4-page Case Study - Posted 11/7/2008

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Instituto Politécnico Nacional

University Optimizes Communications Environment, Saves $2 Million Annually

Mexico’s Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN) wanted to empower employees with tools that increase efficiency and improve the quality of collaboration. At the same time, IPN needed to reduce operating costs, especially telephone charges and travel expenses. The university worked with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Grupo Unika to implement unified communications solutions, including Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, and Microsoft Office Live Meeting, which together promote collaboration through instant messaging, unified messaging, and Web conferencing. IPN is also in the early stages of deploying Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 to enhance collaboration across departments. With the new solutions in place, IPN expects to save U.S.$2 million annually in licensing costs, reduced operating expenses, and cost avoidance.

Situation

Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN) is one of Mexico’s largest public education universities. IPN is known as a leader in science and technology and for its contributions to Mexico’s economic, social, and political development.

To serve the enormous demand for education, IPN has 40 campuses in Mexico City and 22 research center campuses throughout the country. While the distributed campuses make the university accessible to more students, this also presents collaboration challenges for students and staff. It can take several hours by plane to reach some of the more remote campuses and multiple hours by car to get from one Mexico City campus to another. “Because the city is so vast and congested with traffic, our employees can spend hours trying to get from one campus to another for meetings or to engage in collaborative research,” says Luis David Terán Gutierrez, Systems Manager at the Information Systems Office for Instituto Politécnico Nacional.

IPN employees tried to conduct business with colleagues using the telephone and a basic e-mail system from CommuniGate Systems. However, they often had to resort to in-person meetings when phone and e-mail communication could not produce timely results. “To be truly productive, we needed functionality that extended beyond rudimentary phone and e-mail capabilities,” says Terán.

Face-to-face meetings presented their own challenges, as well. Before the time and hassle involved with traveling to a meeting, employees had to struggle to schedule the meeting. The CommuniGate Systems product did not include the scheduling or calendaring features that would be useful for IPN’s needs; therefore, everything had to be done manually. Says María Esther García, Final User Support for Instituto Politécnico Nacional. “There was a tendency among staff not to check e-mail that often because it wasn’t always reliable. Therefore, we had to call all prospective attendees to check their availability, send an e-mail message to propose two or three possible dates, receive feedback about those dates, and then call attendees again with the agreed-upon date and time. It was impossible to schedule meetings less than three days in the future, and the whole process was frustrating for everyone involved because it took so much time.”

University decision makers were concerned about the amount of time that IPN faculty and staff members spent traveling to different campuses, in addition to the expensive telephone bills that employees incurred due to heavy call volumes. IPN also sought to address several other problem areas that stifled productivity. “Employees faced issues with document version control and spent a great deal of time looking for the right information,” recalls Terán. “They needed a better way to track and share electronic documents, along with the ability to conduct video conferences, exchange instant messages, see one another’s calendars, and generally make better use of their time and IPN resources.”

IPN lacked the technology to support these goals but was determined to provide its user community with a comprehensive solution. “We wanted to shift toward more powerful, effective communication and collaboration,” says Terán. “But we also must continually respond to the need to do more with less. Therefore, it was important for us to deliver enhanced communication and collaboration capabilities that could also reduce costs.”

Solution

When Microsoft launched its unified communications solutions in November 2006, university decision makers grew excited about the opportunities that those solutions would afford. “It seemed to us that unified communications solutions from Microsoft could provide us with the highly integrated, robust environment we needed,” says Terán. “Plus, we saw that we could cost-effectively implement the solutions and minimize our administration, operation, and licensing costs.”

University faculty and staff members spend more time making valuable contributions to learning, and, at the same time, we’re optimizing our infrastructure and conserving resources. Luis David Terán Gutierrez Systems Manager, Instituto Politécnico Nacional

Instead of purchasing the unified communications solutions separately, decision makers decided to buy them as part of a Microsoft Enterprise Client Access License (ECAL) Suite agreement, which includes such solutions as Microsoft Forefront™ Client Security business security products. “After analyzing our choices and our plans for the future, we concluded that the ECAL Suite would provide both considerable economic savings and flexibility as we grow,” says Terán.

In June 2007, IPN began its deployment of Microsoft unified communications solutions by migrating to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007 messaging and collaboration client. The university worked with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Grupo Unika to test Exchange Server 2007 using a pilot group of approximately 500 administrative staff and faculty members. The university also rolled out Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 to the same group of pilot users, who rely on it for capabilities such as instant messaging and computer-to-computer voice calls. IPN is also developing a plan to migrate more than 200,000 students and other faculty members to Exchange Server 2007 and to extend the use of Office Communications Server 2007 to more users.

To help reduce travel time and expense, the university adopted Microsoft Office Live Meeting and replaced many of its in-person meetings with virtual meetings. Says Oscar Novoa, Chief Information Officer for Grupo Unika, “We’re helping IPN expand its unified communications environment to find other ways to work more efficiently.”

For instance, the university deployed a proof-of-concept implementation of Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007. “We’re testing how best to handle the diffusion of information through our Web portal, the services to support our long-distance education programs, and the improvements that we’d like to see in terms of workflow management and document sharing,” explains Terán.

IPN faculty and staff members will use Office SharePoint Server 2007 to exchange information and collaborate on projects, with each department maintaining a shared workspace. IPN is considering the Enterprise Search capabilities of Office SharePoint Server 2007 to make it easier to find relevant materials, and it also is exploring the idea of using it to support its e-learning processes.

Beyond unified communications, IPN has deployed other products that are included in its ECAL Suite agreement, such as Microsoft Forefront Security for Exchange Server. IPN also plans to move from an Altiris system for IT management to Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 and System Center Configuration Manager 2007 for a more integrated management infrastructure that adapts to the characteristics and needs of the institution.

Benefits

IPN established an environment that supports increased productivity, reduces operating costs, and provides better tools for communication and collaboration. “Adopting Microsoft unified communications solutions and the ECAL Suite agreement has made it possible for us to embrace a culture of communication,” says Terán. “University faculty and staff members spend more time making valuable contributions to learning, and, at the same time, we’re optimizing our infrastructure and conserving resources.”

Significant Cost Savings

IPN expects to save money in several areas, including licensing, reduced operating costs, and the potential elimination of all third-party products. “In terms of licensing alone, we’re saving $171,000 annually because of our decision to take part in an ECAL Suite agreement rather than purchasing products separately,” comments Terán. 

With Web conferencing through Microsoft Office Live Meeting, the university lessened its operating costs, lowered telephone bills, and reduced employee transportation costs. Says Terán, “We’ve decreased our amount of travel and the related expenses by 20 percent so far—and that’s just the beginning.”

If IPN opts to move forward with products, such as Microsoft Forefront Client Security and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, the university will save even more money because it will no longer need to pay for third-party products. “Although we haven’t yet measured our comprehensive cost avoidance or reductions in operating costs, we estimate that we’ll save approximately $2 million each year by optimizing our environment with solutions from Microsoft—that’s a 50 percent reduction in overall IT costs,” says Terán. 

Increased Productivity

IPN increased productivity among its user community by providing people with the communication and collaboration tools to do their jobs more effectively. “We’ve boosted productivity by as much as 30 percent in areas such as administration and IT, which are the departments where we currently have the most people using the new solutions,” says Terán. “We’re looking forward to expanding the areas that use unified communications solutions so that we can experience increases in productivity throughout more of the university.”

The university has made great strides in the area of scheduling. “Today, we use the scheduling capabilities in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 to send meeting requests, which means we now schedule meetings in a matter of minutes, rather than days,” says Mario Valdez, Project Coordinator for Instituto Politécnico Nacional. “Our users can be smarter, more efficient, and more proactive about how they handle many routine tasks, such as reserving rooms for any in-person meetings that are still necessary.”

Many meetings, however, now take place through Web conferencing. “We still travel when physical papers need to be signed and so forth, but we’ve eliminated unnecessary trips,” says Terán. “For instance, teams now hold virtual weekly staff meetings through Office Live Meeting, which means that more employees can spend a greater portion of their days working productively, rather than sitting in a car or airplane.”

Much of the university’s collaboration also occurs through instant messaging. “Instant messaging is one of the most-used services in the university for internal and external communications,” says Terán. “In fact, our researchers who have to travel or temporarily reside in another country now use instant messaging to collaborate with their teams in Mexico, and professors are using it to improve their communication with students. For them, instant messaging has become a tool for supporting the learning process.”

IPN believes that its use of new communication tools helps improve the quality of collaboration among faculty members. “Before, people avoided physical travel whenever they could because it was so time consuming, frustrating, and expensive. They either worked independently or used e-mail messages and phone calls to collaborate, which wasn’t always effective,” says Terán. “Now, people travel less and have more useful, convenient tools for interacting, which will improve the depth and breadth of the research that they can accomplish.”

Improved Employee Satisfaction

The user community throughout IPN has responded positively to the new communication solutions. “Our employees are very satisfied with the new solutions, and we’ve seen high adoption rates because the Microsoft products are based on technologies that are already familiar to users,” says Beatriz Astilla, IT Project Manager for Instituto Politécnico Nacional. “In fact, we’ve been able to minimize the amount of training we do because the products are so intuitive. And for the training that is still necessary, we’ve made it time-efficient by conducting the training sessions through Office Live Meeting.”

IPN employees also enjoy the increased reliability of the new messaging system, which offers greater uptime than the previous system. “We have enhanced security and availability by moving to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and configuring it with redundancies—and our users have noticed the difference,” says Valdez.

Concludes Terán, “Even though our user community is extremely heterogeneous, every group will find a way to work better and take advantage of the functionality that we’re making available to them through Microsoft unified communications solutions.”

Microsoft Infrastructure Optimization
With infrastructure optimization, you can build a secure, well-managed, and dynamic core IT infrastructure that can reduce overall IT costs, make better use of resources, and become a strategic asset for the business. The Infrastructure Optimization model—with basic, standardized, rationalized, and dynamic levels—was developed by Microsoft using industry best practices and Microsoft’s own experiences with enterprise customers. The Infrastructure Optimization model provides a maturity framework that is flexible and easily used as a benchmark for technical capability and business value.

For more information about Microsoft infrastructure optimization, go to:
www.microsoft.com/businessproductivity

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 Grupo Unika products and services, call (52) (55) 53 65 23 40, or visit the Web site at:
www.grupounika.com.mx

For more information about Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN) products and services, call (52) (55) 57 29 60 00, or visit the Web site at:
www.ipn.mx