Moving to the cloud

To: John Smith

From: Shivangi Gosai

Date: June, 2 2014

Subject: Impact of Google Drive

In regards to the discussion that we had  two weeks ago along with some colleagues , we ended up with a conclusion of reviewing Google drive in order to see if the very thought of replacing the Microsoft office with Google drive will be a benefit to our organization or not. 

As our company is continuously growing, we could greatly benefit from a better collaborative platform that will increase our revenue. The interactivity, simple sharing capabilities and ability to edit documents from anywhere at any time, makes Google Drive a new and extremely capable alternative. Fantastic for those unwieldy group projects, one person just has to create a document, share it with the team and BAM – instant real-time collaboration! To make navigating around one shared file even easier, there is an inbuilt chat function so one can boss teammates around while they’re working. My pet hate with MS documents is the constant compatibility dance between its many working versions. I found that sometimes files of Word 2013 gives hard time getting it opened in older versions. When uploading any Word/Excel/PowerPoint file to Google Drive, it’s automatically converted into a usable document ready to edit and share online.

The great thing about Google drive is that it comes with 15GB space; the service comes with any Google email account. Implementing Google drive within our organization would allow for greater collaboration and therefore, higher productivity. Using Google drive, employees can edit and view documents created from any computer, Android phone, iPhone, and iPad, as long as there is an attachments back and forth, comparing and consolidating individual files.

Google Drive will take almost anything, slide presentations, word processing documents, drawings, PDFs, spreadsheets – you name it. They even have their own survey feature which allows you to make professional forms and distribute them to contact lists. The form feature then aggregates and displays the answers in a user-friendly format for data export. Every document is up to date. With Google Drive there are different visibility options therefore, employees can control who sees what document. Data availability is 99.99% so using Google drive is reliable and assures that our data will be available almost always. A downside of Google drive is that there are not as many features as excel, word, and PowerPoint, but it has the basic capabilities. It is also important to keep in mind that one can work offline i.e viewing and editing with Google Drive that can be shared as soon as one gets an access to the web. 

Collaborating in real-time means that work gets done a lot faster. By making collaboration easier, we can increase the amount of projects that we can take on. Being able to acquire more projects will drastically increase our revenue. Also there are no costs to implementing this platform because access to Google drive is free with  Google gmail account. Also, Google drive has been used on daily basis by most of the employees as per my study during last two weeks. Moving to the cloud will be cost effective in a way that free online training is available. So the major portion of putting in cost for Google drive i.e  training, is almost reduced. Adopting Google drive is a clear decision because there is no investment needed but a great deal of benefits come as a result of the software.

Lastly, I would meet with each client service manager to identify unaddressed client concerns. Next I would put this input in a memo that I’d share with you. If you felt that this list was sufficiently important, we and the client service managers would meet to discuss an improved approach to client problem solving if any. If all agreed, you would assign a small team to implement this strategy. I’d appreciate your input on whether this recommendation might make sense for our division at this point in time.