One of our long time clients, Soho Experiential, was on G-Suite for about 8 years or so. It worked, most of their team liked gmail or used Outlook and used google drive as well. We do have some expertise in supporting the G-Suite platform but we approached them in January of 2020 and advised them they would be much better served by migrating to Office 365.
For years they utilized G-Suite as just an email system and nothing more. As we outline the major points below what it created was a fragmented documentation system, lack of collaboration and they often used other tools and platforms to fill in the blanks.
G-Suite’s default documentation makes it difficult to scale a robust document system. As a result SoHo used an onsite storage device, google drive and some even used Dropbox.
Soho was forced to keep and pay for numerous G-Suite mailbox licenses for past employees. G-Suite doesn’t have a viable way to archive inactive mailboxes.
Soho does a lot of collaboration with outside freelancers and G-Suite made creating and securely sharing a central file structure very difficult.
Having team meetings especially remotely is important. Soho ended up relying on Skype calls for conference which sometimes proved difficult and unreliable to host.
Soho need efficient workflows and were forced to pay for 3rd party packages to fill in the gaps where G-Suite simply fell short.
In order to properly use Outlook you need a utility to sync Outlook to Gmail. Often times the sync would fail, create errors or have problems with larger mailboxes.
A point of contact was designated on the Soho team to work with a NeoTech project lead. This was a rather large and complex migration since it involved more then just moving email from one mail to another.
Office 365 allowed Soho to segment and consolidate their file system into different departments and teams. An onsite file system, google drive and Dropbox all rolled into Office 365.
Office 365 offers a lot more options to keep the licenses lean like shared mailboxes among other options. Soho was able to reduce their license spend while increasing value.
Working with outside contractors is easier then ever with Sharepoint. Their freelancers can log into a sharepoint site with no extra cost and gain access to the soho files and resources they need.
Microsoft Teams allows the Soho team to schedule virtual meetings internally as well as invite clients. Microsoft Teams completely streamlined their collaboration and team meetings.
Soho was able to eliminate some outside tools they were using and instead brought that workflow into Office 365. For example getting forms created and approved is now all done within Office 365.
We joined all computers to the Office 365 directory along with Office apps. This meant users had less problems with their email, Outlook and a more productive experience.
After all the smoke cleared Soho has a much more productive experience that is scalable and works anywhere.
Not only has Office 365 improved and addressed some of their current pain points but now they looking to leverage the additional Office 365 tools to add more workflow and time savings to their production.
So in conclusion addressing all of these major points that extend well beyond just simple email use would never have been possible without Office 365.
I'm very happy we moved to Office 365, now file sharing and communication is easier then ever. Especially with the requirement to work from home Office 365 has reliably enabled us to do just that.
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