Mary Kay wants to be more than just another pretty face, and the company’s IT department is digging deep into Microsoft’s Office 2007 product lineup to make that happen.
The 43-year-old cosmetics company with more than $2.2 billion in annual sales in 2005 is focusing on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 to become the foundation of its content management, collaboration, search and business intelligence efforts.
MOSS is part of a family of Office-branded products that includes software, hardware and a Web conferencing service for real-time communication. The lineup includes the traditional Office applications, Office Communications Server 2007, Exchange Server 2007, the Office Communicator 2007 client including a version for phones, and the Office Live Meeting 2007 Web conferencing service.
Microsoft’s intent is to provide users with a single platform for real-time communications that can be integrated with traditional desktop and network applications, mobile devices and the business processes that run across all three.
Mary Kay’s goal is to set up a corporate collaboration infrastructure with MOSS as the hub that ties together front-end Office applications, such as InfoPath forms technology, real-time communications and a Vista desktop.
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MOSS also will become Mary Kay’s main content management repository and workflow engine to automate its manual business processes.
It’s a lofty endeavor, says Obe Salahuddin, senior analyst/programmer with Mary Kay, one he admits has rewards and risks.
“It just seems like Microsoft’s operating system, server, and Office groups are all getting on the same page and attempting to deliver solutions that truly complement each other. Our hope is that all this comes together so our employees can use all these components to be more efficient at what they already do.”
But with enough experience in long-term projects, Salahuddin is realistic: “Things don’t always work out perfectly, but this is our plan going forward.”
The plan began back in June when Mary Kay jumped into Microsoft’s Technology Adopter Program and began rolling out MOSS, which will be officially released to volume licensing customers Nov. 30 along with Vista and Exchange Server.
The company is initially tapping into the search features of MOSS to support its existing portal built with SharePoint Portal Server 2.0 as the content repository and Web Parts for building customize features.
Today, MOSS acts as a Web service that provides search capabilities to an internal portal that serves roughly 500 staff in the IT department.
The search infrastructure is built on two Dell PowerEdge 6500 servers with Quad 2.0 GHz Intel Xeon processors. The servers run Windows 2003 SP1 with 4GB of RAM. Both servers run a Web front end while one also serves as the indexing engine.
“We use to have security by obscurity, but when we put search in now we can get to all that information so we have to control it,” says Salahuddin.
The idea is to perfect that control as the company roles out content management services, which are a big part of its overall plans. MOSS 2007 incorporates the old Microsoft Content Management Server product, which has been discontinued.
MOSS also will support Mary Kay’s team sharing sites and business process automation. The company’s road map also includes extending search to file shares and SharePoint team sites, which are online workspaces where staff can collaborate and share digital data.
As Mary Kay preps for rollout of these features over the next year, it is finding some challenges in making the migration to MOSS.
In its first instance of the portal, Mary Kay customized its project management application using a SharePoint Portal Server 2.0 technology called Master Pages. That technology is not supported in MOSS, which uses templates to build pages. While the new version allows for more flexibility, Mary Kay has to rewrite the application for the new SharePoint environment.
On the up side, the company can scrap a workaround it developed, and for which Microsoft offered no support, for controlling access to certain functions such as the approval process of a workflow. Mary Kay had devised a method in SharePoint 2.0 to control access and editing rights to certain pieces of data. In MOSS, users can set security levels on specific content and the feature is supported.
Salahuddin says there are other features such as site management and backup and restore features, which don’t require the entire database to be recovered, that will help make it easier to expand the collaboration site to more than 4,000 employees in 34 countries.
He says the only other challenge to that is localization of features and functions.
“We want to create one site with components is different languages,” says Salahuddin, “but Microsoft has not addressed localization in a serious way.”
Mary Kay is now working on building server farms to handle the expected workload of its team sites. It hopes to have that done before March 2007 and then see how it can scale.
“We want to expose the infrastructure to the rest of the business and then we will find out how it will grow and what [additional] features that we need,” says Salahuddin.
