Cineplex Entertainment

Canada’s Largest Motion Picture Exhibitor Improves Remote Collaboration

Cineplex Entertainment, Canada’s largest motion picture exhibitor, serves approximately 60 million guests annually. In an effort to improve communication among its geographically dispersed locations, which include theaters and home and district offices, the company deployed Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007. With this new solution, the company’s IT department expects to resolve issues faster because advanced presence capabilities will help staff members quickly find the expertise they need. Presence integration with the 2007 Microsoft Office system lets users see who is available at a glance—from within familiar desktop programs. Cineplex Entertainment also anticipates that the new solution will help the company conduct highly productive remote meetings, which will simplify and improve collaboration across time zones and reduce travel expenses.

Situation

One of the biggest benefits of Office Communications Server 2007 is the ability to collaborate without physically pulling a group of people together.  Scott Hughes Vice President of IT Infrastructure and Point of Sale Cineplex Entertainment

Cineplex Entertainment, Canada’s largest motion picture exhibitor, owns, leases, or has a joint venture interest in 131 theaters—1,321 screens from British Columbia to Quebec. The company employs more than 8,000 full-time and part-time employees, including employees who work from the company’s Toronto, Ontario home office and district offices in Vancouver, British Columbia; Calgary, Alberta; and Montréal, Quebec.

These employees relied primarily on e-mail and phone for communication across locations. The company also spent a significant amount of time and money on travel to bring employees together in the same location for training sessions and other in-person meetings. “You can measure costs in many different ways,” says Scott Hughes, Vice President of IT Infrastructure and Point of Sale at Cineplex Entertainment. “We invested a lot of time traveling in order to pull our groups together.”

Collaboration was also a problem for the company’s technical help desk. As communication happened over the phone or through e-mail, it was difficult for help-desk staff to see a problem as the user experienced it, which made it a challenge to troubleshoot issues with remote users. Also, resolution was often delayed when someone else’s expertise was needed and that person didn’t answer a phone call or e-mail message immediately.

“We’re always looking for opportunities to serve our guests better,” says Hughes. “A lot of that depends on our agility and quick response times. Even though it’s just one part of the equation, the ability to quickly communicate with other offices and theaters is very important to the level of service we can provide.”

In 2005, Cineplex Entertainment grew significantly when it acquired Famous Players, another motion picture exhibition company. “The acquisition doubled the organization from a revenue standpoint and greatly increased the number of locations,” says Hughes. “It became critical that we invest in a comprehensive communications solution.”

Solution

In early 2007, Cineplex Entertainment worked with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Legend Corp., an IT consultancy based in Toronto, Ontario, and began to construct a new collaboration environment. The company deployed Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and, to address its enterprise content management needs, it deployed Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007. Cineplex Entertainment had also worked with Legend Corp. in 2004 to deploy Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2004, Microsoft Operations Manager 2005, and Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003 with Service Pack 2 for its IT infrastructure management.

We’re a Microsoft shop, and we thought we could realize many more benefits by adding Office Communications Server 2007 to our communications environment.  Scott Hughes Vice President of IT Infrastructure and Point of Sale Cineplex Entertainment

In 2007, when the public beta version of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 became available, Legend Corp. helped Cineplex Entertainment embark on a pilot implementation of the new communications solution. “We were impressed with the integration of this new solution with the other Microsoft products and technologies we had in place,” says Hughes. “We’re a Microsoft shop, and we thought we could realize many more benefits by adding Office Communications Server 2007 to our communications environment.” Cineplex Entertainment relies on Office SharePoint Server 2007 as its central point for shared documentation, policies, and procedures, and Exchange Server 2007 for e-mail and calendaring.

Cineplex Entertainment’s Office Communications Server 2007 environment includes three server computers that run the Windows Server® 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition with Service Pack 2 operating system. On one of these server computers, a Dell PowerEdge 4600, Cineplex Entertainment installed Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 Standard Edition database software, which archives information such as call detail records that collect instant messaging (IM), and meeting usage statistics. These statistics can be used by Cineplex Entertainment to monitor and gauge participation level for the purpose of justifying its technology investment or determining its return on investment. Office Communications Server 2007 Enterprise Edition server software is installed on the second server computer, a Dell PowerEdge 1950, to which users connect through Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 client software. The third, a Dell PowerEdge 2950, is used for the Office Communications Server 2007 edge server roles, including the Access Edge Server, the Web Conferencing Edge Server, and the A/V Edge Server, which support communications and multimedia conferencing with external users.

To deploy Office Communicator 2007, Cineplex Entertainment used Systems Management Server 2003 and remotely installed the software on employees’ desktop and portable computers. Cineplex Entertainment initially deployed the solution to a small number of employees within the IT department but, after a brief test period, expanded the deployment to the entire department. After a successful two-week pilot, in mid-September 2007, Cineplex Entertainment began its deployment of Office Communications Server 2007 to its home and district offices. A companywide deployment, including all theaters, is planned for 2008.

Now employees use the online conferencing capabilities of the solution to hold impromptu meetings among different office locations. They collaborate on documents and presentations, share applications, and communicate through IM, audio, and video.

The IT department takes advantage of new IT management features of Office Communications Server 2007, which includes an enhanced Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 pack with a run-time diagnostics module that monitors potential problems and activates alerts regarding server connection, Domain Name System failures, certificate validation, client authentication, and more. These features help Cineplex Entertainment maintain high availability of the solution through Operations Manager 2005.

Benefits

With this new solution, Cineplex Entertainment employees are able to collaborate and communicate easily among geographically distributed locations. The company expects significant improvements to productivity, faster issue resolution, and its newfound agility to help it better serve its guests. It also expects to see a reduction in time and money spent on travel, as it expands use of the new solution.

With Office Communications Server 2007, employees will be able to quickly pull together meetings and see what one person is doing on his or her desktop. The quick response, the immediacy, is crucial to collaboration.  Scott Hughes Vice President of IT Infrastructure and Point of Sale Cineplex Entertainment

Enhanced Communications and Collaboration

Cineplex Entertainment expects to see great improvements to communication and collaboration among users at its many, widespread locations. “With Office Communications Server 2007, employees will be able to quickly pull together meetings and see what one person is doing on his or her desktop. The quick response, the immediacy, is crucial to collaboration,” says Hughes. With the Office Communicator 2007 client software, Cineplex Entertainment employees have many options for communications from a single tool, including IM and Web and video conferencing. A group of Cineplex Entertainment employees can choose to go into an online meeting or even to a video conference from an IM session and edit a document or conduct a discussion together in real time. With advanced presence awareness, users at work on a Microsoft Office Word document or within a SharePoint site can see who is available. This means collaboration can happen any time; there is no need to schedule a conference call or incur travel expenses and lost work hours to accommodate in-person meetings.

“One of the biggest benefits of Office Communications Server 2007 is the ability to collaborate without physically pulling a group of people together,” says Hughes. The potential for the new solution with the company’s training department is high. “Our training department often needs to travel to the theaters to demonstrate new applications or to conduct general trainings. With Office Communications Server 2007, the department will be able to do online demonstrations and training, pulling together many locations at once, without travel.”

The integration of the new solution with other key elements of the company’s IT infrastructure adds to the streamlined, intuitive nature of its communications environment. “Office Communications Server 2007 provides a third point of integration into our communication and collaboration toolset,” says Hughes. “All three of these products—Office SharePoint Server 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office Communications Server 2007—integrate well with each other, providing clear methods for presence, communication, document sharing, search, and document management.”

Faster Issue Resolution

Office Communications Server 2007 will also help Cineplex Entertainment improve the speed with which the company’s technical help desk is able to solve users’ issues. With the application sharing capabilities of the new solution, help-desk employees can start an online conference with a user who needs assistance and view the application within which the user has the problem, on the user’s desktop. “Experiencing what the user is experiencing is a great benefit of Office Communications Server 2007,” says Hughes. It leads to faster and more successful troubleshooting and issue resolution, which in turn will help Cineplex Entertainment reduce administrative costs and allow employees to focus on other strategic work.

In addition, presence helps employees readily see their colleagues’ availability through familiar Microsoft Office programs, such as the Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 messaging and collaboration client. And, because the company relies on Office SharePoint Server 2007 for document management, help-desk employees who review technical documents in a document library or shared workspace can see which team members are available if a question arises or more help is needed. Hughes says, “One of the biggest challenges for the help desk is bringing people with the right information together to solve an issue. Office Communications Server 2007 IM, online conferences, and integrated presence will help employees find the expertise they need faster, which will help us solve issues faster.”

Improved Productivity

Office Communications Server 2007 will help us meet our overall goal in IT of being more productive.  Scott Hughes Vice President of IT Infrastructure and Point of Sale Cineplex Entertainment

For the IT department, faster issue resolution will lead to enhanced productivity. “Office Communications Server 2007 will help us meet our overall goal in IT of being more productive. If we solve technical issues faster, we can use that time saved for many different initiatives including new software deployments and critical maintenance,” says Hughes.

Another productivity boost for the IT department comes by using Office Communications Server 2007 in conjunction with Microsoft System Center tools. “Our goal is to be proactive. This means spending less time dealing with issues coming through the help desk and more time using the tools at our disposal, like Operations Manager 2005, and Systems Management Server 2003, to monitor our new communications infrastructure and resolve problems before they become apparent to the user.”

Future Plans
Cineplex Entertainment is evaluating the Microsoft RoundTable™ conferencing and collaboration device, which provides remote meeting participants with a 360-degree view of the conference room, wideband audio, and video that tracks the flow of the conversation among multiple speakers. “Remote communication has its challenges, and we’re looking forward to any improvements we can make,” says Hughes. “We think that RoundTable will improve the overall flow of meetings and make them a more natural, intuitive experience.”

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com

For more information about Legend Corp. products and services, call (416) 465-4540 or visit the Web site at:
www.legendcorp.com

For more information about Cineplex Entertainment products and services, call (416) 323-6600 or visit the Web site at:
www.cineplex.com

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Document published October 2007