Empowering Traditional Media Companies through Cloud Innovation

Technological advancement plays a vital role in modern day businesses landscapes. Looking back at how businesses were done decades ago, technology has truly shaped and helped the way businesses evolve — thanks to the internet, communications are now instantaneous. Huge amounts of information are exchanged through email, instant messaging, and other Internet applications regardless of location and time. Innovation in technology have improved operations at companies of all sizes and helped turn small local businesses into global businesses.

In embracing the Internet and its powerful tools, SPH or Singapore Press Holdings has taken a step ahead of the innovation by adopting Google’s set of intelligent apps G Suite to connect everyone within the organization. As a renowned media organization in Singapore with businesses in print, the Internet and new media, TV, and radio, outdoor media, and property, SPH’s decision in future proofing their day-to-day operation is definitely a smart yet a compulsory move.

Given the challenges facing traditional media companies globally, SPH recognizes the need to charge, and to change quickly in order to embrace collaboration and efficiencies afforded by cloud technologies. By going cloud with Google, SPH strives to continue to be at the forefront of the media industry and to face the many challenges that a media company faces, subsequently empowering traditional media through cloud innovation. As a prominent regional cloud technology consulting firm, PointStar is truly honored to be chosen to partner with SPH in driving the digital transformation of their organizational landscape.

Product Experience: Lotus Notes vs G Suite

After decades of operation in traditional print advertising, SPH’s digital transformation seems to be the most fitting decision. SPH is taking on innovation and technology in parallel with it’s disruptive online and social media efforts in winning the mindshares and revenues of the market industry.

Prior to the migration, SPH utilized Lotus Notes for their daily operation and productivity. Though the organization is accustomed to its Lotus Notes legacy system, there are significant pain points they had to face which prominently, the cost to maintain the application. Lotus Notes’ subscription, licenses, and maintenance for thousands of applications cost a fortune, hence SPH saw the urgency to seek for a better, smarter and much more cost-effective solution.

On another important note, Lotus Notes presented quite a handful limitations to the organization especially in terms of productivity and collaboration. Communication among team members is difficult as the system doesn’t allow real-time collaboration and on-the-go collaboration without using a VPN.

G Suite’s line of innovative online productivity tools will help SPH to strengthen their communication by allowing employees to work together, regardless of their location and with whatever devices team members are using.

The migration will benefit organization members of all levels. For instance, reporters are no longer have to come back to the office to piece together articles or unable to send info (photos, pointers, information, journalistic materials etc) back to the rest of the team in SPH’s HQ. Collaboration is just a click away, and the rest of the team are now able to receive any documents through G Suite’s Docs, and Google Drive.

Challenges

With almost 4,000 users on board and on multiple domains and locations, the migration was quite a challenging excursion. The data migration during the global go-live was one of the major challenges as PointStar’s G Suite specialists have to manage around thousands of end user mailbox migrations in parallel. PointStar also deployed a change management team physically on site to hand hold end users. PointStar’s G Suite change management team also conducted multiple sessions of end-user training at multiple locations. These training were highly customized to ensure clients could understand the shift from Lotus Notes easily.

During the deployment, PointStar’s G Suite specialists have also provided a to-do list for SPH’s admin and end users to facilitate the process. Based on that, SPH management team created the communication and SOP for their data migration, while being communicated regularly to end users during training. Regular meetings with Google Guides were done so that they can handle end users’ queries in a better way, and last but not least a customized FAQ for end users.

Solution

Choosing G Suite along with the deployment services provided by PointStar is beneficial to SPH considering PointStar provides the most cost-effective solution. It also represents the way ahead in utilizing Google’s innovative products such as G Suite’s Gmail, Docs, Calendars, and App Maker, that are proven to assist competitive businesses across the globe in improving their day-to-day productivity as well as focusing on their core competencies to move faster and smarter. That being said, Google has become the most suitable platform for SPH to build various applications while having the benefit of Google’s line of innovative cloud products.

With the assistance of PointStar’s G Suite specialist team, SPH embarked onto a seamless digital transformation that changed their organizational landscape and innovates the way works are done within their organization. SPH is looking forward to take advantage of Google’s line of powerful innovative online tools such as the latest App Maker to build their internal apps which provided the impetus to move out of Lotus Notes and onto Google G Suite The Google Appmaker represented a game changer for organizations, businesses and institutions of all sizes as a platform to create custom applications.

From the migration, SPH will definitely be benefited by G Suite and Google’s innovative technology that enable teams to collaborate, iterate, and innovate together, from anywhere, in real time. More than just productivity tools, G Suite brings out the benefits of Google’s excellence machine intelligence across all its products such as the App Maker. App Maker is a low-code application development tool that lets organizations build and deploy custom apps easily and securely, on the same platform that powers G Suite. Feel free to reach out to PointStar’s team of Google Cloud and G Suite experts to assist your organization with planning, migration, implementation or training. Our team is certified as a Practising Management Consultant (PMC) and works with numerous Singapore Government agencies such as SPRING, IE Singapore, and IMDA amongst others to help ‘digitally transform’ Singapore-based business to be more ready for the future through the cloud platform.