“Using Office 365 will be like having 30 extra hours a day—or having three more people in the office. We will be able to bring a new level of consistency and faster response time to our customers.”

Elia Wallen, President, Travelers Haven

Travelers Haven is growing rapidly and is launching new businesses like Hotel Engine, a site that offers easy instant to corporate hotel rates. To support its growth, the company wanted to better coordinate employee activities. Travelers Haven is testing Microsoft Office 365 and already finds it exceptionally useful in improving efficiency and communicating with remote employees. Once the whole staff is using Office 365, the company expects to save 30 hours a day, avoid US$100,000 annually in IT costs, and feel comfortable opening new offices around the United States.

Business NeedsTravelers Haven provides temporary housing services for organizations that are relocating employees or moving employees to temporary assignments. It primarily serves the healthcare and insurance industries, and has 32 employees. The company has doubled its number of employees and its revenue every year since President Elia Wallen founded it in 2006. Keeping up with growth has been his biggest challenge.

“We have not had time to put in a proper technology infrastructure, which has made it difficult to keep all employees aligned,” Wallen explains. “We have a file server, but some people use it and others keep documents on PCs. For everyday communications, we used AOL Instant Messenger and email—the Microsoft Outlook 2010 client on our desktops with a hosted Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 back end.”

Most staff members are at company headquarters in Denver, Colorado, but Travelers Haven also has employees in Georgia, Texas, and Florida. Keeping employees coordinated was difficult and time-consuming. “Our whole business depends on knowing what one another is

doing and staying synchronized,” Wallen says. “Without good communication, it is very difficult to respond to customers quickly and correctly. We wasted a lot of time updating one another and locating information.”

Setting up new employees was also time-consuming; Wallen had to install AOL Instant Messenger and Microsoft Office 2010 on employee PCs. “I knew that we would ultimately need to invest in our own servers and better communications tools, but this would cost tens of thousands of dollars,” Wallen says. “I wasn’t looking forward to the headache or the expense.”

SolutionIn late 2010, Wallen learned about Microsoft Office 365, a set of cloud-based email, calendaring, collaboration, and conferencing tools combined with web-based versions of the popular Microsoft Office programs. “I knew that cloud-based computing was the way that businesses would operate in the future,” Wallen says. “I didn’t bother looking at Google, because everyone who we hire knows the Windows operating system and Office. Why not stick with what we know if it performs?”

Customer: Travelers HavenWebsite: www.mytravelershaven.comwww.shorttermhousing.com www.shorttermhousingdenver.com Customer Size: 32 employeesCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Professional services—Real estate

Customer ProfileTravelers Haven provides corporate and temporary housing solutions in all 50 U.S. states and in more than 5,000 cities. It is based in Denver, Colorado, and has 32 employees.

Software and Services Microsoft Office 365− Microsoft Exchange Online− Microsoft Lync Online− Microsoft Office Web Apps− Microsoft SharePoint Online

For more information about other Microsoft customer successes, please visit: www.microsoft.com/casestudies

Microsoft Office 365Customer Solution Case Study

Housing Firm Plans to Save 30 Hours a Day, Avoid $100,000 a Year with Cloud Solution

To set up new employees on Office 365, Wallen simply gives them a URL and a password. Travelers Haven employees who are testing Office 365 have been most excited about Microsoft Lync Online, the instant messaging and videoconference component of Office 365. “We use Lync Online to talk to our remote people constantly,” Wallen says. “Even people sitting 20 feet away from one another use it to converse; I bet we send more than 1,000 instant messages a day. And unlike AOL, we can save our instant messaging conversations.”

Travelers Haven plans to consolidate all documents in Microsoft SharePoint Online, which will simplify access and ensure that everyone is using the most current versions. Employees use Microsoft Office Web Apps to make changes to documents stored in SharePoint Online, and the company will soon switch its email to Microsoft Exchange Online.

BenefitsBy adopting a subscription service that combines familiar Office Web Apps with web-enabled tools that are easy to use, fast-growing Travelers Haven will be able to work more efficiently and respond faster to customers, communicate better, and avoid the expense and headaches of an in-house server infrastructure. Specifically, the company expects:

Estimated productivity gain of 30 hours a day. Office 365 consolidates currently disparate tools into one online service that helps Travelers Haven employees find what they need and stay in touch throughout the day. “Today, every employee spends at least an hour a day looking for things and playing telephone tag,” Wallen says. “Using Office 365 will be like having 30 extra hours a day—or having three more people in the office. We will be able to bring a new level of consistency and faster response time to our customers.”

Better communication with remote employees. By using Lync Online, employees working in different states can communicate as if they were in the same room. “Email can seem aloof, and tone is often hard to read,” Wallen says. “Phone calls make for more pleasant contact, but

video takes it to the next level. Videoconferencing has not achieved wide use because it is exhausting to connect separate tools. Lync Online does that for us and is very powerful; it is just like being there.” Wallen now feels comfortable opening up offices around the country. “I am kind of a control freak and need to know what our numbers are, where the deals are, and so forth,” he says. “Now I can use instant messaging and videoconferences to chat with people and stay in touch.”

Estimated cost avoidance of US$100,000 annually. By using Office 365, Wallen has avoided the expense of building an on-premises server infrastructure. “Office 365 eliminates the need to set up our own servers, which we certainly would have had to do eventually,” he says. “I figure we are avoiding $100,000 annually in hardware, maintenance, software, and the cost of a staff IT person. Office 365 is incredibly easy to set up and use, and it costs as little as $6 a month per person. At today’s employee count we are avoiding about $8,000 a month. Plus, nothing that we could afford would equal what Microsoft has in its data centers. The redundancy, backup, and security are much more than we could ever provide.“

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Document published June 2011