LTech and The College of Southern Idaho

Company Overview
LTech is a leading cloud technology integrator and search solutions provider established in 2001. As an early Google Enterprise Partner, LTech has successfully completed dozens of Google Apps deployments and Google Search Appliance configurations.

The College of Southern Idaho, established in 1965, is a public 2-year community college located in Twin Falls, Idaho. The school has approximately 7,000 undergraduate students, and offers associate and technical certificates in over 115 subjects.

Challenge
The College of Southern Idaho needed a way to improve communication between all students and staff on campus. Tired of expensive software licenses and limited storage space, they decided to switch their email system to Google Apps Education Edition for its superior webmail interface, integrated chat and calendar, and document sharing capabilities. CSI also wanted students to have more flexibility when logging in to their system. They came to LTech with a concept that would let students choose their login name from a list of options.

Solution

After deploying Google Apps, LTech worked with CSI to determine a custom Single Sign-On solution that would meet their needs. Within two weeks, LTech developed and implemented an on-demand provisioning system that would sample each student's name and generate a list of name combinations. When a student provisions their email for the first time, they can log in with their student ID number and then choose an email address from the list of identity options.

Results

By moving to Google Apps, CSI could provide their students with increased storage space and better collaboration tools. Since Google offers free server storage and maintenance to colleges, they were able to free up time and resources to focus on other computing objectives. LTech's Single Sign-On customization work was completed just in time for the CSI summer '09 semester.

"LTech was able to provide us development expertise that we enjoyed working with. We were able to brainstorm well with them, good give and take, with solid professional recommendations from them." - Jay Sneddon, Data Services Director

LTech and BodyBuilding.com

Company Overview
LTech is a leading cloud technology integrator and search solutions provider established in 2001. As an early Google Enterprise Partner, LTech has successfully completed dozens of Google Apps deployments and Google Search Appliance configurations.

BodyBuilding.com is a Sports Nutrition E-Retailer and Online Fitness Community. The site, which has been ranked as the most visited body building site in the world, motivates people to reach their fitness goals with informational resources, forums, editorial content, and a cyberstore of high-quality sports nutrition products.

Challenge

BodyBuilding.com was using a Google Mini to crawl and index their site and provide customers with the best possible search. As the site gained popularity, the content began to expand, drawing it closer to the document limit. After adding a new BodySpace site area for visitors to track their fitness progress, the Google Mini was no longer able to handle the amount of documents on the site. BodyBuilding.com upgraded to a standard GB-1001, but needed help replicating their current search structure.

Solution

After the upgrade, LTech configured the Google Search Appliance for BodyBuilding.com based on their specific requirements. The appliance was set up to crawl and index all of their documents, reproducing their previous site search. LTech added built-in KeyMatches to promote certain pages and created collections to let users search separate parts of the index. The search and results pages were customized to match the look and feel of BodyBuilding.com.

Results

As one of the top health and fitness websites with hundreds of products and a wealth of content, BodyBuilding.com wanted to provide their visitors with highly-refined search capabilities. With search powered by Google and LTech, BodyBuilding.com users are receiving fast, accurate results with the ability to query the entire site, or limit their search to stores, product reviews, blogs, groups and more.

Grove Group and CORE Education

Company Overview

Grove Group is a Google Distributor and a leading provider of SaaS solutions for more than 400,000 users worldwide. Based in the UK with offices in the USA and Africa, Grove Group works with Google to help companies achieve operational efficiency from their IT infrastructure by integrating Google Message Security, Compliance and Collaboration services.

CORE Education is a not-for-profit educational research and development based organisation involved in the support and promotion of the use of new technologies for learning across all education and training sectors.

Challenge

When the new IT manager stepped in at CORE, email services were provided by a single Intel Linux server with a two hard drives in RAID 1. Archiving was provided by copying every mail to a duplicate account on the same server. Backup was provided by copying the mail directories to an external USB drive that was rotated daily.

There had been a number of occasions where mail services were disrupted due to lack of disk space and other server hardware problems. Spam filtering was provided by an external service that filtered the mail prior to delivery to the local server.

With a very small IT team of just two people Core-Ed wanted to remove the worry of maintaining an in-house mail server so more time could be spent supporting staff in more interesting areas of IT research and development. A more robust and scalable system was also wanted that provided proper archiving and more failover.

Solution

After researching a number of options, including a locally or remotely hosted Zimbra it was decided to move email to the Google Apps Education Edition. According to IT Manager Glen Davies from CORE Education, “A number of archiving options where investigated to support this service but Postini was decided on due to its scalability and educational pricing. CORE Education decided to use Postini through Grove Group because of the much better support provided by them.”

Result

Google Apps Education Edition was rolled out for all employees at CORE Education. Additionally, add-on services provided by Postini enhanced security and email archiving. Grove Group provided CORE Education with quick service deployment and ongoing support from dedicated account managers and around the clock support from Grove Group’s Global Network Operations Centre (GNOC). This was echoed by the IT Manager Glen Davies, - “Thanks for your help through the sales and setup process. It was great to work with a company that actually responds to my emails. I am constantly amazed by the number of IT companies that I have to chase up and harass just so I can buy their product! - so it was nice to work with a company that actually treats me like a customer.”

SADA Systems and Victoria Junior College

Company Overview

One of the first 10 Google Apps for Enterprise partners worldwide, and initial contributor to the Google Apps Open Source provisioning tool kit, SADA Systems, Inc. has developed a proven track record in implementation of Google Apps solutions. SADA works with a diverse client base to create custom, leading edge solutions that strategically meet client business objectives.

Victoria Junior College (VJC) is located in Marine Vista, Singapore. VJC opened its doors to its first class of students in 1984, and was the eleventh Junior College in Singapore. Programs available at VJC include two-year programs in 'A level' courses, and four-year programs.

Challenges
This was SADA's first Google Apps for Education project located in Singapore. Victoria Junior College's location required SADA to coordinate efforts with its Indonesia based development team to ensure the completion of the project. Prior to contacting SADA the client had already deployed Google Apps Education Edition, and provisioned accounts, but they found they did not have a means for creating and managing distribution lists in Gmail.

Solution
SADA's team deployed it's Gmail List Tool which allows Google Apps account administrators to easily create "on-the-fly" Gmail distribution lists. Users are added to distribution lists by means of a check box next to the user's name. New users may also be added to a distribution list by uploading a CSV file.

Result Victoria Junior College can now create the lists it needs using SADA's Gmail List Tool and save significant time. This solution has allowed VJC's administrators to complete the task of creating necessary lists, so they can dedicate more time to critical IT projects.

"SADA's Email List Tool has certainly helped me in my work as the administrator of Google Apps in my school. The bulk upload feature is easy to use and most of the time reliable. The simple interface helps me to browse and view my email list addresses quickly. Although I have not interacted with SADA's staff face-to-face, they 'listened to me keenly' over the email, addressed my queries and solve my problems speedily."
- Josef Tan, Arts Department, Victoria Junior College

TriCipher and Awana

TriCipher, Inc. provides strong authentication and identity management technologies to protect web applications and enterprise portals, the people that use them and the business processes that flow through them against fraud and identity theft. The myOneLogin service from TriCipher combines strong authentication, single sign-on and federation as an on-demand service.

Awana has been a leader in children's and youth ministry for nearly 60 years. Awana is the only organization with fully integrated evangelism and discipleship programs for ages 2 to 18 that actively involve parents, church leaders and mentors. Each week, more than a million children and youth, 250,000 volunteers and 300-plus field staff take part in Awana in over 17,000 churches in the U.S. and internationally.

Challenge
Like many nonprofits that are watching their costs, Awana decided that the most cost-effective way to manage their computing needs was to use web-based applications and software-as-a-service. According to Michael Litz, Manager of Networking and Computer Services for Awana, "We'd like to put everything in the cloud, and use other people's infrastructure rather than maintaining our own."

When Awana decided to move from in-house Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps including Gmail for mail, the issue of lost and forgotten passwords had to be addressed. Not only would Gmail represent one more account and password to manage, but password sharing was a concern. Some individuals wanted to be able to delegate the ability to check their email inbox to an assistant. Awana wanted to enable email delegation without sharing the actual accounts and passwords.

Solution
Awana found myOneLogin on the Google Solutions Marketplace. myOneLogin offers tight integration with Google Apps using SAML-based federation. By enabling the SSO option within Google Apps, Awana can ensure that users only connect to Google Apps using myOneLogin. This means that their Google Apps accounts are now protected with the strong, two-factor authentication provided by myOneLogin.

myOneLogin also solved the problem with delegated inboxes. Using myOneLogin, it is possible to give an individual access to an application without actually giving them the password.

Results

Awana included myOneLogin as part of the Google Apps rollout; to access their email, users needed to use myOneLogin. Awana also added to the portal the other applications used by the organization, including Salesforce, Citrix, Aetna, and many others. Says Litz, "Once people started using myOneLogin they saw how convenient it was for accessing all of their web applications. In this case, seeing is believing."

Today Awana's users can access all of their web applications easily, no matter where they are. Help desk calls for password resets are a thing of the past, as are calls asking how to access specific applications and URLs. Using myOneLogin and web-based applications lets Awana focus on its core mission, rather than maintaining and supporting on-premise applications.

Manymoon and Six Magazine

Company Overview

Manymoon is a social productivity application that solves the information overload problem by making it simple to organize tasks, events, documents, links and projects with co-workers, customers and partners.  With Manymoon you can quickly create a project, invite people and start sharing Google Docs, tasks, events and links.

Six Magazine is a magazine operated and written by Sixth Formers for a school in the United Kingdom.  Six Magazine currently has a staff of 30 using Google Apps and is expanding to serve additional schools in the area.

Challenges
Before Six Magazine used Google Apps and Manymoon, article submission and editing was slow, and could only be done by one person. Further, Six Magazine could not easily delegate tasks as the email system was patchy if at all used.

Solution
Six Magazine's 30 people are now using Gmail to consolidate messaging and contacts.  Communication between writers and editors has increased and become more efficient since everyone is now on the same email platform. Manymoon is used to submitting articles that are Google Docs as well as uploaded documents.  Articles are attached to tasks and sent to multiple people for review.  Six Magazine editors can group these articles and tasks into projects to organize the process of creating a magazine run.  The staff also uses Manymoon to automatically convert their Gmail emails to tasks.  This is useful to capture information floating in email and associate it with articles.

Results

Now that Six Magazine uses Manymoon, they have been able to expand their editing team since it is easier to get people up to speed. Use of Gmail has expanded through the simple integration with Manymoon. "We have also shortened our workflow from about 2 weeks, from receiving the first article, down to less than one week." - Hugh Wren, Six Magazine

Manymoon and Mil Mujeres

Company Overview

Manymoon is a social productivity application that solves the information overload problem by making it simple to organize tasks, events, documents, links and projects with co-workers, customers and partners.  With Manymoon you can quickly create a project, invite people and start sharing Google Docs, tasks, events and links.

Mil Mujeres provides holistic legal services to low-income Spanish-speaking domestic violence survivors in the areas of immigration and family law. Mil Mujeres is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that was founded to address the growing need for bilingual legal services to serve the Washington DC area’s Spanish-speaking survivors of domestic violence.  

Challenges
Mil Mujeres utilizes staff volunteers that are located throughout the country.  As a result they were using email to coordinate everything from tasks to document reviews and projects.  A large amount of time was spent searching for email attachments and important information.  It was especially difficult for the Washington DC staff to work with staff in California since there was no shared repository to track work items.

Solution
Mil Mujeres currently has 11 people using Google Apps for Education (available to registered non-profits).  They use Gmail across the organization for communication between staff and clients.  Google Docs is used as a filing system which is especially useful for Mil Mujeres' distributed staff.  Google Calendar is used for scheduling staff and client meetings.  Mil Mujeres is now using Manymoon to coordinate all office work.  This includes administrative tasks, such as filing taxes and corporate paperwork, as well as keeping track of client work.  Using Manymoon, staff can now add Google Docs to tasks and projects and track status towards completion.  The staff also uses Manymoon to add important tasks to their Google Calendar.

Results

Mil Mujeres has saved thousands of dollars a month on office space by allowing their distributed staff of volunteers to collaborate on projects no matter where they are located.  Manymoon and Google Apps also make it simple to bring new staff volunteers on-board and allows them to quickly contribute.

"Being able to share websites, documents and calendars has made it incredibly easy to stay organized and increase transparency between staff.  Mil Mujeres will be using Manymoon as we expand and add more volunteer staff." - Keli Lovejoy, Mil Mujeres