By Jody Leon Guerrero, Finance Manager, Thomas Kemper Soda Company

I am the Finance Manager for Thomas Kemper Soda Company. Our company is four years old, and we run a lean and mean operation in Portland, Oregon. We make small-batch, craft-brewed soft drinks sold throughout the western U.S.

Our CEO and sales reps are always on the go—working from their home offices, airplanes, or anywhere with an Internet connection. The rest of us work from the office. Like other companies, we’ve become highly dependent on email to stay in touch. We have our own email server, but for some reason we’ve been unable to share calendars. So we are constantly tracking down our CEO to check his availability for meetings and sending emails to sync up calendars. We also have a file-share server, but people can’t easily connect to it remotely, so we end up using email to share files. It isn’t very efficient, and the emails keep piling up.

Our marketing manager and I share IT duties, plus we pay an outside IT consultant to help with bigger problems. It’s been getting to the point where we just can’t take care of everyone’s problems, which mostly involve setting up email on new computers and solving server connection issues. Recently, our server started acting up and our IT guy told us it would cost $10,000 to replace.

So when Microsoft gave us a demo of Microsoft Office 365, we were blown away by all that it included and immediately saw the potential for our operation. With half our people in the office and half on the road, good communication and collaboration is huge. Using Exchange Online will give us economical hosted email, calendar-sharing, and huge mailboxes—and I won’t have to purchase another piece of hardware.

Employees can contact one another much faster with instant messaging and web conferencing rather than relying on email messaging. Lync Online will also help us communicate with vendors and partners. And our CEO is looking forward to using the web conferencing and screen-sharing capabilities of Lync Online. We plan to move all our file-share documents to SharePoint Online.

Between being able to access documents immediately, see where colleagues and managers are, and get in touch with people immediately, I bet we’ll save at least an hour a day per employee—that’s 40 hours a week companywide. And, I’ll recoup about six hours a week not having to deal with technology support work.

With Office 365, there will be no more painful logon procedures to get to the file-share server, because we can go straight to the cloud to get what we need. Security is a bit of a concern in moving to the cloud, but Microsoft has access to the best security technologies in the world. I am confident that they will keep our data safer than we can.

From my point of view, we will actually save money by switching to Office 365—I estimate $7,400 a year— by eliminating separate conference call and videoconference services, email hosting fees, and consultant fees. We also won’t have to spend $10,000 every three years to refresh an email server.

Office 365 is just what we need to maximize our time and continue to run lean and mean.