Sunday, June 1, 2014

Implementation of a new program

Dear Mr. Pereira,

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to look into a different program which our company could use within our internal operations.  My finding might prove to be surprising and I hope you take my opinions into consideration.

We are a small company which consist of around 50 employees.  We currently operate using Microsoft Office programs and pay $15 per user on a monthly basis.  We use the higher service which would allow us for a max of 300 users, however, we have not reach the maximum and are nowhere near reaching it.  The second highest package offered if for $10 but it has a maximum of 25 users, which makes it not possible to use.  There is also no extra program we use from Microsoft which we must pay extra for.  The SharePoint program is used in order to share documents with our coworkers when they are out of the office; this costs us an additional $5 per user on a monthly basis.

During my research into Google, I have discovered all the features which they offer at a lower cost.  There are two plans which we could use; one for $5 per user a month which would give us access to all the programs which we would need to run our business.  However, this package does not offer Vault which provides a backup for audit access and activity as well as archiving all emails and being able to restore messages which have been deleted by error.  This package costs $10 per user a month. 

Google would have a large impact on our company if implemented.  We currently pay $1,000 a month in order to run our Microsoft programs.  With Google we would be looking at $500 a month and we would be able to run our business the same way we do now and not have to pay extra for SharePoint.  Google offers Cloud, which would allow us to back up all our documents and share them among our employees.  We can give them access to either read the documents only or read and write, this also allows the publisher to track all the changes made and by who.  This was not possible using SharePoint which made it difficult when deciding who would have access to publish documents there are they would be in charge of updating the documents.  But with Google Drive we can make this a possibility.  

I understand it can be scary to think of making all these changes and having to train everyone on this new program.  But during my search I have also conducted a mini survey amount our employees.  The survey was conducted in order to find out what programs our employees use in their personal lives.  Due to the demographics of our employees, mainly the fact that they are all young and very tech savvy; I have discovered 80% have a Gmail account, have used Drive, and also use Hangouts in their day to day activities.  This allows for the implementation of Google Drive to go smoothly.  The remaining 20% have agreed to take courses online which are offered by many institutions and even Google tutorials.  In my opinion the transition would not be difficult, time consuming, or costly.  I would also offer my expertise on the matter and can create procedures on different scenarios in case of errors.  Our IT personnel are also up to date on Google and will require no training.


As you can see the transition from Microsoft to Google will be beneficiary to our long term success by cutting costs by 50% and allowing for a significant increase in productivity.  It will allow our company to become transparent between all our employees, increasing moral and self-worthiness within the company.  We can change our internal attitude and make them feel like we are a big family just by bring connected through Google.

Sincerely,
Jennifer Couto

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