About the client
Beesfund is an equity crowdfunding platform operating on the basis of a sale of shares model. Since 2012, it has been helping companies issuing shares build and grow communities of investors ready to support their innovative ideas.
Beesfund in numbers:
- 9 years in the market
- 90 completed issues
- Share issuers have raised over 57.5 million zloty
- ~ 4.2 million zloty – the amount raised by the issuer of the largest number of shares
- ~ 65,000 investors registered
The main challenge
Beesfund’s employees use devices running on different operating systems – they needed a suite of office apps that would work and be compatible with Windows, Linux, MacOS, and ChromeOS alike. The said suite of office and communication tools was to streamline the team’s remote work because not all of its members work every day in Beesfund’s Warsaw office.
We considered also Office 365 but the integration of services with mobile devices, videoconferencing combined with a calendar, and the best solution to share and edit documents at the same time spoke in favor of Google Workspace.
The solution to the problem
Google Workspace has met all the expectations of Beesfund’s employees. The available web apps enable them to make use of document editors using web browsers on their computers running on any operating system – both in the office and when working remotely from any place in the world.
Results
Effective induction
In the case of the vast majority of Beesfund employees, the adoption of Google Workspace wasn’t anything surprising. They had already had experience with Google and Gmail, which helped them get quickly used to the new office software. The Google Workspace training run by FOTC was very helpful to those who didn’t have any first-hand experience with the service before. Thanks to the effective induction and the evening out the knowledge level in the entire team, the company managed to go through the process of switching to new tools smoothly.
Documents digitized
Google Workspace enabled Beesfund to adopt a system of electronic document circulation. All company documents are now stored in Google Drive – this way, it’s easy to stay in control of them, and every employee has access to the data they need. Digitizing company documents and uploading them to Google’s cloud environment makes it also possible to control the security of business data thanks to the rules of sharing files within and outside the organization.
Full adoption of the service
The more Google apps are used on an everyday basis, the sooner the cost of Google Workspace subscription will pay off. Beesfund employees – as investment experts – are very well aware of it. That’s why they have been taking as much advantage of the potential of the service as possible since it was launched – not only using the inbox and the file editors, but also organizing video conferences in Meet, making use of Google Drive’s storage space, of administration security measures, of the mobile versions of the apps, and of the calendar, including the option to book resources. All this made their remote work caused by the social isolation of 2020 much easier to embrace.
Security first
Cloud-based office tools need to be well protected against all and any online threats in particular. Luckily, Google Workspace offers a complete range of security measures, and Beesfund’s instance administrator is keen on making use of them.
Company Google accounts are used for single sign-on (SSO) with other services. The process of user authentication is a frequent target of attacks. SSO reduces the risk of company data leakage. This way, the only log-in details the employees need to know are their Google account log-in details. But even the strongest password can be broken. That’s why every Beesfund account comes with two-factor authentication. Properly configured security alerts help the administrator stay in the loop and keep their finger on the pulse – no suspicious activity will go unnoticed.