Rippe & Kingston and Purple Trout

Company Overview

In addition to offering Google Apps deployment, integration and customization services for its clients, Rippe & Kingston Systems, Inc. is an Authorized Google Apps Reseller. By purchasing Google Apps Premier Edition accounts through Rippe & Kingston clients engage with an experienced Google Apps partner. Rippe & Kingston solutions focus on delivering a competitive advantage and business flexibility. Rippe & Kingston customers demand sophisticated, global business applications and services with low cost of ownership.

Purple Trout provides state of the art search engine marketing (SEM) services including: Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Paid Search/Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns, Social Media marketing, Video Search Engine Marketing, Usability Analysis, Conversion Tuning, Web Analytics, Competitive Analysis and more.

Challenge

Purple Trout enjoys the challenge of rapid growth and dispersed employees and writers across the United States. They decided to implement Google Apps Premier Edition in order to achieve significant cost savings, reduce administration overhead related to managing similar systems, and provide best-of-breed email and collaboration tools to their clients and employees. One major concern was the transition and the "potential" disruption of service even for a few minutes. Compounding the scenario was the need to change some independent contractors to employees and move their separate email accounts as well. With clients communicating primarily via email, they could not afford any issues so they turned to Rippe & Kingston for help with the migration process.

Solution

Rippe & Kingston worked with Purple Trout to migrate their domain and setup all of their employees on Google Apps. Part of the process included:

• Dual delivery of email during set up process
• Bulk provisioning of existing accounts
• Email and Contacts migration for existing users
• IMAP-based email migration for existing users
• POP3 activation and forwarding-configuration so that a sub-set of users can continue to access mail the same way they are accustomed to
• Creation of Nickname accounts

Results

The approach to implementing Google Apps at Purple Trout resulted in a lower than expected impact on its employees during the migration process. Rippe & Kingston established dual delivery for all email accounts so that email was delivered to current accounts as well as the new Google accounts. In addition, Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook was used as a safety net since all users were using Outlook. The transition was pain free and everyone has decided independently to use the Google web interface instead of Outlook.

The Google Apps solution implemented by Rippe & Kingston will help Purple Trout save money, but that was not the driving force. "Google is clearly a far superior method of communicating, scheduling and collaborating with my employees and clients" said Steve Phillips, President of Purple Trout. He went on to say, "After one week all of my employees have turned off Microsoft Outlook even though Rippe & Kingston enabled us to continue to use it with Google should we desire. We are focused on client satisfaction and are pleased to say that Google and Rippe & Kingston share the same passion." You can truly say "Purple Trout is Hooked on Google Apps".