Office Timeline – Stand out and impress your audience with integrated project timelines
Office Timeline utilizes Azure technologies with their new PowerPoint application to deliver high quality professional time lines and Gannt charts instantly so that users can impress their audience with just a couple of clicks.
Create professional Gannt charts, project visuals, and project timelines with Seattle-based startup Office Timeline’s new Microsoft PowerPoint application. Office Timeline’s application frees business professionals from the tedious work of manually creating project visuals that are difficult to produce and manage. With Office Timeline, professionals can quickly create and manage clear, elegant project visuals. Office Timeline’s new Timeline Wizard lets users pick their desired timeline style, and finishes the visual in three easy steps.
Office Timeline’s application enables the user to quickly create, and seamlessly integrate, professional project visuals for any presentation – allowing companies and individuals to distinguish their project plans with beautiful timeline slides, created from within PowerPoint. While these projects have previously taken working professional’s hours to complete, Office Timeline completes the project in just a couple of clicks, says CEO Tim Stumbles. “People actually try to make these project timelines themselves piece by piece because they need project visuals, but they are brittle, fragile, time consuming, and difficult to change. Office Timeline get the details, the data, and turns it into a beautiful presentation right inside PowerPoint.”
Cultivating business relationships and accessing resources has been key part Office Timeline’s growth and prosperity, as with any startup. The Microsoft BizSpark program has provided Office Timeline with Azure as reliable hosting platform, improved scalability, and flexibility – enabling them to establish a customer base of over 1 million users. According to Co-Founder Eddy Malik, “Given the benefits of BizSpark, there is no way we could have launched this business without the state of technology that Azure provides. We have exponentially grown and Azure has been a godsend to our developers. We have been able to expand with hashing and storing. As we’ve grown it has all been so smooth and natural.”
Although not originally reliant on Azure, Office Timeline decided to make the switch after having problems with their previous hosting service says Malik. “At one point we had a great business and PR opportunity and, that day, the entire server went down so nobody had any access. We constantly had issues with email servers and it was really inhibiting our ability to market our product and grow our user base. Consequently, we decided something had to be done. We needed to make a change if we were going to be successful.” After this set back, Office Timeline decided to cultivate a relationship with BizSpark and migrate to Azure to update their technology stack, continues Stumbles. “We looked at other services, but it always ended up being too complicated. Azure’s services have made it an absolute no brainer. When we migrated, we got the file transferred and online in under one hour. Our scale functionality has been amazing and we have not had a single minute of downtime since our switch to Azure. We have ten or twenty times the traffic as before and still no troubles.”
In addition to Azure, Office Timeline utilizes other Microsoft Services to enhance the quality and usability of their product – including CSharp, ASP.NET, Visual Studio, and Visual Studio Online. Visual Studio and Visual Studio Online have been a key part of Office Timeline’s growth says Mallik. “We used to have our own server, but it was difficult to maintain - especially with our overseas office. Since switching to Visual Studio, everything has run flawlessly, it has been perfect.”
Office Timeline’s has been able to use their quality PowerPoint application and essential business partnerships to thrive in the competitive and demanding startup industry. “Our biggest challenge, initially, was getting the product to market quickly. In every effort I made to reach out to the BizSpark team, there have been people that have wanted to help.” says Malik, “We feel lucky and grateful to have worked with BizSpark. We really would not have been able to top the 1 million user mark without them.”
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Microsoft is helping these startups succeed through its BizSpark program. To join or see other startup stories, visit us at our website here. To listen to our startups, check out these podcasts on devradio here.
About BizSpark: Microsoft BizSpark is a global program that helps startups succeed by giving free access to Microsoft Azure cloud services, software and support. BizSpark members receive up to $750 per month of free Microsoft Azure cloud services for 3 years: that’s $150 per month each for up to 5 developers. Azure works with Linux and open-source technologies such as Ruby, Python, Java and PHP. BizSpark is available to startups that are privately held, less than 5-years-old and earn less than $1M in annual revenue.