Client Case: Promodo

How Promodo effectively migrated to Google Workspace with Cloudfresh in 2 weeks

About the client: Promodo is Ukraine’s largest digital marketing agency, founded in 2004. The company employs over 400 specialists in five offices in Ukraine, the USA, and the UK. Promodo has been recognized as the No. 1 performance marketing agency for three years in a row, according to the IAB Ukraine rating. The agency is among the top five companies in all other rating categories.

Project start date: August 16, 2023

Project end date: On September 4, 2023, all Promodo employees began using Google services at the corporate level

Challenge: Promodo has used Microsoft services since the company’s founding. The company was satisfied with the confidentiality and security of internal information. However, inconveniences often arose when collaborating with clients since a significant part of the work was used to working with Google tools. They were uncomfortable opening Sharepoint, Docx, or Excel documents and connecting to calls and meetings via Teams.

Then, Promodo’s team realized that this fact interfered with efficient and productive work. Therefore, they switched to Google Workspace — a more convenient ecosystem of highly integrated applications for employees and customers.

Over many years of using another provider, thousands of critical historical files and correspondence have accumulated on mail and corporate OneDrive. A significant number of business processes were explicitly tailored to the Microsoft ecosystem.

Therefore, the challenge was to preserve the information essential to the company and seamlessly migrate the necessary data to Google Workspace for employees. For this, Promodo decided to turn to migration experts — the Cloudfresh team.

Solution: The Cloudfresh technical specialists, having extensive experience migrating to Google Workspace from various sources, began planning this process with the Promodo team.

First, Cloudfresh received the necessary amount of data, access, and permissions to analyze the scope of work and configure the required tools. After this, Cloudfresh experts planned and agreed on further activities and launched the migration process. One of the requests from Promodo was to complete this migration quickly so that the company’s employees would avoid experiencing this impact on their workflows.

To migrate all files, mail, disk, calendars, contacts, and other data in a short period of time, Cloudfresh specialists automatically created all users with special attributes, which significantly influenced the speed of the process. It was done using Active Directory synchronization (a directory service developed by Microsoft for Windows domain networks, which is an analog of Cloud Identity from GWS) and LDAP (a special synchronization protocol that helps users find data about organizations, individuals, etc.).

The Cloudfresh technical team also used their own environment to migrate, representing 10 Google Cloud virtual machines. Thanks to this, the migration process was accelerated from 270 days to 2 weeks. During this period, Drive, Sharepoint, accounts, and mail for 416 users were successfully transferred.

During the migration, Cloudfresh trained Promodo administrators on managing an organization in Google Workspace under the company’s chosen Enterprise Standard plan. It helped Promodo administrators get the most out of Google Workspace management.

Before completing the migration, technical experts also provided end users with training on using the service to ensure that the Promodo team was working effectively with all Google Workspace functionality.

Results: Effective transition to the Google Workspace solutions completely fulfilled Promodo’s needs for comfortable work and the company’s main tasks, such as using Google services at the corporate level and providing centralized account management.

In addition to convenient navigation and synchronized work between Google Workspace tools, Promodo optimized the company’s internal and business processes. Given that Promodo’s work is critically dependent on online communication, the lack of restrictions in Google Meet, the rapid creation of meetings in Google Calendar, and the ability to record corporate meetings and share them within the company have become some of the main advantages for the teams.

The use of Google services at the corporate level guarantees company and client data security, fast work with files, and convenient synchronization across different devices. It helps teams be more efficient and avoid wasting time switching between accounts.

Promodo is successfully mastering Google Workspace; employees are happy to work in an ecosystem that is understandable to them, providing the company with the following:

1. All-In-One Solutions: Seamless coexistence and secure application integration improve Promodo’s workflows and team collaboration.
2. Productive Communication: Using Gmail, Meet, Drive, Calendar, Docs, and Sheets allowed Promodo to eliminate unnecessary communication, quickly organize meetings, and seamlessly find needed files.
3. Ease of Management: Promodo administrators can easily manage all their operations and users through a secure admin console.
4. Enterprise-Grade Security: Leveraging one of the most advanced Google Workspace plans, Promodo gains additional security, administration, and compliance features, including Vault, DLP, and more, as well as secure enterprise email with S/MIME encryption and Gmail Confidential Mode.

Cloudfresh Role: The Cloudfresh team not only helped Promodo choose the optimal edition but also provided expert support for migration to Google Workspace, was always in touch, and helped resolve any issues with Google support.

A separate valuable stage for Promodo was training from Cloudfresh specialists, which 200+ employees completed. Cloudfresh continues to provide technical support and advice on the technical components of Workspace to make setting up services as comfortable as possible. Some of the most popular requests were the work of several users with one account, calendars, and their distribution, and work with file security and backup.

Team collaboration continues. If any requests arise, Cloudfresh specialists are ready to fully cover them to maximize the potential of Google Workspace for the Promodo team.