2 page Case Study - Posted 4/10/2008

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Collegiate Housing Services

Housing Service Consolidates Software; Reduces IT Work and Boosts Worker Productivity

To remain competitive, Collegiate Housing Services of Indianapolis, Indiana, has to keep rolling out innovative Web-based services for customers. But the IT staff was overwhelmed by maintenance work. The company deployed the beta version of Windows® Essential Business Server 2008 and dramatically reduced routine IT work. Mobile workers can remotely access company files far more easily, and system reliability and business uptime is greater.

Business Needs

Collegiate Housing Services is a full-service student housing company that coordinates all aspects of a college’s housing needs, including on-campus housing construction and management and off-campus housing overflow. The company does business in 26 cities across the United States and has 85 employees.

“We need to provide superior efficiency, great customer service, and more convenient Web-based services to colleges and their students so we can survive and grow,” says Sumeeth Evans, Director of IT for Collegiate Housing Services. However, the three-person IT staff spent 80 percent of its time maintaining existing systems and only 20 percent developing new solutions. They spent hours each day monitoring, updating, and troubleshooting the company’s 16 server computers and 90 desktop computers. “We were in reactive mode,” Evans says. “We would assume that everything was running until someone reported a failure.”

The company’s field staff was also plagued with inefficiencies. Half of Collegiate’s staff is field representatives who serve as liaisons with schools and students. They collect fees, provide customer support, and maintain relationships with apartment managers, colleges, and students. They are in touch with headquarters throughout the day to access applications, policies, and forms. However, they struggled with virtual private network (VPN) connections and logged on and off multiple applications each day.

Solution

Collegiate Housing Services looked at both open source and Microsoft® software solutions. “We knew that we could save money up front on open source, but it would take a lot more effort to maintain,” Evans says. “The support you get with Microsoft products is well worth the investment.”

Our administrative workload is one-tenth what it was before.… This is the largest step forward, in terms of our ability to focus on real business needs, that we have ever seen. Sumeeth Evans Director of IT, Collegiate Housing Services

From the Administration Console in Windows Essential Business Server 2008, Evans can see the health of all systems at a glance and is proactively alerted to problems. He knows right away if a security update and or an installation failed. “The integrated technologies of Windows Essential Business Server give us excellent manageability,” Evans says. “Before, an e-mail problem meant reviewing forwarding, DNS, and server logs to find and resolve the problem. With the Administration Console, it’s easy to diagnose problems. Having so many capabilities packaged in one solution is huge. Being a midsize business doesn’t mean we do less; we need the same reliable IT infrastructure that enterprises need.”

End users take advantage of the remote-access and expanded messaging features to more easily access applications and files and work remotely. In the future, the company plans to publish hundreds of forms to an internal Web site where employees or students can complete and submit them online. This will eliminate the need for employees to establish VPN connections and comb the network for files.

Benefits

By deploying Windows Essential Business Server 2008, the Collegiate Housing Services IT staff has increased its own productivity and the productivity of end users, while increasing system reliability and business competitiveness.

• Increased IT staff efficiency. The migration to Windows Essential Business Server 2008 has so significantly reduced the effort required for a range of administrative and management tasks that the company can put much more focus on strategic IT projects. “Our administrative workload is one-tenth what it was before,” Evans says.

For example, “The remote controls in the Administration Console mean that we do a lot less logging into systems and system-side visits,” explains Evans. “We’ve reduced this effort by 70 percent, which is a huge savings.”

The IT staff can also automate security updates and deploy applications automatically. “When we deployed Microsoft Office 2007, we were able to do so without physically visiting each machine. What would have taken 30 minutes per machine took three minutes.”

• Increased competitiveness. Unique products and services make Collegiate Housing successful. “We’ll have more time to develop richer services,” Evans says. “For example, we’ve been working on a redesigned Web site for over a year. In last couple of months, we’ve done more work on the site than we’ve done in the past year. This is the largest step forward, in terms of our ability to focus on real business needs, that we have ever seen.”
  
  
  
• Higher reliability, productivity. With the program’s remote-access capabilities, users log on to the network once, increasing efficiency and reducing frustration. “The more efficient our field representatives are, the more successful we are,” Evans says. Plus, users have increased confidence in the system. “We’ve had no downtime since implementing Windows Essential Business Server,” Evans adds. “Before, remote users often couldn’t get at data they needed because the system was down for some kind of maintenance.”

Collegiate recently had a software update fail on its messaging server. Evans immediately saw the alert on the Administration Console and was able to fix it right away. “The impact on business continuity is substantial,” Evans says. “An exposure like that could take down our messaging infrastructure or the entire business. We are much more secure with Windows Essential Business Server 2008.”

Windows Essential Server Solutions
Windows Essential Business Server 2008 is part of the Windows Essential Server Solutions family, designed to help small and midsize businesses boost productivity and growth. Based on the latest innovations, Windows Essential Server Solutions dramatically simplify the deployment, ongoing management, and use of server technology.

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