Schmidt Family of Companies—Transitioning over 1,000 Rackspace users to G Suite (Google Workspace)

Schmidt Family of Companies (SFC), a leading real estate brokerage, selected a move to G Suite (Google Workspace) from a legacy managed service provider in order to improve agent productivity and cut costs. To ensure a smooth transition for their organization, SFC management selected HiView Solutions as their Google Cloud Premier Partner.

The challenge

For real estate firms, agents are viewed as “customers” of the corporate teams, so special attention is paid to anything impacting agents. Many agents have been working in the same way for several years, making change implementation more challenging and the ability to quickly react and be flexible is crucial when launching G Suite. From the technical side,  migration was conducted from a Rackspace environment managed through a third party supplier, adding additional complexity to the project.

The approach

Schmidt Family of Companies made the decision to deploy G Suite using the highly-recommended 3-phase approach in which the core project team would lead the transformation by serving as “Google Guides.” This allowed HiView and Schmidt Family of Companies to identify possible issues and concerns prior to the full roll-out. Password resets had to be carried out for all users and co-ordinated with the third-party supplier to ensure that business processes would not be inhibited.

The results

• 1700 users successfully migrated to Google G Suite
• 9 domain ownership transitioned
• In-house simple maintenance of Google G Suite configured compared to high costs through third party supplier
• Additional functionality allowing agents to be more effective, from any device, anywhere