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Built in the cloud. Engineered for your enterprise.
Bergelectric on evaluating Microsoft BPOS-S and choosing Google Apps
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Editor’s Note:
We invited Kyle Swafford, Director of IT Services for Bergelectric, to share the story of Bergelectric’s evaluation of Google Apps and Microsoft BPOS-S and their subsequent migration from Novell Groupwise to Google Apps using Google Apps Authorized Reseller SADA Systems, Inc.
Since our founding in 1946,
Bergelectric
Corporation has provided electrical contracting on thousands of construction projects for clients such as Phoenix International Raceway, the FBI, the University of Southern California, and Ritz Carlton Hotels. Bergelectric has more than 1,300 field employees and over 400 office professionals coast to coast.
Our company had been a Novell Groupwise shop for many years, and IT staff had begun to feel increasing frustration with the platform due to its stagnancy. They were forced to dedicate substantial time and resources to maintaining servers across many sites nationwide. And we had to enforce email storage quotas of 100MB, though this amount of storage was often inadequate for users. Collaboration possibilities were practically nonexistent. In short, this aging environment wasn’t keeping pace with Bergelectric and this created a significant challenge for the organization.
The choice to move to a hosted e-mail service was discussed passionately at every level of the company and marked a significant departure from the costly, and dated, infrastructure constraints of our on-premise system. After we made the decision to move to a hosted provider, we spent a considerable amount of time comparing offerings, including Microsoft BPOS-S and Google Apps. Initially we found Microsoft BPOS-S an attractive option, but as we delved deeper into the contract and piloted a production environment deployment we found the BPOS-S solution came up short - even with the significant concessions Microsoft made in order to be competitive with Google. For example, we were put off by the fact that we would have to go through a third party company for email archiving and retention. We soon came to the realization that we would have to invest significant additional time and money into BPOS in order to meet our initial expectations of migrating to the cloud.
We decided to revisit Google Apps. For email archiving and retention,
Google Message Discovery
was easier to use, significantly cheaper, better integrated into the entire email migration process, and offered more features than the third party options available with BPOS. Once more, through the course of our lengthy evaluation, Google continued to update Apps’ functionality to incorporate virtually all of the features that we had valued in Microsoft’s offering. After updates such as Google Calendar Sync, which syncs events between Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook Calendar, and the ability to delegate calendar management to an administrative assistant, we had reached the tipping point where users adamant about using Outlook became confident in the capabilities of the Google Apps suite.
Following a rapid response by a combined team from Google and Google Apps Authorized Reseller,
SADA Systems, Inc.
, Bergelectric quickly made plans to “Go Google.” Key components of the deployment included user synchronization between Active Directory and Google Apps, single sign-on to Apps using Active Directory credentials, migration of all data from Groupwise to Google (including historical email, contacts and calendar items), Google Apps integration with BlackBerry Enterprise Server, implementation of the Google Message Discovery product for mail archiving and discovery, and a complete training and change management effort to ensure the smoothest possible transition and high user adoption rates.
Our migration off the Groupwise platform has allowed the IT staff to focus its resources on more strategic, business-driven initiatives in the online space. The IT team has regained precious time previously spent patching and keeping the e-mail servers running and are now able to focus on things like business continuity and compliance. Employees have a generous 25 GB of e-mail storage and the ability access e-mail and collaboration tools from our many offices and remote project sites, whether it’s via a desktop, laptop or mobile device.
We were impressed by Google’s commitment to making it easy and simple for long-term on-premise users to migrate to the cloud. And Google’s
data liberation policy
gave us peace of mind that, if we ever wanted to move platforms, we’d be able to readily do so. Once more, their commitment to open standards and APIs allow us to access our own data and customize our implementation in ways that we never thought possible. As our business needs evolve, we can find additional apps in the
Google Apps Marketplace
or we can easily build our own on
Google App Engine.
Overall, our employees have been extremely happy with the move to Google Apps. IT is relieved to finally have true redundancy, painless scalability and better control, all while no longer needing to maintain remote servers and tape backups. Management is pleased with the cost savings and vastly improved service offerings.
Posted by Kevin Gough, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Google Enterprise
Introducing the Google Small Business Blog
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Most every business, including ours,
starts small
. These days, technology is giving businesses even more ways to grow bigger... faster.
In our recent
Small Business series
on the Official Google Blog, a handful of real-life entrepreneurs have shared their experiences building companies from scratch and embracing Internet tools that have taken their businesses to the next level. We’ve received fantastic feedback about these posts, and realized that there’s a healthy appetite among small- and medium-sized business owners who want to know all about the latest web tools and tricks. Fortunately, we have lots more to share with you, too!
That’s why we’re introducing the
Google Small Business Blog
, a central hub that brings together all the information about our products, features and projects of specific interest to the small business community. Rather than having to sleuth around in many different locations for details about
templates for creating video ads on YouTube
,
tips for your employees using Gmail
or
how to respond to the business reviews on your Place Page
, you can find all of this helpful information right here in one place.
Of course, we’ll continue to post relevant news about individual services such as
AdWords
,
Apps
,
Google Places
and
YouTube
on their respective
“home” blogs
, but feel free to visit or subscribe to the
Google Small Business Blog
to get everything relating to your small business needs. We’re starting small today, but who knows what tomorrow will have in store!
Posted by Deanna Yick, Small Business Blog Team
LA’s move to Google Apps continues apace
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Earlier today, the Los Angeles city council voted unanimously in favor of completing the City’s move to Google Apps. More than 10,000 City employees are already using
Google Apps for Government
, and Los Angeles taxpayers are expected to save more than $5.5 million.
Within a few months and in less than a year since the project began, we expect that all 30,000 city employees, including the 13,000 members of the Los Angeles Police Department and other public safety officials, will be migrated to Google Apps. LA’s move to the cloud is the first of its kind, and it’s not surprising that it’s taken a little longer than anticipated to identify and address all of the City’s unique requirements. We’re very pleased with the progress to date, and are committed to making this a great success for Los Angeles and a milestone for cloud computing.
Posted by Jocelyn Ding, Director of Operations
Update on Wave for Google Apps
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Soon we’ll be giving Google Apps customers access to
many more Google services
. In the meantime, we want to share an update on Google Wave, a web app for real time communication and collaboration, which has been
available to customers in Labs
since May. Since we first showed Wave as a developer preview
at Google I/O
last year, it set a high bar for what was possible in a web browser. But despite its compelling features for particular tasks, such as discussing and developing content in small groups, Wave has not grown as quickly as we would have liked. For that reason, we don’t plan to continue to develop Wave as a stand-alone product, though we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year. We have already open sourced several components related to Google Wave, so our customers and partners can continue the innovation. In addition, we will work on tools so that users easily "liberate" their content from Wave.
You can read more on future plans for Wave on the
Google Blog
. We are proud of the work the Wave team has done, which has pushed web technology forward, and we will extend the technology for use in other Google projects. Finally, we are hugely thankful to those who have been testing Google Wave with us over the past couple months.
Posted by Matt Glotzbach, Product Management Director
New imagery for Google Earth Pro
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
We're pleased to announce the release of new imagery data across the globe within
Google Earth Pro
.
International coverage is a key feature in this release, including parts of Mexico, Argentina, South Africa, India, and China, to name a few. See the crowds gathering for an soccer match in Johannesburg, or marvel at the rapidly-changing Shanghai skyline.
The United States imagery updates feature key urban sites, such as Boston, San Francisco, El Paso, Des Moines, and Portland, Maine. With the release of exclusive data layers in Google Earth Pro 5.2, professionals can leverage the new imagery with exclusive access to parcel outlines, traffic counts, and demographic data.
Blue car icons offer users historical traffic counts for thousands of locations across the United States, dating back to the 1960’s in some locations. Civil engineers in El Paso can leverage the new imagery in addition to analyze traffic counts to determine the best location for a new stop sign.
Parcel data is also available for most urban areas. With the new imagery, a realtor in, say, San Francisco can use parcel data to spec out a property site, determine parcel zoning, market value and parcel number.
The new imagery and exclusive data layers make Google Earth Pro the right choice for industry professionals looking to leverage state-of-the-art imagery with compelling data analysis.
To learn more about the new Google Earth data layers, check out this
Google Lat Long blog post
.
Posted by Coleman Rusnock, Google Earth Pro team
Upgrade your users’ knowledge with Google Apps Tips and Tricks
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
As a Google Apps trainer, I’ve spent more than two years working with Google Apps customers on deployments, researching how they use
resources provided by Google
or from our
professional training partners
.
I always learn a lot from “Go Live” week – the first days of deployment, when users start to discover Apps’ features and capabilities. But for me, the real “aha” comes a month or so later, when users are familiar enough with Apps that they want to dive in and do more. I often see people beginning to seek out and share power tips and tricks for using Apps around that time.
To help with that sharing, we’re announcing a new addition to the
Google Apps Deployment Site
: a center for
Google Apps Tricks and Tips
. This center contains a collection of ideas and suggestions that that users can try to take their Apps use to the next level. The first collection of tips focuses on Gmail, but insights on using Docs and other features are in the works.
View this image in detail
here
.
The tips are short, easy to understand, and incorporate step-by-step graphics to walk the user through the tip. They’re designed to encourage users to discover features of Google Apps they may not have known existed, and to educate them when new functionality is incorporated into the products.
We’ve made it easy for Google Apps administrators to use these resources. Our
Tips and Tricks Getting Started Guide
walks you through the process of incorporating the tips and tricks in your training site. (If you haven’t created a launch or training site,
check out our support site templates
for an easy way to get started.)
Give
Google Apps Tips and Tricks
a try and watch how quickly your users become more collaborative, productive, and proficient as they incorporate the newly learned features into their daily routine.
Posted by Gary Giurbino, Google Enterprise Training team
Roberto Cavalli fashions Google Apps
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Editor's note:
Continuing our “Going Google Everywhere” series, we’re pleased to welcome Roberto Cavalli. Roberto Cavalli, the globally renowned Italian fashion house, has chosen Google Apps to consolidate their IT, boost productivity and support the company’s global workforce in a more efficient way. Carlo Di Biagio, Cavalli’s Group Chief Operating Officer, tells their story.
We were looking for a solution that would allow us to consolidate all the communication systems currently used by the group into one single system. Having analysed the cost implications and a range of benefits – such as reliability and the 99.9% uptime service level agreements, we selected Google Apps as our new communication and collaboration technology.
We started by adopting Gmail but quickly discovered the power of other applications included as part of Google Apps Premier Edition, such as Sites and Google Video for Business which allow us to easily share videos, pictures and presentations. For people working with product catalogues, picture archives of collections and picture archives for press, accessing those files without overloading their PCs or slowing down their systems while sending large attachments is a great advantage.
The next phase of adoption will use Google Sites to create an intranet to organise, search and share the entire picture archive of collections and catwalk shows within the group. Thanks to Google’s technology, our employees will no longer need to send large images via email or to search for them in archives and folders – the pictures will be stored and organized on customised Google Sites and located within seconds thanks to the integrated Google search.
And, going forward, we will use Google Video for Business to upload catwalk videos, making them instantly available to all of Roberto Cavalli’s boutiques across the world.
So what is the value of all of this? We estimate that by adopting the tools which simplify our work and allow us to cut down on the time we spend on non-critical tasks, such as searching for old e-mails or organizing meetings, we can save up to 40,000 Euros per year in overhead costs and through increased productivity. However, there is another extremely important point we should not forget, even though more difficult to measure: the satisfaction of our employees who appreciate the technology that helps them work better and more creatively.
Posted by: Malgosia Rigoli, Google Enterprise
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