Collaboration and Teamwork with Google Apps. Rypple goes Google.
July 8th, 2010 | Published in Google Enterprise
Editor's note: Today's guest blogger is Jay Goldman, Head of Marketing for Rypple, a lightweight, social service for continuous feedback and collaboration. Rypple helps managers and their teams achieve goals faster with a simpler way to stay on track, recognize achievements, give useful feedback, and get people talking. Rypple has Gone Google from top to bottom — helping them to grow rapidly.
We'd Gone Google even before we'd written a line of code on our own application. Setting up our Gmail, Docs, Calendar, and Sites was one of the first things we did at Rypple. Our team exists online, constantly connected through laptops and mobile devices. All roads lead seamlessly back to Apps, where we easily exchange emails, share information, and collaborate in the cloud.
Rypple is all about teamwork and collaboration, so having an internal teamwork and collaboration platform is essential to our success. We're a small but growing start-up with a geographically diverse team spread across North America, from San Francisco to Toronto. Staying lean and agile is a key part of our DNA, giving us a strong preference for lightweight and simple solutions, so there was no way we were going to choose a solution that didn't allow us to live it in our infrastructure. Google Apps was the clear choice.
We'd Gone Google even before we'd written a line of code on our own application. Setting up our Gmail, Docs, Calendar, and Sites was one of the first things we did at Rypple. Our team exists online, constantly connected through laptops and mobile devices. All roads lead seamlessly back to Apps, where we easily exchange emails, share information, and collaborate in the cloud.
Our customers use Rypple to improve communication and stay on track, so it's no surprise that we're big fans of Google Talk, our inter-office chat medium of choice. Chatting over IM saves us countless trips across the office, making sure we stay focused on building great software. Our knowledge base lives in a Google Site, keeping our team up to speed on the latest developments, marketing strategies, and collateral. On-boarding new employees - a constant concern for a growing start-up - is as simple as logging in to the Apps admin panel and making a few quick clicks.
Our Googley-ness goes even deeper than our choice in email and calendering tools. Google Analytics and Website Optimizer are essential elements of our marketing strategy and significant enablers of our data-driven approach. Their tabs are always open in Chrome, giving us a view into what's happening on our website and how our sales and marketing funnel is performing. And we keep the top of that funnel full thanks to Google AdWords, which drives a considerable portion of our daily traffic.
All of that makes us a cutting edge tech start-up with an infrastructure that helps power our growth. Our love affair with Google goes even one step further: the entire Rypple application is built on Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Our development team loves how GWT gives them the tools to build quickly and easily stick to our agile roots. Our customers love how we're able to push a new release packed with features and enhancements every week.
Launching a start-up used to be a really expensive proposition. You needed teams of developers and expensive servers, not to mention all the foosball tables, basketball hoops, and scooters. Here at Rypple, we're proud to be a different kind of start-up, focused on customers, products, and our business model. We're at the vanguard of a new generation: lightweight, agile, and living on the cloud — and we couldn't do it without Google.
Posted by Ashley Chandler, Google Apps Team