Expedia Group opens the world to those with a wanderlust. The Seattle-based company gathers more than 20 travel-related online businesses under its brand, employing people all over the world. When Expedia Group sought to simplify costs and reduce license costs, yet improve collaboration, productivity, and security, it turned to Microsoft OneDrive, adding SharePoint sites for teams. With nearly half of its 25,000 employees seamlessly migrated to date, Expedia Group offers its employees a deluxe fare to a streamlined environment.
“By consolidating everyone’s usage to OneDrive, and storing shared files in SharePoint, we’re tapping into the potential of Microsoft 365.”
Michelle Nelson, Senior Product Manager, Enterprise Collaboration Tools, Expedia Group
The internet upended the travel industry, changing how travelers choose and book everything from airfare to accommodations and car rentals. New possibilities opened up: hotel alternatives running the gamut from a room in a Hong Kong SAR apartment to an entire villa on the Amalfi Coast. Making it all happen are a web of online companies, many of which now make up Expedia Group. Including fare aggregators like Orbitz, Travelocity, and the original Expedia Group brand, plus metasearch engines to turn up rental cars and accommodations, the company covers the breadth of the industry. With 25,000 employees in more than 20 different companies, keeping its workforce in sync is a major challenge. That’s why Expedia Group turned to Microsoft 365, especially Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint, to consolidate tools, improve security, and kick-start collaboration.
Straddling borders and diverse solutions
Expedia Group is a vast worldwide collection of knowledge workers—customer service agents, account managers, financial managers, and developers. Information is their stock in trade, and easy, highly secure collaboration and data sharing is the framework behind the travel enjoyed by customers around the globe. It’s a company that exemplifies customer service and an out-of-the-box approach. “The Expedia Group culture is about action, not just lip service to making things happen,” says Michelle Nelson, Senior Product Manager in Enterprise Collaboration Tools at Expedia Group.
Expedia Group has more than 200 office locations around the world that relate to four core locations—Seattle and Austin (United States), Gurgaon (India), and London (England). As a result, coordinating people and content is a mega-challenge. “We’re focused on internal productivity,” says Jason Frueh, Productivity Engineering Manager at Expedia Group. “For our team, that means encouraging collaboration as seamlessly and efficiently as possible.” But until the company embarked on its OneDrive rollout in early 2020, that collaboration was threatened by friction. And Expedia Group paid a premium—the expense of multiple overlapping tool sets for collaboration.
Assessing the friction points
Facing a slew of unrelated tools used by Expedia Group teams across the globe, Nelson and Frueh found that nurturing collaboration was far from the effortless ideal that they envisioned—for both their respective teams and for Expedia Group workers. A reliable, easy-to-use file storage and sharing solution was key to the goal of seamless collaboration, but with multiple solutions in play, setting standards was difficult at best. At its worst, the mushrooming variety of solutions decreased productivity on Frueh’s own team. “Because different tools behave differently and often have different configuration options and settings, creating standards for file storage was hard,” he recalls. “And because we set policies for collaboration solutions, we had to create one policy for every tool.”
The simple existence of multiple tools for file storage and collaboration created other issues that prevented employees from working together easily. “Over the past few years, changes to our organizational structure meant that newly formed teams always began a collaboration with a discussion about tooling,” says Becky Wilson, Director of IT Product and Strategy at Expedia Group. “That debate over preferred solutions takes a toll on teams.”
Not all of those tools function well in a multinational corporate space, either. “One of our tools created a lot of sharing and versioning issues for us,” says Nelson. That made it hard to coauthor, collaborate in real time, and ensure that Expedia Group teams could point to a single, consistent version of that document. “The biggest unlock to moving our whole company into a single platform is the ability to coauthor naturally,” she adds. “And we also needed to find files easily—tough with disparate solutions.”
That wasn’t all. Expedia Group maintained security, but again, extra costs were involved. As an Insider Threat Strategist, Insider Threat Operations DPI – Security Cyber Defense, at Expedia Group, Marc Lawes faces the opposing challenges of creating security policies that keep Expedia Group data safe while also keeping the company’s teams as productive as possible. His team examines signals from all the applications in use at the company, weeding out the innocuous ones to focus on real threats and stop them before they cause trouble. But with several systems in play, those challenges multiply. “With disparate systems, we have to watch five or six separate tool sets that all do the same thing,” he notes. “Imagine watching five or six different safes, all in different locations. It becomes exponentially harder to maintain a good overall security posture. My team needs to have a greater breadth of knowledge to understand how all the different events in the various tools impact security.”
Unless a standard was launched, Lawes’s team faced ongoing complexity, and Expedia Group was in for a future of paying for multiple software licenses for duplicative solutions. A corporate change at the top, combined with unforeseen world events, was about to help the company course-correct in a big way.
Decluttering the tool inventory
From December of 2019 to well into the first half of 2020, the company navigated change on a scale that might overwhelm a lot of organizations. Just weeks after both a new CEO and Chairman of the Board took over, COVID-19 flattened the travel industry, challenging it on an unprecedented scale. “We absolutely shifted our focus to the value for customers, stripping out any unnecessary busywork that takes up our time,” explains Nelson. “Having seen a lot of wins in our early COVID-19 quarantine response, our leadership was inspired to ask: ‘Where else could we apply that same energy, momentum, and singular focus?’”
An answer that immediately surfaced to the top of initiatives was a move to streamline the tool set for Expedia Group users. OneDrive would become the Expedia Group standard for file storage and sharing, with SharePoint used for files shared by teams. “After taking a look at the available solutions, we found that OneDrive and SharePoint with its shared library capability made the most sense by a long shot,” says Frueh.
Early in 2020, Nelson, Frueh, and their teams began the groundwork for the first waves of migration, totaling 11,000 users. “Microsoft OneDrive is a really stable, robust tool for all environments,” says Nelson. “And seeing where Microsoft is making investments in web and mobile for these core solutions has really helped me make the decision that OneDrive is the right place for all our employees.”
Knowing the people and the tools
It was always about people for Expedia Group leadership. “Change management and the human aspects of this migration process were the critical piece,” says Nelson. “The technology is so straightforward that the migration itself has been a nonevent.” Her team followed the ADKAR Model for change management: awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement. The process started with leader-to-leader communications. The team then began listening sessions, carefully choosing a diverse selection of power users across the company to gain the broadest possible perspective. “It was crucial for me to not bring in my own biases and burning questions,” reflects Nelson. “We really let the conversations evolve from the employee perspective.” Those sessions pinpointed key areas for training, required configuration changes, and much more.
Initially engaging with the Microsoft Store team gave Expedia Group change managers a solid grounding in the basics of OneDrive use so they could give employees the best possible policy and usage guidance. And because Expedia Group has a “choose your own device” policy, it was important that its workforce— half personal computer users and half Mac users—receive the best information on using those devices effectively and enjoy the same experience. “We worked with the Accessibility Product Manager for OneDrive to get specific help in deploying a screen reader for one of our employees who is blind,” recounts Nelson. “We felt that he shouldn’t have to, in essence, pay an additional tax on doing fundamental knowledge worker tasks.”
In Nelson’s words, OneDrive features like Known Folder Move, which easily transfers files to the cloud, and Files on Demand, which saves local disk space, are table stakes for a modern file storage solution. “Our users value that capability,” she adds.
Putting change management first for a painless rollout
Before the migration, Frueh’s biggest concern was around the enormity of the task. “We had to make sure that everything was migrated correctly, with permissions and shares kept intact,” he says. “Honestly, it was more challenging collecting details about whose files would move and when than actually moving them.” That’s why Nelson and her team worked assiduously during the first migration and continue to gather those details going forward.
Nelson shared Frueh’s apprehension. “What has been a source of concern for me has been the scale of the migration,” she says. “How do I have these very impactful 15-minute conversations with the 25,000 people it affects?” For her, a hyper-organized network model has been the answer to giving Expedia Group teams worldwide the attention she felt they needed and deserved, especially given the abrupt change to remote work caused by COVID-19. “We’re already in a heightened anxiety state,” she adds. “We wanted to make the move as easy as possible, anticipating problems ahead of time to deliver white glove service. That’s where the Customer Engineering Migration team was such a big help.”
The Customer Engineering Migration team, Microsoft experts at migration technology, introduced Expedia Group to Mover, its software tool of choice. The Mover tool works behind the scenes, copying each user’s files over without intruding on their workflow. “If it weren’t for the Customer Engineering Migration team and Mover, we would not have had a successful file store migration this quickly,” says Nelson. “We leaned on the Mover tool for all the checklist type of tasks, like getting permissions right and ensuring that files had copied properly. That freed us to do the more impactful change management: training, awareness, and providing human contact for our employees.” Frueh looks forward to working with the Customer Engineering Migration team for the remaining phases of the migration. “We’ll stick with the Mover tool because it’s been such a great experience for us,” he says. “It’s made the move seamless for our employees. Without that and support from the Customer Engineering Migration team, we would have spent a lot more time and wouldn’t have met our timeline.”
Nelson’s team has begun using Daily TEC (Tools Enable Collaboration), an Expedia Group SharePoint site that hosts webinars and other persistent resources needed to support user learning and adaption.
Safeguarding teamwork
Security and compliance touch every area of the company, from securing customer data to exchanging files with colleagues. For a public company like Expedia Group, identifying and mitigating potential security risks is critical. Nelson’s team is working to refine data loss prevention (DLP) policies across the enterprise. “Azure Security Center and Microsoft 365 compliance center have been very helpful,” she says. The company values the ability to fine-tune those solutions regionally so that they accept the appropriate format; what might be a phone number in one country could resemble a credit card number in other parts of the world.
Wilson relies on highly secure file-sharing technology not only for her own use at work, but to keep workers productive all over the world. “Because Expedia Group is a global company that works online, cybersecurity is incredibly important to our business,” she says. “Secure file sharing (internally and externally) is a core requirement for this type of tool, alongside encryption and DLP. We review products, like OneDrive, against our security requirements on a regular cadence as compliance requirements and risk management evolve.”
Expedia Group appreciates the flexibility that OneDrive provides when it comes to external file sharing. The company currently uses a functionality through which employees can restrict sharing to a specific group of people. There are plans in place to move to a broader sharing strategy with “Anyone links” that are accessible to anyone with the appropriate password. Links will also have defined expiration dates. Ultimately, the goal is to have employees always sharing links instead of files.
Lawes considers security from an operational perspective. “Just knowing that we have a centralized platform where we can monitor threats and set up security rules and policies evenly is a tremendous win,” he says. “Now as we consolidate down to one tool, we can begin to devise a strategy to better look at alerts and take advantage of some of the security offerings from Microsoft 365 E5 to better protect data and implement data loss prevention.” Monitoring traffic and checking egress and ingress points drives IT security people to distraction, according to Lawes. Each separate security solution adds complexity, making it exponentially more difficult to maintain an adequate security posture. “Distilling all those disparate systems into one collective tool with Microsoft solutions is a game-changer for security,” he says.
It was obvious that not only might the company save significant annual licensing cost on overlapping solutions—it could achieve far-reaching productivity benefits. “By consolidating functionality in one tool set, we can work in the same platform to use each other’s code, share ideas, and collaborate in a stronger, faster way,” adds Nelson.
Fueling collaboration, cutting costs
Approaching the next cycle for license renewal, Expedia Group anticipates major savings—about 20 percent of the previous annual licensing spend. Productivity gains are already showing up, according to Wilson. “As teams grow their document coauthoring habits and sharing via OneDrive, we see productivity benefits along with cost optimization for Microsoft 365,” she says. “Using OneDrive has helped cross-functional teams collaborate actively in a common place.”
Nelson looks forward to seeing more Expedia Group employees adopt the Microsoft 365 mobile apps to further lift productivity. “Every time I’m in a webinar or a one-to-one conversation, I remind our employees that there are apps for OneDrive, SharePoint, To Do, and Planner. They should get all of them, plus the Microsoft Office app, which includes Word, Excel, and PowerPoint,” she says. Nelson also encourages everyone to use the Office Lens app, which photographs whiteboards and documents, converting the image to document format. “Being able to click through an edit or review a document from my mobile device saves so much time. It profoundly reduces friction and boosts collaboration.”
Expedia Group rolled out the “Modern” experience in SharePoint, using the hub and home site infrastructure for its intranet. All employees who have the SharePoint mobile app receive notifications for all the sites they follow. “One of our challenges is unified content distribution,” says Nelson. One of her 2021 goals is to eliminate cross-posting across multiple channels. “Being able to post content to our intranet with SharePoint and have a mobile notification pop up in context is brilliant,” she says.
Expedia Group found that Microsoft solutions smoothed the transition to working at home for its large workforce. Key features included the ability to review and edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files from a mobile device. Senior leadership also used SharePoint to create integrated communication sites for all-staff presentation decks, along with work-from-home guidance and blog posts.
Other future plans include expanding Expedia Group’s fledgling QnA Maker bot deployment in Azure. The bot will connect with the company’s online collaboration and help desk platforms to answer the most commonly asked user questions. Any question that needs escalation to a live-agent chat would automatically create a service ticket to quickly connect employees with help.
As the rollout continues, Nelson and Frueh are gratified by the responses they see from employees. “As some people return to a physical office space from remote work, we have to readjust how we work together,” Nelson says. “By consolidating everyone’s usage to OneDrive, and storing shared files in SharePoint, we’re tapping into the potential of Microsoft 365.” Frueh is also excited about next steps. “Consolidating our tools under a one-vendor strategy makes me super excited about the future of productivity and collaboration,” he says. “We use OneDrive and other Microsoft 365 solutions to build a comprehensive, focused strategy and a highly secure, world-class productivity experience for our employees. And we’re just scratching the surface.”
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“We use OneDrive and other Microsoft 365 solutions to build a comprehensive, focused strategy and a highly secure, world-class productivity experience for our employees. And we’re just scratching the surface.”
Jason Frueh, Productivity Engineering Manager, Expedia Group
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