Today, Microsoft employees report in internal surveys that the wireless network gives them as many as five extra hours each week, "in just time they would spend connecting and reconnecting to the network," DuBois says. And that's up from just one and a half hours of extra productivity in survey data from a few years ago.

"If they have a meeting or they're grabbing people from the hall to go in to a room to collaborate," DuBois says, "they can stay connected [to the network] as they undock from their docking station and then just seamlessly connect to the wireless network."

Aberdeen Group's Philippe Winthrop and Stephen Walker note in an August 2007 research brief that with the rise of competitive pressures in today's marketplace, many organizations are turning to a wireless LAN network to improve workforce flexibility and productivity. Research from a June 2007 Aberdeen report, called "Measuring the Real Value of Wireless LAN Deployments," found that best-in-class organizations achieved a 21 percent increase in their workforce's productivity from using a WLAN—a rate 71 percent higher than all other organizations in the survey.

At Microsoft, DuBois reports that 75 percent of the employees use the WLAN regularly. "We see 50,000 concurrent users on some days," he says. When asked if users would revolt if they couldn't have wireless network access, DuBois says, "Absolutely. If it's not working somewhere, we get complaints immediately."

One unintended consequence is that because wireless has become so ubiquitous at Microsoft, "people don't carry around the wired cords, and we don't have [cables] in the conference rooms anymore," DuBois says. So when a wireless access point (AP) goes down and there's not another one in the area that can provide coverage, DuBois's help desk will hear about it from employees instantly—which is usually before IT staffers get a chance to respond to the WLAN monitoring alert.

Microsoft's Wireless Security Plan

Wireless security surveys annually show that most every company's number-one concern with Wi-Fi networks is security. With its size, Microsoft has had its share of security challenges.

Right from its initial deployment of 2,800 wireless access points and 19,000 wireless network adapters, Microsoft "had to deal with issues of security and scalability from the start," states the historical overview. For example, "Microsoft realized that MAC address filtering and early VPN solutions would not be a scalable final solution to support a global WLAN."

Today, DuBois says that wireless networking technology has evolved and is much better than before. Microsoft has deployed a public- and private-key infrastructure that uses certificates to authenticate remote access or special access to the network. IT has to provide an 802.1x certificate to every laptop "before they can get onto the wireless network," DuBois says. "And you actually need to be connected to the wired infrastructure to get the certificate the first time."