Bone Daddy's - A BetterCloud Case Study

From Hosted Exchange to Google Apps

As an inherently decentralized company with locations throughout Texas, Bone Daddy’s began operating their business on a hosted Exchange server. But as the company continued to grow, the allotted 250 MB of data for each employee inbox quickly became inadequate.

In 2010, Bone Daddy’s faced a key decision: bring an Exchange server in house or migrate to Google Apps. Using a test group of 8 employees, each with veto power, Bone Daddy’s began to evaluate its options, eventually landing on Google Apps with the help of reseller Cloud Sherpas.

According to Doug Wittrup, Bone Daddy’s IT Manager (and Head of Beverage Development), Google Apps was a perfect fit for the organization. Where Google provided flexible, affordable options, managing an in house Exchange server would have been prohibitively costly and difficult to manage.

While making the move to Google, Bone Daddy’s also transitioned from Blackberry devices to Android mobile phones. Wittrup noted that with the move to Apps and Android, “there was so much more opportunity to share and collaborate.”

What was initially a search for a new email provider, turned out to be a game changer for Bone Daddy’s. Wittrup remarked that while the company came searching for mail, they stayed with Apps because of Google Drive, Calendar and Sites.

Simplifying Domain Management with FlashPanel

After finding the native Google Apps Control Panel cumbersome and not extremely intuitive, Wittrup went searching for a tool to make managing his domain easier. He landed on FlashPanel and now uses the application for myriad day to day Google Apps management tasks.

User Provisioning and Deprovisioning

To make easy work of bringing on new employees and deprovisioning accounts for departing employees, Wittrup uses FlashPanel’s provisioning and deprovisioning workflows. He appreciates that the deprovisioning wizard walks him through important phases step by step so nothing is forgotten and especially enjoys the fact that he can add custom steps to the workflow.

The provisioning workflow, on the other hand, is “great for initial setup” since it allows Wittrup to copy Group settings and other items key in the onboarding process.

Shared Contacts

Bone Daddy’s is also a heavy user of FlashPanel’s shared contacts feature, which allows the company to share internal and external contacts across their six restaurants.

Google Sites Management

Lastly, Wittrup plans to use FlashPanel’s Sites management feature to survey which sites have been created on the domain and who owns and has access to certain assets.