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KAREN JACKSON: Mercy Corps is an international relief and
development agency, and we do work in developing nations to
build infrastructure, we do peace building.
DOUG CARTER: Our real mission is to alleviate poverty and
suffering in the world, humanitarian relief.
MAHMOUD KHAN: Email is probably the most important
communication system for Mercy Corps.
KAREN JACKSON: An office is losing electricity because of
bombs falling, needs to know that they can go to that web
interface and still have email and communicate with the
people who will take care of them.
MAHMOUD KHAN: Thinking about it, I think it's going to be a
great thing for Mercy Corps to do the migration from the old
system to the Gmail system.
DOUG CARTER: We've been able to populate and enable, get
everything ready to go, and then basically just flip a
switch and we're off now with the new service.
So it's been very painless from a technical standpoint.
KAREN JACKSON: We had to users who are in areas that don't
have roads.
They don't have electricity.
They don't have a lot of the amenities that a North
American is used to.
DOUG CARTER: Another key reason for going with Google
would be the 24 by 7 support, which we did not have with our
other vendor.
MAHMOUD KHAN: The system administrators in the field
would be able to contact the technical support unit
themselves directly and get support, they
don't have to wait.
KAREN JACKSON: This morning we actually had a user in Uganda
who was locked out of her account, and she had some
time-critical email that needed to go out.
I called the support desk, and within a few minutes, they had
unlocked her account and solved the issue for us.
DOUG CARTER: With Google Apps coming out and allowing us to
assign a sub domain to a particular country, suddenly
gave us the power of splitting off the administrative
function and allowing the field office to do that work
and not us.
So it benefited both the field office and it benefited
headquarters, and it gives us a much more accurate picture
of who we're communicating with.
MAHMOUD KHAN: With Gmail spreadsheet, there will be an
online version available there, so field offices can
just enter data to it, and it'll be available instantly
to everyone else and all the offices in that country.
KAREN JACKSON: You know, your application has been so useful
and so easy for me.
Managing 450 people, changing email addresses in 35
different countries is a big task, and the fact that it's
so easy to use has made it so the logistics piece are the
hard part, not the Google piece.
DOUG CARTER: Beginning this relationship with Google, the
support and service we've gotten so far, the attention,
the solid applications that are underneath the Google Apps
platform, the API, all the possibilities, I'm just really
excited about where we're going to be able to take this.