Make it easy to send branded email signatures when using a domain alias

ack in the very early days of CloudM, we had a problem!

Even though we were talking to customers and selling as CloudM, our emails (and their signatures) would often come from our parent company, causing unnecessary confusion.

“Who are you?”, we would hear. “I’ve been talking to CloudM”. And, where there is confusion, there’s doubt. “Who am I really dealing with here?” Even if it was never brought up as a reason, we knew it was costing us – both business and reputation.

Well, the easiest way to get around this was to use a domain alias address, allowing our employees to effortlessly switch between their parent company and CloudM email addresses depending on who they were talking to, with all responses sent to the same inbox. Even today, we have centralized staff that need to represent both sides of the company.

With so many companies now having multiple brands and domains under their umbrella, using an alias is getting even more common. Did you know that, in 2020, Unilever NV had 1,181 individual domain names including Ben & Jerry’s and Dove?

But, this brings up another problem – How do you make the email signature represent the brand you are sending the email from?

Introducing Domain Alias Signatures – a new feature for Gmail within our CloudM Email Signature Management module that allows you to set bespoke email signatures that will be displayed depending on which email address the user decides to send the email from.

It could be as simple as the primary email address displaying your company logo, and the domain alias email address displaying the logo of a specific brand.

Or, completely bespoke with different brand colors, fonts, contact details, and social media links, to name a few. And the best thing is that most of this information is added as a variable so that, as soon as a field such as job title is changed in CloudM, it is automatically changed on the email signature, quickly and easily keeping it up to date.

Domain Alias Signatures is just one of many new and exciting feature changes that we have added to our redesigned Email Signature Management module in the last 6 months, joining our brand new Template Gallery and the ability to schedule signatures for the primary domain, with many more updates in the pipeline.

Want to find out more?

Check out our Smart Teams video on YouTube and visit our CloudM website, or book a 15 minute discovery call to speak to one of our brilliant team.

Data security is one of the most prominent issues of the digital age. Constantly evolving and changing, data compliance can be a difficult area to navigate and can be a huge project for any IT department. When a user is offboarded, finding a solution to help you deliver the complex needs surrounding data can be a tricky challenge and if data compliance isn’t withheld to the letter, you could be left with some serious headaches.

In 2021, CloudM created the holy grail of solutions for your offboarded user data. Archive, an industry-first feature, was designed to help businesses by managing compliance, retaining/restoring data as needed, and purging the data when it’s longer needed.

As the footprint for data becomes more and more embedded within our civilization, Archive and other tools like it will become indispensable, helping you to navigate those difficult and sticky data headaches, and keeping you compliant.

So, what’s the best solution for you?

Well, there are three core solutions that will help you stay compliant and efficient, all whilst working to your needs and requirements as a business.

What can we learn from this?

Every business needs something different, and for that, there must be a relatively flexible solution. This is why Archive can work as a solution on its own or as a hybrid solution.

Get in touch with our team of experts for your free demo today.

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What’s going wrong in your digital workplace and how to fix it.

Having worked with a breadth of different brands reaching from the far corners of education and health to lifestyle and entertainment, we’ve seen a diverse range of digital workplaces and how they’re used.

Whether you’ve been using a digital workplace for a long time, or if you’re new to the Cloud, we see the same mistakes holding workforces back from reaching their fullest potential.

Here are five of the biggest mistakes and the straightforward solutions to fix them.

Email Signatures

Mistake: Whether your business is large or small, a clean and consistent look is essential for professional communication, especially when you’re juggling multiple departments and sub-brands. There’s nothing worse than email signatures with inconsistent branding and fonts, which can be really damaging to your reputation.

Solution: Using an Email Signature Management tool (a popular feature of CloudM) unifies control of signatures across the board while allowing designs to be tailored to specific teams or sub-brands. Automated cohesivity is at your fingertips with just the touch of a button, giving your email signatures a clean, professional, and brand-aligned look with no extra stress.

Shared calendars

Mistake: Not utilizing the full potential of your digital calendars is a tough habit to break, but there are many intuitive features you should embrace if you use a cloud/shared calendar across your business. It would be a huge mistake to not use the brilliant features available to you in order to maximize your efficiency.

Solution: Whether you’re using Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, each productivity suite offers a range of different features so you can get the most out of your time (and your colleague’s time). Whether you want to set working hours so meetings can’t be scheduled on your days off, make appointment slots for people to book, or take some focus time to get on with those looming deadlines, it’s well worth researching the amazing features available to you… Speaking of which, if you want to know more about Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace Calendar, please read our blogs on getting to know their features.

Instant messaging

Mistake: Instant messaging could be something that doesn’t appeal to many businesses because it reminds us of relaxed communication, which might conflict with the professional culture you want in your business, but there are many benefits of embracing instant messaging.

Solution: Instant messaging is a great way to embrace hybrid working whilst still maintaining a good rapport with your colleagues. Instead of piling up a long email chain, or taking up huge chunks of time by hosting meetings, it’s a quick and efficient way to get the answers and solutions you need whilst working. If you’re using Google Workspace, you’ll be familiar with its chat function, Google Chats and Spaces, and its ability to format text the same way you would in a Google Doc. Likewise, you can utilize instant messaging if you’re using Microsoft 365 via Microsoft Teams.

Licenses

Mistake: Along with the licenses for your chosen productivity suite (whether that’s Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace) you’ll be buying licenses left, right, and center for all your other SaaS solutions. This isn’t a bad thing; subscriptions are unavoidable if you want to utilize the true freedom and power of the cloud, but keeping on top of your license count can be tricky and time-consuming.

Solution: Licensing can be one of the leading costs eating up your budget, and managing and maintaining licenses properly can be a huge contributor to saving money. With CloudM, you can automatically manage your most used licenses so the costs don’t build up.

DIY Migrations

Mistake: Many businesses want to make the most of their amazing staff, and so a DIY migration seems like the best opportunity for their IT team to step up to the challenge. But as data migrations require a niche skillset, this can cause spiraling costs, long and drawn-out projects soaking up important resources, and data loss.

Solution: The solution to this is easy. Trust the experts. Many believe experts will end up coming hand in hand with enormous costs, but on the contrary; experts are there to help you save money by keeping the project running smoothly. Having worked with a large breadth of established household names in the past, we’ve saved companies millions.

Step into the future with CloudM

At CloudM, we have an extensive track record of helping our customers with their migrations, digital workplace management, and their data archiving needs. We’re proud to have worked with a huge number of household brands who’ve praised CloudM and our people. We’re ready to help you with any projects you have on the horizon.

Don’t believe us? Ask our customers.

“The time you get back from having a simple user interface you click into compared to our process of how we would restore things is night and day. It used to take a full afternoon to restore something and now it’s literally a few clicks.” – Jamie Tanner, Digital Innovations at Kingston & Sutton Council

The team at CloudM is communicative and supportive. The regular product demonstrations help us to stay up to date with new features and exciting updates to the platform. We feel listened to and valued as customers, and our feedback has gone on to help develop the software.” – Dan Morley, Head of I.T Infrastructure and Service Delivery at Village Hotels

“The customer success team has worked with us to not only better understand the CloudMproduct, but also how we can better utilize Google Workspace. The ongoing support is great. If we’ve had any issues with the product the support team has replied almost immediately, it’s a first-class experience and I believe the best platform for managing your user data. We’ve actually recommended your product to other companies and partners, we have no plans to move away from CloudM, and it really has become an integral part of our role.” – Noberasco

Designed to save businesses time and money whilst meeting compliance demands

Archive allows you to easily, automatically, and safely store and recover user data, without the mounting license fees or complexity of solutions such as e-discovery

CloudM, a SaaS data management platform, has announced the launch of Archive, a new feature which allows users to easily, automatically, and safely store and recover user data, helping businesses to remain compliant without facing the mounting user license fees associated with traditional archiving and ediscovery solutions.

Companies managing their environment through CloudM will now be able to reduce the administrative and economic burden of complying with regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA and FOI, which have traditionally been a manual and time-consuming process.

The new data retention and recovery capability allows users to automatically and securely retain data for employees who have left an organisation, and keeps the data indexed, searchable, and restorable for a time period of the company’s choice. This entire process can be automated as standard, so, as an employee goes through the company’s existing offboarding procedure, their data will automatically be archived into a cloud storage bucket of their choice.

With Archive, IT departments don’t need to worry about the headaches of sifting through old files, or even making sure the data is stored in a compliant manner as Archive manages the whole process. Users can easily search and restore the data that they need, including the emails of a previous employee, at the touch of a button, all within one platform.

A French-Swiss multinational company which manufactures building supplies and operates in 80 countries was among the first to use CloudMs Archive feature to manage its 60,000 user accounts. In total, the company paid €2,100,000 under its existing Google system, and this bill has now been reduced to just €234,000 by switching to CloudM.

Gary Bennion, Managing Director at CloudM, said: “Archive is an industry first, cloud native solution that is designed to help organisations comply with regulations, answer information requests, and deal with conflicts and disputes efficiently while giving them the confidence that the data needed is safe and secure within their chosen storage environment.

“Within any digital workplace it’s vital to keep licence costs down, but this is especially true in organisations with high staff turnover. With current leading SaaS vendors if 200 employees leave an organisation each year that’s 200 unused licenses to add to the bill annually, which can add up really quickly. With Archive that cost is eliminated, but you still have the peace of mind of having kept it in place.”

To find out more about CloudM and Archive, why not read our Ebook? If you want more technical information, we’ve got a blog on that too!

We’re growing from strength to strength and as we make our way through 2022, we’ve hit another major milestone – 1 million platform users!

We’ve come a long way
The CloudM platform was launched in 2018, and in those four short years we’ve amassed a staggering 1 million users.

Our SaaS data management platform now helps customers across the globe not only migrate, but also manage their data in Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 for a truly automated experience.

After being initially approached by Google to migrate the Economist magazine from GroupWise to G Suite, a project that went off without a hitch, we’ve grown our software from a simple migration tool to a full SaaS management and automation platform.

And we haven’t stopped evolving. 2021 saw the launch of our innovative Archive feature, which automatically retains user data as part of the offboarding process, with even more news to come in 2022 and beyond.

Our platform has empowered employees around the world to become more efficient using our extensive features and automated tools so it’s no surprise that we’ve now hit this impressive 1 million user milestone.

With over 68 million migrations performed and counting, we’re proud to support our clients and we won’t stop innovating now. We’ve recently won the ‘Cloud Management Solution of the Year’ at the Cloud Excellence Awards and have been shortlisted for many other awards.

As the market shifts and grows and changes, we’ll be right there, supporting our ever-growing list of prestigious clients and developing the latest pioneering cloud technologies.

Bring on the next million users!

From a migration tool to a full platform solution

While our beginnings saw us develop and implement a unique migration tool, today the company and what we offer is very different.

The CloudM platform is a SaaS management tool that helps you get the most out of your digital workspace. Whether it’s Microsoft 365, Google Workspace or other SaaS applications, the CloudM platform drives your business through a simple, easy-to-use interface, helping you to work smarter, not harder.

We have created and developed a unique platform that automates time-consuming tasks like IT admin, onboarding and offboarding, archiving, and of course, migrations, allowing you to get on with the real job – growing your business.

Where we stand today

• 1 Million Platform users
• ISO 27001 Certified
• Employees in the UK, EU and USA
• Cloud Management Solution of the Year 2021
• Featured in Gartner Market Guides for SaaS Management
• Platforms and Cloud Office Migration Tools

“I was so proud of the team when we won the Cloud Management Solution of the Year. The award is an acknowledgment that our transition to a full platform solution for the cloud is complete. We’ve been at the forefront of cloud data management and this is the recognition of that from the industry.”

Gary Bennion, CloudM MD

Some of the biggest names in the business
Our passion is helping our customers, and it’s on that foundation that we’ve built such an impressive list of well-known brands as clients. Household names such as Netflix, Uber and Groupon are all on our list of satisfied customers, along with some of the largest franchises in the world.

Kempinski Hotel Group, for example, is Europe’s oldest luxury hotel group, with a collection of distinguished properties around the world. With more than 70 hotels in over 30 countries, a move to the cloud was inevitable.

We fully migrated all their users to Google Workspace using our platform, transferring existing messages, appointments and contacts.

Jeremy Ward, Senior VP for IT at Kempinski, said “We not only have an email platform to support our future growth, but a collaboration platform that is continuously improved. This will allow us to introduce new functionalities to our employees at a significantly reduced cost compared to our old solution.”

So why do people come to us?
It’s simple; we make your life easier and save you money while we do it.

CloudM is the one-size-fits-all solution for IT Admins. It automates onboarding and offboarding workflows, automatically creates or revokes permissions and access and gives other trusted departments the ability to handle their own affairs like email signatures, freeing up time for the IT team.

Not only are we innovators in the cloud management space, we are also one of the world’s leading migration experts and our trusted migration tool makes the job simple, fast, and secure.

Migrations can be a stressful affair, and if not done correctly, can result in data loss or serious downtime for a company. That’s why choosing the right software partner is so important, and that’s why we’re so passionate about what we do.

Whether you’re a small start-up or a large, globally recognised brand, streamline your business with CloudM.

Our award-winning platform that gives you the ability to automate your office, saving you time, stress and money.

Get in touch to discover what we can do for your organization.