We turned to the Cloud to provide email and applications for increased collaboration across our global operations.

For us to be able to communicate effectively with each store we needed to look at how we delivered our email, collaboration and general communications to our disparate workforce. Our legacy on-premise solutions needed a significant investment and we had to make both a technical and commercial decision as to how best we moved forward.

Our old GroupWise 6.5 email system required upgrading and for the same budget as we were spending on maintenance contracts we moved to the cloud and saved tens of thousands of pounds on a brand new email system.

Working with CTS has been an absolute joy so far in our G Suite project. They are a well organised, can-do outfit with bags of energy and enthusiasm. We feel we’re in safe hands on the technical side and our own IT staff are full of confidence in the project and seem renewed and refreshed. We are convinced the Google platform is a big digital culture carrier, and will deliver great productivity gains and closer collaboration. CTS being involved gives me peace of mind during a transformation that we know we need to get right!

We selected CTS as our Google implementation partner through G-Cloud, following assessment of a number of possible partners. We chose CTS on the basis of price, the expertise demonstrated in their offer, and positive references from other organisations (including local authority references). Our experience of working with CTS has been very good, and we are happy to recommend them to other organisations who are making the move to G Suite. We have been well supported by CTS throughout our migration, have found their knowledge invaluable, and have found them very good suppliers to work with. Looking to the future we expect to be building on the successfully partnership with CTS to support our services in taking the fullest possible advantage of the powerful capabilities available from G Suite, including introducing Chromebox for Meetings and Chromebooks.

We made the decision at Fire Protection Online to dump Microsoft Outlook and Exchange and to go into the ‘Cloud’ with G Suite. I’ve been a Gmail user for years and would use nothing else, but everyone else was still a little nervous stepping out of the comfort zone of Outlook. I told everyone that training wouldn’t be needed but they did not believe me (this usually happens when I tell anyone that something will be easy). Migrating the entire company’s Outlook accounts, folders, calendars, contacts, etc, was a breeze as we contracted the wonderful people at Cloud Technology Solutions and they did it on a weekend without a glitch. So, after just three days, everyone admitted that Gmail and G Suite are fabulous. Learning to use it took a few minutes and spam is no more (hard to believe until you try it). And, that’s my tip. Try G Suite and Cloud Technology Solutions for your business. You will not regret it.

GroupWise 2012 required us to run it on a new and unfamiliar operating system which would only introduce additional risk, training and ultimately greater cost of ownership.

the most mature and widely available of the solutions we considered. It was the logical choice, bearing in mind our geographical spread

Cloud Technology Solutions came up with a commercial plan to best suit our needs. They were always patient and answered questions which came out between the time of making a decision and the go live.

I believe that Cloud is not just another buzzword, but instead the future of productivity for organisations. Simply put working in a web browser means there is less need to install and update local applications. Plus, it gives our employees extra flexibility to take work away from their desks onto mobile phones, tablets and other gadgets.

We had outsourced the provision of our email to a third party who delivered us a hosted Microsoft Exchange and Outlook service. In addition we used local copies of Office 2003 as our productivity tool but this did not provide us with much in the way of collaboration. We wanted to move to a platform that gave our users more freedom as when they were away from the office they were only able to access email and Office remotely via our VPN. The idea of bringing all our systems in-house was looked at but we did not want to design, build and support our own Exchange infrastructure as we were working on other more business beneficial projects at the time and did not want to remove resources from these.

We had been using Lotus Notes since 1999 and knew we needed to replace it for a number of reasons. Firstly, it was unreliable with approximately 40 calls being logged monthly to our help desk, which equated to 11 hours of support time. A number of these had to be escalated to IBM, causing further problems and delays.

Lotus Notes had become restrictive, space was at a premium and users felt functionality was way behind the modern offerings.

Cloud Technology Solutions (CTS) were selected via the G-Cloud framework, as the design, implementation and training partner for our migration to Google Apps. CTS met all the criteria within cost, technical, training, 3rd party apps and migration tools. Throughout the migration process all CTS staff conducted themselves professionally and were a core part of the technical design and training work streams in the project. Our experience of working with CTS is excellent and they helped us deliver a successful G Suite project and real benefits associated with this. We are still working with CTS today. Our work together now includes integration with our on-premise applications where the CTS development team are working with Warwickshire development teams to understand the best approach for using Google APIs. I would recommend using CTS to anyone considering a move to G Suite. They are a pleasure to work with and provide a professional service and set of migration tools, both of which are essential to a successful ‘Going Google’ project.