• Keeps documents up-to-date and available online in real time, eliminating the need to exchange files via email

• Helps management teams save time spent traveling to meetings by using Google Meet instead

• Enables team members to work on the same document simultaneously, making it easier to aggregate financial data

While consuming news on screens is the preferred method of 91% of 25 to 34 year old Indians, print newspaper sales are still enjoying growth, in parallel with this digital trend. To serve both print and digital readers, 70-year-old publishing company The Printers Mysore is keeping its journalism tradition alive in print for more than 10 million regular readers across the country and taking its publications online.

The Printers Mysore has four titles under its umbrella: the English-language daily Deccan Herald, and the Kannada-language daily Prajavani, weekly magazine Sudha, and monthly literary magazine Mayura. To keep the four publications alive in print and also attract readers to their respective websites, the company realized that digital transformation was the answer. So in February 2020, in order to optimize its internal processes, enhance productivity, and enable greater collaboration among editors, content coordinators, contributors, and other departments such as HR and IT, The Printers Mysore migrated its 1,000 full-time employees to Google Workspace.

“We want to maintain the integrity of print to keep delivering for our print readers, while leveraging the speed of digital to innovate further,” says Sitaraman Shankar, acting CEO at The Printers Mysore. “We see Google Workspace as a gateway to this innovation journey.”

Working with Google Cloud Premier Partner Shivaami, The Printers Mysore completed its migration from a previous mailing solution to Google Workspace, across its 25 offices, in just one month. “The Shivaami team was fantastic in handling the technical side of the migration,” says Abhishek. “Thanks to its help and support, our 1,000 employees were able to quickly start using their new tools with no problems.”

Adjusting to the change was a speedy process too, says Abhishek, as most employees were already familiar with Google Workspace due to having personal Gmail accounts. And those who weren’t, or needed support to adopt more Google Workspace solutions, received guidance from Abhishek’s team, who had been trained by Shivaami using “train the trainer” methodology. As a result, good news started traveling fast: “Within just 10 days of rolling out Google Workspace, there was already positive feedback from different departments,” says Abhishek. “Management teams are saving time by using Google Meet instead of traveling for meetings, and the finance department is using Sheets to make financial data aggregation easier as a team. Staff can now update spreadsheets online, in real time, and simultaneously access information on Drive, rather than having to exchange files via email, which is more time-consuming and risks leaving team members without access to the most up-to-date version of a document,” he explains. “Google Workspace is helping us transition from a 70-year-old way of doing things on paper, to an efficient and collaborative way of doing things in the cloud,” he adds.

“Google Workspace provides a platform, a common ground, for all our internal teams and operations to collaboratively support our primary business goal, which is to deliver quality information to our readers quickly,” says Abhishek.

Now that The Printers Mysore has Google Workspace as its main set of productivity and collaboration tools, it’s looking to also leverage Google Cloud solutions to support its ambitions for the future. “We want to be among the top three digital news providers in India while sustaining our position in the print market,” says Abhishek. “To power this vision, we may move some of our legacy applications to Google Cloud and take advantage of App Maker to automate and bring more of our internal processes up to speed,” he says. The race is on.