How the Cloud Helps Us Onboard Our Summer Interns + A Giveaway!

Image by Paul Bradbury / Getty Images

It’s an exciting time here at BetterCloud. This year’s crop of summer interns will be joining us Monday and we’ve been preparing for the last week or so to make sure we’re ready come 9 AM. We’ve ordered new desks and chairs, fully stocked the kitchen and, most importantly, provisioned new Google Apps accounts.

Our interns are truly an integral part of the day to day at BetterCloud and with summer being so short, we need to make sure they get up to speed quickly. To both prepare for their arrival and train our new team members, we rely heavily on the cloud.

Google Apps

First and foremost, Google Apps, the platform on which our entire company is run, helps us onboard interns quickly. We’re able to instantly purchase new licenses through the Google Apps Admin Console and create accounts on the spot.

Once the Google Apps accounts are created, we’re able to provision relevant third-party applications on a user by user or OU by OU basis. For instance, our interns will likely need access to Expensify and Harvest, but they won’t need JIRA access. With just a few clicks, we’re able to give interns access to only the applications they’ll need throughout the summer.

Where training is concerned, Google Apps helps tremendously. All materials are created in Google Drive and shared from there. And we’ve built our company intranet using Google Sites – so anyone with a BetterCloud domain login can access the site and all of its contents.

As for scheduling training times, we’ve created a shared calendar to keep training on track and on time.

Lastly, since the BetterCloud team is spread out over two offices, one here in New York City and the other in Atlanta, it can be hard for the interns in each office to get to know the entire staff. To help ease this process, we hold weekly Google Hangouts between the two offices, giving every team member a chance to introduce him or herself.

FlashPanel

While we use FlashPanel to manage and secure our Google Apps domain on a daily basis, the application’s Drive security features come in especially handy when new interns start at BetterCloud. FlashPanel allows us to set Drive sharing policies for our Intern OU. Depending on what we feel is appropriate, FlashPanel will allow us to restrict the sharing of Docs by our interns to within the domain only or to only the domains which we approve.

FlashPanel’s shared contacts and group management features also allow us to push out important company contacts to our interns and add them to relevant groups. For example, our Marketing intern will be added to relevant marketing-related groups.

Chromebooks

When our interns start on Monday, they’ll each be handed a shiny new Chromebook. Since Chromebooks are web-only, they force interns to get into the habit of working exclusively in the browser – something we take very seriously at BetterCloud. Chromebooks also allow us to pre-install relevant Chrome extensions and applications and set certain browser settings like enforcing safe search, disallowing incognito windows and more.

Movie Ticket Giveaway – The Internship

In honor of our newest class of interns and next Friday’s much anticipated release of The Internship, a movie based on interning at Google, the Google Gooru will be giving away 5 pairs of tickets next week. Make sure to follow the Gooru on Google+ for the latest contest information.