Prinsiri: Helping home buyers find their dream home with Google Workspace
About Prinsiri
Prinsiri is the holding company for PrinVentures that develops houses and condominiums across Thailand. Prinsiri is built around the founder’s vision of affordable, well-designed properties where families enjoy quality time together within nature.
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Contact usPrinsiri migrated to Google Workspace to improve collaboration and data sharing of corporate files while transforming its backend with App Engine and Compute Engine for innovation on new projects.
Google Cloud results
- Enhances collaboration between colleagues and partners through Meet
- Sets up cloud resources for new projects in minutes instead of days
- Restores data from Google Cloud backup within 24 hours to fulfil compliance requirements
- Speeds up development of business apps and automations with Apps Script
Supporting secure, remote work with Google Workspace
As more home buyers today start their search for a perfect home online, real estate companies need to have a digital presence if they want to remain relevant. This knowledge is what led Prinsiri, one of Thailand’s leading real estate company, to undergo digital transformation. It started with replacing its 20-year-old legacy email system and moving its day-to-day operations to Google Workspace.
The company introduced Google Workspace to its 200 employees in October 2019. This was a timely move as Prinsiri could support employees working remotely when the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions arose. Employees didn’t have to worry about not being able to go to their offices as they could use Google Meet for day-to-day communication, and access corporate data securely through multi-factor authentication on any device. This was a far cry from having to connect to the corporate network through a Virtual Private Network (VPN).
Before rolling out Google Workspace company-wide, Prinsiri initiated a pilot program with its finance and legal departments and found that they quickly overcame any potential obstacles they had anticipated. As a result, leaders in both departments embraced the new technology quickly and encouraged their colleagues to do the same.
As a company that takes pride in its creative designs, the ability for employees to access proprietary information securely despite working from home during the COVID-19 restrictions was a huge benefit. "The creativity of our designs sets us apart from our competitors, which is why data security is paramount to the business," says Prinya Kovitchindachai, Managing Director at PrinVentures. "Google Workspace helps us to control access to intellectual property while enabling data sharing with our employees and partners." With multi-factor authentication, employees could access internal documents remotely.
"Remote meetings on Meet are now the norm at Prinsiri. Employees can schedule calls on Meet with colleagues and partners anywhere, making it easy for people to meet on the fly."
—Chavai Kovitchindachai, Director, PrinVentures Company LimitedImproving employee collaboration from anywhere
At any given time, Prinsiri oversees 15 to 20 construction projects across Bangkok. In the real estate market, developers conduct regular on-site meetings with architects, engineers, and marketing to discuss the progress of each project.
However, when most of its employees started to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, they pivoted to Meet for meetings. Being able to have meetings on Meet meant that their work did not have to be hampered by travel restrictions.
"Remote meetings on Meet are now the norm at Prinsiri. Employees can schedule calls on Meet with colleagues and partners anywhere, making it easy for people to meet on the fly," says Chavai Kovitchindachai, Director, PrinVentures Company Limited.
An example is when the design team wants to present their new drawings. The team can schedule an impromptu meeting in minutes for feedback instead of waiting days for multiple stakeholders to be able to meet physically in the office. If a meeting needs to be shifted, participants can see real-time changes to the meetings on their Calendar so they have more control over their work schedule. During the meetings, presenters use Slides that works seamlessly with Meet.
Unlike legacy on-prem solutions where the vendor locks in the company to existing features and bug fixes, Google Workspace continuously improves existing services and introduces new ones. For example, Prinsiri is exploring the approval feature in Docs to automate its memo approval process.
The company used to send paper-based memos to stakeholders for their signatures. By requesting approvals in Docs, Prinsiri can get reviewers to provide their approvals digitally and reduce inefficiencies and carbon footprint from routing physical documents from point to point. This also speeds up the approval process, making it a more seamless and positive experience for everyone.
Managing data security of Drive documents
When employees leave their jobs, some may download work-related documents such as contact lists and design files without the company’s permission. To prevent the loss of proprietary information, Prinsiri set up rules on the Drive audit logs that alert the administrator of unusual activities such as a spike in file downloads or log-ins from unfamiliar IP addresses.
The administrator can review log events from the Admin console for user actions performed on Docs, Sheets, Slides, and content uploaded to Drive, such as real estate project photos and property videos.
"We trust Google Cloud for its security that logs every API call and action. I can search the audit logs for critical details including user name, date, and IP address if there are suspicious activities," says Parit Sripakdeevong, Chief Technology Officer at PrinVentures. "Google Workspace features such as Drive audit log and two-step authentication strengthen our security posture by preventing unauthorized access to our company data."
"It's easier and more efficient to innovate on new features on modern stack like Google Cloud by breaking down big projects into manageable tasks for faster and more frequent release cycles… It takes five minutes to start a VM in App Engine and Compute Engine instead of days deploying to on-premise servers."
—Parit Sripakdeevong, Chief Technology Officer, PrinVentures Company LimitedBuilding business resiliency with backups on Compute Engine
As a publicly-listed company, Prinsiri must comply with performance audit requirements to recover data within 24 hours in a data loss event such as a cyberattack or natural disaster. Before Google Cloud, Prinsiri maintained a separate server at a data center to back up its domain data once every 24 hours. Now, the company optimizes its operating costs by using Compute Engine to protect its data because it doesn’t pay for data recovery until it is needed.
Prinsiri creates a snapshot of its backup VM instances on a predefined schedule and stores them in Cloud Storage for faster recovery if a data loss event should occur. For employees, this means that when data is lost, they don’t need to re-enter the data and can continue working uninterrupted, saving hours of their time. Compute Engine also backs up all of Prinsiri’s data daily, so that engineers can restore data with ease. The result is more uptime for employees and customers.
Embracing agile project management for innovation at scale
Agile project management is a guiding principle for the Prinsiri engineering team to quickly deliver minimal viable products (MVP) with Google Cloud in a fast-changing market. This iterative approach to development allows the team to finetune the prototype based on user feedback post-launch.
"It’s easier and more efficient to innovate on new features on a modern stack like Google Cloud by breaking down big projects into manageable tasks for faster and more frequent release cycles," says Sripakdeevong. "It takes five minutes to start a VM in App Engine and Compute Engine instead of days deploying to on-premise servers."
One example of an in-house project on Google Cloud is the Apps Script function to connect SAP and Salesforce data with Google Workspace. As enterprise apps offer only the essential print functions, the output doesn’t always meet expectations in terms of presentation. To solve this problem, Prinsiri routes print jobs from its SAP and Salesforce systems to Docs and Sheets for professional-looking reports by building Apps Script.
Sripakdeevong adds that developers today are excited about writing code without managing the infrastructure. "We can attract engineering talent with a modern tech stack on Google Cloud as it’s much more preferable to working with on-premise, legacy technology that requires constant maintenance. Google Cloud products such as Apps Script helps us to quickly build and test new products without managing a complex backend."
"We trust Google Cloud for its security that logs every API call and action. I can search the audit logs for critical details including user name, date, and IP address if there are suspicious activities. Google Workspace features such as Drive audit log and two-step authentication strengthen our security posture by preventing unauthorized access to our company data."
—Parit Sripakdeevong, Chief Technology Officer, PrinVentures Company LimitedTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About Prinsiri
Prinsiri is the holding company for PrinVentures that develops houses and condominiums across Thailand. Prinsiri is built around the founder’s vision of affordable, well-designed properties where families enjoy quality time together within nature.