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Customer Success

Altar’d State Elevates Collaboration While Cutting Costs Through Google Workspace Transition

Pythian helped the retailer streamline costs, simplify management, and improve productivity by moving from Office 365 to Google Workspace.

Overview

Solution: Google Workspace
Platform: Google Workspace Industry: Retail
Location(s): USA

Altar’d State is a fashion retailer with an e-commerce presence and brick-and-mortar locations across North America. Altar’d State was growing its retail business and looking to move to Google Workspace as part of a broader migration to Google Cloud. 

About 80% of its staff were already using the consumer version of Gmail, so the retailer decided to shift from Microsoft Office 365 to Google Workspace to streamline costs, simplify management, and take advantage of the overall integration with the rest of the Google ecosystem.

What we did: 


Altar’d State turned to Pythian, a Google Workspace Premier partner, to handle the migration, as well as manage and support the change with internal teams. The team at Pythian realized the project needed to be put on hold during the months of November and December—during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and Boxing Day—so as not to impact the retailer’s peak business period.


Pythian migrated 700 active OneDrive users to the corresponding destination accounts in Google Workspace, 50 archived users’ mailbox data to the corresponding Google Workspace mailboxes, and 13 Sharepoint online sites into Google Shared Drives. 


Pythian also defined an end-to-end change management approach for Altar’d State and provided training sessions, which were tailored to specific personas—staff that worked in the stores were provided with different training than knowledge workers based out of the corporate office—to ensure training was aligned to each individual’s day-to-day needs.

 

Technologies used: 

 

  • Google Workspace – Enterprise Plus edition
  • Google Workspace – Frontline edition
  • Google Compute Engine

Key Outcomes

The project was rolled out using a three-phased approach where all users were migrated to Google Workspace over a period of 18 weeks.

 

  • Leveraging a single vendor environment and Google Workspace Frontline edition allowed Altar’d State to streamline costs and simplify management.
  • Altar’d State saw increased employee engagement with frontline workers and improved overall collaboration and productivity.
  • As part of a larger initiative to move to the cloud, the migration served as a successful first step in the retailer’s digital transformation journey.

“Amazing team to work with. Very responsive and always willing to take on any part of the project. The team didn’t bat an eye as the company continued to throw curve balls into the project. They are one of the best project teams I have ever worked with and hopefully I get a chance to work with them again on a future project.”

— Michael Cooper, IT Systems Administrator, Altar’d State

Want to see similar results for your company?

Get in touch with a Pythian Google Workspace expert to see how our team can help.