Unicity streamlines global collaboration with Google Workspace and SADA

Promoting health and wellness

The health and wellness industry offers a wide range of products designed to support overall well-being and address specific health concerns. These supplements can provide essential nutrients that may be lacking in one’s diet, boost the immune system, or enhance energy levels. 

Unicity International, known for their research and development of botanical supplements and focus on metabolic health, produces over 400 nutritional products in the health and wellness category.

“Unicity’s mission is to help people everywhere enjoy a beautiful, healthy, and fulfilling life through our exceptional wellness products,” says Zach Middleton, Director of IT Operations at Unicity. “We’re defined by our excellent products, and it’s really our mission to help people.”  

Business challenge

As an international company, Unicity has sales in over 60 countries around the world, with staff located in 18 nations to support their customers. While headquartered in Utah in the United States, a large number of their employees work in other countries. 

For more than 20 years, they relied on Microsoft Office and then on Microsoft 365. Throughout that time, Unicity’s IT environment became outdated and fragmented, with different departments and global teams using a variety of unofficial productivity tools that varied from the sanctioned Microsoft deployment. 

“One of the glaring needs that we had was to create some uniformity around the collaboration and communication technology for our business,” says Middleton. “We had a lot of employees using many different chat and video platforms such as Slack, Discord, Telegram, WhatsApp, Skype, and Zoom.”

Lack of standardization led to several challenges:

• Compliance risks: Disparate platforms made it hard to adhere to data privacy regulations and standards like GDPR and PCI DSS in countries with varying requirements.
• Collaboration barriers: Employees struggled to work together efficiently due to lack of a unified platform, hampered by versioning and file-lock issues and no real-time editing.
• Communication gaps: Use of multiple messaging and video conferencing tools created communication silos and hindered cross-team collaboration.
• Security vulnerabilities: The use of unauthorized productivity tools across departments made it difficult to monitor workflows, apply consistent security policies, and protect against potential threats.
• Outdated technology: Unicity’s reliance on an on-premises data center presented scalability and security limitations.

Solution

With a looming deadline to renew their Microsoft 365 license, Unicity took the opportunity to consider their options: continue with legacy Microsoft infrastructure with many shadow IT applications that pose security and compliance risks or find an alternative that would let their employees collaborate on a secure platform that complies with data and privacy regulations and standards. They decided on the latter and chose Google Workspace as their new productivity and collaboration solution. 

“Google Workspace filled a lot of those boxes that we wanted to check because we had really old infrastructure,” says Middleton. “To better collaborate across teams globally, communicate on a standardized platform, and use tools that function way better than traditional Microsoft Office products, Google Workspace really met that need.”

Introducing the implementation expert

Unicity was also using Active Directory as part of their on-prem infrastructure. To replace that, they decided on JumpCloud, a cloud-based identity, device, and access management platform. Then JumpCloud introduced Unicity to SADA for their Google Workspace deployment expertise.

“JumpCloud is an open identity platform that allows you to have identities similar to Active Directory but located in the cloud,” says Middleton. “It was a natural relationship between JumpCloud and Google Workspace. Then JumpCloud said they had this great partner, SADA, who could help us migrate from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace.”

Collaborating leads to a quicker solution

As a veteran of three previous Google Workspace migrations, Middleton was used to doing moves internally only with IT staff. However, with the Unicity migration set to be his biggest challenge to date with more than a thousand users, he really needed outside help to make it happen. The tradeoff of doing the migration alone just didn’t add up. That’s when the collaboration with SADA began in earnest. 

“We definitely talked about doing the migration ourselves, but you have to look at the actual costs—not just the financial costs but also the labor costs and the potential for data loss,” says Middleton. “So we engaged with SADA in fall 2023 to start planning this migration. From the very beginning, it was a very good process for us and a very good relationship from the start.” 

Unicity has a small IT staff of 25 in comparison to their large and spread-out user base. Their day job of taking care of the workers’ IT needs as well as completing a different cloud migration at the same time as the Google Workspace transition meant they just didn’t have enough time or resources to get it all done simultaneously. With only seven and a half months to finish the Google Workspace migration, things had to happen fast.

“At that point, we don’t really have the time to do it ourselves, especially, because we’re supporting over 1,000 users globally, dealing with an aging infrastructure, and migrating 50 workloads out of our data center,” says Middleton. “When you’re faced with that set of circumstances as a project manager—as a leader—you have to leverage outside IT providers.” 

Migrating the entire organization

By collaborating with SADA, Unicity chose to work with a multiple-time Google Cloud Partner of the Year to migrate their entire organization to Google Workspace. SADA’s expertise and white-glove service were instrumental in ensuring a smooth transition. The migration occurred in three stages: core IT staff, early adopters comprising developers and product managers, and then the remaining 90% of Unicity’s employees. 

“SADA migrated a small group of people first, tested it out, worked through the data migration details, then had a secondary migration for what we called early adopters; together, they’re 10% of our workforce,” says Middleton. “By the time SADA got to our global go-live, all our concerns about the migration were resolved.” 

With the migration proceeding like clockwork and finishing ahead of schedule, Unicity IT staff were all able to dive into learning the Google Workspace Administrator Console in depth with SADA training. “By the time we were at the global go-live, we were basically all master administrators when it came to Google Workspace,” says Middleton.

Key aspects of the solution included:

• Comprehensive migration: SADA migrated over 17.5 million email items and 7 TB of data from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace within a tight six-month timeframe.
• Change management: SADA provided dedicated change management support to 1,000 users, including email communication templates to keep users informed on the transition, training resources in 14 languages to ensure user adoption and minimize disruption, and training recordings for asynchronous use by late adopters.
• Internal resource site: SADA’s change management experts created an intranet repo with Google Sites for SADA-produced Google Workspace training recordings, which are updated continuously from SADA’s master training recording repository. 
• Ongoing support: SADA’s technical expertise and direct access to Google Workspace support ensured that any issues were resolved quickly and efficiently.

“The process that we went through with SADA, the expertise and the guidance they provided, to me, we couldn’t have bought that kind of service,” says Middleton. “We were able to meet weekly, have status update calls with my leadership team where I was able to fill in my CTO, track deployment, and talk about timelines and progress. And having a dedicated person to prepare the communication templates that I needed to use to communicate to my end users on a daily or weekly basis was a game changer for Unicity.”

Scoping SharePoint work after the project at no additional cost

At the end of the project, Middleton and his IT staff discovered that some groups in Unicity’s global workforce were using SharePoint 365 and Microsoft Teams, which were not in the original project scope. It was vital that the data for these apps be migrated to Google Workspace. Fortunately, SADA’s project management team was able to find flexibility in the original project scope and added the extra work to the project at no additional cost.

“One of our shadow IT uses was around SharePoint 365, where certain departments globally heavily relied on both SharePoint 365 and Microsoft Teams Chats,” says Middleton. “SADA was able to do the discovery with us and understand what was missing and add it to the scope of the project at no extra cost, which was an incredible service to Unicity.”

Impact

As a result of collaborating with SADA, Unicity was able to successfully complete their migration from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace in only six months—50 days ahead of their Microsoft 365 deadline. SADA’s assistance also delivered other significant benefits for Unicity, including:

• Improved collaboration: Google Workspace’s real-time collaboration features, such as simultaneous editing in Google Docs and Sheets, streamlined workflows, and enhanced productivity, saving hundreds of hours per month.
• Enhanced communication: Google Meet and Chat provided a unified platform for seamless communication across teams and time zones.
• Streamlined compliance: Centralized data management and security controls in Google Workspace simplified compliance with data privacy regulations like GDPR and PCI DSS.
• Cost savings: Eliminating the need for multiple communication and collaboration tools reduced license costs and improved IT efficiency.

Middleton highlighted the positive impact on user experience: “Overall, it’s been a very positive experience, very positive feedback. Some users talk of processes that took a couple hours due to file collaboration limitations on desktop applications that are now down to just a few minutes.”

The company achieved 100% adoption of Google Workspace, with employees embracing the platform’s ease of use, real-time collaboration capabilities, and seamless integration with other cloud technologies.

Overall, Unicity’s work with SADA on their Google Workspace migration was a resounding success. By consolidating their IT infrastructure, enhancing collaboration, and improving compliance, Unicity empowered their global workforce to operate more efficiently and effectively. The positive user feedback and seamless transition demonstrate the value of working with a trusted Google Cloud Premier Partner like SADA for complex IT projects.