How Vendasta moved from Slack to Google Chat with CloudFuze

In under eight weeks, CloudFuze helped us move more than 600 channels and 800 employees from Slack to Chat with zero downtime.” 

— Jason Coutu, IT Czar, Vendasta

Snapshot: Vendasta migrated from Slack to Google Chat to centralize its communication and collaboration tools under one roof. Learn how Chat has helped the commerce platform:

• Foster a collaborative, connected culture

• Streamline communication across its 800 global employees

• Lift and shift its trove of business information to Chat without losing any content

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  The mission and the challenge

  Vendasta is a customer engagement platform that helps businesses get more customers and keep them. Since our launch in 2008, we’ve grown from a small startup to a global enterprise with more than 700 employees in Canada, the United States, and India. We rely heavily on our collaboration tools to keep our distributed workforce connected.

  When Vendasta was a fresh startup, our team lived in Google Chat. It’s where we had real-time conversations, catch-ups, and check-ins. Chat facilitated agile collaboration and quick communication. But as we scaled, we needed more robust capabilities, such as discoverable channels and administration tools that Chat didn’t offer at the time.

  For eight years, we relied on Slack to support our instant communication, collaboration, and decision-making processes. But we kept hoping Google Chat would evolve to a place that would allow us to return. And to our excitement, 2023 was the year. With the velocity of new features arriving for Chat and the support of CloudFuze, we are thrilled to have made the switch back.

CloudFuze and Google have entered the chat

In the first half of 2023, we looked into Google Chat and discovered that it now had everything we required from a communication tool: private and public spaces, discoverable spaces anyone could join, a robust administration interface, and more, with the added benefit of being fully integrated into the Google Workspace platform we already use. But we had a trove of business information at our fingertips in Slack, including research and development discussions, conversations about sales strategies, historical IT data, and countless integrated processes across our organization.

As we sought ways to preserve, or better yet migrate, all of our Slack data to Google Chat and spaces, we learned that Google had released new APIs designed for this purpose. Unfortunately, the process would take more than a month for our small IT team to create the tools to use on our own.

That’s when we met CloudFuze, a platform that makes it simple, fast, and cost-effective to migrate data between cloud environments. With the first Slack-to-Chat migration tool, CloudFuze helped our team plan, manage, and carry out the transition, effectively lifting and shifting all of our important channels without losing any content. In under eight weeks, CloudFuze helped us move more than 600 channels and 800 employees from Slack to Chat with zero downtime.

Google Chat is once again a vital part of Vendasta’s culture. Everyone on our team uses it to collaborate on projects, share updates and insights, and build community with colleagues. The integration between Chat and all other Google Workspace tools simplifies communication by allowing us to work from a single tab, with everything in one place.

With discoverable spaces, we’ve been able to clear the clutter from inboxes and shift to real-time communication. Instead of sending long emails that many people don’t read, we use announcement spaces as a central place to skim company updates. People can interact and engage with each other through comments, messages, and emojis, further fostering a sense of camaraderie within our team.

One of my favorite examples is Petdasta, a space run by the pet owners in our community where people share photos of their dogs and cats being silly. We don’t want to assign everyone to that space because it might not be relevant for non-pet owners, but those who are interested can easily discover it and join on their own.

Chat also allows us to schedule meetings in a single click through its integration with Google Meet and Google Calendar. We can have one-to-one or group conversations to prepare for meetings ahead of time, include documents from across our Google tools, and share follow-up information and takeaways afterwards. For example, we have a weekly all-hands meeting of 800 people, and we've got a dedicated space for employees to make comments about what's being said in real time. Using these two tools together makes that meeting interactive and meaningful to everyone by ensuring they can all be in on the conversation.

Smart chips have been another amazing addition to our Chat and Meet experience. The ability to link to documents, channels, and people directly in Chat has really changed how we're interacting with these products. If we’re having an important conversation through Meet and need to loop someone in, we can drop it as a smart chip and they’ll immediately be notified in Chat.

Looking ahead

Chat now offers the features, integrations, and capabilities that we loved in Slack, all built into our existing Google Workspace framework. But switching back to Chat wasn’t just a way to unify our collaboration tools under one roof — it was part of our long-term strategy to empower our team to work better, faster, and smarter together. For me, Chat helps me stay connected to my staff, no matter where I am and no matter how busy I get.