As Canada’s busiest art museum, MMFA requires a well-oiled machine to keep things running smoothly. Email and calendar management are key collaborative tools for its staff of around 300. By the start of 2017, the museum’s existing collaborative productivity solution was straining under the pressure, suffering frequent outages and disrupting the events schedule. To make things worse, there were very few specialists who could repair that particular system so the museum would often have to extend downtime until the right engineer could be found.
The MMFA welcomes a million visitors annually. Quebec’s most visited museum, it is one of the most popular museums in Canada, and ranks eighteenth among art museums in North America. The Museum’s original temporary exhibitions combine various artistic disciplines – fine arts, music, film, fashion and design – and are exported around the world. Its rich encyclopedic collection, distributed among five pavilions, includes international art, world cultures, decorative arts and design, and Quebec and Canadian art. The MMFA complex includes Bourgie Hall, a 460-seat concert hall. The MMFA is one of Canada’s leading publishers of art books in French and English, which are distributed internationally. The Museum also houses the Michel de la Chenelière International Atelier for Education and Art Therapy, the largest educational complex in a North American art museum, enabling the MMFA to offer innovative educational, wellness and art therapy programs.
We have been following a strategy to increase the number of visitors to the museum and show our art to as many people as possible. G Suite has been an integral part of that strategy.
Gaétan Bouchard
Director of I.T., Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
In March 2017, MMFA turned to Canada’s only French-speaking Google Partner, S&E Cloud Experts, to implement a new productivity system. Together, they chose G Suite for its ease of use and cost effectiveness. With Google Calendar, MMFA’s staff were able to quickly and easily assign dates, check event schedules and keep track of room availability with one simple interface. The museum’s employees found the transition to Gmail straightforward, thanks to its clear design principles and small, handy features such as auto-saving drafts. After some initial training from S&E Cloud Experts, the museum identified the keenest G Suite users to help out and train the rest of the 300 or so employees.
Since the migration in March, MMFA has not seen a single outage on G Suite, ensuring a smooth and successful summer of events. With G Suite’s multi-platform capabilities, museum staff were able to access emails and calendar appointments any time on any device. By transferring its email system to G Suite, the museum’s I.T. department was able to significantly save on infrastructure costs and network resources without compromising on speed. MMFA is now looking at the cloud storage solutions offered by Google Drive to lighten its load even further and help make Canada’s busiest art museum even busier.
S&E cloud experts are the opportunity to bring people, processes and technologies together to transform the way they work.
