Turbulence on the Way to the Cloud

British newspaper publisher Telegraph Media switched from Microsoft Outlook to Gmail and is rolling out other Google Apps. But the voyage has been bumpy

By Nick Heath

Businesses thinking of switching to cloud computing should expect a bumpy probation period, if the experience of the Telegraph Media Group (TMG) is anything to go by.

The company's CIO, Paul Cheesbrough, knows all about the challenges of moving to the cloud, after recently migrating 2,000 staff from Microsoft (MSFT) Outlook and Exchange to Google Apps Premier Edition and Google's email archiving service Postini.

TMG began its transition to Google (GOOG) Apps in July 2008 and completed the migration in July this year. A survey of workers in October this year found that in their first six months of using Gmail about 45 per cent of staff rated it as worse or the same as using Microsoft Outlook as their mail client.

Cheesbrough said he has experienced "a fair bit of noise" from staff who are uncertain about the benefits of moving to Gmail during their early days of using it.

"As a CIO… for the first three to six months you have got to have your seatbelt on and have the resolve to push it through," Cheesbrough told Google's recent Atmosphere event in London.

But there are significant rewards for CIOs willing to tough it out, Cheesbrough said, with TMG finding a spike in staff satisfaction and productivity six months after users completed their move to the new system.

After six months of using the new system, the survey found that 82 per cent of employees rated using Gmail as superior to using Outlook, and 65 per cent of employees feel they are able to work more effectively than they could before the shift to Google Apps.

It also found that staff spend nine per cent less time searching for documents and emails and seven per cent less time managing their inbox.

Cheesbrough said that the key to a successful transition is compulsory training for staff on using the new system, warning that initially TMG swapped workers over to using the Google system with no formal training, a policy Cheesbrough said "backfired on us in a big fashion".

Following this setback, TMG introduced a mandatory two-hour training session for every employee.

"For some people the learning curve is an hour and for some it is six months.

"We put all our effort into turning that curve around with workshops and personal support," he said.

Apart from a compulsory move to Outlook, staff at TMG have been given access to all the programs within the Google Apps suite but have been allowed to choose whether to use Google Apps or carry on using their existing Microsoft application of choice instead. Subsequently, overall use of Microsoft software at TMG has dropped by two-thirds.

TMG has also recently struck a new deal with another cloud computing firm, Salesforce.com, to carry out payment processing for its online sales operation on Coda software on Salesforce's Force.com platform.

The business also uses hosted CRM from Salesforce.com (CRM) to manage its subscription service and advertising sales, as well as its expanding ecommerce business.

In addition, TMG has been using Amazon's (AMZN) EC2 cloud computing infrastructure to support business intelligence and analytics work carried out via Salesforce.com's Force.com platform.

Provided by silicon.com—Driving Business Through Technology

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