Photos: Microsoft’s workplace of the future
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Tom Gruver, group program manager for the Center for Information Work (CIW), sitting at a workstation with a curved glass StraTech monitor and a wireless keyboard and mouse.
CIW’s DigiDesk workstation (seen with Tom Gruver) is operable by touch screen.
A dual-monitor workstation with integrated Tablet PC and Smartphone are just some of the multidevice wireless-integration devices that CIW envisions for the future workplace.
Physical objects like the PDA (personal digital assistant) and Webcam at this workstation will be labeled with RFID (radio frequency identification) tags and other metadata technology for automatic identification and syncing.
Microsoft’s RoundTable, a multivenue video conferencing system due for release in 2007, came from CIW prototypes.
CIW uses the scenario of a pharmaceutical company dealing with pharmacies, government compliance, manufacturing and other chain links to illustrate new cross-enterprise software capabilities.
Microsoft sees Tablet PCs as a possible tool for biometric logins–authentications employing things like fingerprints and handwriting–in place of usernames and passwords.
CIW includes a mock hotel room used to illustrate the possibility of collaboration and communications from remote locations. A pharmaceutical company representative, for example, could participate in a video conference from her Tablet PC.
