After employees rejected Servcorp’s initial choice of cloud storage service, the company was forced to go back to the drawing board to provide a better file sharing solution for its workforce.
“Probably about two or three years ago we had a particular set of users that had a requirement to become quite mobile and have access to storage,” said Servcorp’s chief technology officer, Daniel Kukucka.
Across the company employees use a combination of smartphones, tablets and PCs.
The files that need to be shared, both internally and with external parties, range from standard documents through to images and videos from the marketing and web teams.
“We went to market and had a look at a few options. We chose an incumbent provider that we had available at no extra cost to us,” Kukucka said.
“Over the two years of having that solution in place there was a lot of pain and suffering through the business. We had a lot of negative feedback — usability was quite poor and accessibility was quite challenging.”
Kukucka cited the example of an executive accessing the wrong storage instance and finding himself in a meeting with an outdated copy of a presentation.
“We negated the users to an extent and we thought, ‘Well this product should suffice and it’s not adding any extra cost,’” Kukucka said. “I think the primary focus was the cost element.”
Users ended up working around the service, setting up their own instances of Google Drive and Dropbox to share files and collaborate, the CTO said.
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“We soon realised that cost wasn’t so much of a factor compared to the user experience that our personnel were facing, and that quite quickly became the priority,” Kukucka said.
“From the feedback, we decided we need to go back to market and have a look,” he said.
“Instead of going the traditional path, which was as an IT group we will go out to market and tick off all the technical aspects of what we wanted, we instead went to the user group and said, ‘Look can, you let us know what you prefer.”
“Overwhelmingly when we got the feedback from that particular user group the selection was Dropbox,” the CTO said.
As a result, Servcorp chose Dropbox Business.
“People already had personal accounts and, interestingly enough, around the same period Dropbox sent me an email noting all the users that had Servcorp domains attached to their accounts,” Kukucka said.
“It gave me some confidence in going down that path,” he added.
Servcorp rolled out the file sharing solution last year.
Kukucka said part of the appeal was Dropbox Business wouldn’t tie up his IT team.
“We set up the relevant ADFS authentication through the backend, so that way employees can use their Servcorp credentials,” the CTO said.