeaway is that FedEx recognized that providing a building block service was an important differentiation in the shipping and printing industries. This foundational piece allows FedEx, its customers, or its partners to build applications that bring FedEx to someone's favorite application environment. QuickShip is a great example of this.
Another point to this is that FedEx recognized that Microsoft Office is a popular platform where their customers spend a lot of time. Based on some of the numbers given here of the deployment base (seems like I heard 500M installations), FedEx wanted a way to promote their web services in a few big-hit activities so Office made good sense. FedEx also recognized that Visual Studio and VSTO made for a more productive development effort.
FedEx SharePoint Template
FedEx showed some of their early exploration into SharePoint webparts. For example, one could click on a document in a document library and get a "Print To FedEx Kinko's" option on the action menu. FedEx has some other ideas about functionality in this area, and I hope they come to fruition.
There's even a showing of shipping history using Virtual Earth. What a cool idea! In my opinion, a company has to have confidence in its services to show up delivery detail like this, and this was an interesting innovation.
This work was done using Visual Studio 2005 and the SharePoint Extensions.
FedEx Kinko's Printing in Word
Another demo of possible future FedEx direction was the Kinko's integration in Word 2007. Showing the ribbon in the Office "Fluent UI", John showed how a customer could take a document that he was working on, and send it to FedEx Kinko's for printing. The cool part of this was that they were able to select different printing options in the ribbon and see the results in a preview pane (link b/w vs. color, or a binder) - all in Word. Their demo also displayed a Kinko's invoice as well as uploading the document to the service. All nice touches I thought, and showed the power of Visual Studio 2008's new ribbon designer capability.
Other Interesting Events and News Here
Lost Guitar story - today's presentation by Mr. Zanka was around the story of Mr. Gates looking for his lost guitar. The demo's showed that John Finney worked for a company that found the guitar and wanted to ship it back to Mr. Gates (see the picture of the actual guitar on Eric's blog). At the conclusion of Mr. Zanka's presentation, an actual FedEx courier ran into the auditorium to present the Guitar Hero guitar to Mr. Gates. As I type, crowds of people are at the FedEx booth getting their complimentary FedEx USB drive as well as registering for this guitar.
Office Live announcement - as part of the keynote, the Office Live team announced their next set of enhancements (see press pass link below). Part of their demonstration had FedEx functionality too. While not a full featured as the earlier presentations, it was still cool to see another way to leverage FedEx's web services, and this time it was targeted at small business (an area the FedEx has a strong passion for). My hope is to see this in a more permanent form someday.
Our Partners - As I mentioned earlier, we have the assistance of Interknowlogy (Emilie Hersh, Mike Bosche, Rodney Guzman, and some guy named Tim) and Microsoft Consulting Services (hey, Mitch Powers and Michelle James). Chris Bryant, the coordinator of keynotes for the event as well as a PM on the Office Platform Strategy team, also played a large part in the success of this morning. And how could I forget Jim Morgan, Microsoft's account manager for FedEx. We also had a great partnership with FedEx. Thanks to everyone for making an exciting chapter for John and me.
Later Today - Mr. Zanka presents on the Executive Track. Heading that way now.
Tomorrow - FedEx presents a technical breakout session on how they built some of these pieces that they showed off today.
Summary
So, in my viewpoint, the takeaways to recognize in this story:
- FedEx understands the idea of "connectedness" to its customers. Mr. Zanka used the term "access" as a similar theme.
- FedEx acknowledged Office as a popular and pervasive platform that its customers use.
- FedEx showed that they see value in Visual Studio and VSTO.
- FedEx recognizes that customers need a variety of ways to work with customers, and that web sites are only one of the valid ways. Note: this really shows off our S+S story.
Other Related Links
ComputerWorld (US): Microsoft users get ability to ship via FedEx from inside Outlook, ComputerWorld Australia
Forbes: FedEx Enables Shipping Inside Microsoft Office Outlook
Memphis Business Journal: FedEx Announces Microsoft Outlook Services
Microsoft PressPass: Microsoft Office System Developers Conference 2008 Virtual Pressroom
MSFT Press Release: Developers Gather to Showcase Power of Office Business Applications
“At FedEx, we believe in the power of user access. By integrating our services into the Office system, we ensure that access to printing and shipping is available wherever relevant documents or contact information is stored and edited,” Zanca said. “The Office system is an ideal platform that enables us to provide broad and comprehensive access to our services in places where people want to consume them.”
Eric's Pictures from the ODC Keynote (Thank's Eric!)