Google Apps Migration

Challenge/Opportunity

A Washington, DC-based non-profit organization had been experiencing repeated outages in November with their internally-hosted Microsoft Exchange email platform and needed assistance with finding a solution. Year-end contributions in December are a major source of the non-profit organization’s revenue so a solution needed to be identified and implemented immediately.

Solution

Widelity reviewed the existing email platform and then assisted the non-profit organization in their decision-making process and then with their migration to Google Apps, hosted by Google Inc. Widelity’s technical services included:

• Setting up the Google Apps organizations and users, and then adding user groups in order to create distribution lists and email addresses for groups of employees.
• Configuring the various applications, such as email, contacts, calendaring, and other collaborative functions, including Google Docs/Drive.
• Creating calendar resources, such as conference rooms, that can be reserved for meetings by employees within Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook.
• Activating email services by updating the mail exchange (MX) records within the domain name services (DNS) to enable incoming email to be delivered to the new Google Apps accounts.
• Helping employees migrate their email messages, contacts, and calendar events using Google’s client-side tools for Microsoft environments, including Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Outlook (GAMMO) and Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook (GASMO).
• Supporting the configuration of mobile devices, such as Androids and iPhones.
• Transitioning from Microsoft Outlook to Gmail for those employees who prefer to work within a web browser going forward, rather than Microsoft Outlook.
• Creating shared calendars, and adding new calendar events.
• Implementing Google Docs/Drive in order to collaborate on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, including local synchronizations, online real-time collaboration, and remote access via mobile devices.

Benefits

Widelity helped the non-profit organization in restoring email and collaboration services to near-100% levels again, within just a few weeks of being contacted, and in time to process their December spike in contributions. In addition to providing more reliability and overall functionality than the previous Microsoft Exchange platform, Google Apps provided a reduction in ongoing maintenance costs of more than fifty percent.