Roots Canada – A BetterCloud Case Study

Employees: 200
Founded: 1973
Industry: Retail
Website: www.roots.com

Established in 1973, Roots has been Canada’s leading lifestyle brand for four decades. Known around the world for its quality leather goods and activewear, Roots got its humble start in Toronto when co-founders Michael Budman and Don Green founded the company – first as a natural footwear supplier.

Currently, Roots has more than 120 retail locations in the US and Canada with an additional 40 stores in Asia. While over the years, many of Roots styles and products have changed, the company is just as committed to its founding principles, which are based around health, wellness and protecting the environment.

Trading Up to the Cloud

Just as Roots’ products have changed with the times, their email system was in desperate need of an upgrade. About three years ago, Roots was faced with an important IT decision – replace their dying Exchange server with a new one, or move to the cloud.

According to Aaron Drever, Roots’ Technical Services Manager, moving to Google Apps was a better fit for the company. Roots liked Google’s collaboration tools, Postini spam services and generous storage space (at the time 25 GB compared to Microsoft’s 90 MB).

Streamlining Google Apps Management with FlashPanel

In order to streamline the Google Apps management process, Aaron and his IT team began using FlashPanel, which replaced a command line tool.

Shared Contacts

Roots primarily uses FlashPanel to add and manage shared contacts “on the fly.” FlashPanel’s shared contacts feature has given Roots the ability to maintain one global address list for the entire company, freeing employees from managing and maintaining their own disparate lists.

Email Delegation

Roots also heavily relies on FlashPanel’s inbox delegation feature to give a number of employees access to the same generic email address.

Google Drive Inventory

While Roots has yet to allow individual end users to enable the Desktop version of Drive on individual machines, the company does heavily monitor Drive usage through FlashPanel’s Drive Inventory feature, specifically checking to see how many Docs users have created.