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The mission of Expedia, one of the leading travel services companies in the world, is to provide its customers with everything they need to research, plan, and purchase a trip. The company gives consumers direct access to travel products and services through its North American Web site, localized versions throughout Europe, and extensive partnerships in Asia. Expedia-branded Web sites feature airline tickets, hotel reservations, car rentals, cruises, and many other in-destination services from a broad selection of partners. The company’s portfolio of brands includes Expedia.com, hotels.com, Hotwire, Expedia Corporate Travel, TripAdvisor, and Classic Vacations.
“The role of IT at Expedia is to provide applications, connectivity, and anything else that’s needed in order for the business to meet its goals,” says Mark Whitehurst, Director, Applications Engineering at Expedia. “For a long time, our focus was on facilitating and managing rapid growth during our first couple of years. Now we want to make more progress in the area of productivity, and one of the keys to that is effective long-distance collaboration.”
The company’s messaging and collaboration environment is built on Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2, deployed on 12 HP DL380 and DL580 server computers running the Windows Server® 2003 Enterprise Edition operating system. The system supports 5,000 mailboxes, 4,500 of which are user accounts. Nearly all Expedia employees use one of the many available instant messaging programs as a productivity-enhancing tool; the company wants to standardize this technology in the near future. Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 enables document sharing and collaboration across the enterprise.
“Remote access is very big for us right now,” says Chris Wolfe, Senior Systems Engineer at Expedia. “Many of our employees use the network from remote office locations or while traveling. It’s important to us that they be able to access the resources they need in a secure, compartmentalized way that’s appropriate to their roles.” Some of the ways that remote and mobile workers access the Expedia network is through Microsoft Office Outlook® Web Access, virtual private networking, and a variety of mobile devices.
Solution
As part of its search for tools that would better enable long-distance collaboration, Expedia deployed Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 in October 2006. Microsoft Services demonstrated the beta version of Exchange Server 2007 to Expedia technicians in April 2006, seeking their feedback on the installation process and administrative console. When it came time to deploy the software at Expedia in October, Expedia drew upon the expertise of Wadeware, a consulting firm specializing in communication and collaboration.
Bill Wade, Senior Consultant at Wadeware, says, “We used the Microsoft Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer prior to the installation to verify that the environment was ready. We sent the output that we received to Microsoft Services, who went through it to confirm that there were no configuration issues that would present a problem for Exchange Server 2007.”
The Expedia deployment team installed Exchange Server 2007 with the Mailbox server role on an HP server computer with a 64-bit dual core processor and six gigabytes of random access memory. They also configured three Dell 2850 64-bit servers with:
- Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging server role.
- The Hub Transport and Client Access server roles.
- Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2004 Enterprise Edition.
With this configuration, ISA Server enables connectivity with Windows Mobile® software and remote procedure calls. All of the servers run the Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition operating system.
Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Gold Systems provided valuable assistance with deploying and configuring Unified Messaging— which provides e-mail, voice mail, and fax services through Exchange Server 2007—on the company’s existing Nortel telephone system, using Dialogic PBX-IP Media Gateway with DNI. Gold Systems worked with Expedia IT administrators to implement the system, training them on features such as dialing restrictions and customized auto-attendants. Expedia reports a smooth, successful installation and reliable messaging access since Exchange Server 2007 was deployed. The company plans to begin migrating substantial numbers of users to the new environment in early 2007.
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