Microsoft Office 365 helped Finnair to strengthen positions in the market

April 02, 2015. The Finnair airline thanks to a packet of cloud services of Microsoft Office 365 provided^[1] to the employees wide, reliably protected from external penetration, access to corporate data. Now the personnel of airline at any time, and from any device can find necessary information, whether it be the text document or the media file in any place, to quickly consult passengers and to discuss any working questions with colleagues and partners. At the same time costs on communication were reduced by 15%. New methods of interaction with partners allowed Finnair to increase business productivity, customer service quality and to strengthen positions on aviation market of Europe in a situation of intense competition with cheap airlines.

Now Finnair uses a broad spectrum of the Microsoft Office 365 cloud applicaions for business. Microsoft Exchange Online provides access to corporate mail irrespective of the place, time or the device, at the same time the Exchange Online Protection filter effectively blocks spam and malware. For communication with colleagues and partners staff of airline use the corporate service Microsoft Lync Online giving an opportunity of instant messaging, telephony and the video calls allowing to browse and discuss jointly projects or documents. All information, necessary for work, is available in the cloud storage of OneDrive, and for file sharing employees use SharePoint Online service.

Active communication and information exchange continues on corporate social network Yammer. At high dispersion and mobility of personnel of airline it helps to resolve working issues several times quicker: now the staff of Finnair instantly exchanges the best practices of an aviation industry, in case of non-flying weather easily agrees about comfortable accommodation of passengers with employees of the airports and consults with partner airlines about routes.

When specialists of Finnair started updating of services of e-mail, they seized the opportunity to review all IT infrastructure. As a result the company came to a conclusion that maintenance and operation of own mail server are inexpedient as they require more time and budgetary funds, than it is necessary when using of the integrated cloud applicaions.

Therefore the IT department of Finnair decided to issue to the staff of the company of a subscription to Microsoft Office 365. Earlier the airline tried to use Docs Google service, but it was badly compatible to the Office tools. As a result IT specialists made a choice for benefit of software products of Microsoft since with a high performance and reliability they have the familiar interface and do not demand long implementation and personnel training. Besides, process of migration from one mail server on another took only one day.

"We survived because we successfully controlled our costs not to the detriment of service quality and employee performance. At the same time we need to attract the best personnel ready to work in the modern environment and to exchange the valuable ideas, – commented Carry Henninen, the architect of management of corporate information of Finnair. – Thanks to Microsoft Office 365 we could reduce considerably costs on support of IT infrastructure and at the same time it is essential to expand possibilities of information exchange between employees".

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