SINGAPORE, April 29, 2014 – Microsoft Singapore announced today that leading travel agency, Dynasty Travel, has successfully deployed Office 365 for its entire operations in Singapore to enable its increasingly mobile travel agents and employees to access their emails and documents anywhere, anytime.
With 36 years of experience, Dynasty Travel has been at the forefront in providing service excellence and innovation in providing a unique travel experience for its customers. However, when it came to email communications services, the agency had been using a dated POP3 email service and had found the service limited in features and unreliable at times. The travel agency had also evaluated an on-premise solution, but found it to be costly to implement and maintain for their operations in the long run.
“With the previous service, our employees were not able to access their emails from a remote location and this limited their ability to work virtually,” said Jerry Loi, IT Team Leader, Dynasty Travel. “With Office 365, we have noticed an improvement in productivity by 40% and time saving of up to 30%, which meant that our team achieved more with the cloud service than ever before.”
The deployment, which was undertaken by Software Exchange, took just 72 hours to implement, has enabled the travel agency to better manage its email services, while freeing their employees by enabling anywhere access with a cloud-based solution that was flexible and scalable. Additionally, with Office 365, Dynasty Travel is also now able to manage their employees’ inboxes in a more efficient manner which would have been impossible before.
“Cloud solutions like Office 365 are easy to implement for businesses who want minimal disruptions to their operations when the migration and deployment happens,” said Nick Tham, Director, Software Exchange. “We were able to conduct a smooth and swift transition for Dynasty Travel in just three days due to meticulous planning and the ease of usability and manageability with Office 365.”
“Local companies such as Dynasty Travel are increasingly embracing the concept of cloud computing which enables them to scale in accordance to their business needs,” said Gerald Leo, Business Group Lead, Microsoft Office Division, Microsoft Singapore. “With Office 365, companies are able to achieve improved productivity, with lower upfront costs as companies no longer have to worry about hardware and software costs.”
Enabling anywhere access with Office 365 for businesses
Office 365 is the leading cloud-based productivity service in market today, with one in four enterprise business customer using the service today. In Asia Pacific, Office 365 is seeing a stupendous growth rate of 169% year-on-year, which is three times faster than the overall public cloud services in the region. Office 365 for business enables information workers to be able to get to and work with the most up-to-date versions of their documents with the tools on virtually any device.
In Dynasty Travel’s case, its 100-men strong team are now able to take advantage of the cloud and Office apps such as Outlook Web App (OWA) on iOS and Android for their smartphones to work from anywhere. The app has become indispensable for its employees who are using their own personal smartphones to access their corporate emails while on-the-go.
In recent months, Microsoft has announced several new applications for Office 365 users to enable anywhere access, which include the free Office for Mobile for iOS, Android and Windows Phone devices, as well as Office for iPad – which brings the most widely used productivity tool to almost all platforms in markets today.
Microsoft has also recently announced the following key feature updates for Office 365 for business users that enables customers to do more anytime, anywhere in an increasingly social manner:
- Office 2013 Service Pack 1: Microsoft released Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Office 2013 in February 2014, including SharePoint 2013 and Exchange Server 2013 which delivers greater stability, expanded functionality, security enhancements and improved compatibility with Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2. For Office 365 subscribers, these updates are delivered as part of automatic updates so that customers are always on the most up-to-date version of Office.
- Improvements to SharePoint Online: Microsoft has increased the site collection limit for OneDrive for Business and team sites to 1TB, which will enable organizations to establish large, centralized team document centers without the need to introduce new information architecture. Additionally, customers can enjoy infinite tenant storage scale with SharePoint Online, which means that businesses no longer need to worry about running out of storage ever again.
- Updated Yammer App for SharePoint: Organizations can add a real-time social layer to their SharePoint site with the Yammer app for SharePoint, which allows employees to collaborate in a more social manner, which help speed projects and spark ideas.
- And many more feature refinements and updates which can be found via Office Blogs
Mr. Leo added: “Organizations in Singapore no longer need to invest in additional resources to maintain and upkeep the tools they have invested in, as they can now truly benefit from up-to-date features delivered through the cloud with an Office 365 subscription.”
For more information on Office 365 for business, visit www.office365.com.
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About Dynasty Travel
As one of Singapore’s leading travel agencies, Dynasty Travel has consistently offered high levels of service excellence and innovation in its products and services.
The company provides full-service retail for outbound travel packages and corporate travel to many MNCs and government offices. Its expertise in destinations, international faring and strategic mindsets has allowed the company to leverage on its strength to provide its highly diverse customer base the best possible travel options.
About Software Exchange
An established name in the local and regional IT scene since 1999, Software Exchange helps small and medium businesses take their mind off IT – by providing solutions in software, hardware, and services – so that they may focus on their business. And thousands of our clients in Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam over the past many years, have benefited from our support in helping them to outmaneuver their competitors.
Representing prestigious software and hardware brands like Acer, Adobe, Autodesk, Cisco, Fortinet, HP, IBM, Lenovo, Microsoft, Symantec just to name a few, our partnerships have been exceptionally fulfilling and we have the privilege of picking up numerous awards from them over these years.
Fronted by knowledgeable and customer-oriented sales individuals and backed by a team of certified and experienced engineers, we are able to carry out our mission of being our clients’ one and true trusted IT advisor. Finally, our “30+30”-DAY SERVICE WARRANTY ensures that our clients that we’d resolve irregularities detected within 30 days of our system implementation – at no additional charge. After the issues are addressed, we’d extend the warranty for another 30 days so that we could be absolutely sure the same irregularities don’t occur again.
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.