Microsoft is best known for its consumer facing products, the operating system Windows and its software for business productivity, Office.
Far less well known are its enterprise scale frameworks, which tend to be the province of the super nerdy backrooms of IT departments and the entrepreneurial developer community that is at the heart of so much of the company's success.
Few have ever heard of Microsoft Dynamics (http://ow.ly/s7z6X) for instance, but it's a software platform that thousands of developers depend on to create unique products to meet business needs.
It isn't often that the company builds a product designed for general use using that development framework, but Dynamics is at the heart of a new product for leveraging digital technologies into city scale software called CityNext.
"The core of the solution is Microsoft Dynamics CRM," acknowledged Frances Correia, Country Manager of Microsoft Trinidad & Tobago, Eastern & Southern Caribbean.
"The new Microsoft Dynamics CRM on-line offers provides a new look and feel that has been customised to provide additional user requested features and easier access to enter information and gain insights from the data."
"This release of CRM also includes workflows specifically developed for (the) public sector to provide a basis for customisation."
At a press briefing called to introduce a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between Microsoft and the Government of T&T (for a Student Social initiative of the Ministry of Education to be developed using the CityNext framework), Barbara Perry demonstrated a proof of concept that showed how a public dashboard for New York might work.