Creative and account. Agency and client. Partner and peon. When it comes to our priorities and preferences, the differences are many. And epic. But there’s one thing on which we can all agree: Google Apps makes our working lives better. At a basic level, Google Apps has been an improvement because it works well across Macs and PCs. We were previously using Exchange, and it just wasn't friendly to Macs. Actually, it was downright rude. Google Apps plays nicely with everyone. We also saw a significant cost savings, which made our partners happy. Hosted Exchange cost us quite a lot for email. The cost-per-user of Hosted Exchange was expensive for our growing business, compared to Google’s cost-per-user of $50. Beyond what’s already built in to Google Apps, we love the add-ons in the Google Apps Marketplace. We could shell out major chunks of change for existing software to get the robust functions we need, or bog down our developers and build them in-house. Instead, we get them from Marketplace. In fact, that’s the first place we look when we need something new. Bonus: The transition was painless. The team at Umzuzu, our Google Enterprise Partner, was very knowledgeable about the change management we’d need for a successful deployment, technical aspects of mail routing like DNS changes, and all of the other technical aspects involved in our environment. They helped us manage the entire migration process from Hosted Exchange to Google Apps and continue to support us when we have questions, help us learn about new features, and are always sharing tips and tricks. It couldn’t have been easier. Huzzah!

From the outset of Centric Projects, the mantra has been that technology should make life simpler, not more complicated. As a new and innovative company, the firm would not be burdened with legacy systems; racks of servers, VPNs, miles of cable and fiber, complicated mobile logins, and clunky hardware. When we launched Centric, the Umzuzu team got us up and running with Google Apps for Business. We have used Google Apps for Business since we launched our company in 2010. Since then, we've grown to 40 people on over 100 laptops and mobile devices. All company email, calendars and contacts are managed on the cloud, which means we have full and constant access to the most up-to-date information from any location and device. Gmail's search is unbelievably robust, with plenty of storage, which means we can have easy access to a full record of all email communications forever. In addition, from an overhead management standpoint, we've never had the capital expenditure of a server or expensive enterprise software. Google Apps licenses are a variable, easily scalable operating expense. In short, working with Umzuzu and leveraging Google Apps make our lives simpler, not more complicated - and allow us to spend more time on the client and their project, where we belong.

Everyone was operating in different countries, different time zones, and using different email clients. We’d have to send new consultants instructions on how to set up their email clients so we could forward DeyFischer email to them. Corporate contacts and calendars, which are vital in our business, were sent out only once a month because sharing them was so cumbersome. The transition to Google Apps was painless. It didn’t cost a lot to set up and there was no downtime or lost emails. With Google Apps, individuals that used to spend time managing IT processes can go back to focusing on core jobs that make the company money.

Our Mac users have always had a second-class experience on the Exchange server. In 2001 Microsoft released a Mac Outlook client, and for about two years we had an acceptable experience for the Mac users. For much of the last decade we made do with the limited functionality in Entourage. We were hopeful that Outlook 2011 would solve a lot of our issues. Outlook 2011 was better, but it still lacked the features that our PC users enjoyed. We had SharePoint running, but it didn’t play nicely with our Macs. Now we share project calendars directly with clients via Google Calendars. Project managers can do this themselves and don’t need assistance from IT to do so. Since Going Google, Barkley has added 30 additional staff and we just add the accounts. We don’t worry about mail clients, disk space, or what platform they’ll be on; Google Apps finally put us all on the same tools. On the Web, everyone (and device) is equal.

Initially all IT support was in house. As we grew, and added new locations it became increasingly difficult to manage our systems. We have 30 field techs, each at different locations, with 90% of their work being done after hours. Supporting these systems was taxing on our resources. The SharePoint server required a lot of overhead. We had to administratively create share points and maintain VPN tunnels for our remote users. Our users had taken to just emailing the documents instead. In Google Docs, collections were created to share Operations Docs and Sales Docs. With Drive, Corporate Floors was even able to share scheduling docs directly with clients. Umzuzu and Google have been great partners for Corporate Floors and we expect to work with them for the next 18 years!

Our YMCA was in need of a solution that would allow us to improve internal communications for our 2,200 employees. After reviewing our options we decided that Google Apps was a good fit for our needs. While working with Umzuzu our IT department learned a great deal about Google Apps, the process was efficient, interesting and enjoyable. They were easy to work with, offered solutions to our challenges, and were highly professional. Today we brought up Google Apps for the majority of our Full Time staff and it was a very smooth process. This has been the smoothest IT project, with the highest user adoption, and the least amount of issues in the history of our organization. Looking forward to working with Umzuzu on additional projects, we would certainly recommend their work.