This is the first in a series of interviews with users of the productivity and collaboration tools covered in this blog. Dan Norris, founder of the web design agency Web Circle, gives an insight into his company's move into the cloud.
What does Web Circle do and how many people work with you?
We are a small web design agency established in 2006 specialising in open source technologies like Joomla, WordPress, Magento etc. The team is just me and one other full time employee and the rest contractors. We have around 150 active clients and operate out of the Brisbane Technology Park.
You recently moved from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps - what was the thinking behind this move?
Last year we invested quite a bit of money in physical infrastructure. We bought a Microsoft Server for the office, setup Exchange, bought a PABX etc. The main reason for it was to be able to better work together on projects and not be so independent in terms of what we each had to manage. This worked to some extent. However, there were ongoing performance issues with Exchange, ongoing costs with maintaining the infrastructure as we didn't have the in house skills for the more complex setup. We also found that more and more, the tools we liked to use were moving to the cloud and integrating everything with Exchange wasn't easy (just maintaining a standard shared contacts list on Exchange and our hosted CRM was a nightmare). In addition we found the physical infrastructure locked us down too much to the office and made working away from the office difficult. The VPS was painfully slow compared with something like DropBox. We decided to simplify the physical infrastructure and move our main day-to-day functions to cloud solutions (project management, task management, email, calendars, CRM etc).
Why did you switch from using SugarCRM for CRM and Project Pier for project management to using the Google App, Insightly?
The Sugar CRM and Exchange Sync was a nightmare for one thing. We weren't able to easily get the shared address book to sync with Sugar. We had to sync with our own address books first and required a few different programs to do something which we thought was pretty basic. Sugar CRM was too complex for a micros business - I hardly used it. Project Pier was a good free open source project management solution but there was no integration between our systems. With Google / Insightly the integration is fantastic. We get an email that we need to act on and I can create a task or a project right there in the email and allocate it to Steve. If a lead comes in I can create an opportunity right there so only the decent opportunities get added to the CRM (we previously added all leads from our website into Sugar which loaded with all sorts of junk). We can have a shared contact list with Insightly and email direct from within Insightly and associate emails with projects / tasks / opportunities etc. Best of all we can use the exact same systems with the exact same performance no matter where we are for zero dollars - it's a no-brainer really for a micro business.
What have been some of the key benefits of moving to Google Apps and Insightly?
The integration between email, task, contacts, and project management, the price (free), the ability to have systems that we don't need in house skills and infrastructure to maintain and the ability to work from anywhere under the same conditions.
What have been some of the challenges/issues arising from the move?
There are some things that Google Apps doesn't do that well. There isn't presently a shared address book which seems crazy. It doesn't have shared email folders so previously I had about 10 main folders and probably 100 or 200 folders within each of these (one for every client) and we'd each drag all emails into the folder as they came in (we could all see any email from the client no matter who it was sent to). With Google Apps this isn't possible which means important info in the emails has to come out of Google and go into Insightly to ensure everyone has access to it or we have to forward emails to each other. And even managing your own emails isn't as easy because GMail uses filters instead of folders which don't support nesting. Because it's impossible to have a few hundred different labels I have moved away from dragging client emails into folders / labels at all and instead I just leave them as read and search for them (part of the reason I used to have a folder for each client was because Outlook's search capabilities were pretty limited).
There are some other little things with Insightly like you can't choose to update the person who owns the task when you add comments, you can't drag tasks up and down to prioritise them like you can in Basecamp, you can't see a list of only the tasks that are assigned to you - if you choose to show a task you have assigned someone else then it displays in your list so it looks like you have a lot of work to do!
What has been the reaction of your clients?
They don't even know. Actually the email deliverability with Google is much better than it was with Exchange so that's a positive.
What advice would you give to anyone thinking of using cloud services like Google Apps in their business?
My advice in general for a micro business is don't spend money on anything until you have ruled out the free options and don't choose any computer-based software solution before you have ruled out the cloud-based options. Micro businesses need to be tight with money and they need to be flexible and not locked down to the one place. Some of the cloud based technologies now are embarrassing the PC-based solutions with what they can do (for example, accounting software) so look to the cloud first.
Monday, January 2, 2012 at 1:04PM 
Any organisation thinking of moving its internally managed email and calendaring over to a cloud provider should read this. The University of California at Berkeley recently made the switch and weighed up Google and Microsoft 365. Google won. However, Berkeley have drawn up a matrix of the criteria against which they made their choice. Although Google won overall, it was quite a close-run race. Worth a read.
;)
