Taylor Woodrow heads for the cloud

Taylor Woodrow has moved its 1,800 staff onto Google Apps for email and other services, estimating it will save £1m per year in the process.

The construction division of Taylor Wimpey has embraced software as a service by adopting Google Apps Premier Edition to improve mobility and flexibility for its workers.

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Staff are now using Google Mail along with the Docs, Calendar and Sites services, all of which is hosted by Google, removing the need to install or maintain the technology on site.

The company predicts it could save around £1m in terms of up front costs with each of the 1,800 licences costing just £25 per year for 25GB of storage. These costs are also predictable due to Google not charging extra as new features are added.

Previously, the company was using HP's Open Mail which offered little flexibility especially for clients and contractors who often use other people's machines.

Speaking to silicon.com, Rob Ramsay, IT director at Taylor Woodrow, said: "It was frankly holding the business back. We required as a business to implement a new mail system."

Google was an obvious choice as the company had been using Google Search Appliance for more than two years to manage search and retrieve documents on its internal network.

Ramsay said: "We got talking to Google about what would be available as a corporate entity in terms of email."

The company ran a successful pilot of Google Mail in October last year with 150 members of staff trying the application out.

Ramsay said: "We knew we were doing something different so we took our time with that. By the time we got into the New Year it was clear the product was going to do a job for us and we then looked to migrate the entire base of our employees and other stakeholders to that mail platform."

The technology was fully implemented on 5 May following a period of staff familiarisation.

Ramsay said: "We had to make sure that as we adopted into the new mail environment people would have the skills to use it. We utilised Google Sites as a communications channel to put up training material."

Around 1,000 staff undertook training through Google Sites before the system went live. "That de-risked the project immensely for us because issues such as capacity and availability were all answered," Ramsay added.

Taylor Woodrow is also using Google's Message Discovery application for email security and archiving.

Ramsay said: "With the procurement of Postini and the ability of [Google] to utilise the Postini infrastructure to deliver these services, we felt comfortable that those services were as good as, if not better than, some of the services we had previously."

Other benefits have included improved wide area network performance and ease of desktop migration due to less data being held on each machine.

Ramsay said: "There weren't any real technical challenges. I think the main challenges we encountered as a business were around the user familiarisation cultural aspect of changing from an interface [like Outlook] that people had become very familiar with over the years."

He added: "Where we are now today, we have email that isn't tied down to your individual desktop - you have the ability to access your email from anywhere within the organisation [and] from the anywhere on the internet."

Ramsay said the organisation is now looking at the Google Chat instant messenger and greater use of Google Sites in the near future.