Attended a webinar on Google Apps, but you're not sure what to do next? Daston can launch a Google Apps pilot program for your organization, to provide you an inside look at how Google Apps can transform the way your organization communicates and collaborates.

Understanding the Google Apps pilot

Although Google Apps products are easy to use and learn, switching your organization’s
email, calendar, and document-authoring applications to Google Apps will initially impact your
users. They’ll need to learn about the products and adjust to an exciting new way of
staying in touch and being productive. Therefore, we recommend that you follow IT best practices and conduct a pilot deployment first. The following sections answer some common questions about the Google Apps piloting process.

What are the benefits of a Google Apps pilot?

A pilot lets you duplicate your production deployment on a small scale, so you can evaluate
Google Apps without changing your existing infrastructure or disrupting your normal business
operations. In short, it’s a testing ground for your production deployment.

During the pilot, your users can experience Google Apps and provide feedback. And you can
evaluate how well Google Apps improves users’ productivity and supports your business
processes—all with minimal risk to your existing environment. Also, because only a subset of
your user population will use Google Apps during the pilot, you can keep your support efforts
to a minimum.

Another benefit of running a pilot is that you can leverage any integration work you complete
for your production deployment. For example, if you decide to implement an automated user
provisioning process using the Google Apps Provisioning API or provide integrated
authentication through our Single Sign-on (SSO) service, you can continue to use your
implementation when you scale up to a complete rollout of Google Apps.

Pilot Phases

Daston can help coordinate what we call a “Fit Test” in less than a day. We will provision an account, setup users, and conduct a short online training session that will allow you to quickly evaluate whether Google Apps could benefit your organization. If, at the end of the "Fit Test," you're convinced that Google Apps has potential, we will help you take the next steps and orchestrate a mock deployment.