Client success story: In Good Company Workplaces

The challenge

In Good Company is a community for women entrepreneurs, providing women business owners with professional peers, events, learning opportunities, and a variety of office space solutions. They’re a highly mobile organization, relying on a consistent IT experience, both in the office and when working remotely, to maximize their productivity.

Aside from providing IT services for a number of In Good Company’s entrepreneurial members, Help with a Smile provides the core IT infrastructure that powers IGC’s business and our on-demand help desk support keeps them working when technology goes awry.

When the Help with a Smile team first met with the founders of In Good Company, it was immediately apparent that we could make improvements to maximize their mobile productivity. IGC’s team was spending plenty of time working on-the-go, so they needed a better method of keeping their contacts and calendar items in sync across their many laptops and mobile devices. The founders also expressed a need for shared calendaring functionality. Scheduling meetings among team members was cumbersome. Without the ability to view each other’s availability, the staff was blindly trading appointment requests back and forth to find an agreed upon time.

One of the greatest challenges of a mobile organization is keeping critical business data safely backed up, and In Good Company is no exception. Their dedicated Help with a Smile account manager pointed out a need for a backup solution that the IGC staff didn’t have to worry about- a solution that was automated, monitored, and that would work regardless of where they were working from, without the need to lug around extra devices. Data loss is far more common than most business owners realize- we knew that putting a solid backup solution in place was a key part of IGC’s IT puzzle.

Our solution

In Good Company’s needs fit perfectly with Help with a Smile’s proactive solutions for the critical IT functions of e-mail, collaboration, and backup. These solutions offer the stability of enterprise-class technologies that had already been rigorously tested and that our team knew inside-and-out. Also, having already experienced Help with a Smile’s "People-First" approach to help desk support, the IGC team valued having the support costs of the solution included in a fixed, affordable monthly cost.

Rather than continue using the standard e-mail that came bundled with IGC’s website, our team recommended a move to one of our proactive offerings, a Hosted Exchange e-mail and collaboration platform. Implementing this new solution not only led to greater reliability of their e-mail service, but also allowed wireless mobile sync of contacts and calendar to their Blackberry devices and the real-time calendar sharing they required to stay in sync as a team.

Safeguarding the company’s data was not an issue for Help with a Smile, even though In Good Company didn’t fit the mold of the traditional server-based IT infrastructure. We worked with the IGC team to identify their most critical data, such as materials they were preparing for their upcoming book, and introduced them to our proactive backup offering. This solution offered the automated, off-site monitored backup solution that works perfectly for mobile professionals- and because we monitor the progress of IGC’s backups on a weekly basis, the founders can focus on running their business instead of worrying about their backups.

The results

As a direct result of Help with a Smile’s IT advisory and proactive offerings, In Good Company’s founders and staff are now able to effectively collaborate in real-time and access their most critical data on their many laptops and mobile devices via Hosted Exchange on our proactive e-mail and collaboration platform. We rest easier knowing that In Good Company’s critical business data is safely backed up via our proactive backup plan, and our staff monitors backup progress to ensure that we’ll be able to produce a successful restore at a moment’s notice should it become necessary due to laptop theft, loss, or a hard disk failure. With these worries aside, IGC can focus on what they do best- building a successful company and the best possible community for their members.