United Built Homes
About
United Built Homes specialise in building customisable, affordable homes in Texas Louisiana, Oklahoma and Arkansas.
Greg Langham’s primary role at UBH is CIO in addition to overseeing marketing and design teams. He has been with the company for over 28 years.
Subscription Type
Includes
Challenge
Greg chose GAT primarily to gain visibility and management of user file shares, especially for when staff members leave the organisation, although he says he has since found many other great uses for it.
Greg needed something to manage email signatures, though not just for UBH corporate branding, there was also a regulatory requirement. As they offer financing, a prerequisite of the US Government is that employees display their company NMLS ID in all correspondence which includes email signatures. Greg looked at other solutions but they weren’t able to facilitate his need.
“When we first ran across the external file share problem, we didn’t know how we were going to approach it. So finding GAT to solve the problem, rather than having to spend the time writing the code to Google’s APIs was just great.”
Use Cases
File Auditing & Management
With GAT Unlock, Greg can now change ownership or file access rights, and silently copy or view files of users whose employment has ended. He can get pre-approved access to all files and change ownership of an entire folder tree.
“Users may have shared files with their own personal accounts or with users outside the business that we weren’t comfortable with. So as soon as a user terminates we remove the external shares.”
Email Delegation
When a user terminates, one immediate step taken is that their emails are delegated to their manager and this is kept in place for several weeks to ensure emails are answered. GAT allows this to be done without involving the end-user which makes it a much more efficient process. They can also delete spam or accidentally sent emails, do bulk downloads and view email contents.
“At one point, we had the CEO come and say, “Hey, I sent an email and it's out and I really need to try to remove that email from the users' mailboxes because I wasn't ready.””
Email Signature Management
UBH needed to display their unique NMLS ID in email signatures. Signature data is pulled through a Google API from standard user fields in the Google Admin console. However, an NMLS ID is not a standard Google user field so Greg got in touch with GAT Labs Support team to request adding a custom field.
Feature Request
“A lot of companies will say, hey, we’ll put a feature request on the roadmap, sometimes somewhere and then you never hear from them. I think within a few weeks, GATlabs had added it and were responsive and asked us how it was working.”
“You guys sell yourselves short on the signature functionality – there’s a lot of companies out there and that’s all they do and they charge big dollars for a signature tool, but with you guys, it’s just an extra little feature!”
Chromebook Management
UBH also use GAT to help manage their large fleet of Chromebooks. It allows them to keep track of device location, last login and more.
“It’s good to know that one hasn’t wandered off or been thrown in a drawer and is not being used”
Results
The features that stand out in GAT for Greg are the workflows, automation and signature management that save the company so much time. The fact that you can do a lot of this without user involvement is a real bonus.
GAT has significantly reduced the IT workload in UBH.
“We currently have one Level 1/Help desk engineer and without GAT we would be looking at least two.”
Greg chose GAT over other tools because of it’s signature management capabilities and is sticking with it because of that plus all the other features.
“We would need at least 2 or 3 different tools to do what GAT does.
Greg’s advice to anyone considering GAT is:
“Take a look at the tools you’re already using and compare it to what GAT can do. From a security standpoint, it helps you understand where some of your exposures are and GAT Flow gives consistency and an overall big-picture view of the Workspace environment.”
Going forward, Greg has already put plans in place to automate staff onboarding using GAT Flow and he’s looking forward to using GAT Shield for DLP, Browser Security and more granular Chromebook Management.
