Bergelectric migrate from Novell GroupWise to Google Apps

Since it’s 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.

Bergelectric had been a Novell Groupwise customer for many years, and IT staff had begun to feel increasing frustration with the platform due to its stagnancy. Bergelectric were forced to dedicate substantial time and resources to maintaining servers across many sites nationwide.

It’s a typical story, limited email storage quotas, with was 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 deciding to move to a hosted provider, Bergelectric spent a considerable amount of time comparing offerings, including Microsoft BPOS-S and Google Apps. Initially Microsoft BPOS-S was the most attractive option, but as Bergelectric delved deeper into the contract and piloted a production environment deployment they found the BPOS-S solution came up short – even with the significant concessions Microsoft made in order to be competitive with Google.

Bergelectric 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 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 Bergelectric 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, Bergelectric had reached the tipping point where users adamant about using Outlook became confident in the capabilities of the Google Apps.