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Clearwing Productions – A BetterCloud Case Study

BetterCloud Monitor

April 25, 2013

2 minute read

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Clearwing ProductionsEmployees: 60
Founded: 1985
Industry: Entertainment
Website: www.clearwing.com

Since its founding in 1985, Clearwing, a Milwaukee based production company, has helped some of the nation’s largest brands and best known performing artists create, implement and produce top of the line audio and visual displays.

Whether it’s renovating the audio system at ASU’s Wells Fargo Arena or designing and building the Miller Lite branding effort at the Dallas Cowboys Stadium, Clearwing has proven itself as a leader in the entertainment production industry.

Migrating from GoDaddy to Google Apps

Three years ago, Clearwing decided to migrate from GoDaddy email services to Google Apps. According to Patrick Doran, Clearwing’s IT Manager, who joined the company this past November, “Google Apps is built rock solid.” By migrating to Apps, Clearwing would no longer have to worry about email quotas, reliability or spam filtering. Most importantly, the company loved the “overall ease of use and integration among Google products.”

Google Spreadsheets in particular have transformed how the company coordinates major production events. “Team members collaborate and build out spreadsheets for each client and event to coordinate everything,” Doran notes, “I can’t do anything but speak volumes for how awesome Google’s spreadsheet functionality is.”

In addition to Google Spreadsheets, Doran sees the use of Google Calendar, Groups and Drive grow every day.

Securing Google Drive with FlashPanel

After joining the organization this past fall, Doran went searching for a tool to manage the company’s growing use of Google Drive. He quickly found FlashPanel and implemented the application immediately.

Google Drive Security

“I love FlashPanel’s ease of management when it comes to Google Drive,” said Doran, “the ability to supercede what documents are being shared with whom is crucial.”

Doran saw the true value in FlashPanel’s Google Drive features when he needed to gain access to a privately shared document owned by an operations employee that could not be reached. Through FlashPanel, Doran was able to gain access to the document and change its sharing settings to give other Clearwing employees access.

While Clearwing doesn’t have a huge concern around security, Doran regularly monitors how documents are shared outside of his organization to ensure sensitive information is not shared improperly.

Email Signatures

In addition to FlashPanel’s Google Drive features, Doran utilizes the application’s email signature tool. Prior to installing FlashPanel, Clearwing’s marketing department had to email every employee whenever a new email signature design was introduced. Users would have to manually implement the new email signature, which usually led to many disparate versions.

Now, with FlashPanel, Doran is able to automatically implement email signatures across the entire company. “This feature has really helped streamline the entire process.”

As Doran becomes more familiar with FlashPanel, he plans to utilize the application’s shared contacts feature to create a company wide directory.

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