The Travel Corporation Intranet

The Client

The Travel Corporation is a 4th generation, family-owned business that operates in 60 countries, with over 35 offices and more than 4,000 team members, serving over 2 million customers annually. As a worldwide travel expert, their multi award-winning portfolio ranges from luxury hotels and boutique river cruises, to independent holiday package companies and a variety of guided travel experiences. Over 30 brands each offer unique experiences with travel styles as varied as their destinations.

The Challenge

The extent of The Travel Corporation’s diversity in locations and brands added considerable complexity to this roll out.

• A site template that might work for one office type or region might not fit the requirements of another.
• Limited staff experience with SharePoint features, taxonomy and development meant that a significant amount of training would have to take place so that the portal platform could be effectively supported.
• It was decided to implement the solution using a phased approach, with the first phase consisting of creating an intranet for the Canada office. Canada’s solution would act as a template, to be rolled out in future phases as a reusable solution to other offices around the world.

The Travel Corporation selected SharePoint Online/Office 365 and Yammer as their new combined platform to introduce a global collaborative work environment. Yammer as the social layer was a key integration component after being launched as the first phase of the project.

The Solution

Following an in-depth analysis of business requirements, Envision IT in close collaboration with The Travel Corporation team, together built a new SharePoint Online intranet site. The company intranet focuses on collaboration and document management, with areas for communications, news and events and other shared information. In addition to documents, employees are also able to use the Intranet as their launching point to other corporate systems.

A compelling, creative design was developed to make the new internal website most engaging for our team members. A clear site architecture with metadata and content types, along with effective Search features mean that the site is highly intuitive and users will quickly find the information they need.

The decision to build the new Intranet on the SharePoint Online/Office 365 Platform presented some immediate benefits. Due to the broad geographic diversity of The Travel Corporation and use of multiple devices, employees worldwide will be able to retrieve and share the information they need much more effectively than in the past, while maintaining a single source. The site employs an adaptive design providing an optimized experience for viewing on different devices, whether accessing from a phone, tablet or desktop.

After the initial pilot period of the Canada office launch, the template will be reviewed and adjusted to suit unique needs of other individual offices. Yammer was heavily integrated into SharePoint Online to combine both solutions for a powerful platform to work from on a daily basis. The integrated Yammer components provide a means for immediate conversations about relevant topics right in the website.

"Using SharePoint + Yammer has changed the way we work by allowing us to be more collaborative and transparent as an organization. We can now benefit effectively from our global offices and brands contributing to one platform. We are already starting to see signs that this platform is making us more agile and innovative as an organization to position us for continued growth and future success."

The Travel Corporation anticipates that they will be able to leverage the platform in the future to streamline processes, such as employee travel requests and payroll forms, contributing to employee productivity. The platform will serve as a tool for sharing structured information more effectively, such as brand promotions, and displaying analytical data among teams.

"Within 3 months, our entire Canada office had transitioned to this new environment with reduced email use and it has kept everyone closely connected."