Customer Solution Case Study

Museum Avoids 92 Percent of Operating Costs for Messaging, Communications Service

OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Nonprofit

Customer ProfileThe Wildlife Experience in Parker, Colorado, is an interactive museum dedicated to instilling respect for habitat and wildlife and inspiring conservation efforts.

Business SituationThe museum’s email service had limited functionality and manageability. When it had to replace the service, the museum wanted to fix this—and keep costs low.

SolutionThe Wildlife Experience adopted the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite, which includes email, instant messaging, web conferencing, document sharing, and more.

Benefits Boosts staff productivity by 5 percent Speeds account provisioning from

days to minutes Avoids 92 percent of operating

expenses for self-hosting

“We’ve broadened the communications services we provide, and we’re able to handle the increased load without additional staffing—that’s what we get from Business Productivity Online.”

Frank Ruggieri, Facilities and IT Manager, The Wildlife Experience

At The Wildlife Experience, an interactive museum dedicated to natural habitats, one environment that was a bit too wild was its own email service. When it came time to replace the unreliable and difficult-to-manage service, the museum adopted the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite. Now, museum personnel save up to two hours per week and are more effective while away from the museum. Email traffic has shrunk by 35 percent. Reliability has increased by 80 percent. Account provisioning time has been reduced from days to minutes. These and other efficiencies make it possible for the two-person IT staff to manage the expanding environment without additional personnel. By adopting the service, the museum avoided an estimated U.S.$30,000 capital outlay for its own infrastructure, as well as 92 percent of the annual operating expenses for a self-hosted system.

SituationTo the staff of The Wildlife Experience museum, just a few minutes south of Denver, Colorado, all the world is a jungle, a forest, a desert, an ocean—and all of it is untamed. Frank Ruggieri, however, wanted a route back to civilization.

Ruggieri is the Facilities and IT Manager for the museum, which uses interactive exhibits, large format film, fine art, and more to educate visitors about the world’s natural habitats and ecosystems. The museum’s email system wasn’t supposed to be another of those untamed environments, but it was looking more and more like one every day.

That system was provided and managed, as a donated service, by a corporation affiliated with the museum. While museum administrators, including Ruggieri, appreciated the gift, they often came up against limitations in taking advantage of it. As the head of a two-person IT department, Ruggieri was on the frontline in dealing with these issues. The system didn’t provide some of the features that many enterprise email users have come to expect, such as shared calendars, full mobile and remote access, conferencing, and presence and instant messaging. It only supported RIM BlackBerry devices, and servicing those phones was time-consuming and difficult. The time and effort to provision, deprovision, and configure user accounts was another concern.

“We had some issues with the system not working as well as we needed it to,” says Ruggieri. “And as we continued to grow,

those issues would have become more significant.”

Tori Labs, Marketing and Communications Director at The Wildlife Experience experienced those issues firsthand on a continuing basis. Labs conducted much of her work in meetings with staff, advertising and media partners, museum leadership, and others. Scheduling those meetings could be difficult. “I could get 20 or more messages in my mailbox about scheduling a single meeting,” she says. “Half would accept, half would decline, and the meeting organizer would have to start all over again. I never knew when my team was available. It wasn’t a very efficient mechanism.”

Labs also felt the constraints of the system when she was working from home or out of the office between appointments. She couldn’t access her own calendar, let alone the calendars of others. Her office files were inaccessible, too. To work remotely, she had to plan carefully before leaving the office and load files onto her laptop. When unexpected developments arose, Labs would return to the office in the evenings or on weekends to retrieve whatever documents she required.

Matters came to a head when the corporate donor of the email service passed into different ownership, and the museum suddenly had to find, and fund, an alternative on its own.

“This was an opportunity to adopt an email and communications solution that would give museum personnel easier access to more capabilities, and to streamline IT management so that we could provide the

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“This was an opportunity to adopt an email and communications solution that would give museum personnel easier access to more capabilities, and to streamline IT management.”

Frank Ruggieri, Facilities and IT Manager, The Wildlife Experience

expanded solution without expanding our IT staff,” says Ruggieri. “At the same time, we were very sensitive to cost—whatever we chose had to be extremely cost effective.”

SolutionGetting more for less would be a tough goal to reach, but that was Ruggieri’s mission.

He and his colleagues first considered acquiring the necessary hardware and software and running a solution on their own. Then they did the math. Hardware and licensing for an email and collaboration solution could cost the museum U.S.$30,000 in capital expenses—and another $25,000 in annual operating expenses. For a small nonprofit organization with 70 employees, that was prohibitive.

“What we decided to do is look around for solutions that could be hosted offsite,” says Ruggieri. That led the museum to consider Google Apps. A Google Apps solution would avoid the capital investment that the museum couldn’t afford—but it would bring disadvantages as well. The user interface would require an adjustment on the part of employees, who were accustomed to the Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 communications and collaboration client. Ruggieri and his colleague in IT would also have to learn to manage an unfamiliar system. Nor would Google Apps be easy to interoperate with the museum’s existing applications, such as the Microsoft Office 2007 business productivity software (since upgraded to Microsoft Office 2010).

The museum turned to its IT provider, CMIT Solutions of Denver, a Microsoft Partner Network member with multiple Gold competencies. CMIT introduced the museum to the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite, part of Microsoft Online Services.

The Business Productivity Online Standard Suite is a Microsoft cloud-based offering that provides mobile, web, and desktop email; calendaring and contacts; presence and instant messaging; audio and web conferencing; shared workspaces; and document sharing. The solution includes Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Office Live Meeting, and Microsoft Office Communications Online. These enterprise communication and collaboration services are hosted by Microsoft at its data centers, and provided as a service over the Internet.

“Microsoft Business Productivity Online would give our employees the broader communications and collaboration features that they’d lacked, would take the maintenance responsibilities largely off our shoulders, and would be less than the cost of a self-hosted solution,” says Ruggieri. “It looked like a good solution for our requirements.”

It looked like an even better solution when CMIT researched pricing options and found that the museum qualified for a nonprofit discount from Microsoft. The museum made the decision to adopt Microsoft Business Productivity Online in January 2011. The museum and CMIT planned the implementation over the course of two

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“Microsoft Business Productivity Online would give our employees the broader communications and collaboration features that they’d lacked.”

Frank Ruggieri, Facilities and IT Manager, The Wildlife Experience

days and implemented it on a Saturday. CMIT used the existing user accounts in the museum’s Active Directory Domain Services system to set up new accounts for the museum’s employees with the Business Productivity Online service. Then, CMIT consultants copied the .PST message files from the employees’ computers over to the new online accounts.

When employees returned to work on Monday, their email looked just the way they’d left it on Friday—but now, when they proposed meetings through Outlook, they could see their colleagues’ calendars and check availabilities. They could use presence and instant messaging to identify and communicate with available coworkers. They could set up web meetings with colleagues, vendors, and others inside or outside of the museum. They could post documents for easy access by coworkers. And they could also do all of this from their laptops and smartphones—any popular smartphone. Employees are no longer limited to BlackBerry devices.

After six months with Business Productivity Online, the museum is looking forward to upgrading to Microsoft Office 365, the next generation of Microsoft Online Services, in the summer of 2011. Office 365 offers a seamless upgrade from the Business Productivity Online Standard Suite and introduces a single user interface that centralizes communications services, eliminating the need to switch among several services. Office 365 also makes it possible for enterprises to federate their instant messaging service with Windows Live, Yahoo!, and AOL.

BenefitsBy taking advantage of the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite, The Wildlife Experience gains exactly what it sought: increased communication and collaboration functionality for users and more efficient management for its two-person IT staff—all at low cost.

Boosts Staff Productivity by 5 PercentThe Wildlife Experience and its employees report that they are working more productively—and carrying out the work of the museum more successfully.

Labs, the Marketing and Communications Director, uses the new communications tools to boost her productivity in a variety of ways. By using team calendars to identify meeting opportunities, she reduces the flurry of email messages formerly associated with meeting invitations, clearing her inbox by about 10 to 15 percent every day. Because meetings are easier to schedule, they can be scheduled on shorter notice, the better to address urgent or unexpected issues.

Labs also uses the broader range of tools to speed communications with her staff. “I use Microsoft instant messaging a great deal because my employees respond faster to it than they do to email,” she says. “As an additional benefit, my inbox isn’t cluttered with a lot of tiny email messages going back and forth on an issue. I’m more efficient as a result.”

Because Labs can now access her email, instant messaging, and files from wherever she is, she’s more productive when she’s away from the office—and, even when

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“I use Microsoft instant messaging a great deal because my employees respond faster to it than they do to email.”

Tori Labs, Marketing and Communications Director, The Wildlife

Experience

she’s in the office. “I can do my job from anywhere with Internet connectivity, so I’m not out of touch when I’m out of the office,” she says. “I don’t have to come back into the office after hours when something unexpected comes up. I don’t even have to spend a half hour in the office on Friday afternoons figuring out which files to take with me so I can work over the weekend.”

In all, Labs estimates that she saves about two hours—5 percent—each week by using the new communication tools. She says her experience is typical of managers and directors at the museum.

Saving time isn’t the only benefit that museum personnel see from their use of

Business Productivity Online. Labs, her staff, and graphic designers and ad buyers now use instant messaging instead of email to hold impromptu creative meetings (Figure 1).

“We chat in real time about the ads we’re creating,” Labs says. “We use Business Productivity Online to solve creative challenges faster.”

Similarly, the frontline workers who interact with members and visitors can handle many of their tasks more efficiently now—and reinvest the freed time in providing more and better member service. “If our service manager spends less time with email, she can spend more time out on the

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Figure 1. The Marketing Director uses instant messaging to converse with colleagues while reviewing an ad script.

floor interacting with members and visitors,” says Labs.

Speeds Account Provisioning from Days to MinutesAs he’d hoped, Ruggieri also sees gains for IT from the use of Business Productivity Online. Most notably, software updates, troubleshooting, server configuration, and maintenance are implemented by Microsoft rather than by the museum’s IT staff.

Functions that Ruggieri and his colleague do carry out are now faster and easier; for instance, provisioning or deprovisioning a user account, formerly a one-day or two-day process, is now accomplished in five to 10 minutes. Email traffic has fallen by 35 percent, a boon to IT as employees shift to less costly forms of communication, such as instant messaging, web meetings, and team calendars. The system is more reliable—up 80 percent over the museum’s previous service. Ruggieri calls the service’s performance “fantastic” and says it gives museum personnel the confidence they need to rely on it.

Taken together, these factors save Ruggieri several hours of system maintenance each week—about 10 percent of his total work time. “We’ve broadened the communications services we provide, and we’re able to handle the increased load without additional staffing—that’s what we get from Business Productivity Online,” he says.

Avoids 92 Percent of Operating Expenses for Self-Hosting Keeping costs contained was another key goal, and the museum has accomplished it,

as well. In contrast to the $30,000 capital expense and $25,000 annual operating expense that the museum would have incurred with an on-site deployment, the museum pays just $2,100 for its annual subscription to the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite, taking into account its nonprofit discount, the number of licenses it acquired, and other factors.

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“We’re avoiding 92 percent of the annual operating cost to maintain an on-site deployment by choosing Business Productivity Online.”

Frank Ruggieri, Facilities and IT Manager, The Wildlife Experience

“Even setting aside the capital expense we’d have to incur to bring up our own communications system, we’re avoiding 92 percent of the annual operating cost to maintain an on-site deployment by choosing Business Productivity Online,” says Ruggieri, who now sees his way out of the communications jungle.

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Microsoft Cloud Power Microsoft offers a complete set of cloud-based solutions to meet business needs, including solutions for advertising; communications (email, meetings); collaboration (document storage, sharing, workflow); business applications (customer resource management, business productivity); data storage and management; and infrastructure services. In addition, customers can take advantage of an entire ecosystem of solution providers and Microsoft partners.

For more information about Microsoft Cloud Power, go to: www.microsoft.com/cloud

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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 in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. 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 CMIT Solutions of Denver products and services, call (303) 756-2648 or visit the website at: www.cmitsolutions.com/denver

For more information about The Wildlife Experience, call (720) 488-3300 or visit the website at: www.thewildlifeexperience.org

Software and Services Microsoft Business Productivity Online

Standard Suite− Microsoft Exchange Online− Microsoft Office Communications

Online− Microsoft Office Live Meeting− Microsoft SharePoint Online

Partners CMIT Solutions of Denver