Summit Goes Google to Improve Mobility and the User Experience

Company Background

Founded in 1992, real estate company Summit is headquartered in Stoke, New Zealand and supports six physical offices and branches in Nelson/Tasman and Marlborough, including offices in Nelson, Stoke, Richmond, Motueka, Blenheim and Picton. With a team of more than 100, Summit is the largest real estate company in the top of the South Island, New Zealand.

Business Challenges

Summit used POP through Outlook and a local online email system. With more than 100 employees and only one IT manager, supporting the IT needs of the company began to become overwhelming.

“It was quite a horrible system,” said General Manager Vaughan Borcovsky.

Of the company’s 100 employees, most are mobile, as they spend time prospecting and listing properties for sale and working with potential buyers.

Because the POP client did not synchronize well with mobile devices, employees had difficulty accessing emails and calendars when off-site. Furthermore, employees did not have the ability to share calendars and the inbox quota was set at 100 megabytes, which became troublesome for some employees.

“We wanted a product that was very easy for everyone use, that was accessible from and would be synced on mobile devices and we wanted all of our information in the same place,” Borcovsky said. “We wanted to have a large data storage limit and we wanted to provide shared calendars.”

Solution

When a new IT manager joined Summit in 2010, the organization began to seriously consider switching platforms.

“I was pushing for MS Exchange, but the manager said to try Google, so we did the trial,” Borcovsky said.

He said the trial was crucial to the decision to Go Google.

“If we didn’t have the involvement of Cloud Sherpas, it wouldn’t have been a successful trial for us,” Borcovsky said. “Cloud Sherpas’ involvement was key.”

During the pilot period, Borcovsky said he began to realise the benefits of Google Apps over a Microsoft Exchange solution.

“We decided that Google Apps was the way to go,” Borcovsky said. “We did a cost comparison between the Microsoft and Google cloud solutions, and Google Apps was far more affordable. We would have had to outsource support issues with Microsoft Exchange and we don’t have to do any of that with Google Apps. With Google Apps, we don’t have to have servers for back-up. There are just so many more features in the Google Apps platform that every user can access.”

Borcovsky said the entire team was happy when the decision to move to Google Apps was announced.

“Employees are thrilled to be able to access their mail, documents and calendars from virtually anywhere. Everyone loves that we can now access everything we need from any computer or smart phone,” he said. “Calendar sharing has also made a world of difference when it comes to scheduling appointments and meetings.”

Results

Summit’s IT manager completed the migration with advice and guidance from Cloud Sherpas. However, though the migration was an overall success, Borcovsky said he wished he would have asked for more help.

“If I had to do it again, I would have gotten Cloud Sherpas to come and spend at least a day with the IT manager and go through the migration,” Borcovsky said. “At the time we were looking at lowering costs, but we could have been better suited if we had more migration training beforehand.”

Now that Summit has transitioned to Google Apps, users no longer have to empty their inboxes to stay under the storage quota, and emails, calendars and documents are now accessible from any device from anywhere with an Internet connection.

“The use of labels and conversation threading has been a major advantage to the team,” Borcovsky said. “Gmail makes it so much easier to keep track of emails, and having the power of Google search on your inbox makes finding emails much more efficient.”

As for the IT manager, Google Apps has freed his calendar so that he may work on more strategic technology initiatives for the company instead of resetting passwords and retrieving missing emails.

Though Summit has not formally surveyed its users for satisfaction, Borcovsky said he can gauge sentiment by the lack of complaints following the transition to Google Apps.

“We certainly know when they’re not happy,” he said with a chuckle. “We’re very happy to have Gone Google.”