Carpenter Realtors moves to the Cloud with Google Apps for Business
January 27th, 2012
Carpenter Realtors held their annual Kickoff for 2012 yesterday. Amid the many exciting announcements and new programs, we unveiled Google Apps for Business to our sales team.
Google Apps for Business is a paradigm shift in communications, breaking away from the old way to do business – the tired approach of loading software onto one machine and either lugging that machine around or doing without all your documents. The USB sticks, the merging of multiple versions of documents, lost files, inaccessible files, etc. are a thing of the past.
The new paradigm is cloud computing. Everything is stored, processed and accessed on Google’s servers – the “cloud.” The device accessing the data is no longer anywhere near as important. If you’re about to give a presentation and your laptop dies, under the old paradigm you’re completely shut down. With Google Apps for Business you can log into your Google account from any computer, any tablet, any smart phone and access your documents, including that presentation and the show goes on. Google Apps for Business gives our agents 25GB of storage. Consider Dropbox starts at 2GB and our old email server provided 3GB of storage for comparison. Old sales files from years ago can now be kept for the day that buyer from years ago becomes a seller. The platform gives our users business Gmail, Google Docs, Google Video, Google Sites, Chat & Video Chat. And instead of buying one license from Microsoft that gave us one copy of Office to install on one computer (and one copy to upgrade, for a fee, down the road) we get with one license of Google Apps for Business access to all those features on a multitude of devices – as many as that user needs.
Consider an example – an agent creates a document on a walk up computer in one of our offices. They email that document and walk away. Two hours later while they’re on the other side of town they get a call and need that document again. Maybe they retrieve it from their sent items or they drive back to that office. Maybe someone deleted the document. Or someone is sitting on that computer. Or worse, they created the document in Word 2010 and the recipient has Office 2003. Or doesn’t have Office at all. Whatever, it’s less than ideal. So you track down the document, make the changes, email it back to them and later get to the closing table and they’re using the wrong version of the document you emailed. They’re on version six and version nine has all the corrections. Ugh.
Now with Google Apps for Business that same agent creates a document and shares it with someone – not emails it, shares it. The recipient gets access to the document in Google Docs. No software to install, no compatibilities to overcome. No file size limitations to worry about with email. The recipient says they need some changes made. Great; Use the Google Docs App on your smartphone or tablet. Or log in from any computer to your Google Apps account. Make the changes. You’re done. It’s already a shared document. You don’t have to email it again. Or worry about which version of the document they’re going to use. As Google says, there’s only one version of the “truth.” One document, one version that everyone has. Edit it umpteen times and there’s still just one copy of that document. You could be in China or in a cave with really good wifi and you’re just as connected to your stuff as you would be sitting at your desk in your office.
This is the tip of the iceberg – and it will be just like Titanic – the one that grossed hundreds of millions of dollars, not the one that sank – and we will find uses and functions and solutions to problems we didn’t even know existed with this platform. It will reduce sales friction, another Google-ism, and make our agents that much more productive. Oh, and we’ll be writing a six-figure check to Google for these services while providing this to our agents at no additional charge. Carpenter Realtors partners with our agents and continues to look for agent friendly tools to enhance their value proposition.
Posted by: 
George Christodoulou
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Jim Newell
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