November 2015

How wizy.io makes issuing receipts faster and easier with Google Sheets – Robert Ransley, The Anglo House Academy

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Robert Ransley is the founder of The Anglo House Academy, in Extremadura, Spain. An English-language learning center that employs modern education methods such as Project Based Learning and Flip It, the academy has a broad client base, ranging from schoolchildren interested in a second language to professionals relocating to the UK and needing to improve their English.

Business is thriving. “I’ve lived in this area for almost 20 years so I’m well-known,” says Robert. “Once word got out that I was opening an academy, word of mouth took over.”

Organizational efficiency is important for any entrepreneur, and Robert knew that one area that needed improvement was how The Anglo House issued receipts. In the beginning, they would do it the old-fashioned way. “I’d write them out by hand,” he says.

He started keeping their clients’ data in Google Sheets and, looking for a productivity tool, he went into the Add-ons marketplace, where he discovered G Merge from wizy.io. The add-on has two parts, Document Merge and Mail Merge.

screen for nov 24

Document Merge takes data entered into a spreadsheet, enters it into a document or spreadsheet template, and from these it automatically creates a document or a PDF file. This is how The Anglo House issues their receipts now. Robert uses the add-on regularly. “Especially at the beginning of the month,” he adds.

He says that he has not seen the need to try other solutions since discovering Data Merge. “This one is quite user-friendly and does everything I need it to do.”

“I keep my clients by delivering quality,” says the language coach. With Data Merge making sure that administrative tasks are handled better, Robert can now devote more of his energies to delivering the academy’s core service of providing English education to non-native speakers. “I go a lot faster with Data Merge,” he says. “It helps me save a lot of time.”

You can try G Merge by clicking here.

Apol MassebieauHow wizy.io makes issuing receipts faster and easier with Google Sheets – Robert Ransley, The Anglo House Academy
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“8 things I learned from being a Google Apps reseller”

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From 2006 to 2012, wizy.io CEO Laurent Gasser headed Revevol, a consultancy based in Paris that he co-founded and built to become one of the most important Google Apps resellers in the world. In March 2007, when Google Apps was officially launched, 70 percent of the early adopters cited were French companies that Laurent and his team brought to Google.  Here, in his own words, Laurent talks about the lessons he learned during those years.

Lesson no.1: Believe in a vision, and the rest will follow. “I met IT visionary Louis Naugès in Paris during the Web 2.0 hype in 2005. Louis told me that major changes were coming in the enterprise world. Louis described what would be later called the cloud – apps running in a browser, on multi-tenants hosting platforms, with the same software version for hundreds of customers, no more separate versions for different customers. I was very interested in the concept and quickly believed that it would be the major change in the IT world in the next 10 years.”

Lesson no. 2: Being daring will take you places. “I believed that Louis and I should work together. With his vision and my ability to execute business, I sensed that there was good business potential for both of us. A short while later, Louis was contacted by two large French multinational companies, Valeo and Essilor, to study new solutions that could replace or compete with the duopoly of Microsoft and IBM Lotus Notes for communication and collaboration.

So we called Google France and told them, ‘We believe that you have in the works a Gmail for business. We have two large French corporations interested in trial-testing your future solution.’ Google asked us to sign non-disclosure agreements and in two weeks, at the end of October 2006, we – Louis, myself, and people from Valeo and Essilor – found ourselves in Google’s Paris office, in a video conference with Rajen Sheth, the product manager of the future Google Apps. Then another two weeks later, I was invited to join the first GApps partner training in Mountain View at Google HQ.”

Lesson no. 3: Sharing your ideas can change the world. During the proof of concept with Valeo in February 2007, we contacted Salesforce to see if they could deliver a PaaS to replace the Lotus Notes Domino servers that were installed in 80 Valeo factories around the world. At that time Salesforce was only a SaaS CRM. A global VP of Salesforce was in the room at Valeo when we asked her, ‘Why can’t you make a product without the CRM layer, providing a platform where companies can develop their own applications, and maybe sell them to others customers through a marketplace?’ We did in fact describe precisely to Salesforce top management what was to become the Salesforce PaaS offering and AppExchange.”

Lesson no. 4: You have to keep the message simple. “The perception has changed radically today, but in the beginning our biggest challenge was that nobody believed that hosting your data in Google’s data center was more secure than having your own email servers with your own admins who had access to most of your emails. They were all resistant. We had to find very simple messages like, ‘Is your money more secure under your mattress when everybody knows you have it there, or in a safe inside the central bank of your country?’”

Lesson no. 5: Be perceptive. “I think it is key to any success. Having a correct understanding of your business and the human environment allows you to avoid costly mistakes. I have met many people much more knowledgeable and clever than I am who missed out because they failed at analyzing and adapting to our quickly changing world. I heard that even Google has recently changed their recruitment process. While before it was exclusively centered on Ivy League or equivalent universities, meaning IQ-based, now they focus more on EQ or Emotional Intelligence.”

Lesson no. 6: Work with what you know, specially if it continues to excite you. “After I sold Revevol in 2012, I got involved with Collabspot, a Chrome extension on Gmail – and now wizy.io – working with Google Apps. Continuing with Google technologies seems obvious to me for two reasons. One, I have been in the Google Apps ecosystem since its inception in 2007. It’s much easier to leverage my knowledge here than to start in a new ecosystem.

The second reason is that Google is going to stay a leader in the coming years, developing crazy new services for their billions of users. Just think of the impact of Android and the Chrome browser for the last five years. Now Google has just opened its new artificial intelligence system called ‘Tensor Flow’ to third-party developers. This latest release and the future ones will enable the development of enterprise solutions we could not even have imagined a few years ago. I want to leverage  for the enterprise world all of the incredible innovation Google has built for billions of public users.”

Lesson no. 7: Work with the right people. “Revevol was able to bring to Google 70 percent of Google Apps early adopters because Louis was connected to many CIOs who knew he was a visionary. He had predicted many major innovations changing the way corporations managed their IT, including the rise of the PC, office solutions, and business intelligence. He even invented the  French word for office solution, ‘bureautique.’

Wizy.io was created by bringing together two teams that I had worked with at Revevol and Collabpsot. I had already worked long hours with each of the other three co-founders, Mohamed Bahri, Jérémy Rochot and Gino Tria. We share the same vision and work ethic. Between the four of us we have an incredible cumulative 30 years of experience with Google Apps, its usage by customers, the missing pieces, and the Google technology platform.”

Lesson no. 8: Practice what you preach. “Our global management office at wizy.io is inside Google Apps. I divide my time between San Francisco, Paris, Singapore, Manila and Brisbane, places where our customers and teams are located. I have no physical office, and no unique home. We have daily meetings with managers, and one-to-one interaction using Google Hangout. We work in a virtual world for real.”

Laurent Gasser“8 things I learned from being a Google Apps reseller”
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Why I use G Merge for Drive – Maxence Lacroix, CEO, javry.com

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Maxence Lacroix, CEO of the Belgian subscription coffee company Javry, was looking for a better way to communicate with his clients when he discovered G Merge by wizy.io.

He had decided to start emailing his customers in a more personal manner. There was, after all, much good news to share. The company had found an investor, and with an expanded product line, they were set to start delivering their freshly ground coffee selections right to the mailboxes of clients in three more countries. From the current customer base located in Belgium, France and Luxembourg, they were ready to serve subscribers in Germany, Switzerland and Holland, as well.

Mailchimp was already being used to send newsletters to a database of 10,000 email addresses, but the mass email marketing service was not what Maxence wanted for his new purpose.

Most of the people in their database were companies and individuals who had signed up to receive javry.com news, but were not paying customers. “These are two different kinds of contacts,” says Maxence, differentiating between the former and latter groups. “We want to treat our clients as unique,” he says, “not one in a list of 1,500 emails.  We want to personally send news about the company to them. I don’t think Mailchimp is the right solution for that.”

After some research, Maxence decided that for the kind of targeted, personalized email communication he needed, G Merge by wizy.io was just what his company was looking for.

screenshotG Merge allows you to send personalized emails in 3 steps right from your spreadsheet.

It is part of G Merge, a Google Sheets add-on developed by wizy.io that offers two functionalities: One is Document Merge, which allows the user to transform his spreadsheet into a document generation tool. The other function, Mail Merge, lets a user create and send personalized emails without ever leaving his data-source spreadsheet.

Maxence tried other mail merge solutions before making his final choice. For example, he tested Yet Another Mail Merge. “I didn’t like it. It was simply not as obvious as yours.” He continues, “I like the way you put the pop-up box on the right side of the spreadsheet, and that you have just 3 steps. The email template is very well done. I like the fact that you can do it all in your Drive. With Yet Another Mail Merge, I think that you first have to write the draft in your Gmail account… There were several tools available, but I found that your solution was the easiest to use.”

He is above all satisfied with the results that he has been getting with the personalized email approach. Using Mail Merge for Drive, Maxence has succeeded in better connecting with Javry’s coffee-loving clients. “My customers feel more respected. They have the impression that I am taking the time to write a personal email. This is the main reason we use G Merge.”

Proof of his success is that his clients write back. “One said, ‘Hi Maxence, I wish you good luck and enjoy this new challenge.’ Customers also feel happy for the company,” he says. “This was exactly my goal.”

You can try G Merge by clicking here.

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Apol MassebieauWhy I use G Merge for Drive – Maxence Lacroix, CEO, javry.com
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