McLane is a highly successful $34 billion supply chain services company, providing grocery and foodservice supply chain solutions for thousands of convenience stores, mass merchants, drug stores and military locations, as well as thousands of chain restaurants throughout the United States.

When the McClane Company embarked on a joint construction project with an international materials handling company, they quickly ran into a project management challenge: How to share and revise a large amount of documents with team members scattered across the globe?

"How could we manage the large number of drawings and documents flowing through this project? At any given time, 50-70 people will need access to the latest version," explained Cortney Hunt, McClane Company’s corporate director of logistics. "Email wasn’t a workable option."

The solution? Glasscubes.

"Glasscubes is ideal for collaboration and coordination across a large number of people and departments," Cortney explained. "It’s a different way of working. At first, there may have been some resistance. But, I think everyone involved has come to rely on Glasscubes as a primary source for storing documents."

For McClane, Glasscubes offered the right mix of functionality and features, at a price that made sense.

Before picking any project management and online collaboration tool, it’s important to clearly identify the challenge(s) and know what you’re trying to accomplish. "Even with Glasscubes, there are a variety of ways to use the tool, multiple ways to organize the work and lots of features," Cortney noted. "I’d recommend having a clear vision for the problem and how you want to solve it and then survey the tools available."

With trainers all over the world, Blauer Tactical Systems was becoming too reliant on email -- so much so that it was adversely affecting productivity. When Tony decided they needed to work smarter, he began researching online project management solutions. With lots of options available, Tony knew he wanted a user-friendly solution that provided options for multiple departments, as well as a strong commitment to providing quality customer service.

According to Tony, "Our team communicates virtually from multiple timezones. Many of our employees work in multiple departments within the company, so keeping information separate -- yet organized -- was a challenge. We relied a lot on email, which was quickly becoming a nightmare as important information went missing or unread."

Blauer "test drove" a variety of systems, but nothing seemed to be clicking.

"My team isn’t very tech-savvy. Sometimes, it was all I could do to get them to answer emails regularly," Tony explained. "We needed something to galvanize our global community that was both visually appealing and intuitive to use. And, that’s where Glasscubes came in."

As a true testament to Glasscubes’ functionality and ease of use, Blauer Tactical Systems implemented it during what turned out to be the three busiest weeks in the company’s history. And, how did that work out?

"Immediately, I noticed that the issues regarding missing emails were reduced. Trainers were taking to the program more quickly than anything we’d tried before," Tony observed. "And, it was crucial to be able to get questions answered quickly during those crazy weeks. I was impressed by how quickly Glasscubes’ support team was able to respond to my questions."

The Blauer team uses Glasscubes almost like a discussion-based blog, which makes it easy to see who is actively involved, and who isn’t. Tony said it’s almost like Facebook meets Filemaker.

"We create workspaces for different departments to keep everyone organized, which streamlines the communication process. The Google Docs integration was a huge bonus, since we used Google Apps prior to Glasscubes," Tony added.

Glasscubes helps Blauer’s global team keep documents and conversations in a central location, making is simple for employees to stay updated, despite the time zone differences.

"I can ensure that people have access to the most updated information, and that they are staying on track," noted Tony. "Additionally, my team is keeping tabs on me as well -- checking in to see that I’ve looked at the workspaces. I really don’t have anything bad to say about it -- it’s increased our efficiency, and my employees seem to like using it."

Conversify is an international Social Media marketing agency, based in the US and UK. Conversify monitor and engage in online conversations in order to stimulate awareness of, and engagement in, your brand.

"We’re a virtual team with all the challenges that go with it. So we needed not just a project management system, but a workspace where we could store documents and images, and also have discussions.  We needed them all in one place, and in an environment that was intuitive and comfortable to "hang out" in. "

Q: What was the business case behind the decision?
It was kind of a "must-have". Google documents was our free service and that’s just documents. 5pm was what we had been using for about a year. (Our founder preferred that over Basecamp because of the design), but it was not as intuitive as Glasscubes and not as robust.

Q: What aspects of the Glasscubes do you use and why?
"We use tasks, documents, and discussions all the time.  I like that tasks is so simple to add and change. It’s handy having everyone’s in one place, but also having the option to see what tasks just belong to me. And I LOVE that we can comment on tasks."

"We upload all our important documents and images into glasscubes, and organize them into folders, so that’s handy. And the whiteboard is a stroke of genius. We do a lot of messaging on behalf of our clients and it’s easier to just cut and paste into a whiteboard and futz with it there, then it would be to cut and paste into a word doc. We use discussion probably more than we should!"

"We don’t use calendar as much as we should, but I’m glad it’s there and I love that due dates from tasks are automatically entered. And I LOVE that I have the option of seeing ALL the workspaces calendars when I’m in the workspace of just one. It really helps me organize due dates."
 
"We now also using the time recording - our controller needs that information to understand our company’s margin, the margin for each client and the efficiency of each employee."

"Finally we LOVE the responsiveness of the Glasscubes staff and how we’re critiquing their betas."

Q: How has Glasscubes helped your business?
It’s saved our COO from having to train everyone. It’s helped communication since everyone seems to be able to understand it quickly and find disparate information fast.

Girlguiding UK is the United Kingdom’s largest voluntary organisation for girls and young women, with around half a million members including about 100,000 trained volunteers, adult leaders and supporters.

2010 was Girlguiding UK centenary year and with that in mind the centenary team started looking for a product that would allow them to connect with their volunteer work force all across the UK, to help organise events and programs to celebrate 100 years of Girlguiding.

The main challenges that faced Girlguiding UK as suggested by Emma Hack who was in charge of the centenary project:

1 – Geographically dispersed groups
2 – Issues with volunteers working on different versions of documents
3 – Different levels of technical ability due to the diverse group
4 – Handling large amounts of information easily and being able to track what was happening on a day to day basis.

"Girlguiding UK chose Glasscubes first and fore most due to its ease of use, with our diverse group it was important that we found a product that would be simple enough for everyone to start using straight away, but at the same time giving us the robust project and document management functionality we were looking for."

"In Glasscubes we found exactly that.  It has allowed us to communicate with our respective teams much more efficiently, instead of everyone sending emails back and forth, with Glasscubes document management; we were able to work together in one place on the correct versions of documents.  Whilst also using the discussion boards and task management."

Glasscubes has made our way of working much more streamline and efficient, taking away the traditional bottle necks that you would expect with national projects and event organising.  Primarily, limiting the number of emails and attachments being sent out to the various different groups across the country.

Another area which was important to us was to find a company that we could communicate with, we found with Glasscubes that the level of customer service we have received has been fantastic, even to the point where they have made changes to the product on our recommendations, which we never expected.

Glasscubes has enabled our teams to work in a much more organised and structured manor which has made their day to day working lives much easier.

Moving forward we have continuous projects and will be using Glasscubes as a core system for the foreseeable future.