Case study: Grass Roots replaces Exchange 2003 with Google Apps for Business

Grass Roots migrated 1,500 users from a fragmented Microsoft Exchange environment to Google Apps for Business in just six weeks, with a four-person project team

Grass Roots describes itself as a performance improvement company; it aims to help businesses engage with employees and customers using an array of incentives and rewards schemes. It’s clients include John Lewis, Tesco and Bupa.

Its four-person project team recently completed the migration of 1,500 users across 25 countries over from five disparate email systems to Google Apps.

According to Grass Roots’ CIO, Danny Attias, the technology was the easy part.

“There was a lot of data to migrate, but it wasn’t a technology project. The technology was already there, it’s called Google Apps for Business. I didn’t have to worry about making Google work.”

Grass Roots was previously running an Exchange 2003 estate using various different versions of Outlook across the business. “We needed to get onto a new platform because it was old and tired, and the company had grown using an oldish, badly maintained platform,” said Attias.

He explained that initially staff were reluctant to buy into the migration because they were used to their existing email and calendar client.

“You’re taking something automatic for the users, something they use all the time. And the project was perceived by most people as merely a cost-saving exercise.”

He admitted that this perception was the fault of the business case, which had been pared down to a minimum: it was cheaper to pay for the entire Google Apps solution, including archiving, than to pay for just the existing spam filtering system.

“We were paying £50 to spam filter email and keep a copy for litigation purposes, and it was £49.50 for Google Apps plus archiving. So for the same money we get the same functionality with email, calendar, video and social networking thrown in.”

High-level buy-in from the business was crucial to the project’s success, according to Attias.

“We engaged with the CEO, and he bought in from day one. We brought the business unit managers in from around the world, and when we told them about the migration it was carnage because they all had a view. Then the CEO stood up and said: ‘We’re doing it, it’s not a debate’. If I’d started allowing it to be a discussion, we’d still be talking now, and not reaping the benefits we’re seeing today.”

He explained that everyone has a view on how major rollouts like this should be run, and the chances are high that each view will be different.

“You need to make one decision that will impact everyone equally. Find out how the business uses the tool, be empowered to make the right decisions along the way, but don’t have committee meetings about it,“ Attias added.

Once the business accepted that the change was inevitable, Attias scheduled a phased rollout, where the phases comprised different elements of the Google Apps portfolio – but the entire organisation underwent each phase at once.

Case study: Grass Roots replaces Exchange 2003 with Google Apps for Business

Grass Roots migrated 1,500 users from a fragmented Microsoft Exchange environment to Google Apps for Business in just six weeks, with a four-person project team

This was to avoid a situation where some teams had access to the new calendar system before others, meaning that people would be unable to check some of their colleagues’ availability during the migration.

This approach also proved to be efficient, with the migration taking just six weeks.

After a major new implementation such as this, most IT departments would expect to be swamped by support calls. But Attias encouraged self-help among staff to minimise the extra workload on his team.

“When someone buys an iPhone at Carphone Warehouse, they don’t go back to ask how it works several weeks later. But at work that’s what they do, it’s suddenly IT’s problem and you have to train them.

“That’s old thinking. The new thinking is self-help. If you have a question, the first thing to do is Google it. If you can’t get an answer on Google, you’ll have wasted no more than 10 seconds. Then you ask the person next to you. If you can help each other you’ll move a lot faster than if you phone the service desk and they do it for you, and you’ll both remember how to fix it.”

While the main migration project has now finished, Grass Roots is still migrating shared and public folders, and is still understanding how to get the best value from Google Hangouts and its social network, Google Plus. Something that still excites Attias, however, is that the offering from Google Apps is still rapidly evolving.

“We were on the Exchange 2003 platform for eight years, and it didn’t change in all that time,” says Attias. “The Google product we use now changes every day. The highlight of my day is waking up and seeing what’s changed.”