Hello and welcome to the latest issue of the Avanade Advisor, our forum for sharing insight, best practices and other advice from our IT consultants with our colleagues and customers worldwide.

In today's workplace, effective collaboration is a critical factor for business success. Collaboration is not only tied to messaging systems across organizations, but also how information is stored and shared between an organization's employees, partners, and customers.

Our issue this month looks at a few different approaches to creating collaborative environments. We take a look at how Marquette University explores ways to maximize new messaging hardware by deploying beta technologies ahead of their official release. We'll also hear from our own IT teams at Avanade who similarly explored early adoption strategies as a way to increase collaboration for a highly mobile and distributed workforce.

We also look at trends in the communications and collaborations space, to examine how workplaces have changed over the past five years, and what they can look like today and in the future. Last we also explore practical measures organizations can take to assess their current messaging environments and create long-term strategies to maximize communications inside and outside of their organization.

Thank you for your time and interest. As always, we look forward to receiving your comments - simply send as an e-mail to editor@avanade.com.

Adam Warby
Executive VP - Market Development