Russ: This is the Businessmakers Show heard hear and seen online at thebusinessmakers.com. Now we've got more of that time with Jennifer Heard, vice president with Microsoft. Jennifer, welcome back to the Businessmakers Show.

Jennifer: Thanks Russ. Great to be here.

Russ: You bet. And today we're gonna be talking about being a professional working mom and staying connected to that personal very important side of the house, your family and children. Let us know how you can do that with Microsoft products.

Jennifer: I would love to do that and that's a question that I often get from people that work at Microsoft and outside of Microsoft, especially women because we try to balance being a mom, being a wife, being a professional at work and trying to bring all that together can create some challenges unless you're really organized. And so I love the opportunity to share this story about how do I, being an executive at Microsoft running a billion dollar business and have a six-year old daughter at home and being her room mom.

Russ: Okay. Being her room mom.

Jennifer: Being her room mom.

Russ: At school.

Jennifer: At school.

Russ: Wow.

Jennifer: That's right. That's right. So, being a room mom is a very time consuming commitment.

Russ: Absolutely.

Jennifer: As many moms know.

Russ: Right.

Jennifer: Well what I've found is leveraging technology enables me to do that because I'm on the road 90 percent of the time and the fact that I can use the technology to organize her classroom, organize the fund raisers, create connection to all the moms through our live site. Microsoft has a live site. If you go to live.com you can get to our sites, create a group website and that's what I did for the classroom. I did it in five minutes, set it up, put the entire school calendar on there, put all the moms names in there and some dads that participate as well.

Russ: Right.

Jennifer: We now have a group site. We have a group instant messaging or if you wanna do IM or instant messaging chat and we have a e-mail alias and we all collaborate on this portal and it keeps us connected. In addition to that, that portal integrates with my work. So in Outlook I have a dropdown for my daughter's class. My husband also has it in his Outlook. We can see our professional calendar and our daughter's calendar side-by-side never missing a beat.

Russ: My goodness. So the other parents impressed with what you're doing? Do they even know you're traveling all over the world while you're doing this?

Jennifer: They do and in fact, when I had the opportunity to kick it off at the start of the year they could not believe how easy this site was to use. They were like, "How did you do this? How did you create that?" So other room moms are now asking me how to do it. So it's just a matter of spreading the word and I'm really excited to have the opportunity to share with all the working moms that you can do the room mom thing and the professional thing if you get organized and in Microsoft the live sites, the live group sites can really help them do that.

Russ: Cool. Now I know your daughter's only six years old, but I guess if you moved up in the grades and you got up to sixth grade and they're 12-year olds they might be involved in the communications on the live site as well perhaps -

Jennifer: Absolutely. You can add anybody. The great thing is we share the sites with the grandparents and they can see all our pictures. So imagine being able to create a photo album of the classroom, its class projects because it still uses Word, Excel, PowerPoint and it's all Office web apps. You don't even have to have it on your local machine and you can get to it from your phone. So you can create content whether you're a Mac, PC, from a phone, it doesn't matter. The access to that information is always available.

Russ: Okay. Let's say that we have a professional mom that's tuned in right now listening or watching this and they're going, "Oh my God, I've gotta do this." How do they do it?

Jennifer: It's very easy. Just go to the live.com website and it'll walk you through how to setup a group.

Russ: That's great. Well once again Jennifer, thank you so much for sharing your insight.

Jennifer: It's been my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Russ: Alright. Stay tuned in for our flashback with Scott Gerber, founder of Sizzle It and author of Never Get a Real Job. Scott was recently a guest on our Small Business Network show. You're listening to the Businessmakers Show heard here and seen online at the businessmakers.com.