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Office 2000 Case Study Lifetime Products Lifetime Products
is a fast-moving player in the consumer sporting goods industry, earning a
spot on Inc. Magazine�s list of
fastest growing companies. To help its growth, Lifetime focuses on constantly
improving its computer systems in order to meet its corporation�s strategic
needs and reduce the total cost of ownership. As part this strategy, Lifetime
Products is deploying Microsoft� Office 2000 so employees can take advantage
of the suite�s Web technology to share and analyze information�easing the
workload on a small IT staff. Business at Lifetime Products is jumping as fast as its
customers. A Clearfield, Utah-based manufacturer of popular lines of adjustable,
portable basketball systems and table tennis equipment, the company has grown
from less than two dozen employees when it began in 1986 to nearly 1,000
employees, with sales growth that earned it an Inc. Magazine ranking as one of the nation�s top 500
fastest-growing companies. To handle its continuing, rapid growth, the
enterprise is conducting a full-court press on its technology systems, including
an upgrade to Microsoft Office 2000. Office 2000, with its Web-enabled applications, is
helping the company share important information and be more effective through
the use of the company�s intranet, making it far easier for employees work
collaboratively on documents and share ideas across the network. With its
powerful administrative features such as self-repairing applications, the
application suite is making it easier for the small IT staff of Lifetime
Products to deliver what end users need. Taking Advantage of Office 2000�s Web Functionality
�Like many companies, we face the challenge of
information redundancy,� says John Bowden, director of Information Systems and
one of the six IT staff members at the company. �Before deploying Office 2000,
we frequently had people coming to meetings thinking they all had the most
up-to-date information, when in reality only one person did. Because everyone
did not use a consistent, up-to-date data source, we often had conflicting
information surrounding critical business issues.� That scenario has changed dramatically with the rapid
acceptance of the intranet as a common data source, enabled by the adoption of
Office 2000. Because Office 2000 uses HTML as a native file format, it lets
Lifetime end users save and edit Office content�a sales memo created in Word,
for example, or an Excel spreadsheet from the accounting department �on an
intranet as easily and quickly as saving it and editing it on a file server.
Lifetime�s corporate intranet has become a dynamic place where users find,
share, and collaborate on dynamic, up-to-date corporate information. Bowden explains that with previous applications, it was
much more difficult to publish to the intranet, and users frequently had to rely
on IT staff to create links to documents using the Microsoft Visual InterDev�
Web development system. Now, users can do their own publishing quickly and
easily. Anyone with Office 2000 and the correct access rights
can quickly publish and edit information on the Web, while any user with a
browser and access rights can see that information. Employees are also using the interactive Web features in
Office 2000 that allow them to publish information to the Web with
interactivity. Users with only a browser can manipulate and analyze key
corporate data, drilling down on information and performing �what-if�
scenarios. Lifetime enhances these capabilities through its use of
Office Server Extensions (OSE), a set of technologies that allow users to take
part in threaded Web discussions within a document, spreadsheet, presentation,
or Web page. Lifetime users may also subscribe to this content and receive
notifications when changes are made. Through OSE, users can share ideas and stay
on track with changes in which they are expressly interested. �Now our users can take a document,
easily publish it to a central location, and e-mail a link to other employees to
let people know about it. The fact that it is available through a single source
reduces or eliminates the redundancy caused in the past by multiple data
sources,� Bowden says. Broad-Based Effort to Lower Costs
Lifetime�s adoption of Office 2000 is one of a series
of strategic moves designed to make the company more profitable by reducing
costs. �The decision to go with Office 2000 is part of our
focus on lowering the cost of IT, an effort we began three years ago,� says
Bowden. �We chose to deploy Windows NT� on all the desktops throughout
the company so we could lock down workstations, and have a standard set of
applications on the desktop through Microsoft Office.� Bowden says the company also made a decision to begin
deploying �thin� clients using Microsoft Windows NT, Terminal Server
Edition, which allows the company to host multiple, simultaneous client sessions
on the Windows NT Server version 4.0 operating system with minimal software
deployments on desktops. Office 2000 is also a boon to the company�s Terminal
Server rollout because it enables the IT staff to repair or replace the
configuration on a desktop in a matter of minutes. Reducing the Workload of IT Staff
The deployment of Office 2000 to more than 300 desktops
located in nine buildings in Clearview is also helping the small IT department,
which is under constant pressure to produce more with less. �With our tremendous growth, there�s been a lot of
demand on the IT department,� Bowden says. �Users want more computers and
more technology, yet we have to deal with the issue of training and retaining
skilled IT staff. Office 2000 is giving our department an edge by reducing the
demands traditionally made on the IT staff.� The deployment of Office 2000 also goes more
quickly�it now takes less than one hour, down from two or three hours under
the old system�because all desktop configurations are identical thanks to the
Custom Installation Wizard, which helps the IT staff determine in advance
exactly which applications and features will be needed for each department. Office 2000 is also reducing calls to the help desk
because of the self-repairing function in each application, which automatically
checks and, if necessary, fixes executables, the registry, and DLLs. Interactive
Help also cuts down on help-desk calls by walking users through specific tasks.
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