Tangible enriches their company with Google Apps for Business.

Tangible is a widely successful integrated marketing agency which helps clients to understand their customers and promote themselves effectively. With a portfolio of well known clients such as WWF, Oxfam and Grant Thornton, Tangible are continuing to grow in global success. With over 300 employees the Tangible group have four offices located across the U.K. In September 2010 their licensing for their old mailing system was up for company wide renewal and the team at Tangible saw an opportunity to revolutionise their I.T systems and overcome the challenges they faced with their traditional archaic systems.

With our self hosted environment we had a single point of failure with our internet connection. Losing that connection for any reason would not only impact staff sending emails, but client emails to us would also fail or be delayed causing numerous problems. One of the most fundamental aspects of our company is that we are able to communicate with our clients at all times. This meant that we had to remove that single point of failure. Moving to a cloud based solution such as Google Apps for business was not only beneficial to restore time and resources to our IT department, but it was also essential to fulfill the needs of a growing communications business spread out over multiple offices. Chris Hamilton (Head of systems)

Before their migration to Google Apps Tangible were using traditional methods when it came to emails, communications and document sharing. With over 300 mail boxes their systems were becoming dated and they decided on migrating from Novell GroupWise to Google Apps for business. Chris Hamilton managed the project.

There were various reasons that we had begun to look for an alternate solution to our mail servers. We are a small IT team and the cost and effort involved in maintaining the email environment was becoming too great as the company grew. We also had several limitations inherent in the self hosted environment, such as mailbox size, backup, and primarily availability.

Here at Cloud Technology Solutions we’re working with many organisations, large and small, to help them move to the cloud whether that’s to Google Apps, Office 365 or any other large cloud platform. After some deliberation Tangible decided to use our renowned Cloud Migrator Tool. Chris continues: ‘We spent a great deal of time looking around for GroupWise to Google Apps migration tools, and as well as coming highly recommended by our Google contact the Cloud Migrator Tool was by far the best one available.’

The migration process ran smoothly however there was a technical hitch early on in the project. Our 24/7 technical support team were able to respond speedily and resolve the issue within hours.

There was one issue with the migration tool license that halted our migration process. With it being a Saturday morning I expected to have to wait until the weekend, but I was able to get hold of our contact at Cloud Technology Solutions, and he managed to get someone to fix the license count and send the new version out to me within a few hours. This meant that we were able to resume the migration and complete that user batch on time that weekend.

At Tangible their primary focus when utilising Apps has been Gmail and Google Calendar. Google Apps allows staff multiple access and collaboration on documents, sync their calendars and communicate via chat, email, or even video chat from any location at any time around the world.

The ability to share calendars across our offices, and companies, has been a huge benefit to
staff. The constant availability to access email and calendars is also extremely important.

After deployment of any new IT system companies can have teething problems however the move to Google Apps for Business proved to be painless and well received.

Responses have been positive. Most staff members tend to use Gmail for the personal email
accounts and so the switch from the old email system was extremely smooth for them with very
little training required. The simplicity, speed, and constant availability of the new system has also
been very well received, as well as the huge increase in mailbox storage space.

With improved security, communication and efficiency Tangible has seen a dramatic change in their business . Google Apps for business has dramatically cut their IT costs allowing them to spend money elsewhere helping Tangible to continue to grow and succeed.

There have been many benefits since the migration including financial savings, and system
resilience. However, the biggest benefit we have experienced has been the flexibility created by
having a cloud based email solution. I am a huge fan of cloud based computing. It affords a level of flexibility that is hugely beneficial to those who use it. I think we are going to see an increased focus on free, and paid,cloud based storage that is more consumer friendly than the currentoptions available. Dropbox and iCloud are good examples of this.