Bean Blog

With a busy digital office, you can imagine that we here at Bean Creative are super reliant on a full suite of e-mail and other office software tools. Until recently…

We used to work like most professional offices do, utilizing Microsoft Office products at a significant licensing cost. We also hosted our e-mail system internally, also at significant cost in terms of hardware, bandwidth and upkeep.

Then one day, Keith comes to me with some bad news. Our servers were nearing the end of their lifecycle, and therefore in need of upgrading to support our current and future bandwidth needs.

The cost? Five figures. Ugh.

While forking over a large amount of money to upgrade our servers isn’t what most people would call an “easy” solution, it would have been the simplest quick fix – in essence, throwing money at a problem to make it go away.

We run our studio lean and mean to optimize our clients’ budgets, so it only made sense for us to step back for a moment and analyze if maybe this current challenge was a golden opportunity to research and implement a better solution.

The answer for us lies in the cloud. We switched to Google Apps Premier.

Kudos to Keith, my partner in crime, for doing a ton of homework on pros, cons and pricing. As it turns out, we are now spending a fraction of what Microsoft Exchange costs, and doing business in the cloud means our tools are always current and managed by the fine folks at Google, so we gain back time to manage our business, not our mail server.

Best of all is that we actually are seeing considerable enhancements in terms of functionality, allowing our staff to better manage, organize and oversee projects to make life easier. That’s a benefit I wasn’t necessarily foreseeing, but really thrilled to hear from staff.

It would have been simple (albeit expensive) for Bean to keep the status quo. Challenging your current technologies and methods takes time and critical thinking, but as we’ve seen from our own back-office migration, the results are certainly worth the endeavor.

What areas of your office can be retooled to help you work smarter, not harder?