The client is an IT solutions provider headquartered in India, with more than thousand employees nationwide. The client primarily provides IT support to Indian citizens in e-governance, energy, and utility initiatives and programs.
Challenges faced by the client in the pre-G Suite days
The client was using Microsoft Exchange Server for mailing services across their organization. They faced issues with server maintenance and the IT team had to spend a lot of time attending to support tickets. Also, most of the users were accessing emails through Outlook and had the emails downloaded in their Outlook, adding the cost of additional Outlook licenses to the overall expenditure.
The VP Technology with the client organization wanted to take a relook at the communication and collaboration tools available in the market. They needed a robust solution which would significantly cut down the time and cost investments, and fare exceptionally well on internal performance parameters like – uptime, real-time collaboration, security and more.
The client narrowed down to G Suite Basic as a solution to address most of their challenges. During the discussions with Persistent, a Google Cloud partner, the client listed out the major challenges as a lot of downtime, huge amounts of spam emails, and the increasing time spent on server maintenance and as a result a steep increase in the number of support tickets raised by employees.
Migration to Google Workspace with Persistent
Persistent migrated the client from Microsoft Exchange Server to Google Workspace Basic that includes Gmail, Google Hangouts, Calendar, Google Docs, Google Drive, and Google Sites.
Google Workspace Basic implementation started for 500 users, wherein one year of email data of the employees and all the data for the senior management were migrated from the Microsoft Exchange Server system to Google Workspace.
Persistent carried out the entire deployment of Google Workspace across the client organization through a three-phased deployment process designed by certified Google Workspace consultants at Persistent. The core IT users were covered first, then the early adopters and finally all the users were covered in the company-wide Go Live.
To make the migration and change seamless, Google Workspace change management sessions were designed specific to business needs. All sessions were designed keeping in mind the need for specific departments like HR, Operation, IT etc. and delivered over a period of time, with live environment working as a part of each training session. Also, Persistent designed a training portal for the users to facilitate self-learning of the various Google Workspace apps.
The bigger piece of business transformation was moving out of SharePoint Servers. The client had three major sites running on SharePoint Server. Persistent designed portals and migrated content from these servers to Google Sites, all while maintaining the same content and workflow hierarchies.
Currently, the client has been using Google Workspace for three years and has observed reduced admin overheads, reduced support tickets, IT cost savings, more uptime, smooth internal and external business communications, and employee mobility through Mobile Device Management.
