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Telegraph spreads the news on Google Apps
Newspaper group embraces the cloud...

By Tim Ferguson

Published: Wednesday 23 July 2008

The Telegraph Media Group (TMG) is moving all of its employees onto Google Apps following a successful trial of the technology.

The group is rolling out Google Apps Premier Edition to its 1,400 employees working on The Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and Weekly Telegraph, as well as the telegraph.co.uk website.

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Journalists and commercial staff will be able to access their email, documents and other work related information using any internet-enabled device.

With each user licence costing £25, TMG estimates that over the next three years it will spend a fifth of what it would have done for similar office software from Microsoft.

The company carried out a six month trial of the Google Apps technology with around 10 per cent of workers across all departments, gathering feedback through Google Sites.

Speaking to silicon.com, TMG CIO Paul Cheesbrough said: "The feedback was, as far as IT trials go, overwhelmingly positive. People were able to find things much quicker and share things much quicker. So the feedback was good and certainly the bulk of the people who trialled, it would have been very difficult to take it away from them - and if you'd have said that to me at the beginning of the year, that would have been quite surprising."

Staff will have an increased inbox size, improved email search capability along with calendar functionality.

People can also use the Google Talk instant messenger and Google Docs - meaning journalists can share information more easily and collaborate on documents.

Cheesbrough said another benefit is that users have the same experience when using work applications both outside and in the office.

But he added there was initially some resistance due to the cultural changes the new technology represented.

He said: "There were a number of people who were sceptical during the early stages…but after a week or two of the learning curve they got used to it."

TMG is embracing the cloud as the preferred approach when refreshing its technology and already uses salesforce.com CRM to manage its reader subscriptions.

Cheesbrough said: "A key part of our technology strategy is to try and purchase and deploy systems as a service predominantly in the cloud where we can, so that when you're out of the office you can access data and information in the same way as you could as when you're in the office.

"We see the levels of innovation happening in the consumer space…you can actually take advantage of within the enterprise space."

Building company Taylor Woodrow recently completed its rollout of Google Apps across 1,800 members of staff.