Microsoft Online Services Customer Solution Case Study

Streamlining Operations and Improving Effectiveness with Microsoft® Online

OverviewCountry or Region: SpainIndustry: Consulting

Customer ProfileCompetitiveness works with clusters of companies, local, and state governments to increase the competitiveness of the cluster. The company works with clients around the world and operates virtually, with no physical offices of its own.

Business SituationCompetitiveness employees were relying on Google Apps and a dozen other online services. Compatibility issues and the need to remember so many distinct passwords and manage so many distinct user interfaces were compromising employee effectiveness.

SolutionCompetitiveness executives conferred with the Centro de Innovación en Productividad, where they discovered the Business Productivity Online Suite from Microsoft Online Services.

Benefits Single sign-on to required

applications Greater inter-application

“You want the interaction with the tools you need to do your work to feel frictionless—and when we had a dozen tools and passwords and user interfaces it was not frictionless at all..”Emiliano Duch, CEO, CompetitivenessIn 2007, the Spanish consulting firm Competitiveness

went virtual, closing its offices and decommissioning its

infrastructure. Since then, it has been running its global

business using Google Apps, WebEx, and a dozen other

Web-based tools. While Competitiveness was

comfortable with the idea of working online, the

multiplicity of passwords and user interfaces, poor

integration, and inconsistent levels of functionality were

subtly undermining its ability to conduct business

effectively. Competitiveness turned to the Centro de

Innovación en Productividad for help, and CIP introduced

it to the Business Productivity Online Suite from

Microsoft Online Services. Competitiveness can now

access the majority of services it needs from one

provider, with a single sign-on, and better integration

between online and offline applications, ensure that its

employees can work more effectively than ever.

SituationCompetitiveness provides consulting services that helps clusters of companies become more competitive in the global marketplace. It has 25 full time employees and, at any given time, 25 or more customer trainees working all over the world. While Competitiveness is officially based in Barcelona, the company operates virtually. It has no formal office space. In fact, since 2007, Competitiveness has operated entirely online and relied on cloud-based applications and infrastructure from Google and other service providers.

Competitiveness was comfortable with the idea of working online, but the company’s needs had given rise to a complex mixture of services. On any given day, its 50 users worked with Google Apps, SugarCRM, WebEx, MindSalt, SurveyMonkey, BeamYourScreen, and more. In all, Competitiveness was relying on more than a dozen application and service providers. That meant more than a dozen user interfaces and more than a dozen passwords for each employee to remember and re-enter on a daily basis. The Google applications tended to be somewhat basic in their functionally, too, so Competitiveness employees typically ran the Microsoft Office suite of productivity tools on their laptops and used those whenever preparing final docs and presentations for clients. Given the difficulties of saving those documents in Google Docs without formatting issues, they had to resort to a different cloud-based repository

accessed through yet another application.

After a year and a half of struggling to make online applications work, Competitiveness executives approached the Centro de Innovación en Productividad (CIP) in Manresa, Spain, which works closely with evolving companies in Catalonia to improve productivity through better use of technology. When CIP showed Competitiveness the Business Productivity Online Suite from Microsoft Online Services, the end of the struggle appeared to be in sight.

SolutionThe Business Productivity Online Suite from Microsoft Online Services enables Competitiveness to gain access to a range of integrated, enterprise-class services without having to procure or maintain an in-house infrastructure for those services. Microsoft Online Services enables access to collaboration tools and shared workspaces, workflow, desktop and mobile e-mail, calendaring and contacts, instant messaging, presence, audio/video conferencing, and Web conferencing. Yet because the applications supporting these services—including Microsoft SharePoint® Online, Microsoft Exchange Online, Office Live Meeting, and Microsoft Office Communications Online—run on servers residing in a state-of-the-art Microsoft data center, neither Competitiveness nor CIP needs to invest in on-premises infrastructure to take advantage of these services.

“We also used to use Google Talk to do meetings, but we could not use it to have meetings with multiple people, so the Business Productivity Online Suite will really help us with group interactions.” Emiliano Duch, CEO, Competitiveness

Microsoft hosts and maintains the servers with its own staff of hardware and software experts, supplies patches and security updates in real time, and guarantees 99.9 percent uptime with a financially-backed SLA, so Competitiveness employees always have access to the latest, most up-to-date versions of the applications to which they subscribe. CIP can provide Competitiveness with support, training, and other value-added services to enable the company to make the most of this online solution. CIP and the Business Productivity Online Suite offers still other advantages. Instead of having to purchase separate server and client licenses for infrastructure components such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server or Microsoft Exchange Server, Competitiveness can, though CIP, simply subscribe to the applications its users need on a per-user, per-month basis. This eliminates up-front licensing costs and enables Competitiveness to cover the nominal expense of accessing these services using its operational rather than capital budget. CIP enables Competitiveness to provide its users with access to the entire Business Productivity Online Suite for one low monthly fee. If a user were to need access to only one service—Microsoft Exchange Online, for example—CIP could set up the service so that that user could access just that service, and at an even lower

monthly fee to Competitiveness. The choice belongs to Competitiveness.

BenefitsFor Competitiveness, the Business Productivity Online Suite has proven to be an ideal solution. CIP set up accounts and migrated the company’s users from their older online applications in a matter of weeks. Now, the only online services Competitiveness relies on aside from the Business Productivity Online Suite are its online banking and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. The functionality delivered by the online services formerly used by Competitiveness consultants are now supported by Microsoft Online Services and the Business Productivity Online Suite. The net results include a more streamlined online experience, greater flexibility and security for developing project-specific communities of interest, and what Emiliano Duch, CEO of Competitiveness, calls a decrease in the “friction” that had made it more difficult for employees to work optimally in a virtual environment.

A Streamlined Online ExperienceBy itself, the Business Productivity Online Suite from Microsoft Online Services provides many of the features and functions that Competitiveness had been relying on multiple providers to deliver—and it provides access to all these services with a single password and a consistent user interface. Employees can continue to use the Microsoft Office applications on their laptops

“We can easily share files without worrying about the format becoming corrupted because we saved it online. That saves a lot of headaches and rework.” Emiliano Duch, CEO, Competitiveness

and save their documents and presentations to a SharePoint Online workspace in the cloud.

“The degree of integration among these applications is one of the most valuable aspects of the Business Productivity Online Suite,” says Duch. “We can easily share files without worrying about the format becoming corrupted because we saved it online. That saves a lot of headaches and rework.

“The other aspect is the ease with which we can choose to work online or offline,” Duch goes on to say. “If our users were trying to use Google Apps before, they could only do it while online. They could not use these applications while they were on a plane or unable to get a good connection. That’s one of the other reasons why our users chose to run Microsoft Office on their laptops—so they could be productive while offline. The Microsoft online and offline applications complement each other, so they can create offline and save online when they get a chance to reconnect. In this way, the Microsoft Office applications on the laptop and the Microsoft Online Services in the cloud work very well together.”

Group interactions are similarly streamlined. “To call an online meeting before, someone had to go into WebEx, enter the password, set up the meeting, and send an e-mail to all the participants. They’d have to open the e-mail message and click on the link to join. Now, using Office Live

Meeting, all of that is done automatically. We also used to use Google Talk to do meetings, but we could not use it to have meetings with multiple people, so the Business Productivity Online Suite will really help us with group interactions. We want online meetings to be easy, as though we were sitting in the same room—even when we’re not.”Business-class Flexibility and SecurityFor Duch, the Business Productivity Online Suite also offers levels of flexibility and security that he found missing from other online services. Competitiveness works on many projects simultaneously. Many of its projects involve training local businesspeople to run their operations in new ways, so these trainees need access to the same online tools and collaboration spaces that Competitiveness consultants use. At the same time, Competitiveness needs to maintain control over its intellectual assets and needs to set up its project spaces with different levels of security and user access.

“We’re building intranets for our consultants and selected groups of participants” explains Duch, “but we want them to be closed. These are essentially communities of interest, but we don’t want them to be linked with any others. The problem with using an online service such as LinkedIn or Face book to do this is that once you join a community everyone knows who you have as friends. We want the opposite: we want our clients to understand that it’s an advantage to be in our

network, that being in our network they can get updated information about things that will be useful for them, and that that information is not available to everyone. It’s a closed system and we can control who has access.”

Today, the idea of “online” is synonymous with “open,” says Duch, but for a business like Competitiveness, the idea of “online” and “closed” is more important. “That’s actually something that’s difficult to find in many of the online systems that are out there,” Duch continues, “particularly in systems that originated as free services and became fee-based services after the fact. Google, Skype, and others—they all began as free consumer-oriented services and then they tried to become professional. But you’re still sharing the same infrastructure with the free services. The services in the Business Productivity Online Suite started as enterprise-class services for individual companies, with a lot of attention paid to privacy and security, and then they moved online. For Competitiveness, that’s a real advantage. With the Business Productivity Online Suite, we gain the flexibility and scalability benefits of being online, but we also gain the privacy and security benefits that an offline system would ensure.”

Eliminating Friction, Increasing EffectivenessFor the consultants and executives at Competitiveness, the need to enter a dozen different passwords on a daily

basis and to navigate a dozen distinct user interfaces were problems less of productivity and more of operating efficiency. “We want our people to be at ease working online,” says Duch. “We want them to feel as comfortable interacting with people online as they would be meeting face to face, even if the people they’re interacting with are on opposite sides of the world.”

Ultimately, that is the problem that the Business Productivity Online Suite from Microsoft Online Services is helping Competiveness to overcome. The goal of ease of computing was impossible to achieve when Competitiveness consultants were using multiple online applications and having to disrupt their work by dealing with multiple passwords or adjusting to inconsistent user interfaces.

“Every delay compromises this goal,” says Duch. “So every distraction that you can remove becomes critical. You want the interaction with the tools you need to do your work to feel frictionless—and when we had a dozen tools and passwords and user interfaces it was not frictionless at all. That’s why the level of integration we gain through the Business Productivity Online Suite and Microsoft Online Services is important. It will help us operate far more effectively as an online organization.”

“If our users were trying to use Google Apps before, they could only do it while online. . . . The Microsoft online and offline applications complement each other, so they can create offline and save online when they get a chance to reconnect.” Emiliano Duchy, CEO, Competitiveness

Microsoft Online ServicesMicrosoft Online Services is a business-class communications and collaboration software offering delivered as a subscription service, hosted by Microsoft, and sold with partners. These services help make it easier for customers to rapidly and cost-effectively access the most up-to-date technologies, and are designed for rapid deployment to provide customers with streamlined communications, simplified management, and business-class reliability and security. For IT staff, Microsoft Online Services helps reduce the burden of performing routine IT management tasks such as installation, provisioning, ongoing maintenance, patches, updates, and upgrades, making it possible for them to spend more time on initiatives that move the business forward. These services are backed by strong SLAs and are designed to meet the regulatory compliance and reliability needs of enterprise customers. On a technical level, the services boast the sophistication and reliability that customers expect from Microsoft, which continues to invest heavily in building data centers to support these services.

For more information, visit: www.microsoft.com/online

For More InformationFor 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 Centro de Innovación en Productividad products and services, call +34 93 877 2100 or visit the Web site at: www.productivitycenter.org

For more information about Competitiveness products and services, call +34 669 86 55 00 or visit the Web site at: www.competitiveness.com

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published March 2009

Software and Services Microsoft Online Services

− Microsoft Exchange Online− Microsoft SharePoint Online

− Microsoft Office Communications Online

− Office Live Meeting