To complement our migration services and to ensure you get the best out of your move into the cloud, we also offer custom solutions. We have an experienced team with in-depth knowledge and development expertise around Google-based solutions to help your organisation work better. We develop, support and distribute one of the most flexible Google migration tools on the market, used to migrate tens of thousands of user accounts to Google Apps worldwide. Alongside our migration tools, we have also developed many custom solutions, used both in house and commercially, with Google App Engine and integrated with Google Apps installations.
We know that when moving away from traditional working practices and established ways of getting your work done that there are times when you might think:
Wouldn’t it be great if I could do that in my Google account
Well, the chances are you can, and you may be able to do a lot more than you could in your previous collaboration environment. Google Apps offers a host of extension and integration points and with these we can extend the Google environment to help you work better.
Examples
Contextual Gadgets and Company Data
Many organisations have customer databases, often located on-premises and behind a firewall. You may well be moving your email into the cloud, but you may want to keep this kind of data in-house. With extensions that we can provide, we can securely integrate this in-house data with your email. For example, when an email arrives from a customer of yours, you may want to know more information about this customer, their phone number, what products they have bought from you, when they placed their last order, etc. This data is stored in your in-house database, but using technology built with the Google infrastructure, Cloud Technology Solutions can bring that data into your inbox. When you open an email from a customer, all the information about that customer can be displayed right in the Google mail interface and you no longer need to open a second application or webpage to obtain everything you need to work better – its all there in front of you, and all customised so that only the relevant information is displayed.
Centralised Management of Google Sites Content
Google sites offer a great way to build websites, be they for public viewing or for your own Intranet and there are many extensions and widgets to make life easier. We can help you take this one step further. Often, your web-team will manage your website, and you may have a content management system so that non-technical users can edit content without having to edit code. Similarly, with Google sites, you may have restricted the editing of the sites itself to a group of administrators. We can provide custom solutions that can give you centralised management of content within Google sites so that authorised users can edit content without using the Google sites editor, giving you full control over the layout and design of the site and allowing authorised users to make content changes to some or all parts of your pages as you wish. You could have widgets that display daily news about internal events or important information regarding major deals, all of which can be driven from a central source with no editing of the actual website required.
The Possibilities
The two examples above are just examples of what we can do to help you integrate your existing data and requirements with the Google infrastructure, but think of what else could be achieved. Think how your company works, and how you want your company to work, then contact us. We can research, architect and develop the solutions that will make your move to the cloud even more efficient and effective.