NYKO PROPERTY

MAKING BUSINESS EASY, PROFITABLE AND SUCCESSFUL WITH GOOGLE APPS

Google Apps has many features that assist business operations for businesses of all shapes and sizes. There is never an issue with Google Apps when it comes to consistency and reliability of sending and receiving correspondence and managing calendar appointments. Implementing Google Apps is quick and painless if done by a suitably trained IT servicing company such as Onsite Helper and the results speak for themselves. The platform is simple to use and dramatically improves the business’s performance which is so vital in such a competitive market.

Company profile

Nyko Property is a business that provides property research advice specialising in exclusive “off market” property investment opportunities throughout metropolitan Melbourne. The business operates primarily from the head office based in Melbourne. However, a large amount of work is also done outside the head office which makes accessing their business information off and onsite vital.

Challenges

Nyko Property came to Onsite Helper looking for a solution to their email and calendar problems. The business was using Outlook as their email server which they found were not adequately meeting their needs and was seriously impacting the business. The two major problems with the use of Outlook were lengthy delays with emails being received and sent and that calendars were not synchronised between mobile devices. This meant that the correspondence was not being managed efficiently and that tracking appointments was a nightmare. The issues with delays with emails in Outlook was due to the way the program was installed on the computers. There were synchronisation issues between the program and the Outlook server. The operation of Outlook was very inconsistent. On some occasions the program worked fine in sending and receiving emails. However, too often there would be length delays of hours or even days with sending and receiving correspondence. This made it difficult to respond to customers and suppliers in a timely fashion severely impacting on the business. The issues with calendar appointment scheduling was due to Outlook not updating calendars between staff iPhones and vice versa. This meant that that certain business opportunities were missed because appointments had been lost or overlooked. Further, the ability to see each others calendar appointments would be ideal but this was not available with this setup. These two issues went from a mild inconvenience to a serious problem as the business grew and an overhaul of their IT system was required.

Solution

Google Apps was highly recommended by Onsite Helper as a solution to the businesses current and potential future problems. As the business was using Microsoft Outlook as the email client, we knew that Google Apps would work very well using the Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook (GASMO) plug. It has worked beautifully with many of our other clients. The migration from Outlook.com to Google Apps was a little tricky as the business was using Microsoft Office 365, which has a “click to run” Outlook 2013 and was not capable of uploading the emails to Google Apps. Our solution was to make a copy of all the email data files to a USB hard drive before migrating the data to Google Apps from our office using the Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Exchange (GAMME) tool and uploading all the Outlook .pst files to Google. We implemented Google Apps on a Friday afternoon on all computers and mobile devices. We ensured that we set up Google Apps to receive new emails that day as we worked to migrate their existing data. This enabled the business to continue working which meant that there was no downtime experienced. The migration of all historical emails and data was done over the weekend which included calendar appoints. The migration was completed by Monday morning ready for the start of the working week. As the interface for users was still Microsoft Outlook, this made an easy and smooth transition for staff and no extra training. The business noticed immediate results due to the change of email exchange servers from Outlook to Google Apps. Email correspondence became reliable and consistent. Calendar appointments were syncing between mobile phones within minutes. Further, we activated the additional functionality in Google Apps for calendar sharing which translated into Outlook. This enabled the receptionist to manage staff calendars and determine their availability for meetings. We also set up calendar resources for meeting rooms so staff could manage staff and client meetings without rooms being double booked.

Capabilities of Google Apps

Google Apps has the capacity to significantly improve business operations by resolving some of the most seemingly simple problems. It provides immediate, consistent and reliable email correspondence, ensures calendar appointment synchronization between devices and allows for calendar sharing. Some staff have decided to switch from Outlook straight to Google Apps as their email interface to take advantage of the other features of the platform such as Gmail’s quick and comprehensive search capabilities. Google Apps does provide a more pleasant working experience for the business.

“When Onsite advised us to change over to Google Docs we were sceptical. Changing everything over was daunting and we didn’t want lengthy disruptions. The result has been brilliant, our emails are now accessible from anywhere through webmail and they can now be relied upon – a huge relief for our business which receives most of its sales via email.” – Bill Nikolouzakis, CEO of Nyko Property