• Provides peace of mind for users and staff with automatic locking on Google Chrome devices

• Assembles new anonymized datasets on elderly care ready for researchers costs

• Creates a single, easily managed and easy to use communications solution

“We give older people digital support, too, helping them learn to use smartphones and tablets to be in contact with other people,” says Fabio Toso, General Director at OIC Onlus. “There is a lot of immigration in our region, and giving people the possibility to keep in touch with their relatives is very important.”

To update the organisation, the digital transformation team decided to bring communications, administration, and more together under a single, cloud-based platform that would be easy to maintain and simple to use. Google Workspace was an ideal fit.

“As a charity, we use Google for Nonprofits, but the great support and savings we receive through that project was not our primary driver for choosing Google Workspace,” says Guido. “We chose Google Workspace because we get everything within one global system. All the tools are in one box and users can easily pass information between different applications. It’s a complete, integrated solution.”

To do that, OIC Onlus switched to Google Workspace with support from leading Google Cloud Premier Partner Noovle and Google for Nonprofits. “We set up Google Workspace as the general instrument for the whole OIC Onlus organisation and its satellites,” says Guido. “To complement that, we have adopted around 400 Google Chromebooks. They’re inexpensive, so we can simply replace them if we need to without a heavy investment in hardware or time lost to repairs. Now we are eliminating all PCs so that the only credential our employees need is one Google Workspace account for everything.”

By bringing everyone on to Gmail, Google Sheets, Docs, Google Meet, and Drive, Guido and his team provide a complete communications environment that delivers the level of security guests expect. “I totally trust Google with data security,” says Guido. “Previously we had people entering from a number of different passworded systems. Now it's just one, and we manage levels of access for it from the centre.”

“We’ve also created a setup with Google Workspace and Google Chromebooks that makes every Google Chromebook leave the network after ten minutes of inactivity, to protect vulnerable guests from unauthorised access. We can even lock Google Chromebooks so that they will only work when they’re used at one of our facilities.”

“Our OIC Onlus digital transformation is not only a technical company project, it is social, too,” says Guido. “Our 1,700 employees come from more than 29 countries and we show them how to use Google Meet in their personal lives as well as how to keep in touch with their families abroad, or share photographs with Google Drive. We show guests in their 80s how to use Google Docs to plan holidays with their children. It’s not just about work. Our team of four is the centre of a small solar system.”

Integrating with specialist systems

In parallel with Google Workspace, OIC Onlus uses specialized software to collect data on guests and manage their care. “We manage very critical data for private and public healthcare systems,” says Guido. “That means integration is very important, so we work with our software supplier to integrate with Google Cloud APIs, generating notifications in Google Calendar, for example, to flag appointments or medication needs on Android devices held by carers, and to share examination results over Google Drive.”

“We use Google Chromebooks and vertical software to monitor everything for the guests, from drugs, to meals, to activities, so that every guest is a specific project, with individual care,” says Chiara Cavazzini, research project leader at OIC Onlus. “Google Workspace makes it easy for us to share that information safely and make plans.”

“It helps researchers, too, because we have assembled an enormous amount of anonymized data about the use of food and drugs in an elderly population. In a recent collaboration with the university in Milan, we looked at the impact of specific foods like red berries. The data helps us judge how to use food instead of combinations of drugs to keep people healthy.”