• Gives the legal team oversight on unauthorized document deletion with Google Vault

• Eliminates the need for VPNs for a more mobile company culture, thanks to Drive

• Saves over 5 hours a week for members of the IT team by minimizing maintenance

General Mobile is a leading smartphone manufacturer in Turkey, where it is one of the top three choices for mobile devices. Because it's also one of the most popular brands in countries including the Netherlands, Croatia, and Azerbaijan, General Mobile is growing fast, and is now exporting to more than 30 markets worldwide.

Behind that success, a team of more than 900 General Mobile employees work at the company's headquarters in Istanbul or at its factory nearby, coordinating with a sales team of 60 people dispersed around the country. Communication is vital to that collaboration, which is why the company moved from its cumbersome legacy communications tools to a cloud-based, mobile, low-maintenance Google Workspace solution.

"We produce, develop, and distribute our devices by ourselves, from our own factory," says Mehmet Fatih Sahin, System & Network Manager at General Mobile. "To make that more effective, we decided that everything we do, from beginning to end, should operate using Google Workspace."

Over time, many companies accumulate a complicated array of legacy communications solutions – and the burden of maintaining those systems. General Mobile used a number of different on-premises email and file server solutions, together with third-party applications for additional services, such as video conferencing. For employees, that complexity made collaboration more difficult, and mobility was hampered by cumbersome VPN connections to on-premises systems. For Fatih and his team, managing that array was a major challenge.

"We had to allocate storage on servers to individual users, and set limits," says Fatih. "The archive system was a particular problem. We did not have a way to oversee accounts that prevented users who were leaving the company from deleting files. That became a serious legal concern for the company."

To avoid these issues and to create a more efficient work environment for employees and the IT team, General Mobile switched to Google Workspace. "As a smartphone company, we use smartphones even more than computers," says Fatih. "Google Workspace is ideal for that mobility, because it's based in the cloud. Now we can collaborate from anywhere, on any device, without VPNs."

Google Workspace collaboration tools have made collaboration quicker and easier, in part because now everyone is using the same product. "We've started to use Keep for keeping minutes in meetings," says Eyüp Kaya, Project Hardware Manager in the General Mobile Research and Development department. "Before, we would need to email minutes to people or even use other third-party applications, which could be a problem if not everyone had the same third-party apps. Now we can share minutes with all participants."

Vault has been especially valuable for the company, as Fatih explains: "Now that we use Google Vault for archiving, if someone changes or deletes a document, we know about it and can retain a copy. That's made things a lot easier for our legal team."