How Flat Branch uses Google Drive Embedder Enterprise version to bring the power of Google Drive to its employees – without them even realizing they have learnt how to use it!
Flat Branch Home Loans simplifies home buying for thousands of Americans each year by ensuring its 100+ staff members work closely together to deliver a seamless service.
Their WordPress-based intranet is central to ensuring their entire staff base – covering 14 offices in the state of Missouri alone – operates as a tight-knit community.
Since the company uses Gmail for every staff member, Google Apps Login Premium was purchased so everyone could access the intranet effortlessly from day one. Doing this was critical for the site to become a thriving communications hub available instantly and from any location.
However, managers soon noticed a problem: it was difficult to share documents reliably amongst staff. Most employees used a combination of Dropbox and Gmail to move documents around the company, and this became hard to track and maintain over time.
Management believed Google Drive would offer a more accountable file storage system since its granular permissions could be implemented across user accounts that were already being managed to make use of Gmail. But users found it awkward to adopt yet another separate system, with its own structure and learning curve.
Since the intranet was already popular, the IT department realized that Google Drive Embedder Enterprise version would allow them to bring Google Drive into the intranet, allowing document sharing to be backed by Google Drive’s file storage and permissions systems, without users having to navigate through Drive’s native front end.
Nick Trabue, IT Specialist at Flat Branch, describes the implementation: “Each team already maintains its own company-wide and intra-departmental sections of the intranet, and Google Drive Embedder allowed us to embed a unique Drive folder into each one of those areas automatically. Right within the intranet, users can view and upload documents within any relevant department’s Drive ‘Attachments Folder’.”
Nick and his team can mange these folders and user accounts from the regular Google Drive front-end and the Google Apps domain admin panel, but regular users need never visit Google Drive itself.
“The IT department can harness the power and flexibility of Google Drive while users remain comfortably within their familiar intranet environment.”
“I was worried that integrating Google Apps into WordPress would mean a lot of custom development, but WP-Glogin provided us with a suite of plugins that essentially created a Google Apps intranet out of the box. They have allowed us to focus on content and building out an incredibly useful intranet site for our employees.”
For more information about Google Drive Embedder, Google Apps Login, and our other intranet WordPress plugins, please see our web site.
More information about Flat Branch:
Address: 101 S 5th St Suite 200
Columbia, Missouri 65201
NMLS Number: 224149
Website: http://www.flat-branch.com/
