Share via

Growing Firm Plans to Save 30 Hours a Day and Avoid $100,000 a Year with Office 365

  • Article

Today we hear from Travelers Haven on why Office 365 was the best choice in their decision to embrace cloud computing!

“I knew that cloud-based computing was the way that businesses would operate in the future. 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?”

-- Elia Wallen, President, Travelers Haven

Travelers Haven
Based in Denver, Colorado,Travelers 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.

IT Challenges
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.”

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.”

IT Solution and Benefits
In late 2010, Wallen learned about Microsoft Office 365. “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?”

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.

By 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. “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.”

Furthermore, 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.”

Read the full case study or watch the video, below. What productivity and cost savings benefits do you find with Office 365?

[Video]

Comments