Situation

Office 365 has helped us to save costs, improve communications and reduce support needs, contributing to enhanced productivity. Shane Izaks General Manager, Information Technology The Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels, Limited

The Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels, Limited (HSH) is the holding company of a group that is engaged in the ownership, development and management of prestigious hotel, commercial and residential properties in Asia, the United States and Europe, including the renowned Peninsula Hotel brand. The company has over 7000 employees worldwide.

“IT is expected to deliver strategic value at every level of our organization, from planning to procurement to in-house services,” says Shane Izaks, General Manager, Information Technology, HSH. “While technology has a subtle presence on the frontend of our operations, behind the scenes it enables our employees to deliver the premium luxury experience that our brand promises our customers.”

The global reach of HSH’s business and the 24/7 nature of the service industry make high resource investments difficult to avoid. “In our industry, there is always the challenge of IT infrastructure becoming too hardware and server-centric,” says Izaks. “We need to enable the continuous growth of our operations, while utilizing the expertise of our IT team. This creates a conflict because increasing our on-premise hardware assets means increasing the amount of time our IT team spend managing them.”

Previously, HSH used an on-premise legacy based e-mail system from Novell in a distributed architecture with servers in each location. Microsoft® SharePoint® 2007 was used as the corporate collaboration platform. HSH was keenly aware that continuously adding servers and sending large files around the network did not provide the flexibility and efficiency needed for the business strategy, and adopting cloud computing might be the solution. “The challenge for a round-the-clock business like ours is how to get the flexibility and speed to market with minimal disruption to operations,” says Izaks.

Solution
In 2011, HSH began to look for a solution to this challenge. The company studied various cloud computing services on the market. Finally, HSH decided to deploy Microsoft® Office 365. “The Microsoft solution won out because it offers a full package of benefits, including robust security, full integration, collaboration and flexibility to move at our own pace,” says Izaks.

Shane Izaks, General Manager, Information Technology, The Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels, Limited

The decision was made easier by the company’s experience with Microsoft® Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). “We have been using BPOS in one of our locations since last year,” says Izaks. “It was one of the fastest e-mail deployments we have ever experienced and it lends strong support to our business initiatives with minimal investment and maintenance.”

In mid-2011, with the help of Microsoft partner tForce Technologies, HSH piloted Office 365 and initiated plans to migrate its legacy e-mail system to Microsoft® Exchange Online and its on-premise SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 Online for more than 2000 employees worldwide in the first phase of deployment. The process for deployment is straightforward because the system is already set up in the cloud, eliminating the need for HSH to consider what hardware to purchase, what version of software to install and how to secure its data.

Benefits
Reduced costs; as a subscription service, Office 365 will reduce the costs of purchasing and managing hardware and software assets for HSH. “Having Office 365 in the environment we are looking reducing costs by about 15-20%,” says Izaks. “And this will certainly increase as we move forward with the deployment. Office 365 will allow all our operations to stay connected at an affordable price.”

Smooth transition to the cloud; unlike other vendors, Microsoft’s cloud solution can be fully integrated and co-exist with on-premise infrastructure. “Office 365 allows us to transition to the cloud with no disruption to our services,” says Izaks. “This is very important because it means we can plan and deploy at our own pace. Employees only have to remember one password and once logged on can access all the information they need from a SharePoint Online portal.”

Robust security; “We handle a lot of customer data and discretion is critical to our brand value,” says Izaks. “It is absolutely impossible to compromise on data security in any way. Our stringent requirements in this area are more than met by Office 365’s security such as 128-bit SSL/TSL encryption, Forefront Online Protection for Exchange and the fact that Microsoft complies with SAS 70 Independent Audit. Moreover, we no longer need to manage platform security, antivirus and disaster recovery as this is part of the subscription.”

Greater reliability and ease of maintenance; “Having Microsoft manage our Office 365 environment is freeing up our IT resources, so we can be a lot more proactive in other areas of our business,” says Izaks.

HSH is also benefitting from Microsoft’s investments in reliability. “The kind of resilience on [Microsoft’s] infrastructure is not something a company can implement without heavy investment,” says Izaks. “Also, Microsoft offers a 24x7x365 support environment as part of the service”

High scalability and flexibility; “Office 365 is very flexible and scalable, we can just add or remove users as we need,” says Izaks.

Improved mobile productivity and collaboration; “Another advantage of Office 365 is that it gives us access to all the advanced features of the latest Microsoft productivity tools,” says Izaks. “We have travelling staff around the world and one of the things we want to do is keep them informed by giving them the ability to access information and communicate at any time and on any device.”

The improved mobility feature Office 365 has introduced to HSH is helping the company to boost productivity because staff can remotely access e-mail from any Internet-enabled device.

Employees can also co-author Word documents or Spreadsheets in real time with Office Web Apps, resulting in faster and more streamlined collaboration. Similarly, the ease with which Office 365 enables employees to communicate will drive productivity. “We have a lot of conferencing and having Microsoft Lync as part of Office 365 is a major benefit,” says Izaks.

“Office 365 has helped us to save costs, improve communications and reduce support needs, contributing to enhanced productivity,” he concludes.

Microsoft Office 365

Microsoft Office 365 brings together cloud versions of our most trusted communications and collaboration products—Microsoft SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Lync Online—with the latest version of our Office desktop suite and companion web applications for businesses of all sizes.

Office 365 helps save time and money, and it frees up valued resources. Simple to use and easy to administer, it is financially backed by a service level agreement that guarantees 99.9 percent reliability. Office 365 features robust security, IT-level phone support, geo-redundancy, disaster recovery, and the business-class privacy controls and standards that you expect from a world-class service provider.

For more information about Microsoft Office 365, go to: www.office365.com

tForce Technologies Ltd.

tForce Technologies, Microsoft certified solution partner, we have a proficient team of consultants and systems engineers with profound knowledge on Business consultation, Enterprise Resources Planning and Supply Chain Management who are able to understand business and operational needs and thus come up with practical suggestions for Enterprise Portal Solutions. We have developed our own Portal solutions and modules on top of SharePoint, and these can be categorized into: Business Performance Management, Corporate Efficiency Management and Compliance Management.

For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the customer hotline at (852) 2388-9600. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: http://www.microsoft.com/hk