Migrating to Google Apps for Business is providing staff at international academic publisher Edward Elgar Publishing with reliable access to their email from anywhere in the world; a key business tool for the company. Migration services from Ancoris helped the company quickly move from an in-house solution that regularly crashed to a cloud-based service that allows staff to access their email as long as they have an internet connection. The move saw both user accounts and email archives transferred for staff working in three offices in two continents.
Business Challenges
Edward Elgar Publishing is a an international academic publisher specialising in high-level economics, business and law titles authored by leading academics and experts from around the globe. An independent, family-run business set up 25 years ago by chairman Edward Elgar, the company currently employs 60 staff across its three offices in Cheltenham and Camberley in the UK and Northampton, MA in the US. It publishes around 300 new titles each year and makes the majority of its sales to university libraries.
Email is key to the company's operations. "We're very much an email-based company," explains Darrel McCalla, IT Manager at Edward Elgar Publishing. "Even if we are working in the same office, we'll email colleagues to ensure we have a paper trail of discussions and decisions. We also need to collaborate with authors and customers all over the world, and email is usually the best way to do that. If our email system goes down, we're losing business and staff can't do their jobs."
However, the company's email system was proving highly unreliable. To allow staff in all three offices to access mail delivered to the mail server running at the company's Cheltenham site, the company used a third-party client to mirror each user's mailbox on the user's desktop or laptop. However, mail wasn't always mirrored completely, so staff weren't seeing all the mail that had been delivered to the server. The client application also crashed frequently, and it could then take a long time to reload and restore access to affected mailboxes. Finally, the client application's web-based interface was poor, making it slow for staff to access email when working away from the office.
The Solution
When McCalla was introduced to Google Apps for Business, he quickly realized that Google Mail as part of a Google Apps for Business with Google Message Security would meet Edward Elgar Publishing's needs for a new solution.
Firstly, McCalla says, "We wanted a solution that would allow staff to access their email from anywhere at any time. A lot of our staff regularly work away from the office and may not have their laptops with them." However, the company needed a solution that would be as effective at handling spam as its existing system. "We get a lot of spam and our previous email system was very good in that area, so we didn't want to take a step back from that," he explains.
Another requirement was to be able to transfer users' complete email history and archives to the new solution, as email is the main information store for the company. Finally, of course, Edward Elgar Publishing also wanted a reliable solution. "We want our users to be confident that as long as they have internet access, they can always get their emails," McCalla says.
Edward Elgar Publishing engaged Google business partner Ancoris as its implementation partner, working with Ancoris to create a migration plan to implement the solution across three different offices in two time zones. "This is a big transition for any company," McCalla points out. "Because Ancoris had experience of doing this before on other platforms—although this was the first time they'd handled a move from our particular environment—they could provide standard processes and timescales that helped us plan the change. We were impressed by the way Ancoris made sure they highlighted areas where we might have issues and worked with us to fix those issues before they had an impact on the migration.
Ancoris also helped the company understand how it could make use of other elements of Google Apps for Business to improve areas such as calendaring and global address books, where the company's previous solutions had not been particularly good. In addition, Ancoris provided McCalla with training in how to manage Google Apps for Business through a series of one-on-one webinars.
The whole project took around two months, from the initial meeting between Edward Elgar Publishing and Ancoris in August 2010 to completing the migration by the middle of October 2010. Starting with the US office, each of the company's three sites was migrated over a separate weekend, with migration of email archives during the previous week and then infill during the weekend of any emails sent or received after the end of the archive period. On Monday morning, staff were able to simply start Google Mail rather than the old email client and access everything they need.
The Results
Edward Elgar Publishing now has 60 staff in three offices using Google Mail, Google Calendar and Google Contacts and users are benefiting from a more reliable service. "Since we moved to Google Mail, we haven't had any loss of email service," says McCalla. "With our previous system, I would normally expect to have to rebuild a mailbox every two to three days. We no longer have to worry that staff can't do their work because they can't access their email, and they have the confidence that their email will always be available to them as long as they have an internet connection." McCalla estimates that he is saving two days a week of his own time that used to be spent fixing email issues—time he can now devote to projects that move the company forwards.
McCalla attributes the success of the project in large part to the excellent working relationship he was able to create with the consultant provided by Ancoris: "He knew what he was doing and worked well with me on technical issues, but was also good at talking to non-technical people like Hilary in terms they could understand. He was also willing to be flexible to accommodate the time zone issues we have from being based in two countries, making himself available out of hours when we were migrating our US office and coming onsite when we switched over the UK offices. Overall, Ancoris were very good at understanding our needs and showing us how Google Apps could meet them, as well as providing practical help to achieve a successful migration."
