Google Data » Ashley Chandler

Shaw Industries floors its employees with Google Apps

Ashley Chandler — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 17:45:00 +0000

Posted by Jim Nielsen, Manager of Enterprise Technology Architecture and Planning for Shaw Industries

Editors note: Our guest blogger this week is Jim Nielsen, Manager of Enterprise Technology Architecture and Planning for Shaw Industries, a 25,000 employee company headquartered in northwest Georgia. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Shaw Industries was founded in 1946 as a small area rug company, and over the last 66 years we've grown to become the world's largest carpet manufacturer, with 25,000 employees across 200 locations worldwide. During my 15 years at Shaw, I've watched the organization grow, but our collaboration capabilities began to lag behind the needs of our global manufacturing company. We found challenges in scalability and stability in our previous email solution. Support resources were also an issue, as we required a team of three full-time employees just to keep our email up-and-running.

In 2012, we made the move to Google Apps for Business, after proving in pilot programs that it would provide the integrated tools to help our dispersed global teams work together more effectively, would meet the requirements of uptime and ease of provisioning our IT team wanted, and accommodate the security requirements we were looking for.

Prior to moving the entire company to Google Apps, we used Microsoft® Office, which did not meet the collaboration needs of a global manufacturer. We’d end up with 15 different versions of a document attached to who knows how many different emails. As an example, the marketing team wanted a way to easily share files and work together on copy for our website and ads with our agencies. With Google Drive and Google Docs, multiple team members could work on content, and you could actually see it evolve in a very short period of time from a concept to a script for a TV commercial, all in the same shared document.

True collaboration and access from anywhere was something our employees were demanding with more frequency. We knew we needed to extract ourselves from our current email environment. When I did a cost and benefit analysis, it was clear we needed to move to the cloud. We discovered that Microsoft Office 365 would cost about 13 times more for us than Google Apps. In March, with the help of our Google Apps Reseller, Cloud Sherpas, we implemented Google Apps for more than 10,000 of our associates who use email.

It turns out that collaboration doesn’t just benefit the marketing department. We have an elaborate budget process inside IT that we were able to move to Google Sheets. Now our master spreadsheet can be instantly updated in real time, shaving about two months, or 50 percent of time spent, off the budgeting process. We’ve also started to use Hangouts for a lot of our meetings. In fact, we’ve started holding our staff meetings via hangout, even though the team is only 20 minutes apart. Hangouts have allowed us to be more focused, trimming the hour long meeting to 30 minutes.

One responsibility in my job is to find ways to help our teams be more productive. That can be challenging in a manufacturing company where the majority of users aren’t necessarily tech savvy, but with Google Apps that doesn’t matter because the products are intuitive. They are now able to do things themselves, and we have wanted to allow them to be self-sufficient for a long time. After just a few months of using Google Apps, I’m inspired by the way our teams are working together and finding faster, easier ways to work.

Europe’s oldest luxury hotel group moves to the cloud

Ashley Chandler — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 16:03:00 +0000

Posted by Jeremy Ward, Senior Vice President for IT, Kempinski Hotels

Editors note: Today we welcome guest blogger Jeremy Ward, Senior President for IT at Kempinski Hotels. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

At Kempinksi Hotels, we believe we are personally responsible for creating rich and meaningful experiences for each of our guests. As Europe’s oldest luxury hotel group, it’s important to us that we provide perfection for our guests, whether that’s planning their wedding or just making sure they’re comfortable in a city they’re visiting for the first time.

As we began planning our five year strategy in 2010, we recognized the need to free operational resources from IT and find ways to work together across 70 hotels in 30 countries to continue providing best-in-class guest experiences. We found that moving to the cloud would allow us to reduce the overall cost of ownership and IT administration at each individual hotel so they could focus on driving efficiencies out of applications instead of just maintaining them. Quickly moving all of our properties to the cloud became a key part of our broader business strategy.

After considering cloud email platforms from Microsoft and Lotus, we found Google Apps to be the most mature solution and would allow us to collaborate easily across hotels and offices around the world. With the help of Google Apps Reseller, Cloud Technology Solutions (CTS), we transferred existing messages, appointments and contacts from GroupWise to Google Apps using their CloudMigrator multi-platform migration suite.

Now that we’ve fully migrated our 5,000 employees, we feel like we have an email platform that allows us to easily scale our business across each location, adding and removing users in a matter of minutes. We’re excited about being on a platform that continues to innovate and release features like instant translation in Gmail, Google+ Hangouts in Gmail, and document storage and collaboration using Google Drive. Moving to Google Apps was key to reducing the overall cost of ownership and cost of administration to the hotels, but we believe that the true benefits will come from the creative ways our employees use these tools to work together and provide an even better experience for our guests in the coming years.

Getting Indonesian universities connected

Ashley Chandler — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 23:46:00 +0000

Posted by Raden Arief Setiawan, Brawijaya University

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Raden Arief Setiawan, Head of Information and Technology Assessment and Development at Brawijaya University in Indonesia.

The world has been paying more attention to Indonesia these days to see how the world's fourth most populous nation moves into the digital century. While we're excited about our progress so far, there is still much work to do. Being a member of the G20, Indonesia has lots to offer the global economy in terms of both growing markets and a young workforce. This puts particular pressure on national universities to better prepare the next generation of leaders to enter the competitive worlds of science and business.

Despite the advances of information technology, many state universities face challenges in getting the latest systems in place. Despite having an internal email system for all its faculty and students, Brawijaya University faced numerous challenges of maintaining the infrastructure. The email system, along with server hardware, consumed a significant portion of the IT budget, and managing the email system alone took hundreds of man-hours.

Students and faculty members had to be resourceful, at times sharing single email accounts to transfer files and download the latest class notes. This was far from an ideal solution, but a solution nevertheless, considering the situation.

Now, with the help of the free and cloud-based Google Apps for Education system, 45,000 Brawijaya students and teachers have access to a whole new way of doing things: an updated, secure email system bearing the proud institution’s name; collaboration tools in the form of Google Docs and Groups, as well as access to the world wide web from various access points around the campus. For the administrators, Google Apps for Education was an easy choice due to the system’s openness, ease of access, and the way it can be connected to existing systems without having to buy new licenses and hardware.

We are proud to join other educational institutions around the world by fully embracing technology to change the way our university community will communicate, collaborate and learn. This will help develop a culture that simulates the ever-competitive global working environment, providing the nation’s best minds for the future.

Home improvement: Leroy Merlin moves 1,900 users to Google Apps in Brazil

Ashley Chandler — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 18:37:00 +0000

Posted by Reginaldo Barbosa, Manager of Acquisitions, Telecom and Technology, Leroy Merlin Brazil

Editors note: Today we welcome guest blogger Reginaldo Barbosa, Manager of Acquisitions, Telecom and Technology for Leroy Merlin in Brazil. You may remember our guest blog post by Luis Herrero, CIO of Leroy Merlin, Spain in February. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

We expanded Leroy Merlin - the French home improvement and gardening store - to Brazil in 1998 and have grown to more than 26 stores and over 6,000 employees throughout the country. For the past three years, we’ve actually been the leading construction materials retailer in Brazil. To be successful in the retail industry, it’s important that our employees are able to work together across our corporate and store locations to provide the best experience for our customers.

As our business grew in Brazil, we found ourselves faced with a number of IT challenges. One of our biggest obstacles was communicating between our locations in Brazil and our headquarters in France. We found that our calendar system was so unreliable that our own directors would use their personal Google Calendars to share events with one another. With a growing retail business - regularly opening new stores and traveling between different locations - we knew we needed an IT platform with more flexibility, mobility, and reliability if we wanted to keep our employees and customers happy.

That’s why we moved our 2,100 IT users to Google Apps for Business last year. With Google Apps, our team is now able to work together easily and much more efficiently, while providing a much better experience for our customers. When a customer wants to know if an item is in stock, our sales rep can immediately chat with our logistics team using Google Talk and verify the inventory in real time. We can also now share calendars across our stores and with headquarters in France, which allow us to better manage our promotions and events, and helps us to always know what’s happening across the Atlantic.

Google Apps for Business not only helped us streamline our business, but the costs savings have been substantial. We’ve been able to cancel our antispam and antivirus contacts saving us $25,000 per year and Google+ Hangouts have saved us from having to make a $100,000 investment in videoconferencing technology. On top of that, we ended up saving $200,000 in infrastructure and maintenance costs that we would’ve spent setting up users on our old IT system last year.

It’s clear that Google Apps for Business was the right choice for us: in a recent company survey, our employees gave Google Apps a 95 percent satisfaction rating. It’s so rewarding for me to know that these tools are helping us provide a better experience for our customers and our employees.

Hudbay Minerals moves its global team to Google Apps

Ashley Chandler — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 22:39:00 +0000

Posted by Joe AbiDaoud, CIO of Hudbay Minerals

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Joe AbiDaoud, CIO of Hudbay Minerals, a publicly traded Canadian mining company headquartered in Toronto. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Since 1927, Hudbay Minerals has focused on discovering and producing base and precious metals. From exploration projects in North and South America and our current operations in Canada, our 2,000 employees depend on technology to work together and make sure our efforts are coordinated across regions. To do this, we really needed a platform that allowed us to easily collaborate, work remotely using our mobile devices, and communicate across teams in different regions and different languages.

We had been using Microsoft® Office for years, with several Microsoft® Exchange servers across the company, but it became increasingly difficult for our IT team to stay up and running with the uptick in support calls due to a dated system. After exploring various options at different price points, we knew we wanted to move to a cloud-based solution to work more efficiently and provide a scalable and reliable solution.

We invited Google reseller, Sheepdog, to conduct a two-day Google Apps for Business workshop for a small group of employees from various levels and departments within the company. During the workshop, employees evaluated Google Apps against our “success criteria,” which included ease of use, efficiency, functionality, speed and cost. We quickly realized that Google Apps was a good fit for our geographically dispersed company and in July we started moving more than 1,000 employees to Google Apps.

Our IT support calls for email plummeted overnight, demonstrating just how easy it is to use Google Apps. For a global company, being able to instantly translate messages in Gmail and use Google+ Hangouts to meet “in person” made the language and geographical barriers easier to overcome. We’ve also estimated that by going Google we will reduce our costs over the long term when compared to the cost of upgrading and maintaining our old infrastructure. As a public company, we’re thrilled with the savings and new ways of working that we discovered by moving to the cloud.

Insphere Insurance Solutions comes together with Google Apps

Ashley Chandler — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 21:45:00 +0000

Posted by Steve Jensen, VP of Information Technology at Insphere Insurance Solutions, Inc.

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Steve Jensen, Vice President of Information Technology at Insphere Insurance Solutions, Inc., one of the fastest growing insurance distribution companies in the U.S. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Insphere Insurance Solutions, Inc. is a distribution company that specializes in meeting the insurance needs of small businesses and middle-income individuals and families. Our field sales force consists of approximately 3,000 independent agents nationwide who offer life, health, long-term care and retirement insurance.

In 2009, we decided we needed to move all of our agents, in more than 80 locations, off of various email systems, including Microsoft® Exchange, onto one platform. This would keep operational costs down and allow our agents and support teams to communicate more effectively. Since our agents rarely come into an office, access from any device was critical.

Today, nearly four years after our initial implementation, Google Apps has dramatically increased productivity and transformed our business. Now, our agents are using Google Docs to collaborate with each other on projects and can meet virtually anywhere using Google+ Hangouts to share ideas and best practices from their experience. With no more servers or software licenses, we reduced our projected costs from other solutions by almost 70 percent. That kind of savings delivers true value to our bottom line.

As a company, we have been able to leverage Google APIs to help us be efficient. When an agent joins or leaves the team, our provisioning system manages all account items with our Google integration.

In addition to the add/change user administration, we utilize Google Groups to constantly maintain distribution lists for email and control file security related to GoogleDrive/Docs. This automated maintenance promotes increased use of Docs collaborative capabilities. An office manager never has to worry about sharing docs or managing a distribution list again.

After this successful integration, we integrated our CRM platform with the Google calendar. All of our agent appointments are pushed to Google Calendar and then to their mobile phone automatically. Any update on the phone is then reversed and posted back to Google and CRM. We were able to leverage the Google platform and its APIs to deliver for the business without incremental licensing costs.

When it comes to recruiting and sustaining our growth, Google Apps has been instrumental in helping us hire new agents quickly while ensuring that they are equipped with the information they need to be successful. With all their documents, calendars and email accessible on the go, our agents are always connected to each other and clients, no matter where they are. This platform has really helped our teams stay connected and collaborate in ways they hadn’t imagined.

IT is no longer a barrier and no one has to wait to meet with someone from the IT department to get going with Google Apps. In fact, I personally haven’t had to pick up the phone once to call an email administrator. It has been truly amazing to see the natural adoption of the product by our field agents.

Quincy Finds the Perfect Fit with Google Apps for Business

Ashley Chandler — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 18:05:00 +0000

Posted by Christina Wallace, Co-founder and CEO of Quincy

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Christina Wallace, Co-founder and CEO of Quincy, an online retail store for professional women. Quincy joins other retail organizations in going Google. See what they have to say.

At Quincy, we understand that every woman’s body is different. After years of struggling to find boardroom-appropriate clothes that really fit, my business partner Alex Nelson and I realized that typical size charts are often the root of the problem and decided to take matters into our own hands. That’s why we started Quincy. What sets us apart from the competition is that our clothing sizes are defined by height, bust, and hip-to-waist ratios -- three areas of the body that women have the most trouble with when purchasing clothing.

When Alex and I decided to go into business together, I was living in Washington D.C., while she was in London. That didn’t stop us, but we needed a simple and inexpensive communication solution that would help us stay efficient and organized while working in two different time zones. Using Google Apps for Business we were able to get our retail brand off the ground in less than a year. Today, Alex and I have built an office in New York and have grown to seven additional full-time staff and six interns.

Over the past year, Google documents and spreadsheets have become some of our most important tools. Docs makes it easy for us to write shared documents like our business plan together, and we can be confident we don’t have to worry about version control when we reference it later. We keep all product development information in spreadsheets, including the textiles, trims, colors and more. We’re able to easily keep track of each product in real time, and if we have a merchant issue, we know about it immediately. We also keep track of all our costs in spreadsheets, which makes it easy to manage and share with our accountant.

Google Chat has also become an important tool for the company. We work in an open-concept office, so Chat provides some privacy in conversations between Alex about sensitive business matters, for example. We also like the option to go "on the record", in case we want to go back to reference chats later. We also use Chat to connect with our customers. While browsing our website, shoppers are able to chat with someone from our team if they need help navigating our site or understanding how our size chart works. And what’s great about Google Apps is that we are able to chat with customers from our office, home, or mobile device.

While we are busy making the perfect fit for our customers, Google Apps has been the perfect fit for our young and growing business.

Google Apps is the Perfect Fit for Design Within Reach

Ashley Chandler — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 18:55:00 +0000

Posted by John Edelman, CEO of Design Within Reach

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is John Edelman, CEO of Design Within Reach, a national retail operation that sells modern design for homes and offices. Design within Reach joins other retail organizations in going Google. See what they have to say.

At Design Within Reach, we make authentic modern design accessible. Rob Forbes founded the company in 1999 when he tried to furnish his apartment with the clean, simple classics he’d come to appreciate while living in London, but found that many of his favorite designers weren’t accessible in the United States. Design Within Reach quickly took off and today has 44 retail locations across the U.S. and Canada.

In 2009, my partner and COO, John McPhee, and I decided to move the corporate office from California to Connecticut, it gave us the opportunity to reevaluate our internal operations. Our previous technology platform required us to maintain multiple servers, and moving them across the country and setting them up again would have been costly. Plus, an on-premise solution was never going to provide the ease of collaboration across our store locations and headquarters that is essential to our success. With the help of Google Apps reseller Cloud Sherpas, we decided the move was the perfect opportunity to implement Google Apps.

Before Google Apps, it wasn’t easy to share important materials like store promotion schedules, store layouts, or PR updates quickly and efficiently. Instead, we relied heavily on email for communication. In retail, things change all the time and emailing about employee schedules, promotional timelines or new merchandise availability meant that the information was quickly out of date and risked employees having inaccurate information. Google Apps changed all that. Now, our marketing team is able to track in-store promotions via shared calendars. Employees can track inventory through Google Docs, so when we have a floor sale and someone wants 4 red chairs and we only have one, we can easily hop onto Google Docs and find the chairs at another location. The customer is happy – and we’re happy because we’ve made a sale and cleared the floor.

Easily collaborating across headquarters and all our store locations helps us provide a much more consistent and inviting experience for our customers, and that’s really important to us. We want our customers to linger, bring their dog or kids, and explore and learn about design. We want our customers to be a part of something bigger than just shopping, and that’s the same way we feel about our employees. Google Apps and the ease of communication and sharing that it brings has helped us do just that.

Simply Hired gets the job done with Google Apps for Business

Ashley Chandler — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 15:04:00 +0000

Posted by Gautam Godhwani, Simply Hired

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Gautam Godhwani at Simply Hired, one of the most comprehensive job sites with over 30 million users, headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

As the world’s most comprehensive job site, our goal at Simply Hired is to help people find a job they love. Our 75 employees work with 30M+ job seekers each month as well as thousands of global employers to provide free access to job openings and an efficient way to reach qualified candidates.

Maintaining a database of more than eight million job listings, working with thousands of employers and managing a remote sales team requires a lot of internal organization. In 2011, we started running into issues with our in-house technology implementation. Employees were wasting valuable time dealing with spam and at the same time, storing and saving company information on a single internal drive was limiting mobility and collaboration for the team. We were also concerned about disaster recovery if our system suffered an outage. All of these factors made it clear that another solution was needed.

With Google Apps, our information is now available in the cloud. Thanks to Gmail, Google calendar, Google Docs, and more recently, Google Drive, important documents and calendar information is now always up-to-date and accessible to all employees – no matter where they are located or which Web device they are using. When our sales team is on the road, they can now easily access presentations and product information from our internal Google site and send it to potential customers. Accessing data and files without being in the office or connected to a local network has helped us provide a better experience for our customers. And, Google Chat makes it easy to quickly reach a colleague while out of the office or on the road. In addition, moving our data to the cloud helps us save resource allocation toward and disaster recovery procedures.

In addition to accessibility and reliability, sharing information as a team has never been easier. Rather than emailing large attachments, we can easily upload large files to Google Docs or Drive. For example, our marketing team is constantly creating new presentations and collateral which include images and video, resulting in large file sizes. In the past, we’d have to email large files, which created numerous issues including slow upload time and unreliable deliverability. Sometimes, the files would be too large to even send. Now, we can upload materials easily to Docs or Drive and simply click the “Share” button.

With Google Apps there’s a new level of transparency and collaboration among teams at Simply Hired. We’ve also seen a reduction in expenses as fewer resources are needed to manage a cloud-based solution. We look forward to seeing ongoing enhancements from the Google Apps team to further improve productivity across our organization.

O’Neill Hotels & Resorts Checks In To Better Productivity With Google Apps for Business

Ashley Chandler — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 19:46:00 +0000

Posted by Mark Abbott, Regional Director of IT at O’Neill Hotels & Resorts Ltd.

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Mark Abbott, Regional Director of IT at O’Neill Hotels & Resorts Ltd., a hotel management company based in Vancouver, British Columbia. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

O’Neill Hotels & Resorts Ltd. was founded nearly twenty years ago by two brothers, Rob and John O’Neill, who spent their entire lives in the hotel business. Today, the company manages world-class resorts and hotels in Canada and the U.S., including several Westin and Embassy Suite resorts, and is continuing to expand its property portfolio. Our job as a management company is to help our property owners run their hotels smoothly, including everything from front desk customer service to back office operational support.

With our growing portfolio, we needed a better way to provide IT support to each property and to ensure that our corporate team could work together from anywhere. Since we are often traveling to different properties, providing easy and secure access to email, calendars, and documents was a priority. While the hotel industry isn’t known for its use of cutting-edge of technology, we were excited to go against the grain and began exploring cloud-based solutions. Google Apps gave us exactly what we needed.

We use Google Apps to help provide hotels with IT support from our corporate office. We maintain detailed notes and pictures of each hotel’s IT infrastructure in shared Google Docs, so anyone can provide support to the properties at any time. If there’s a network issue, we can easily access information about the property from anywhere – our corporate office, a property location, or even our homes -- to help the hotel immediately resolve the problem. We set up a Google Form for hotels to submit network issues or IT inquiries directly to our team. Form submissions are automatically populated in a shared spreadsheet, and a Google Apps Script helps us automatically respond to basic questions. This process has improved our response time and saved our IT team valuable hours.

Google Apps gives us the tools we need to be more efficient in our back office, so our hotels can stay focused on the front desk and providing the best possible service to their guests.

Kaplan tests high with Google Apps for Business and Chrome devices

Ashley Chandler — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 20:33:00 +0000

Posted by Edward Hanapole, CIO, Kaplan

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Edward Hanapole, CIO, Kaplan, one of the world’s largest education companies headquartered in New York, NY. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

At Kaplan, education is our business. Successful student outcomes are our yardstick for performance. We provide higher education programs, professional training courses, test preparation materials and assessment tools for K-12 students. The range of student services has grown immensely since our founding in 1938 as a test prep company that helped many young people gain access to university education. Today, Kaplan employs more than 25,000 people around the globe in over 30 locations and serves approximately one million students annually.

In our business, it’s critical that we stay up-to-speed on the latest technologies because technology based on rigorous data analysis yields the blueprint for how we can improve instruction and curriculum design, and it allows us to help our students attain their desired results in the most effective and efficient way possible. We want to give our employees the same web-based tools that our students are using at home, so we moved the majority of our employees to Google Apps in 2011. It’s not just Gmail that has changed -- Google Apps has significantly impacted our company culture. We now use Google+ Hangouts to hold a lot of our meetings. Even if I’m in the same office, I often prefer using Hangouts and a shared meeting notes document so I know people are actually paying attention.

We're starting to see great usage of Hangouts across our business. Greg Marino, CEO of the Kaplan Higher Education Group, uses Google+ Hangouts to stay regularly connected with his organization's Chief Difference Makers, employees from around the country who help drive employee engagement at various sites. He finds Hangouts convenient, simple to use and cost-effective. As time goes on, I expect usage to increase across our operations.

We are entering a beta test for a new online educational platform that will allow other schools, organizations, businesses and individuals to share information and knowledge with their audiences aligned with best instructional practices. This exciting, highly innovative solution is built on top of the Google engine.

We’ve also been working with Google partner, Genesys, to pilot new Chromebooks and Chromeboxes at our New York call centers. These new devices have replaced our PCs, helping speed up our workflows and avoid aggravating crashes. Through the pilot process, we’ve found Chrome devices to be much faster, simpler to use, and they require no set-up time and far less troubleshooting. We have the ability to leverage real-time, web-based communication, allowing us to do away with phones in our call centers entirely. This will improve our customers’ experience while saving us time, resources and money. Our long-term goal is to deploy Chrome devices across our 65 North American campuses.

The real potential is that Google Apps and Chrome OS devices give us the ability to introduce innovation to our students and employees on an ongoing basis with relative ease.

We all scream for ice cream with Google Apps for Business

Ashley Chandler — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 21:32:00 +0000

Posted by Kelly Campbell, Director of Global Enterprise Small Business Marketing

One of my fondest memories growing up is riding my bike to get ice cream with my family on a hot summer day. For me, it’s exciting to see the local ice cream industry evolve and grow, without losing its charm. Today, ice cream shop owners from around the country are using technology–like Google Apps for Business–to help them run their businesses and reach their customers. From taking their beloved treats on the road to shipping pints across the country, technology is a sweet source of their success.

In celebration of National Ice Cream Day, let’s take a look at how three ice cream shops from around the United States are using technology to scoop up business:

Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams began small, but had big dreams. Jeni Britton Bauer opened her first ice cream shop in Grandview Heights, Ohio in 2002, and turned to Google Apps for Business to help her manage everything from ingredients to employee scheduling. Today, Jeni has grown the business to 10 stores throughout Ohio and Tennessee and has a booming online shipping business, and she depends on Google Apps to help her manage it all. Google Docs helps Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams employees share information from the kitchen with the planning teams on the ground at each location. And it gives her access real-time information to ensure they have the ice cream, packaging and manpower to handle spikes in online orders. Stores are also able to give feedback about each home-made batch of ice cream through a Google Docs form. So if there aren’t enough pecans in the Whiskey Pecan Ice Cream, Jeni’s team can add more in the next batch. Jeni even wrote her best selling cookbook using Google Docs.

Business partners Zach Davis and Kendra Baker knew they wanted to start their exploration in sweet treats with Google Apps. But their journey to get The Penny Ice Creamery in Santa Cruz, California off the ground includes a video they made about spending money locally and rethinking ice cream manufacturing from the ground-up, and a subsequent invitation to the White House to meet the First Lady and the President.

The ice creamery’s menu changes each season, depending upon the fruits, vegetables, flowers and herbs that are in season in Northern California, so keeping track of ingredients is crucial. Google Spreadsheets help them do this, as well as track and reconcile daily sales across multiple locations, and Google Forms help them manage their mailing lists. Zach and Kendra wear a lot of hats as proprietors of an expanding beach empire, but IT falls to Zach, who says Apps has been invaluable because, from a management perspective, it's quick and easy.

While it might feel natural to drive or bike to your favorite ice cream shop, Coolhaus does things a bit differently. They bring the ice cream to you.

The brainchild of Los Angeles natives Natasha Case and Freya Estreller, Coolhaus is an artisan ice cream sandwich truck that launched at the 2009 Coachella music festival. The entrepreneurial duo turned to Google Apps for Business to help them develop everything from writing their business plan to organizing locations to park around the city. Over the past four years, Natasha and Freya have been able to expand their business to Austin, New York, Miami, and Dallas, and they depend heavily on Google Apps to manage their 50+ employees across different locations and time zones. Google Calendar helps streamline collaboration among operation managers and truck supervisors to ensure there are enough employees at each location. And Google Docs lets regional event managers share and menus and truck catering details with CoolHaus clients.

It’s exciting to see how Google Apps has helped these entrepreneurs fulfill their dreams and reach the sweet tooths of so many people. Whether you’re a two-scoops, waffle cone or sundae kind of ice cream lover, celebrate National Ice Cream Day with a sweet treat from your favorite local ice creamery.

Celestica embraces Google Apps to improve global collaboration

Ashley Chandler — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 15:39:00 +0000

Posted by Mary Gendron, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, at Celestica

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Mary Gendron, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, at Celestica, a Toronto-based innovative supply chain solutions company that provides end-to-end product lifecycle solutions from design and manufacturing through to delivery and after-market support.

Our talented global team is dedicated to delivering innovative supply chain solutions to our customers – helping them to stand out in their markets. This requires our employees to work together effectively and increase the sharing of knowledge and ideas across functions and geographies.

After piloting Google Apps, we quickly realized it would enable our global workforce to work more collaboratively, and as a result, we have recently decided to move 19,000 of our employees to Google Apps. Now my team can meet spontaneously using the video chat feature in Gmail or draft our team strategy simultaneously in a Google Doc. That type of collaboration allows us to build on everyone’s ideas to develop better solutions. Also, by sharing a document where all team members have the opportunity to contribute, everyone is invested in the project because we did it together.

Because we’re no longer tied to different time zones or other people’s schedules, we can work together where we want, when we want, and we can all edit a document together in real time. With Google Apps, the stress of compiling edits in time for a meeting or ensuring you are presenting the final version of a deck are gone. Recently, I was working on a strategy document with my team. I could close my laptop in the evening and know that, when I woke up, those in a different time zone or who preferred to work at night would have added their comments and input directly in the document. Overall, we’re accomplishing more together and faster than before.

We’re in the early stages, but I believe Google Apps will help us achieve our objectives faster, more efficiently and with greater success.

Global leader of network connectivity solutions connects employees with Google Apps

Ashley Chandler — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 18:07:00 +0000

Posted by Michael Walsh, CIO, D-Link

Editors note: D-Link is a global leader in providing network connectivity solutions to small and medium businesses. The company has more than 90 global offices to serve North America, Asia, and Europe. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

D-Link is headquartered in Taiwan, but has more than 90 global offices serving North America, Asia, and Europe, each of which operates almost like an independent business unit. Prior to Google Apps, there were multiple IT support groups each with different email systems and no collaboration platform to allow the business units to work together. The old platforms couldn’t keep up with the rate of innovation of cloud-based solutions or the massive storage requirements that are now needed to run a business.

As we looked at our options, it was clear that we wanted to be in the cloud. We had been using an old version of Lotus Notes and I was already familiar with Microsoft® Exchange so I figured we’d just migrate over to Microsoft’s BPOS (currently Microsoft Office 365). In the spirit of democracy, I threw the discussion wide open to the technology team at our North American headquarters and had a bake-off to evaluate Microsoft versus Google Apps. We looked at cost, usability, feature set and the global reach of each platform’s infrastructure. In the end the affordability, infrastructure and features made Google the clear winner.

After surveying our American employees, we found 67% were already using Gmail in their personal lives, so we knew the transition would be pretty easy. Immediately after implementation we saw a 35% reduction in our help desk calls. Just the support resources we saved paid for Google Apps in less than 12 months.

Initially we moved 550 North American employees to Google Apps a year ago and we’re adding 350 more users as we roll out Google Apps to our European offices. We have been supported in our efforts by our Google Apps partner, SADA Systems. The move to Google Apps has fundamentally changed how we communicate. Once people collaborate online to edit a document at the same time, they never want to go back to the old way of edit and email changes around. We use Google Talk and Google Video, both of which are total game-changers. To look your staff in the eye on a daily basis, no matter where they live, creates a real sense of belonging for those remote employees. People want to be social even at work and video interaction enables that.

Since Google Apps is web-based, we no longer have issues with storage and I know that wherever I roam, I can access my data and connect with people with the push of a button. I’m constantly blown away by Google’s rate of feature development. I don’t even have to spend more money; Google just keeps on giving us great new features at no extra cost!

The Roche Group goes Google

Ashley Chandler — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 19:52:00 +0000

Posted by Dr. Alan Hippe, CFO and CIO, the Roche Group

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Dr. Alan Hippe, CFO and CIO of the Roche Group, one of the world’s leading research-focused healthcare groups in the fields of pharmaceuticals and diagnostics. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

The Roche Group is a leader in research-focused healthcare with combined strengths in pharmaceuticals and diagnostics. For over 110 years, Roche has been pioneering the discovery, development, production and marketing of novel healthcare solutions. Our focus has always been on innovation.

For the last two and a half years, our two different email and calendaring platforms have often been an obstacle for effective collaboration. To end these platform interoperability issues, the Roche Corporate Executive Committee made the decision that all employees will move to Google Apps as the single common platform for the Roche Group.

When we evaluated new cloud-based solutions, Roche’s Corporate Executive Committee was impressed with the outstanding service and rapid innovation of Google Apps. Google Apps will enable over 90,000 employees to work better together from anywhere.

The way our employees communicate and collaborate is diverse, and our employees are spread across over 140 countries. The integrated and socially-focused way that Google Apps enables collaboration is very compelling, and we expect this to not only bring our company closer together, but give us a strategic advantage. Additionally, being able to deploy Google Apps by simply enabling them via a control panel versus planning for and deploying complex infrastructure in our datacenters will help us focus on our core business -- helping save patients' lives

Employees will be able to access their email and documents from any web-enabled device, without using remote access systems such as VPN. This will make it easier for employees to work from home or on the go and it will reduce the strain on our IT support teams. Removing barriers to communication and innovation while enhancing mobile access is a key part of our Roche IT strategy.

Roche’s history is one of innovation and progress and we believe that aligns well with the capabilities provided by Google Apps. We’re excited to begin moving our employees to Google Apps and we’re confident that Google’s experience in successfully moving other large organizations to the cloud will make this a smooth transition.

Innovation is in their jeans: Jordache moves to Google Apps

Ashley Chandler — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 23:06:00 +0000

Posted by Ezri Silver, SVP Operations, Jordache

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Ezri Silver, SVP of Operations at Jordache Enterprises. Jordache became well known for its designer jeans in the 1970s and continues to manufacture a wide variety of denim, apparel and accessories. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Although our fashion sense has stayed ahead of the times since the 1970s, we were stuck in the past when it came to technology. We have about 20,000 employees, and we were using Novell® GroupWise for communication and collaboration. From a functional and collaboration standpoint, we were missing flexibility, access and speed. Our calendars couldn’t accept Mircosoft® Outlook invites, basic file sharing didn’t work well across platforms, and employees couldn’t communicate efficiently due to the sluggishness of overloaded Groupwise email and the limited mobile access to their email and documents.

As our email volume grew, GroupWise couldn’t support it and we experienced frequent outages that brought business to a halt. Once, when the electricity went out in New York, we lost access to email for 24 hours – that’s unacceptable for a fast-moving manufacturing and retail business. We have stores all over the country and factories around the world, and we needed an easier, more reliable way to support communications among all of them.

We evaluated Microsoft® Exchange, Microsoft Outlook, and Microsoft Office 365, but then one of our employees suggested Google Apps. We quickly saw that Google was the best solution. Employees would have access to their email, documents and calendars from anywhere, our IT team wouldn’t have to worry about outages, and employees could collaborate easily across store locations. Plus, Google offered more ongoing innovative feature development and a better price.

We started by piloting Google Apps in about 20 retail stores across the country. With the help of Google Apps partner, Cloud Sherpas, we now have access to our email, calendar, and documents regardless of whether we are in the office, on vacation, or at a plant in China.

Google Apps is built for team collaboration, which makes so many business processes easier. For example, reviewing job applicants used to involve emailing each reviewer for individual feedback. With Google Groups, we can post the resume to a group and people can provide feedback and discuss it so that we interview the best candidates for the team. We also use Google spreadsheets to track supply orders and Google Docs forms to distribute quick inventory surveys and aggregate data from our retail stores.

On top of the easy access and collaboration, Google Apps has saved us at least 20% over GroupWise and about 30% over Office 365. The pricing of Google Apps is simple, and it’s easy to see how much value you get for $50 a year. Plus, with Google Apps you know you always have the latest features instead of being stuck with a specific version. For Jordache, moving to Google Apps has been a great experience with a lot of solid business and technology benefits.

We’re better together: how cloud, mobile and social are transforming the way we work

Ashley Chandler — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 17:56:00 +0000

Posted by Amit Singh, Vice President, Google Enterprise

Who puts in a 9-5 day anymore? Or works on their own? The demands on our time are multiplying, information is increasing exponentially, and there are still only 24 hours in a day. So when you go to work, you don’t want to step back 15 years and use outdated tools that slow you down.

With Google Apps we want to free you from the weight of technology and help you work smarter. We want to help you better manage your time, find new ways to discover and share knowledge within your business, and collaborate with others more effectively.

We’re pursuing those goals by focusing on three areas: cloud, mobile and social. As 2011 draws to a close, we thought we’d share a few thoughts on our plans for each in the year ahead.

Cloud: The movement of computing to the web is inevitable and will only accelerate in 2012 as many large businesses join Fortune 500 companies like Guardian Life, MeadWestvaco, and Sanmina-SCI in the cloud. We also expect that 2012 will be a huge year in the cloud for small businesses, which represent 99.7 percent of all U.S. employers, yet only 10% of SMBs have deployed cloud technologies.

Our computing experience is designed for today’s world and built with entirely modern technologies far more powerful than the PC -- from apps to browser to OS to device -- to benefit businesses of all sizes. Our 100% web focus lets us innovate faster while delivering best-in-class reliability, security and support. In 2011 alone, we added more than 175 new features to Google Apps, while still delivering 99.99% reliability in Gmail.

Going forward, we’ll further integrate the products in the Apps suite to make the experience more seamless, and we’ll accelerate our efforts to make them even faster and more responsive. Our cloud services are another important area of investment, and they will make it easier for you to build scalable web apps and draw trends from huge amounts of data to make better informed decisions. More than 400,000 active applications already run on App Engine, an increase of more than 70% in the last year alone.

Mobile: Increasing numbers of employees are bringing personal devices to work, and there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all enterprise mobile plan. Forrester Research predicts that in 2012 more than 77% of organizations will support Android and iOS devices.* Looking at our own customers, more than 90% of Google Apps for Business users have deployed or are interested in using Android devices in their organization, and for good reason; Android version 4.0, called Ice Cream Sandwich, includes powerful enterprise features such as on-device encryption, VPN and Global Address List (GAL) support.

Managing all of these new devices can be very costly. But the cloud democratizes expensive enterprise software, making it affordable and easy to use for businesses of all sizes. We’ve integrated web-based mobile device management capabilities into Google Apps and recently introduced new features to help you grapple with growing mobile demands.

The best thing about mobile devices is fast and intuitive applications. Our ‘mobile-first’ strategy means our apps will work first and best across different mobile platforms and allow you to be productive from anywhere. Last year we improved our Gmail mobile web app, brought a Gmail app to iOS, introduced a Docs app for Android phones and tablets, and there’s more to come. We’ll continue to invest heavily in mobile and soon you’ll see the products you love work even better on your smartphones and tablets. Beyond our own apps, we foresee many developers increasing their focus on building mobile apps for businesses.

Social: We’ve made strong progress in bringing some of the best consumer technology to business in areas like email, documents, video and mobile devices. But there’s been a glaring exception: social. This despite the fact that businesses are inherently about people and relationships, and the web is ideally suited to groups collaborating together.

That’s changing in a big way. Over the last year we added features like rich discussions in Docs, and made Google+ available to Apps customers. Google+ is our effort to center our products around the hundreds of millions of people who use them every day. It promises reshape all of the services we offer. It’s already changing the way people share knowledge in companies like Journal Communications, which is using Hangouts to train employees on new software.

Our efforts will focus on two areas in the year ahead. First, on continuing the blistering pace of innovation that is bringing multiple improvements to Google+ every week, while also wrapping Google+ with the controls needed for broader use in large enterprises. Just last week we rolled out a number of improvements that make it even easier to connect to your colleagues, customers and business partners face-to-face-to-face via Hangouts and there’s much more to come. Second, on bringing Google+ to the rest of our products: incorporating features that make it easier to connect, share, and integrate with the wider world. The Google+ integrations with Gmail and contacts are one small example of our work to create a seamless and intuitive experience across Google.

Cloud, mobile, social. Fast, lightweight applications that makes it easier to work with others from anywhere. Those are the areas driving our investments for 2012, and transforming the way we work. Join us at www.google.com/apps

* Forrester Research, How to Connect your Mobile Workforce to Cloud-Based Email, December 12, 2011, by Christopher Voce and Christian Kane with Doug Washburn, Ted Schadler, and Lindsey Kempton

TripIt makes communication easier with Google Apps

Ashley Chandler — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 18:52:00 +0000

Posted by Scott Hintz, Co-Founder and Vice President of Business Development at TripIt

Editors note: Scott Hintz, Gregg Brockway and Andy Denmark founded TripIt in 2006 to simplify the Internet travel experience by bringing together travel plans from multiple online sources into a single, centralized itinerary, and allow travelers to manage and share their travel plans. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

We launched TripIt with about 10 people back in 2007. We now employ about 50 and were acquired by Concur at the beginning of the year. It took all of one minute to decide that Google Apps provided the best tools for our growing team. As a Silicon Valley startup, our employees are very familiar with Gmail and we could count on them getting up to speed quickly without any IT training programs.

We attribute a lot of our internal business success to Google’s communication tools. Google Docs has become our primary collaboration tool and makes it easy for those outside our domain to work in tandem with internal employees. We rely on Google Docs for project planning and a lot of our accounting process. Before our acquisition, we used external bookkeepers to manage our accounting, do invoicing, etc. So we created Google spreadsheets where TripIt folks could enter invoice amounts and our accountants could access the doc and issue invoices based on our entries, then add confirmation information. Because Google documents are always up to date, TripIt employees could always track the status of invoices.

Plus, having a Google Docs link removes the email clutter that results from attachments, while allowing us the certainty that we’re all looking at the most recent version of the information. Before Google Docs, project prioritization was done using Microsoft Excel, which mandated a master owner and often resulted in outdated files. I can’t tell you how many times we were in meetings with people who were looking at different versions of the same spreadsheet.

Now we know the most recent versions of all our docs and the rest of our data are automatically saved in the cloud and accessible anywhere with an Internet connection. With hard drives, too many bad things can happen to your valuable files, especially as much as we travel. Mobile Gmail works great—it’s fast and easy—and we rely quite heavily on email and shared calendars while on the road. As a travel company, the mobile capabilities have become indispensable.

We’ve moved our offices three times in just four years. Because we’re now a cloud-based organization, it’s wonderful not having to lug around hardware and servers, and the fact that we never have to worry about interrupting critical email service is huge.

As a company that believes in the power of technology to simplify things, Google Apps is the perfect fit for us.

Atmosphere 2011: A view from the cloud

Ashley Chandler — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:58:00 +0000

Posted by Chris Farinacci, Global Marketing Director, Google Enterprise

(Cross posted from the Official Google Blog.)

Last month 350 CIOs and thousands of live stream viewers joined us for Atmosphere 2011, our annual cloud event. Leading companies from around the world came to explore how businesses are using the web to drive collaboration, innovation and growth in their organizations. In case you missed them, the keynotes are now available on our YouTube channel. You can watch the entire conference in order on the Atmosphere playlist.

This year’s speakers included a best-selling author, award-winning computer scientists, Google executives and product managers, and several Google Apps customers including Flint Waters, CIO of the state of Wyoming, Bryson Koehler, SVP of Global Revenue and Guest Technology at IHG, Michael O’Brien, CIO of Journal Communications and Christine Atkins, VP of Group IT at Ahold.

One of the highlights was listening to Christine Atkins talk about Ahold’s experience moving 55,000 users to Google Apps and how, in her words, “Google Apps is helping us deliver on the promise that we've all been seeking: that of strong collaboration platforms that help our company come together and work together.” You can watch Christine’s presentation here:

Google Apps Finds a Home in Real Estate

Ashley Chandler — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 20:22:00 +0000

Posted by Jim Lamb, Director of Computer Services, Ebby Halliday Realtors

Editor's note: In business since 1945, Ebby Halliday is one of the largest independent residential real estate companies in the U.S. with over 1,600 sales agents. Ebby herself, at 100 years old, is still very involved in the business and a well-known figure in the Dallas area. Ebby Halliday joins other real estate businesses like Baird & Warner and Gibson Sotheby’s International Realty in going Google. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

As we approached our seventh decade of doing business, we needed to modernize our technology infrastructure to provide better communication and collaboration tools for our employees and sales agents.

Before Google Apps, we had an outdated, in-house email system, a continuing battle with spam, and a distributed base of real estate agents with no effective way to collaborate. Each user was allotted 1GB of email storage and email service was provided by a lone Unix server, a single point of failure that crashed every couple of weeks, frustrating agents. The web-based interface was slow, an ongoing source of complaints. Spammers, having tricked users into divulging passwords, would occasionally use the server to send spam, resulting in our email domain being temporarily blacklisted. Mobile functionality was sub-par in an industry that demands anytime-anywhere access.

Among the options, Google Apps was the best choice based on cost, simplicity, and functionality. With help from Google Apps partner Cima Solutions Group, we migrated email from the in-house server, trained 1,600 users, and got everyone operational within serveral months.

Being cloud-based, Google Apps is accessible from anywhere with Internet connectivity. Our agents can access their email, calendar, and contacts whether they’re at an open house, home or the office. That kind of access is key in a business where communication is essential.

Outages are no longer a worry and with each user having 25GB of storage, running out of space is a thing of the past. Spammers no longer bother us. However, the biggest benefit we've seen is the speed and functionality of Google Apps. Using Google Docs to compose a document, for example, is just as fast as using other word processors, and much simpler. Plus, the document is automatically saved every few seconds. We can continue working on the document at home, a coffee shop, or a field office. Little things like these add up to increased productivity and on the go access that's critical in this industry. Google Apps is the perfect suite of apps for the real estate industry. At Ebby Halliday we see this first-hand every day.

Bringing the cloud to life, live on the web: Atmosphere 2011

Ashley Chandler — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 19:00:00 +0000

Posted by Amit Singh, Vice President of Enterprise

What’s the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning? Maybe check the news on your tablet, then send a couple of emails on your smartphone before jumping on a video call with a colleague. It’s all happening on the web, it’s changing the way we think about work, and it’s creating new opportunities for businesses of all shapes and sizes.

While this isn’t new, you’ve heard us talk about this before, we’re experiencing a fundamental shift in how businesses use the web to drive collaboration, innovation and growth. The role of the IT leader in business has never been more critical, and we can’t wait to welcome more than 350 CIOs from around the world to our annual cloud event: Atmosphere 2011, next Monday, November 14.

Representing the vision for this year’s speaker lineup are Steven Johnson, Jonathan Zittrain, and Vint Cerf, as well as CIOs from Ahold, Journal Communications, IHG and the state of Wyoming.

Everyone’s welcome to join us online as we’ll be sharing this event with our colleagues around the world, live. We’ll be broadcasting the event on YouTube from 0900 PST, 11/14 and posting news from the event on our new Google Enterprise page on Google+. We look forward to seeing you in the cloud.

Google Apps helps clients and attorneys collaborate at California law firm

Ashley Chandler — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Posted by Eric Hunter, Director of Knowledge Strategy and Technology at Bradford & Barthel, LLP

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Eric Hunter, Director of Knowledge Strategy and Technology at Bradford & Barthel, LLP, a mid-size law firm in Southern California. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

In the legal industry we have a concept called law2020 - the idea that technology and the economy are causing law firms to change the way they run their businesses to survive in the next decade. Technology like Google Apps and social applications are creating a culture where the legal industry is much more connected with clients and clients have much more access to information about the law. Our primary reason for investigating Google Apps back in 2009 was to start preparing our firm to keep up with this new culture of constant communication and to help employees enhance client relationships through better sharing and collaboration.

Since we migrated to Google Apps in April 2010, we’ve made collaboration much easier and more efficient through the use of Google Sites, Google Docs, and shared Google calendars. Our attorneys have found Google Apps to be intuitive and flexible. With Google Apps, constant innovation comes with the package and we’re pleased by how many new features have been introduced over the past year and a half: priority inbox, offline access and page-level permissions in Google Sites, to name a few. As part of our competitive strategy moving forward, our goal is to use Google’s video, voice, and social tools to enhance collaboration both internally and with our clients.

We use Google Sites and Docs as our intranet and portals with our clients. As a result of this improved communication, we’ve seen improved efficiency across our departments, areas of practice, and externally with our clients. Teams are collaborating directly with clients when developing new business and during trials and depositions.

As a law firm handling confidential information for our clients, Bradford & Barthel takes security extremely seriously. We’re responsible for private information on individuals and companies and our best security option is Google Apps. Google has many security features - SAS70 Type II certification and two step verification included - that allow us to feel confident our data and the data of our clients is much safer than if we hosted it on premise.

Google Apps allows Bradford & Barthel to adapt and succeed in the digital age as we move towards the year 2020. We’re continually improving our knowledge sharing and collaboration tools. We’ve already seen a lot of productivity improvements and stronger relationships with our clients, and our firm’s approach to business is evolving as we continue to realize the benefits of technology in the legal industry.

Lamar Advertising moves to Google Apps for better reliability and collaboration

Ashley Chandler — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 16:22:00 +0000

Posted by Ed Nettles, Vice President and Director of IT, Lamar Advertising

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Ed Nettles, Vice President and Director of IT for Lamar Advertising. Founded in 1902, Lamar Advertising operates over 150 outdoor advertising companies and 63 transit companies, reaching driving audiences. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

In 1902, when Charles Lamar and J.M. Coe decided to dissolve their business partnership, a coin toss was used to divide their assets: the Pensacola Opera House and the Pensacola Advertising Company, the small poster company created to promote the Opera House. Mr. Lamar lost the toss and was left with the less-lucrative poster company. A few years later the Opera house burned down, but that little poster company has grown into Lamar Advertising, one of the largest advertising companies in the U.S.

Prior to Google Apps, we were using Microsoft® Outlook for employees in the field, and Microsoft® Exchange for the employees in our corporate office. With this setup we were constantly facing three problems: data vulnerability, lack of reliable mobile access, and a constant need for IT maintenance.

We had employees saving Microsoft Outlook data in multiple locations, making us vulnerable to data loss and discovery requests that we couldn’t comply with. Microsoft Exchange limited our employees’ ability to get their information when out of the office. Employee smartphones couldn’t sync with calendars or contacts and while employees could get new messages on their phones, they couldn’t see emails older than a few days. We felt like once our employees walked away from the office, they walked away from their work. Even in the office, our email lacked stability so the IT department was constantly dealing with issues. We needed one centralized way of storing and managing our data so that we could provide a better service to our users, provide the business with better security and let our IT department get out of the business of managing email.

We considered upgrading to the latest version of Exchange, but the benefits of the cloud - access from anywhere, increased storage, better security- were too important to ignore. Once we decided that we were going to move to the cloud, Google Apps was the clear choice. Google Apps was affordable and many employees were already familiar with Gmail. Because Google Apps is web-based employees can work and easily collaborate anywhere, any time, making us much more productive.

Cloud Sherpas, the Google Apps reseller we’ve worked with, has been extremely helpful, deploying Google Apps to over 2,400 email users without any major hitches. We now have over 4 terabytes of data in Google Apps. That would have been too resource and cost intensive to build and maintain on our own. With Google Apps, we know our data is safe in the cloud we don’t have to continue to build out our IT infrastructure as we grow.

We’re just getting started with Google Apps, but already employees have started embracing the benefits of its collaborative features; we’ve already seen over 10,000 Google spreadsheets created in just a few months. With so many of our employees working in remote offices and on the road, the ability to access their information anywhere has greatly improved productivity. We know that this is just the beginning and we’re looking forward to seeing the impact Google Apps can have across the business.

Google Apps is big in Japan

Ashley Chandler — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 14:01:00 +0000

Posted by: Akihito Fuji, Google Apps team

On July 20th we held our second annual Google Enterprise Day in Tokyo, Japan. Despite typhoon warnings, we had 1,577 attendees, over twice the number of attendees as last year’s event. The packed agenda consisted of 35 speakers across 20 sessions, including Google Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, COO of SoftBank Telecom, Ken Miyauchi, and Yasuki Sato from Toda Corporation.

Google Enterprise Day was an opportunity for Google to share with Japanese business leaders our vision for a 100% web world, where business applications are delivered via a web browser, enabling improved reliability and productivity with access from anywhere, at any time. This was a particularly important topic following the devastating effects of the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan earlier this year. Business continuity and disaster management have become real concerns in the last few months for businesses in Japan. Well known construction company, Toda Corporation, shared why they moved to Google Apps after losing access to their on-premise servers and business applications during the tsunami. Moving to a 100% web-based platform meant that Toda Corporation could be up and running quickly, with no time spent installing hardware or software.

Several new Google Apps customers announced that they had gone Google at the event, including SoftBank Group, Nortiz, Casio, and Mitsui Soko. Casio’s CIO, Atsushi Yazawa, shared his decision to move to Google Apps. “In deciding to move to Google Apps, speed of innovation was a big factor. Google Apps constantly provides new features and products with a great level of service and reliability. Google Apps also allowed us to decrease our total cost of ownership while diverting our IT professionals from repetitive maintenence tasks to more business-centric work that adds value to the organization.”

Ken Miyauchi, COO of SoftBank Telecom, SoftBank Mobile and SoftBank BB spoke about its successful deployment of 26,000 employees across the business to Google Apps. SoftBank spoke about some of the benefits they’ve started to see from this switch – a reduction in servers and the costs and resources to maintain them, more efficient email with much bigger storage limits, better access to email and documents from mobile devices, and greater creativity resulting from better collaboration across departments and teams.

Sota Umezu, Manager of Sales Strategy in the Sales Promotion Division at SoftBank says, “Google Apps has changed the way we do business. For example, when gathering information from employees, we used to email attachments to each employee, ask them to fill in their information, and manually aggregate their input in numerous attachments back into a master copy of the file. With Google Docs employees all update the same document, making a 6 hour process a 30 minute process. The ability to access data from anywhere and collaborate in real time has greatly improved productivity,”

We really enjoyed hosting such innovative business leaders at this year’s Enterprise Day. If you’d like to see some of the presentations from this event, you can watch the videos on YouTube.

Journal Communications builds a new business model based on the cloud

Ashley Chandler — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 16:40:00 +0000

Posted by: Michael O’Brien, CIO, Journal Communications

Editors note:Today’s guest blogger is Michael O’Brien, CIO for Journal Communications, a Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based media company with operations in publishing, radio and television broadcasting, interactive media and printing services. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Journal Communications owns and operates 33 radio stations, 13 television stations in 12 states, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel newspaper, and several community newspapers and publications in the Midwest. For the past several years, our IT infrastructure for those media stations and papers has been completely separate. We had 17 implementations and multiple versions of Microsoft® Exchange and SharePoint with multiple servers for each location, most of which were not backed up or redundant. The company managed for years without significant problems, until our second largest market, Las Vegas, had a catastrophic hardware crash - just weeks after we officially decided to move to Google Apps. Email, calendar and contacts were not recoverable for many. Some employees had been with the company for 15 years or longer and they lost everything. Now the future of using a redundant, web-based solution really hit home with the company leadership.

When I joined Journal Communications in May 2010, my first priority was to bring multiple IT divisions together and have them start working more collaboratively. We had 18 months left on our Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft, but we realized that if we really wanted to reach this collaborative goal, it would be very expensive and hard to do with the existing portfolio of Microsoft products. Prior to Journal Communications, I had been a CIO at a start up, and one of the decisions I made early on was not to have anything brick and mortar if we could avoid it. I came to Journal Communications and saw all this legacy hardware and software, and knew we needed to build a future business model based on cloud computing.

Despite the existing contract with Microsoft, we decided to move to Google Apps. As we all know, email and calendar have evolved from nice-to-have tools to mission-critical business applications, and everything Google has come out with so far, simply just works - the Google tool set sells itself. Google Apps make the business environment more productive and more cost effective. Instead of IT being seen as a cost center, we’ve really taken the boundaries out of a static IT organization and started to make decisions that provide current and future business value. Until we transition completely, we still have hundreds of servers surrounding MS Exchange and SharePoint, and they just need to go away. My goal is to end up with a media based company that is as much in the cloud as possible, this includes our Publishing ERP system. We are also evaluating the idea of going cloud with phones. Portions of the IT team now use Google Voice and calls through Gmail. Imagine a department and then large portions of an organization with no desktop phones - Journal Communications does.

We’re rolling out Google Apps to over 2,700 Journal Communications employees and will be done by Q1 2012. We realize that this is a significant business change, but even some people who were originally skeptical are getting on board. This is just the beginning of moving to a more digital, cloud based world where we can work together across offices, know that our data is stored in the cloud and accessible from anywhere with any device, and start to move our business systems out of our brick and mortar data centers. We’re entering a new age at Journal Communications. We’re not your grandmother’s newspaper, nor your grandfather’s TV or radio station.

Happy SysAdmin Day from Google – here’s to many happy returns (on investment)

Ashley Chandler — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 17:15:00 +0000

Posted by Anna Mongayt, Google Apps Premium Services Lead

Today is System Administrator Appreciation Day - a humble holiday for all the men and women who keep our IT systems churning and burning. At Google, we’ve had the opportunity over the years to work with many talented teams of SysAdmins, and across the board two things are true: these folks care deeply about technology and giving people the best tools to work together.

We’ve heard stories of teams who spent thousands of hours managing email systems, dealing with laptops going haywire, sorting through disaster recovery scenarios, patching servers and software, working with employees frustrated over lost data, resetting passwords, archiving mail, and managing other tasks fearlessly.

The most enjoyable part of my job has been helping these hard-working teams recover extra time in their days, and making their budgets go further (while helping them look good to executives!) by moving to the cloud. We’ve heard great stories about teams who had so much leftover time that they went out for haircuts and some of them even had time to choreograph a dance to our Gmail Motion April Fool’s joke.

Motorola’s Sr. Director of IT Strategy and Services, Jason Ruger, getting his hair cut after moving to Google Apps.

Here are some of our favorite stories over the past year:

Andrew Murrey, VP of IT Infrastructure, Cinram: “Since moving to Google Apps, my IT team is much happier. We previously had 16 full-time people managing our messaging systems, spending about 8,000 hours per year backing up email, fixing file storage problems, or managing server issues. We now need only two folks to look after messaging and the other 14 are now more focused on business-critical projects. They’re so happy they wear Google t-shirts about once a week!”
Dan Moore, CIO, Quality Distribution: “The lower hardware requirements of web enabled applications allow our IT department to spend more time delivering improvements to the user experience. One of our first examples of this was our implementation of video and voice chat via Google Talk into our driver recruiting process.”
Luke Leonhard, Web Services Manager, Brady Corp: “Our jobs went from constraining and limiting people’s usage to making sure everyone uses these tools as effectively as possible to be as productive as possible.” Check out the photo of the Brady SysAdmin team below.

Google and the Brady Corporation team during Google Apps Go Live

To all of the SysAdmins out there supporting the more than 30 million users of Google Apps, our hats are off to you. So serve up the ice cream and cake, and celebrate the hard work of your SysAdmin today.

Nexteer Automotive steers employees toward Google Apps

Ashley Chandler — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 17:57:00 +0000

Posted by Jay McLean, CIO, Nexteer Automotive

Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Jay McLean, CIO for Nexteer Automotive, a global leader in advanced automotive steering and driveline systems with a workforce of 9,800 people worldwide. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

At Nexteer, we’re focused on our craft of engineering steering and driveline systems for automobiles. Electric Power Steering, is an energy-efficient product powered by specialized software that is tuned to the manufacturers specific vehicle characteristics. It’s a highly technical product requiring collaboration across teams of skilled engineers. Having the most innovative technology, like Google Apps, is one of the ways we’ve found to attract skilled, energetic engineers.

In addition to providing employees with features like better email search capabilities, mobile access to email and documents, and easy collaboration, we wanted to eliminate the cost of buying, setting up and maintaining servers. We looked at hosted Microsoft® Exchange and LotusLive, as well as Google Apps, but Google was clearly the best option.

We factored in monthly cost per user for email and collaboration, as well as easy, any-device mobility. Because we have offices and manufacturing plants all over the world, we have a lot of employees who need access to information wherever they may be working from, and it took extensive work and considerable cost to support VPN access. We wanted an easier and more affordable way to support our global teams.

With the help of Google Apps partner, Solvaire, we switched 4,200 users to Google Apps over a four month period in 2009 and haven’t looked back. As a technology-focused company, Google Apps allows us to be ahead of the curve for the automotive industry, with access to the newest features as they become available. In the year and a half we’ve been on Google Apps, we’ve seen new features like priority inbox, the option to have threaded or un-threaded email, and great interoperability among multiple devices and platforms. Access to that pace of innovation is something only Google Apps could offer.

Since moving to Google Apps, we’ve cut cost of email and collaboration by 64% and we’ve easily reduced VPN costs by about 50% – all because people no longer need to go through VPN to get their email. We were also able to eliminate servers and maintenance costs required to support our internally hosted solutions.

With Google Apps we’re able to get things done faster. Instead of scheduling meetings or emailing back and forth, we’re able to use Google Talk to work across time zones and quickly get answers from co-workers. The search functionality in Gmail helps us find what we’re looking for faster and the increased inbox size lets us store that information, knowing we’ll be able to find it when we need it.

Our end-users are happy and the calls to the help desk related to email have dropped off substantially. Our IT workload is far less, and we are avoiding the cost of buying and maintaining servers, as well as the costs of VPN access. With Google Apps, we have reduced costs, increased productivity, and benefited from a constant stream of innovation.

Premier Salons goes Google with a splash of color

Ashley Chandler — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 13:26:00 +0000

Posted by Andrew Muroff, CIO of Premier Salons

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Andrew Muroff, CIO of Premier Salons. Premier Salons has over 300 high-end spas and salons and almost 500 beauty supply retail stores across North America. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Running a chain of hundreds of retail stores and salons requires efficient coordination. We need to be able to quickly gauge inventory and share best practices while also making sure we can easily add new users and keep our data safe in an industry with a lot of employee turn over.

Before switching to Google Apps, we had multiple email systems and file shares across salons, retail stores and corporate – primarily Microsoft® Exchange 2003 and SharePoint. Substantial resources were needed to maintain these systems, yet they still weren’t supporting the level of collaboration we needed. We were dealing with license management, backups and space constraints. Our servers constantly went down. Just running SharePoint alone required a full-time administrator, yet SharePoint was never really well adopted because the check in/check out process was confusing to our employees. We realized that Microsoft’s technologies for collaboration and communication were not serving our needs.

The turning point came when we were installing a new point of sale (POS) system. The process of evaluating newer, more modern technologies opened our eyes to other possibilities. We have 6,500 employees and we realized that rolling out new versions of Microsoft Office to all of them was cost-prohibitive. After years of experience trying to support Microsoft applications at Premier Salons and other companies, we just didn’t see Microsoft as the best option for us.

That’s when we began considering Google Apps. We saw that Google would eliminate our worries about licensing, security, back-ups, space constraints and server maintenance, and adding new users would be easy. We would save hundreds of thousands of dollars in license fees and maintenance costs alone. And we could collaborate in real-time, with everyone on the same page – literally.

We rolled out Google Apps to 1,050 employees and have increased our efficiency exponentially. In order to keep the most popular products in stock to maximize sales and customer satisfaction, we need quick merchandising updates from our locations to determine what the big-sellers are, particularly over holiday weekends like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day. We had been using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to track and adjust our inventory to meet demand and we didn’t have the visibility required to quickly transfer excess, in-demand inventory from one store to another. We were also missing sales opportunities because we couldn’t provide instant feedback to our purchasing team. Now we’re able to send forms to our retail locations, see the data in real time, and get a quick update on what’s selling and what’s not across the entire company. We’ll keep our existing Microsoft Office licenses, but we won’t upgrade them. Google Docs is intuitive for our users and allows us to collaborate in ways just not possible with Microsoft Office.

Similar efficiencies are being gained in IT, where instead of managing VPNs, Google Apps lets us make information accessible to anyone – all managed through a secure log-in. With Google Apps, we’re keeping our technical support team in-house to a minimum. We have fewer people in IT dealing with email since there are no longer storage issues, server maintenance and space constraints. We’re also starting to use Google Sites so that various divisions can get corporate news and share best practices, without support from IT.

We’re very happy that we no longer have to worry about dedicating IT resources to supporting Exchange, SharePoint, or Office. The bottom line is that our employees are more productive and we expect to save hundreds of thousands of dollars with Google Apps.

Quality Distribution spends less on hardware and more innovation

Ashley Chandler — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 18:01:00 +0000

Posted by Dan Moore, CIO, Quality Distribution

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Dan Moore, CIO for Quality Distribution (QDI), the largest tank truck operator in North America and a major transporter of hazardous materials. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Prior to switching to Google Apps, QDI was a 100% Microsoft®-enabled shop. We heavily leveraged Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Outlook, SharePoint Portal Server 2003, and all of the Microsoft Office suite. Like many companies in recent years, our budgets were tight, and our business requirements were not getting simpler. With approximately 1,000 administrative personnel and 2,500 drivers, and an aged desktop client base, we looked to cloud computing as a silver bullet.

We compared both Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365 for several months in 2010. We decided to go with Google’s product line due to their simpler cost model, wider breadth of applications, and deeper experience at building applications for the cloud. Microsoft Office 365 did not seem as cohesive as the Google cloud offerings. The Microsoft total cost of ownership was higher, had more dependencies on the physical device, and fewer features.

We rolled out Google Apps to our all of our corporate users over the course of a month, and we’ve already received positive feedback from employees. We anticipate saving $250,000 annually in software licensing, plus the cost avoidance of future spend on data center hardware. Perhaps more compelling, is the time savings opportunity of collaborating in Google Docs. We are already seeing early adopters embracing the collaboration of Google Apps, and I believe the time savings will only increase with the users experience.

For the users that have migrated their documents to the cloud, we will be replacing their older PC’s with net-books such as Google’s Chromebook. The lower hardware requirements of web enabled applications, allow our IT department to spend more time delivering improvements to the the user experience. One of our first examples of this was our implementation of video and voice chat via Google Talk into our driver recruiting process.

Finally, as Google Apps comes with access to the Google Apps Marketplace, our team has begun evaluating apps as solutions to business problems previously prohibitive due to expensive hardware and support costs. These apps are generally priced at levels with little risk to adoption while seamlessly integrating into the Google Apps enterprise.

Our company still has a long way to go before I can say we are 100% cloud, but the trip so far has had few storms and many silver linings.

365 reasons to consider Google Apps

Ashley Chandler — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 16:15:00 +0000

Posted by Shan Sinha, Google Apps Product Manager

Help us get to 365! Many of you have asked us to list all 365 reasons to consider Google Apps. We'd like to hear yours- add them here http://goo.gl/Az5Yb, and check back for the results later this week!

Tomorrow Microsoft is launching Office 365. Many of you have asked for our perspective, so we thought we’d share some thoughts to help you make an informed choice.

Technology inevitably gets more complicated as it gets older. Upgrading platforms and adding features results in systems that are increasingly difficult to manage and complex to use. At times like these, it's worth considering a clean-slate: an approach based on entirely modern technologies, designed for today’s world.

Here are some things to think about as you compare Google Apps and Office 365:

Designed for Teams
Office 365 is for individuals. Apps is for teams.

Most of us no longer spend our days working on our own. We work with others: creating, collaborating, sharing.

With Apps you can work with multiple people in the same document. There’s no need to
worry about whether or not it’s possible to share a spreadsheet, or co-edit a presentation. You can see people type in real time, and share a file in just two clicks. Discussions bring people into your documents for rich conversations. You don’t need to buy additional licenses to work with others, or hope people outside your company have upgraded to the same software. If you have a Google account, you can collaborate.

“We’ve shaved eight weeks off of the end-to-end budgeting process using Google Docs, which translates into close to 30% time savings,” said Michael Rodger, Delta’s Director of Digital Innovation.

Productive Anywhere
Office 365 is built for Microsoft. Apps is built for choice.

Office 365 is optimized for Windows-based PCs and devices, which reduces your flexibility. Our applications are designed to work well on any device, on any operating system. Desktop, laptop, Chromebook, tablet, smartphone. Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, Blackberry, iOS, Windows Mobile. Edit on the go. Share from anywhere. Start on your computer, move to your tablet, finish on your phone. When the web is the platform, it just works.

“The initial reason we looked at Google Apps was cost savings, but the on-going value of access to information from anywhere totally independent of the device is where we're seeing the real gain,” said Scot Adams, the CIO of Cadillac Fairview.

Simple & Affordable
Office 365 is 11 different plans, three editions and two tiers. Apps is $5/month with no commitment.

Google Apps for Business and five of eleven Microsoft Office 365 plans
(Click image to expand)

We have a single, transparent, low price that meets everyone’s needs, and it hasn’t changed in 4 years. There’s no extras for basics like phone support and robust productivity apps. No long term contracts or opaque enterprise agreements.

We also don’t lock you in. By design, we make it as easy as possible for you to move off of Google Apps if you want. We have a dedicated team of engineers whose sole goal is to help you get your data in and out of our products for free. We believe that the way to keep you long term is to continue to innovate and make our products better so that you choose to stay with us.

Pure & Proven Cloud
Office 365 is about the desktop. Apps is about the web.

Google Apps are accessed in a browser. There’s no client software to install, secure and maintain. Upgrades and years of patience aren’t necessary to get access to the latest innovation, just click refresh. Our customers received more than 125 new features in the last year alone.

Running a reliable and secure cloud-based service is challenging and requires you to rethink everything. This year Gmail has been available 99.99 percent of the time, which translates to less than 5 minutes of downtime per month. That includes all downtime, planned and unplanned, of any duration, for any and all users. We make zero exceptions when calculating our uptime, and we’re transparent with you in the rare cases when things go wrong.

You can't just take legacy, desktop software, move some of it to a data center and call it "cloud." Apps was born for the web and we've been serving hundreds of millions of users for years.

Ok, we didn’t get to all 365 reasons here today, but we hope we gave you some things to think about. Ultimately, we have a fundamentally different vision for the future of software. That’s good, because it provides a clear choice. Before you invest ten years in the past, we’d humbly encourage you to invest ten minutes in today by checking out why so many businesses have chosen Google Apps.

Apps isn’t for everyone. But in the last week alone 38,000 businesses decided to give it a try. Maybe you should too.

Farsighted Specsavers Goes Google

Ashley Chandler — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 15:33:00 +0000

To remain competitive, businesses of all sizes need to grow and evolve quickly. Web based solutions such as Google Apps for Business offer unprecedented flexibility and deliver constant innovation, with new products and updates introduced instantly and seamlessly to all users.

That’s why Specsavers, the world’s largest privately owned chain of opticians, decided to switch to Google Apps for 2,500 employees worldwide.

The company’s CIO, John Lister, believed the service would best support Specsaver’s global expansion plans: “Over the last two years our company has experienced fantastic growth, opening more than 200 stores in different locations. Google Apps is an excellent set of tools for our email and collaboration requirements because of its capability, technology, and ease of management. Google Apps allows us to scale and deploy easily and quickly, without having to invest heavily in buying software and licenses we may not use. We are now also able to support mobile working by letting staff access mail, calendaring and sites from any Internet enabled device”,

Specsavers is currently rolling out Google Apps to head office staff in Australia and New Zealand. The roll out to the remaining head office, laboratory and manufacturing operations in the UK, Nordics and Netherlands will be completed in the first half of 2011.

Ancoris, a UK based Google Enterprise Reseller and specialist provider of cloud computing and enterprise security solutions, assisted Specsavers with its evaluation of Google Apps versus Microsoft Exchange and helped the company make the switch. As cloud computing has become mainstream and the demand for Google Apps accelerates, working with professional and skilled partners continues to be key to growth.

Posted by Malgosia Rigoli, Google Apps team

Live Google Apps Webinar Tomorrow – Chrome, Chrome OS & Apps for Business

Ashley Chandler — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 22:01:00 +0000

The speed of innovation on the web is amazing, and Google’s Chrome and Apps products capitalize on this speed to bring new productivity and security benefits to businesses. Join us for a live webcast where you’ll hear directly from Google’s Chrome Product Managers Glenn Wilson and Cyrus Mistry on how Chrome and Chrome OS are innovating for Apps for Business. You’ll learn about the latest features and business customer experiences. Plus, a live Q&A will follow the discussion.

When: January 25th - 10 am PST, 1 pm EST, 6pm GMT
Who: Google Chrome Product Managers Glenn Wilson and Cyrus Mistry
Register now

Google Chrome, whose users have tripled in the past year to 120 million, has new IT administrator controls to easily configure and deploy the browser on Windows, Mac, and Linux according to business requirements. Chrome OS is a new operating system that is built and optimized for the web to make computers faster, much simpler and fundamentally more secure.

We hope you'll join us!

Posted by Maureen Bradford, Google Apps team

Google Apps Adventures: A Voyage Through Climate Change with polar explorer Børge Ousland and Traffic Konzept + Film

Ashley Chandler — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 19:15:00 +0000

Editor's note: We're thrilled to share stories from the people and organizations that use Google Apps to explore, discover and push the boundaries. These businesses truly embody the freedom enabled by the cloud.

Our third Apps Adventure profiles Traffic Konzept + Film GmbH, a Berlin-based multimedia studio that supported polar explorer Børge Ousland in a record-setting expedition to document climate change in the Arctic. Assisting Traffic was post-production house Magna Mana.

As a multimedia studio, nothing gets us more excited than a project that demands film and interactivity to take an audience inside a story. When the story is about a world record Arctic voyage, and a close-up look at global warming, our passion goes totally off the scale.

In 2009, Traffic began working with Norwegian polar explorer Børge Ousland to support an expedition planned for Summer 2010. His goal was to be the first to sail through both Passages of the North Pole in a single voyage, and the first to circumnavigate the Arctic in a single season. A feat explorers have tried and failed to do for 500 years.

Now global warming has melted the polar ice caps to such an extent that an expedition is possible. Børge’s intent wasn’t just to set a record, but provide a visual example of climate change that could reach out and motivate people. To accomplish this, our shared vision was to use film and multimedia to bring the world on the voyage as it was happening. A multimedia event that would use adventure as a draw to education and action.

On June 23rd, Børge and veteran sailor Thorleif Thorleifsson set out from Oslo on a small 31-foot trimaran. On board were several film and still cameras, a laptop, and an Inmarsat satellite uplink. Power came solely from a generator connected to a wind vane.

For nearly four months, the team battled raging storms, maze-like ice fields, lethal shallows and sub-zero temps. Because their small boat had no ice breaking gear, any collision or scrape could have been fatal. Long stops also weren’t possible, because they had to stick to a tight schedule to make it through before winter trapped them in the Passages.

Throughout the journey, Børge was able to communicate and correspond online via regular blog posts, YouTube films, Flickr galleries, and e-mail. The boat was also outfitted with a special tracker, so everyone could follow the voyage in real time via Google Maps.

Behind the scenes, Traffic used Google Apps as our project hub — creating a 24/7 connection between us, the expedition and media partners and sponsors around the world. We worked on pre-production planning in real-time with Docs, updated and shared schedules via Calendar, and the whole team could get a snapshot of the latest content and news via our Google Site. Gmail was the email backbone of the project. Using Google Apps saved an incredible amount of time, and because everything was in the cloud, everyone had access on the ﬂy. Even from the Arctic.

For me, the greatest feeling was being right there with a camera crew — on an Oslo fjord — when the expedition began its final leg home in October. After watching the journey online for months, I was so touched to share the last mile with them in person. Being part of their team is an inspiration to us, and in the months ahead, we’ll continue to explore how multimedia can bring their story of climate awareness to new audiences.

Posted by Len Dickter, Creative Director, Traffic Konzept + Film GmbH

Gaining Altitude: Perspectives on Productivity in the Cloud

Ashley Chandler — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 21:25:00 +0000

Editor’s note: Continuing our Gaining Altitude series, we’ve invited guest blogger Michael Bungay Stanier, the author of Do More Great Work: Stop the Busywork and Start the Work that Matters.

Do you ever feel that your work life consists mostly of meetings and email, while the all real, important work needs to be squeezed into the gaps? In an age of information overload, people often talk about the importance of multi-tasking. This can be an effective way to survive the constant onslaught of information, but you have to wonder: does multi-tasking take away from our ability to do great work? How can we actually come up with ideas and think them through if we don’t have dedicated time to focus? Perhaps we need to change the way we operate so we can we not just get things done, but instead do great work?

In Do More Great Work I suggest you can divide everything you do into three simple but powerful categories:

Bad Work: Often called bureaucracy - excess rules, excessive processes, pointless meetings. Sadly, it often comes standard as part of your job.
Good Work: Productive, efficient and focused, this is the bulk of what you do. It’s also at the heart of how your organization succeeds - which means that “good work” is essential. The challenge is there's almost always more Good Work to do than there is time in the day - it sometimes seems that your time is spent just trying not to get further behind.
Great Work: The work that makes a difference and that has meaning. It’s what you were hoping for when you signed up for the job. It’s both exciting and engaging - and a little scary and uncertain.

What you're looking for is a better work diet, one that has you making an impact and doing work with more meaning. What you want is more Great Work - and less of the other stuff.

Simple recipes for success

A few simple techniques and some good tools - like Google Apps - will help you make sure you're doing more great work.

1. Define your Great Work Project

Before kicking off 2011, take the time to think about the one or two Great Work projects you want to work on. Define where you you want to truly invest your time and effort, your hard work and brain power. Establish a goal that will stretch and challenge you. Set your Great Work Project for the year: how it starts, who else needs to be involved, what success looks like, when it will be completed. Use your Great Work Project as the foundation of a memorable, challenging and interesting year.

2. Keep what matters top of mind

Use Calendar and Gmail to prioritize your day. Begin the day by identifying your One Plus Two. First, determine one action that must happen to move your Great Work forward. Then add another two actions that, if you get to them, will be an added bonus. This gives you both focus and flexibility.

Add these three actions as an all-day event at the top of your Google Calendar. That way they’re front-and-center every time you look at your calendar, and serve to remind you to focus on what matters.

If you haven’t gotten to those important actions by mid-day, use labels in Gmail to label any incoming email related to your One Plus Two activities. Then, as the day unfolds and when information is coming at you from all directions, you’ll be able to identify the high priority emails that need your attention.

3. Good work takes collaboration

There are talented people on your team, in your business division and your company. Great Work is often the product of many people sharing ideas and working together. Google Apps makes this easy. Instead of creating a document and working alone, start a Google document and share it with members of your team. With real-time collaboration you can edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations simultaneously, or leave comments and suggestions in the margins.

We all know how hard it can be sometimes to find a time when everyone can meet in person. Rather than setting up a meeting or clogging up your co-workers inboxes with another email, try using Google Talk or video chat to quickly ask a question.

If you prioritize, set aside the time and collaborate with talented peers, instead of trying to do everything, you may just find that you do Great Work.

Posted by Michael Bungay Stanier, author of Do More Great Work

Live webcast this Thursday: “Google on Google”

Ashley Chandler — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 22:12:00 +0000

Have you ever been curious about how we run our business on Google’s products? Join us Thursday for a live webcast with Julie Pearl, a Director in Google's Corporate Engineering group. Julie leads the team responsible for building and operating Google's own enterprise IT services on top of Google products (known internally as running "Google on Google"). Julie's team manages messaging and collaboration for all of Google, and builds a wide range of custom IT applications that are deployed to personal computers and mobile phones.

Register for this live and interactive webcast on Thursday, December 16th, 2:00pm ET/ 11:00am PT to learn from Julie how Google empowers more than 20,000 users in 20 countries, using technologies such as:

Google Apps for Business (messaging, collaboration, and communications)
Google App Engine (web application development on Google's cloud computing infrastructure)
Android (mobile operating system and application platform)

Posted by Ashley Chandler, Google Apps team

Composites One moves to Google Apps for increased productivity and improved collaboration

Ashley Chandler — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 19:07:00 +0000

Editor’s Note: As part of our Going Google Everywhere series, we’ve invited guest blogger, Hal Greene, Director of Information Systems, at Composites One to talk about his experience “going Google.” Learn more about other organizations that have gone Google on our community map or test drive life in the cloud with the Go Google Cloud Calculator.

Composites One is the leading distributor of composites materials. Our products include fibers, resins, and a wide range of chemicals and accessories used in manufacturing. We have distribution centers serving over 8,000 customers across North America and Asia, and we strive to provide the best quality materials, exceptional service, and personalized support

We had been using Novell Groupwise for over 15 years, but maintaining it was becoming increasingly costly and cumbersome. We had separate file servers in more than 30 distribution centers, and keeping up-to-date with Groupwise required major upgrades to all servers involving license renewals and significant IT department resources. In addition to the cost and maintenance issues, end-users weren’t satisfied with the functionality of Groupwise. They wanted the features they were accustomed to having in the products they used in their personal lives.

We began looking for a solution that would provide improved functionality, better support of mobile devices, and cost savings. We put together a 10 year cost of ownership model for Google Apps and we came out way ahead by moving to Google Apps. With many of our employees on the road, we needed better mobile access to communication and collaboration tools. We started to see how much Google Apps would improve our ability to remotely and operate more efficiently. Several employees, including our IT team members, already used Gmail outside of work. After talking to IT executives and CIOs already using Google Apps, who gave very positive reviews, we successfully pitched the idea of moving to Google Apps to the executive team.

Cloud Sherpas, a Google Apps partner, helped us get started with a small pilot for two months, and then roll Google Apps out incrementally to the entire organization. Cloud Sherpas helped with the migration process and initial training sessions. Overall, our roll-out went smoothly and people picked up Google Apps quickly.

One of the biggest benefits to the business we’ve seen is the creation and sharing of calendar for transfer truck routes allow for easy identification for transporting inventory as needed.

Moving to Google Apps has allowed us to increase productivity, give our employees better access to tools from the road, and save money. Our employees are working together with better applications, and our IT department spends less time maintaining servers and updating software on servers all over the country. Google Apps has become essential to the daily operations of our business.

Posted by Hal Greene, Director of Information Systems, Composites One

BI-LO sees productivity gains and increased collaboration by going Google

Ashley Chandler — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 19:35:00 +0000

Editor's note: Over 3 million businesses have adopted Google Apps. Today we’ll hear from Carol Dewitt, CIO of BI-LO. To learn more about other organizations that have gone Google and share your story, visit our community map or test drive life in the cloud with the Go Google cloud calculator.

BI-LO is coming up on its 50th anniversary. We are a grocery retail chain with over 200 stores in the Southeast and have more than 4,500 teammates who utilize e-mail in our corporate offices, retail locations, and on the road. We had been using our previous email system for about ten years, but when it came time to upgrade we evaluated our evolving needs and what we would need to grow our business in the future. While cost was an initial priority, we quickly realized that collaboration was even more more critical to our success.

With our previous solution, we struggled to enable communication with our retail stores, with teammates who frequently travel, and even between teams in the corporate office. We also have a lot of manual and time consuming processes and knew that in order to push our business forward, we needed a better solution. So though cost is what initially led BI-LO to Google Apps, a growing focus on enabling collaboration and empowering our teammates is what convinced us that Apps was the best product with the best features for our growing needs.

Prior to deploying Apps, we structured our IT department so that one group supported intranet applications and a separate group was responsible for email. Since we really wanted to improve collaboration and support our users, working from any location, we decided to form a collaboration team. Since moving to Google Apps this fall, this team is focused less on fixing email issues and managing infrastructure and more on improving our business processes and helping people be more productive.

With the creation of this new team and the help of Cloud Sherpas, a Google Apps reseller, moving to Google Apps has been relatively painless. We migrated data and went live with all 1,500 corporate teammates in less than 90 days (our Executive Leadership migrated successfully in the first 30 days). We were worried that the transition would be difficult for end-users, but we’ve found most of the issues to be minor and that teammates are adopting new products like Docs and Sites before we’ve even announced them.

Teammates who are always on the road love having web-based access to email and documents that are easily shared across teams. We’ve started to replace manual, paper-based processes and expensive applications with Google Docs and Sites. Teammates in our corporate offices used to spend hours calling or emailing stores to ask them about on-going promotions, inventory and recall issues; as they are adopting the forms feature in Google Docs, we’re seeing those processes improve dramatically. We have also replaced several of our old email-based applications, like ethics disclosure, with Google Docs and forms.

Making sure our teams had access to the information they needed was also a big challenge before Google Apps. Now, with Google Sites, it’s easy. We moved our entire corporate intranet to Google Sites, and this has allowed us to give our teammates on the road easy and secure access to company information via the web. We’ve set up the intranet so that our users log in to their Google Apps accounts from the home page of the intranet. This ensures that they always see the most up to date company news and events every day. We posted our most recent commercial on the intranet and our CEO is planning to use Google Video to post announcements. Much of this information sharing had previously been done over email or costly meetings, but this way, we’re sure that everyone has seen important updates and news.

Google Apps has enabled our company to be more collaborative and more productive. Workflows previously handled by IT, like creating content for the intranet, can now be done organically by teammates. Work that used to be done repetitively and manually is now done automatically and instantly using Google forms and shared spreadsheets. Best of all, our teammates are enjoying the ease of access to all their communication and collaboration tools provided by Google Apps. The CEO and the CFO have both stated, “please don’t make us go back.” We don’t plan to. We’ve seen so many improvements since moving to Apps, and we’re just getting started.

Posted by Carol Dewitt, CIO, BI-LO

Z Gallerie goes Google and moves its 55 retail stores to Google Apps

Ashley Chandler — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 18:30:00 +0000

Editor’s note: Today our guest blogger is Howard Kolodny, CIO of Z Gallerie. To learn more about other companies “going Google” check out our community map or test drive life in the cloud with the Go Google Cloud Calculator.

Z Gallerie is a Southern California-based home furnishing and accessories retailer with 55 stores in 19 states. We were started in 1979 by 3 siblings as a poster shop and have grown into a national furnishings store with over 1,000 employees.

We started looking at Google Apps to solve a key problem. In our stores, the only computers we have are also cash registers, so data security is definitely a concern. We didn’t want any confidential information stored on store computers. Moving to a 100% web option with Google Apps instantly improved data security at our retail stores. Now we don’t have to install software on hundreds of computers all over the country, and there is no need to worry about data being accessed on those computers, because it’s all safely stored and protected in the cloud. Plus we’re able to offer a greatly improved email service for our employees.

In addition to added security, we’ve also seen improved productivity since moving to Apps. Before we switched to Google Apps, we had an antiquated email system that made it hard to find emails, and word processing software that hindered collaboration and forced us to do a lot of manual work. Because of the lack of functionality of our previous tools, we often resorted to using paper request forms and faxing information back and forth between corporate offices and retail stores.

Supply ordering has completely changed after moving to Google Apps. Each store used to print out a form, fill in what they need for the store, and then fax it in, only to have someone in the office manually add it all up. Now we have a spreadsheet with all available supplies and each store enters what it needs. We use a similar process for our modified holiday hours. Previously each store would send in their updated hours and someone at headquarters would enter them all into a spreadsheet and send it out to everyone. Shared spreadsheets have saved us hours of tedious manual work, not to mention a lot of paper.

Employees have enthusiastically embraced the new technology and their extra time is put to good use. Many already used Gmail outside of the office so the transition was easy. Google Apps partner, SADA Systems, helped with training and deployment to get employees up to speed. Since deployment, we’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much positive feedback we’ve received from employees. They’ve been particularly appreciative of the speed of search in Gmail. Knowing that they can always easily find something in their inboxes has made it easier to follow up on consumers’ questions about promotions that ran months before, or emails from headquarters. Everything is right at their fingertips.

Google Apps provides a more secure way to store and access data, an easier and cheaper way to maintain our information systems and has increased employee productivity tremendously. This change has also improved morale by giving our employees faster and easier ways to do their work and allowing them to work together. With the holidays approaching, it’s comforting to know that we’re ready to handle anything that comes our way because we have the right tools in Google Apps.

Posted by Howard Kolodny, CIO, Z Gallerie

Australia’s Flight Centre and Ray White have gone Google

Ashley Chandler — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 16:16:00 +0000

[cross-posted from the Official Google Australia Blog]

Our Apps business is one of the fastest growing at Google today, with Australia being one of the fastest growing markets in the Asia Pacific region. Today we are announcing that two leading Australian businesses are the latest to go Google.

Flight Centre is Australasia's largest travel agency group with more than 2,000 shops and businesses in 11 countries. Migrating to Gmail will cut their email system costs by approximately 30% annually, while giving their employees an unprecedented 25GB inbox - meaning staff will never need to be burdened by deleting emails. The new Google Apps suite has given them access to more than just email – they have a collaborative suite of tools that supports their entire global operation. Watch Flight Centre’s story below.

Ray White manages over $30 billion worth of real estate sales across Australia, New Zealand and Asia, writing $6 billion in home loans each year. In addition to providing 1,000 businesses, 8,000 agents and each of its customers a standardised communication and collaboration platform via Google Apps, Ray White also developed apmasphere - a dedicated rental property management system delivering greater efficiency and transparency for property management in Australia. Ray White developed this application on the Google App Engine platform, which provided a fast, efficient and robust development environment, with unique collaboration features. We’re convinced that Ray White’s pioneering work will form a template for other developments around the world. Watch Ray White’s Story below.

More than 3 million businesses worldwide have “gone Google” - including Australian businesses you can read about here.

Posted by Emma Robinson, Google Enterprise AU/NZ team

Spyder follows the snow, pushes the limits, and lives in the cloud

Ashley Chandler — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 18:21:00 +0000

We're thrilled to share stories from the people and organizations that use Google Apps to explore, discover and push the boundaries. These businesses truly embody the freedom enabled by the cloud.

Spyder has always been a company that pushes the limits of design and performance, proving that it’s as important to adapt with speed and grace to conditions on the mountain as it is in business. At Spyder they value speed and innovation in all that they do, and that includes their information systems. Google Apps helps Spyder design high-performance products and work with their athletes and manufacturers all over the world.

While Spyder has grown and expanded its product line over the years, its roots are in ski racing. Founder and championship skier, David Jacobs, started Spyder as a ski sweater company out of his kitchen in 1978. As a former coach of the Canadian National Ski Team, David understood that athletes depend on quality equipment to gain a competitive edge. For more than 30 years, Spyder has focused on engineering superior skiwear for its athletes, whether they’re Olympic skiers like Julia Mancuso and Tommy Moe, back country enthusiasts, or just beginners. Rigorously tested by top athletes on some of the toughest terrain and the most competitive races, Spyder products embody a passion for performance.

Spyder is a business that needs to go where their athletes go. And these people feed on adventure and thrive on adrenaline, so they find themselves in some pretty interesting places - Alpine Ski World Cup stops, Chilean photo shoots, and wherever the Olympics are, to name just a few examples. Google Apps helps Spyder set up shop on any mountain. With Google Apps Spyder employees can just pick up their laptops, check their email on the go, and get to the next race or the next photo shoot.

Spyder works with designers and manufacturers all over the world, so they need to be able to share documents and spreadsheets, have meetings over video chat, and find what they’re looking for in their inboxes - fast. Google Apps has helped Spyder’s internal teams work more cohesively and efficiently, enabling them to get the best quality products to market, wherever they happen to be in the world. If Google Apps helps them get their work done faster so they can get back on the mountain, that doesn’t hurt, either!

Posted by Ashley Chandler, Google Apps team

Ireland’s Belle and Rollo goes Google

Ashley Chandler — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 15:44:00 +0000

Editor’s note: Over 3 million businesses have adopted Google Apps. Today we’ll hear from Michael Wejchert, IT manager of Belle and Rollo, which was founded by his wife Carla Wejchert. To learn more about other organizations that have gone Google and share your story, visit our community map or test drive life in the cloud with the Go Google cloud calculator.

Belle and Rollo is an Ireland-based online children's lifestyle store offering a unique and eclectic range of items for children and families. It opened in Autumn 2010 and uses Google Apps as the heart of its communication infrastructure.

When we embarked on the path to open our store in January 2010, I was in the position of creating a business from the ground up and making critical decisions for solutions that would help us run an effective and efficient business.

I had come from a business with over 2,000 users on a Microsoft Exchange® system and was familiar with the various issues of cost, maintenance and reliability that affected our day to day communications systems. As a small start-up business, I strongly wanted to avoid the problems I had previously witnessed. We needed to have rock solid reliability but did not want to have the added complexity of running our own email hardware and the added expense of maintenance costs.

From my personal experience using Gmail and Google Docs I felt that a cloud solution would be very suitable for our needs. We needed to have accounts covering email, calendar and contacts that were accessible from anywhere, especially when working from mobile devices. Increasing the number of users quickly is also important for us as our business grows. I researched Google Apps further and contacted Baker Security & Networks - a Google Apps Authorized Reseller - who talked me through the various functionality features which lead to our decision to use Google Apps. They also recommended Irish mobile network 3 who supplied us with Android handsets to allow us to be fully connected to Google Apps when we were away from the office.

After more than six months running Google Apps, I continue to be impressed. As I spend the majority of my time on the road, the Android integration with Google services has been invaluable. Syncing multiple accounts for email, contacts and calendars has allowed me to respond to suppliers immediately and process customer queries and action orders efficiently. Once back in the office (or home) everything is in place and just as easy to access due to the Cloud.

Google Docs has given us a central hub for data creation and storage, with flexible and secure sharing settings. We have recently started to use it to streamline our invoicing process - we can generate invoices from any PC and then store them in the Cloud with Google Docs - removing the problem of being tied to a specific person, location or computer. As we work from various places - office, home office, on the road - it’s very helpful to have a central data store for the company. We have found the collaborative nature of Google Docs a very natural way of working over distance.

I am looking forward to seeing our company grow, safe in the knowledge that our Google Apps system will grow hand in hand with us, and without any of the usual technology growing pains!

Posted by Michael Wejchert, Belle and Rollo Limited

Google Apps Adventures: Into the Fire with National Geographic’s Mark Thiessen

Ashley Chandler — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 14:57:00 +0000

We're thrilled to share stories from the people and organizations that use Google Apps to explore, discover and push the boundaries. These businesses truly embody the freedom enabled by the cloud.

Our first Apps Adventure profiles Mark Thiessen, a 20-year veteran photographer for National Geographic who works on the front lines of some of the world’s most powerful fires.

I wanted to become a photographer because it allowed me to see parts of people's lives and lifestyles that I've never seen any other way. What I love about my job is not so much getting my pictures published – that used to be really important to me. For me, what I love are the people I get to meet along the way. They say it's the journey, not the destination that's important, and that is so true.

A lot of people think I just go on vacation and take pictures. That couldn’t be further from the truth. To impress picture editors who have seen the best pictures in the world, I need to show them pictures they’ve never seen before. At National Geographic they give you the time and resources to go do stories no one has ever done before.

I have a deep personal passion for photographing wildfires and the people who fight them. A couple years ago I went to Russian Siberia. Russia is twice the size of the United States and two thirds of it is covered in timber. They have about 4,000 smoke-jumpers and their job is to put out fires anywhere they’re burning.

We flew in helicopters with them for hours over vast forest, with no signs of human life. There’s no place to land, so they rappel out of helicopters straight into the fire with nothing but the metal part of a shovel. Then they’d whittle a handle in five minutes and get to work. These guys do it for barely any pay – no hazard or overtime pay. We were there for five weeks, in the middle of Siberia, with mosquitoes the size of jet planes all over us. It was terrible, but it was such a great story.

No one else had done that story. There are so many aspects to fire that intrigue me – the people who fight them, the forests’ need for fire, the human impact, people’s desire to build in fire-prone areas. Most people don’t even know the Russian smoke-jumpers exist, but with National Geographic, I get to experience their lives and share their experiences with the world, and Google Apps helps me do that.

With Google Apps my data is backed up in the cloud. So no matter what happens to my laptop, I know that my data is safe. That’s important with a job like mine. Google Apps allows us to do things we never could have done before. We can collaborate on a master plan for a story, we can share a calendar with story deadlines and shoot dates, and because of Gmail’s search capabilities, I know I can find any email whenever I want it. Google Apps allows me to be flexible. I can access emails or my documents on any computer or any mobile device. That’s critical when I’m out in the field.

Posted by Mark Thiessen, National Geographic

Hear about best practices for moving to Google Apps from Google’s Deployment Lead, Alex Diacre

Ashley Chandler — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 20:02:00 +0000

Google’s Deployment Lead, Alex Diacre, will be hosting a live webcast this Thursday, November 4th at 11:00 AM PT. Alex has been at Google since 2007 and has been leading the Enterprise Deployment Team in deploying Google Apps at businesses all over the world. Join us to hear from Alex and his team about exactly what you need to do to deploy Google Apps in your organization.

This live and interactive webcast with the Google Enterprise Deployment Team will give you tips for replacing traditional on-premise applications such as email with Google Apps:

* Learn how to scope your deployment process
* Hear about the key design points for moving to Google Apps
* Discover best practices that can be used by your organization

Register today for this live webcast Thursday, November 4, 2010 2:00 PM ET / 11:00 AM PT / 6:00 PM GMT

Posted by Ashley Chandler, Google Apps team

The cloud never tasted so good: Jason’s Deli has gone Google

Ashley Chandler — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 13:11:00 +0000

Jason's Deli is a family-owned, casual restaurant chain that serves more than 35 million people a year in the US. Operating over 200 delis in 28 states, the company has a presence in major markets including Chicago, DC, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Houston, Austin, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Denver.

Jason's Deli was on a custom, legacy email system that couldn't keep up with the demands of so many offices, and users were complaining about the slowness and lagging features. Jason's Deli began looking for a more innovative solution that would continue to release improvements and new features, and that would allow its employees the mobility they needed to effectively run their business.

After successfully completing a 60-user IT pilot in June, the company followed a big-bang approach for migrating the remainder of their users to Google Apps in July. In addition to migrating mail, calendar, and contacts, Jason’s Deli also ported an extensive document library over to Google Docs using the Docs API and custom scripts.

Join this live webcast to hear from CIO Kevin Verde and learn why Jason's Deli chose Google to better support their distributed locations across the country. Thursday, October 28, 2010, 2:00 PM ET / 11:00 AM PT / 6:00 PM GMT. Register now

Posted by Ashley Chandler, Google Apps team

Live Webcast: How Imagination is Changing the Workplace and Saving Money with Google Apps

Ashley Chandler — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 15:09:00 +0000

Back in July we invited Matt Ballantine, CIO of Imagination to tell us about his experiences of switching to Google Apps. At that time, the Imagination team had just moved 600 employees and 2TB of legacy email data to Google Apps, a major milestone in Matt’s broader vision to transform the role of IT within Imagination.

We are really excited to welcome Matt back for this interactive webinar, where he will provide a detailed insight into the project, describe how it has evolved over time and highlight some key learnings for IT leaders who are considering switching to cloud services.

Matt says “This has been far and away the most successful IT project I have been involved in, mainly because I did not have to think about the IT. Google takes care of that, freeing up my team to develop a real understanding of how these technologies allow Imagination to become more collaborative, more global and more creative. This is where my IT team is now adding huge value.”

To hear more about Imagination’s switch to Google Apps attend this live webcast, 27 Oct 2010, 15.00 BST (GMT +1). Register today.

Posted by Matt Charman, Google Apps team

Melrose Resources goes Google for reliability and uptime

Ashley Chandler — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 16:07:00 +0000

Editor's note: As part of our Going Google Everywhere series, today’s guest blogger is Tom Ray, IT Manager of Melrose Resources plc. Learn more about other organizations that have gone Google on our community map.

Melrose Resources plc is an oil and gas exploration, development and production company headquartered in Edinburgh, U.K with over 400 employees globally. In 2009 they decided to switch to Google Apps with the support of Cloudreach, a UK based Google Apps reseller and a cloud solutions system integrator with deep skills in migration to, building of and management of cloud platforms.

We were motivated to move to the cloud by our need for business continuity in the event of disaster -- our goal being a four hour maximum recovery time for email. After consultation from Cloudreach, we felt that Google Apps would provide exactly what we needed in terms of handling the different geographies we operate in and uptime we required. We also considered replicating our Microsoft Exchange Server with a hosting provider but we soon realised that hosting Exchange would have been expensive, both in service fees and in management time, so there was a major financial advantage in choosing Google Apps instead.

Cloudreach was an obvious fit to manage our transition given their expertise in cloud solutions -- both implementing Google Apps and also integrating it with Active Directory without creating any disruption for users. In addition Cloudreach was critical to integrating Google Apps with Amazon Web Services at the company’s Edinburgh head office without any impact on email services.

Recovery time has been reduced to almost zero -- well below the four hour limit we’d set -- so the recovery headache has been totally taken away. We’re saving a significant amount of money now, but I estimate savings will continue to increase in the future since we’ll no longer have to carry out upgrades to server-based applications, or spend management time on it. To accomplish what we achieved with traditional hosted solutions would be almost impossible -- and certainly cost-prohibitive. We’ve also made ourselves less dependent on office infrastructure. Everything now runs smoothly with no intervention from us.

Posted by Tom Ray, Melrose Resources plc

Join us for a live webcast with Baird & Warner to learn why they chose Google Apps for mobility and real time communication

Ashley Chandler — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 04:18:00 +0000

Join us tomorrow for a live webcast with Mark Steward, IT Director at Baird & Warner, the oldest residential real estate brokerage in the nation. With 26 branch offices servicing more than 300 communities throughout northeastern Illinois, Baird & Warner provides a full range of services for consumers including residential sales, financial services, title services and home services.

Earlier this year Baird & Warner began looking at improving their messaging system to help their 1,600 mobile and independent agents stay connected and access information in real time. They decided to use Google Apps because of how much money it saved them over Microsoft Exchange and its ability to scale as they company grew.

Mark says that, “improved mobile access to email is a big win for us. From a cost perspective, with Google Apps there is nothing additional that we need to do, buy or maintain, to enable mobile devices. It just works straight out of the box on virtually any mobile device that our employees care to use.

Beyond better mobile email access, faster performance and infrastructure cost savings, we’re also pretty happy about not having to spend any time maintaining and upgrading our messaging systems. What's equally important, however, is that our employees like using Google Apps. Our Realtors® drive our business, and we need to give them the tools that allow them to be more productive on behalf of their clients.”

Join us for a live webcast with Mark Steward, CIO of Baird & Warner tomorrow, October 19, 2010 12:00 p.m. EDT / 9:00 a.m. PDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT. Register now.

Posted by Ashley Chandler, Google Apps team

Going Google Across the 50 States: Google Apps strikes a chord with Premier Guitar in Iowa

Ashley Chandler — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Editor’s note: Over 3 million businesses have adopted Google Apps. Today we’ll hear from Patti Sprague, Managing Director of Premier Guitar in Iowa. To learn more about other organizations that have gone Google and share your story, visit our community map or test drive life in the cloud with the Go Google cloud calculator.

Premier Guitar is for true guitar enthusiasts, a magazine focused on guitar gear and the musicians who use it. All of our employees are passionate about music, and many play guitar or other instruments. Working with a bunch of musicians creates a fun, creative workplace, but not always a very structured environment. We needed an email system that didn’t tie our team to the office, but allowed us to work together and stay connected wherever we may be. Google Apps was the perfect solution.

In our business we have very tight deadlines. We do things a little differently than other traditional magazines. We not only publish a print version of our magazine, we make all of our content, current and archival, freely accessible over 5 different platforms. We’re able to successfully compete with some of the older print centric publications out there because we’re lean and we can get stories up quickly. That requires a lot of team work. Google Docs allows us to work on a story from wherever we are and get it published quickly. It would never be possible to work as efficiently or collectively if we had to wait for a new version of a document to be sent to us before we could publish.

Often our writers and photographers will need to drop everything to hop on a plane for a last minute factory tour, or an interview with an artist. One of the reasons we started using Google Apps is the ability to access our email and calendars on our mobile phones or anywhere with an internet connection. With Google Apps, we know where the team is and what’s due based on our shared calendars. Our company calendar and editorial calendars are kept up to date so we can get our stories out quickly. Plus, we can always just hop on Chat to ask each other questions or find out the status of a shoot or a photo shoot or piece. Being able to just ask a co-worker a quick question instead of sending them an email and waiting for a response has really helped keep projects moving along.

Apps helps us stay connected and work together, while still having fun doing what we love. For a lean team that wants to meet deadlines while writing about their passion, Google Apps was the perfect choice.

Posted by Ashley Chandler, Google Apps team

Getting the most out of Gmail

Ashley Chandler — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 21:24:00 +0000

Last week we posted some tips to help you move from Microsoft Outlook® and other client-based software to Google Apps. Today we’d like to share some more thoughts on making the most of Gmail.

Save time with Priority Inbox
A busy day often affords few email breaks. When you do get a chance to scan your mail, Priority Inbox helps you prioritize by identifying the messages that require your immediate attention. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most and which messages you open and reply to. The best part is it gets better the more you use it. Turn on and manage Priority Inbox in your mail Settings – and read our tips to become a real Priority Inbox whiz!

Seamless chat, video and calling
We work with people in multiple ways, and Gmail makes it easy for you to choose the most effective means to communicate: email, chat, text messaging, video chats and phone calls are all available from your inbox. For example, voice and video chat lets you have an actual conversation with someone or meet face-to-face in brilliant resolution. And for those early adopters transitioned to our new infrastructure, we recently added the ability to call phones in Gmail, so you can place phone calls from your computer to any landline or mobile phone number and receive calls as well. For phone calls and video chat, download this plugin to get started.

Get more attached to your email
Attachments in other email systems can be cumbersome; they take up space, can be hard to find and you have to open another program to take action, which slows you down. Gmail has some helpful features that let you quickly view attachments without the need to open or download them on client-side software. The Google Docs Viewer allows you to view .doc, .pdf, .ppt and other attachments in a new browser tab simply by clicking the "View" link at the bottom of a Gmail message. If you decide you want to edit the file, click "Edit online" to open it in Google Docs, or download it to your desktop.

Gmail also includes a Google Docs preview lab that lets you read the entire contents of a Google document, spreadsheet or presentation right in Gmail. Note that your administrator needs to have enabled Labs for you to access them.

Put email in context
Wouldn’t it be great if you could update a sales lead without leaving your inbox? With contextual gadgets, you can. They display information from social networks, business services, web applications and other systems, and let you interact with that data right within Gmail. Your administrator or any third-party developer can build and distribute Gmail contextual gadgets to the domain with just a few clicks via the Google Apps Marketplace, which we launched in March. To learn more, browse for apps in the Marketplace that have ‘Mail Integration’.

The keys to productivity
With Gmail, we built in keyboard shortcuts to help you get through your mail quickly and efficiently. Once you enable this feature in Settings, you can archive (e), reply (r), compose (c), delete (#) or take just about any other action with one key or a short combo. For a handy guide, type “?” while you’re in Gmail – for maximum efficiency, print it out and post it at your desk.

Experiment in our Labs
Gmail Labs give users experimental – sometimes whimsical – features to customize Gmail in a way that works best for them. Some Labs accommodate preferences, such as adding a “Send & Archive” button, while others help you communicate, such as the Google Voice player and SMS in Chat. Still others help you stay organized, like the Google Docs and Calendar gadgets. If your administrator has enabled Labs for your domain, check them out for yourself.

What’s your favorite feature in Gmail? Feel free to let us know in the comments below. Happy (productive) emailing!

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Google Apps Product Manager

Going Google Across the 50 States: North Carolina based American Support relies on Docs, Sites and Chat to run its business

Ashley Chandler — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 14:58:00 +0000

Editor’s note: Over 3 million businesses have adopted Google Apps. Today we’ll hear from Matt Zemon, President of American Support, headquartered in North Carolina. To learn more about other organizations that have gone Google and share your story, visit our community map or test drive life in the cloud with the Go Google cloud calculator.

At American Support, we provide back office services to over 400 cable, phone and internet franchises in 29 states. Our services include billing and subscriber management along with 24/7 customer care and technical support.

When I originally founded the company in 2006 we had a joint venture with a Philippines-based call center to provide customer service at a reasonable cost to our clients. In the first couple years of business it became evident that our clients and their subscribers wanted to have American-based customer service. Our clients were not happy with the off-shore customer service we were providing and we were having difficulties winning new business. As a customer service outsourcer the challenge was finding a way to provide the American customer service they desired at a price point they could afford.

To save our business we ended up rethinking our business model and looking to the cloud to drive down costs and increase our efficiency. The first change was migrating to a call center in the cloud platform which enabled us to recruit, train and route calls to rural American home-based employees who needed and wanted the work. With this technology solution in place we began bringing our call center jobs back to America. As of May of last year we are a 100% American customer service organization.

The second change was moving from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps in 2009, which allowed us to more efficiently and effectively collaborate with our employees and clients spread out across the United States.

Today we maintain a small office in North Carolina and a technical assistance center and network operations center in Montana. The rest of our management team is spread out between Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, Georgia and Nebraska. Our entire customer support team works from home.

Tools that fostered collaboration were absolutely essential to running our business. Each manager and their team really live in the Google Apps environment. All of their meetings are done through Google Docs and video chats. I’ve never met 90% of our employees in person. Every meeting agenda is built off of a doc with everyone logged into the same doc at the same time, taking notes and keeping track of next steps as we move along through the meeting agenda. Plus, our clients across the country have started getting used to the value of moving away from attachments to using Google Docs. Working together internally and externally is so much easier when we’re always sure we’re looking at the most current document and you can collaborate on it in real-time.

Google Sites is also a key aspect of our business operations. We create a custom site for each of our clients that contains the most frequently asked questions, their unique policies and procedures, and other useful information for our teams. Sites allows us to keep all information in one place that everyone on the team can update and reference.

We had initially looked at Google Apps for its 25 GB of mail and shared calendars, but it’s Google Sites, Docs and Talk that allow us to communicate successfully and efficiently so that we can support customers with a team all over the country. We attribute our successful collaboration and the ability to run a coast-to-coast virtual team to our use of Google Apps.

Posted by Matt Zemon, President, American Support

The more you know: switching to Gmail like a pro

Ashley Chandler — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Every day, tens of thousands of people switch from Microsoft Outlook® and other client-based software to Google Apps. To make the transition as smooth as possible, we thought we’d share some tips on using Gmail.

Embrace conversations
Emails rarely come just one at a time; they’re usually part of a larger exchange. Gmail helps you manage messages more efficiently by grouping related emails into conversations. Conversations are a collection of messages with the same subject line and other similarities. When you click to read a conversation, you'll see all of the back-and-forth email responses that happen over the course of the entire email conversation.

This makes it easier to follow the full context of a conversation, and keeps your inbox less cluttered and more organized. If you prefer a more traditional view of your Inbox, you can always turn off Conversation view so that all emails arrive individually.

Forget delete, and archive your way to “Inbox Zero”
The average corporate inbox is only 300MB, which means too many people are forced to spend way too much time managing their inbox -- deciding which email to keep, and deleting the rest. With 25GB of storage, you probably won’t ever need to delete an email again because of storage limitations. And if you thrive on clearing your inbox, simply archive your emails to clear the clutter. They’re still fully searchable in an instant!

Search to sort
You may be accustomed to sorting email to find saved messages, which is a pretty limited way to find information because you usually know what you’re looking for. Gmail uses the power of search to help you quickly find what you want. You can even use advanced search operators to search by sender, date, attachment or a variety of other attributes. Try it and you'll find some of the qualities that Google.com is known for: great accuracy and really fast search results. Search is particularly more effective than sorting when you’re looking through multiple gigabytes of email!

Labels instead of folders
While you won't find folders in Gmail, labels give you even more flexibility to organize your email. You can’t put an email into multiple folders, but you can apply multiple labels to the same message, which makes it easy to manage information that may fall into more than one category.

By clicking on a label, you can view a chronological list of all conversations that have been tagged with that label. And you can even organize labels hierarchically, using the “Nested Labels” lab. (Your administrator needs to have enabled Labs for you to access them.)

Work offline
These days you’re probably almost always connected to the Internet. But in those increasingly rare moments when you’re not, you can still access Gmail. When you’re offline, you can work in your browser to compose messages, search, organize mail, and do all of the things you're used to doing while accessing your email online. Any messages you send while offline will be placed in your outbox and automatically sent the next time Gmail detects a connection. To enable offline Gmail, go to the ‘offline’ tab in Settings, select ‘Enable’ and then save changes.

New features
As a web application, Gmail can be updated and improved without the trouble of purchasing, downloading and installing updates. This means Gmail will continually offer new functionality to help you be even more productive, like Priority Inbox, integrated voice and video chat, and labs such as Apps Search and Desktop Notifications. To stay current on new features, we encourage you to subscribe to our RSS feed for updates to the Google Apps suite.

We hope you enjoy the experience we offer -- we believe that ultimately, a fully-searchable, delete-nothing inbox makes for happy, productive people. But if you’re still not quite ready to use Gmail’s web interface, you can keep using Outlook or other clients of your choice. For more tips, check out our detailed transition documentation, and let us know what else we can do to make your move to Gmail easier in the comments below.

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Google Apps Product Manager

Threaded email or not, now it’s your users’ choice in Gmail

Ashley Chandler — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 16:01:00 +0000

We didn’t build Gmail to work like all the other email options out there. We launched with a full gigabyte of storage per person (now 25 GB for business users), lightning fast search, labels instead of folders, and newer improvements like Priority Inbox to help you cope better with lots of information. While most Gmail users find that these features save lots of time, naturally there are people who want to keep using email in more familiar ways. That’s why we launched alternatives like Microsoft Outlook® synchronization, native BlackBerry® integration and IMAP support. More choice helps people move to the cloud more quickly.

Conversation view is perhaps Gmail’s most hotly debated feature. Threading enthusiasts say they spend less mental energy drawing connections between related messages and that their inboxes are much less cluttered. On the other hand, email traditionalists like many former Outlook users think conversation view just complicates something that has worked for years. Russ Midford, Senior Information Systems Engineer at Sanmina-SCI, sums it up well. “I personally prefer threaded conversations, but as an administrator who still needs to support some long-time Outlook users on Gmail, the unthreaded option is like gold.”

We really hoped everyone would learn to love conversation view, but we came to realize that it’s just not right for some people. So today we’re introducing another valuable choice. Users who prefer a traditional inbox can toggle off conversation view to see email as individual messages in chronological order. Some actions commonly associated with unthreaded email can be accomplished with searches in Gmail, so check out our tips on advanced search operators.

Over the next few days, we’ll be rolling out conversation view settings to users in organizations with the “Enable pre-release features” option selected in the Google Apps control panel, and to individuals using Gmail.

Whichever side of the debate you’re on, we hope we’re continuously making Gmail more useful to you. For more information about migrating from common legacy solutions to Google Apps, see our resource pages for Microsoft® Exchange and Lotus Notes®, or contact our sales team.

Join the Google Apps team for a demonstration of this feature, a recap of recent Gmail innovations, and tools to help your school or business switch to Google Apps:
Wednesday, October 6th, 2010
10 a.m. PDT / 1 p.m. EDT / 6 p.m. GMT
On-demand webinar

Posted by Dong Chen, Software Engineer

Going Google across the 50 States: Connecticut-based ice cream franchise decides to ‘gofer’ Google Apps

Ashley Chandler — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 16:43:00 +0000

Editor’s note: Over the past couple months, thousands of businesses have added their Gone Google story to our community map and even more have used the Go Google cloud calculator to test drive life in the cloud. To highlight some of these companies’ Gone Google stories, we decided to talk to Google Apps customers across the United States. Check back each week to see which state we visit next. To learn more about other organizations that have gone Google and share your story, visit our community map.

“It’s always a good day to ‘gofer’ ice cream,” according to Jay Ragusa, President of Gofer Ice Cream. Jay has opened five stores throughout Connecticut that provide high quality ice cream and unique treats such as razzles, smoothies, hand dipped ice cream, and soft serve ice cream with a flavor twist. Jay relies on Google Apps to keep his business running, and today he shares how it has helped him and his staff work more efficiently.

“Between our online accounting software and the use of Google Apps, which has become an integral part of our daily operations, we are gradually putting the entire company in the cloud.

Google Sites, part of the Google Apps suite, is used to create specific pages on our external website (gofericecream.com) so we can easily edit content without the use of a webmaster. Internally, we built multiple intranet sites including the Gofer Network where store managers and franchisees communicate, organize, and operate their part of the company. The Gofer Crew Portal is a site designed for the staff to access information such as contact numbers, store schedules and the internal Gofer Blog, and submit time card exceptions.

We rely heavily on Google Docs to update manuals, recipes, and employee schedules all of which are posted on the Gofer Network for store managers to access and share with employees at each store. For financial reporting, we created custom Google forms to efficiently collect data on point-of-sale purchases every night — store managers input their sales numbers into the form and everything is automatically populated in my spreadsheets. The forms are a great way to get the data quickly without having to expose sensitive revenue information across all the stores.

Whenever possible, we’re developing business processes around the functionality in Google Apps. It’s low cost and we get the security of knowing that Google is backing up our data. I’m looking forward to finding more ways that Google Apps can improve how we work.”

Posted by Michelle Lisowski, Google Apps team

Oldest Real Estate Brokerage in US Chooses Google Apps to enable growth and mobility

Ashley Chandler — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 14:28:00 +0000

Editors note: As part of our Going Google Everywhere series, today's guest blogger is Mark Steward, IT Director at Baird & Warner. Learn more about other organizations that have gone Google on our community map.

Family owned and operated since 1855, Baird & Warner is the oldest residential real estate brokerage in the nation, with 26 branch offices servicing more than 300 communities throughout northeastern Illinois. Baird & Warner provides a full range of services for consumers including residential sales, financial services, title services and home services.

Having been in business for as long as we have, our company has gone through a lot of disruptive changes, not just dramatic market shifts like the current downturn, but also the emergence of new technologies. Over the years we’ve shifted from desktop phones to mobile phones, and more recently, from on-premise IT solutions to the Web as a platform. In IT, we are constantly reevaluating which tools will best support our Realtors® in the field, and administrative staff back at our headquarters in Chicago.

Earlier this year we began looking at how we could improve our e-mail and messaging system. Because of the nature of our business, the majority of our employees are highly mobile and independent. These 1,600 agents operate as islands, and depend on mobile devices to do their work from any location. To support them, we had been using a Microsoft Exchange alternative called Kerio that uses the Outlook client and provides a Webmail product, but we began to see performance issues and maintaining the infrastructure was becoming increasingly costly.

We began to look at alternatives. We needed a messaging solution that could grow with us for the long-term and that would work well for all employees, but we were also were feeling cautious because of the economy. We didn't want to take a huge risk. Since I've been a Gmail user since it was in beta, I had been keeping my eye on Google Apps and how its enterprise offerings have grown.

My positive experience with Gmail helped me to narrow our choices down to Google Apps and Hosted Exchange. After running a cost comparison, the choice became pretty clear. Since Google Apps takes care of maintenance and software updates, the value proposition for a company of our size is pretty substantial. We chose Apps for its capabilities, but the fact that we saved a substantial amount of money over Microsoft Exchange was a nice bonus.

To help us make the transition, we brought in Cloud Sherpas, a Google authorized reseller since 2008. Cloud Sherpas provides a full suite of migration, deployment, and training services for Google Apps, which made it much easier for us to get up and running. The company also offers tools through the Google Apps Marketplace that help IT administrators better manage Google Apps.

Clouds Sherpas did all the setup and configuration of Google Apps and trained us on how to migrate our old mail, contacts and calendar data. After we learned the processes, we migrated the rest of the company. They also provided train-the-trainer services and webinar training for our remote offices. This was critical for us because some users had never used web-based email, so transitioning them to a new way of working took extra time but was critical for our success. Cloud Sherpas provided specialized training for Outlook users, and gave a step-by-step process for learning to do the same tasks in Gmail.

We initially deployed Gmail, Calendar and Chat. We currently have a small team reviewing our existing intranet and determining how we can migrate it to Google Sites and Google Docs in the future. For now, however, we are already seeing a host of benefits just from migrating our messaging system.

Improved mobile access to email is a big win for us. From a cost perspective, with Google Apps there is nothing additional that we need to do, buy or maintain to enable mobile devices. It just works straight out of the box on virtually any mobile device that our employees care to use. Previously, we were using IMAP to enable mobile e-mail. Unfortunately, it wasn't real time, which is critical in our business. Now, our agents in the field get real-time push email and access to their entire mailbox from their mobile devices.

Beyond better mobile email access, faster performance and infrastructure cost savings, we’re also pretty happy about not having to spend any time maintaining and upgrading our messaging systems.

What's equally important, however, is that our employees like using Google Apps. The new tools have eliminated their number-one problem, which was wasting time managing a small inbox. Whereas before they only had 100 MB of space, with Gmail, they get up to 25 GB of storage. There's really no need to ever clean out your inbox now. Our Realtors® drive our business, and we need to give them the tools that allow them to be more productive on behalf of their clients. Because if they're happy, we're happy.

Posted by Ashley Chandler, Google Apps team

Save Money and Improve Collaboration with Google Apps

Ashley Chandler — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 23:18:00 +0000

Wentworth Property Management Corp is a large property management company made up of over 40 offices specializing in security, rental and homeowner’s insurance, concierge, cleaning and real estate services. Keeping all those offices and people connected and maintaining all of their Exchange servers became very difficult and very expensive. Wentworth needed an easier -- and less costly -- way for its employees to stay connected and to continue to scale as company continues to grow. The answer? Google Apps, which has already proven an invaluable tool for helping geographically distributed teams more easily coordinate their efforts.

Join this live TechRepublic webcast, featuring Wentworth CIO Manu Jaggi, to learn exactly why Wentworth chose Google Apps and what it’s meant for the organization:

* Discover the most common criteria for comparing and evaluating Google Apps against alternative solutions such as Microsoft Exchange
* Hear how Wentworth uses the full range of Google Apps to more effectively communicate and collaborate across many geographically distributed offices
* See how eliminating inefficiencies and and focusing on innovation, not IT server maintenance can save money and improve an organization’s productivity

Tomorrow, Tuesday, September 21, 2010 at 2:00 p.m. EDT / 11:00 a.m. PDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT.

Posted by Ashley Chandler, Google Apps team

Diversey awarded for cutting carbon emissions using Google Apps

Ashley Chandler — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 20:53:00 +0000

Editor’s note: We’ve invited Brent Hoag, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, of Diversey to tell readers about their recent recognition as one of InformationWeek’s most innovative users of business technology. Diversey, formerly JohnsonDiversey, is headquartered in Sturtevant, Wisconsin. With sales in more than 175 countries, Diversey is a leading global provider of commercial cleaning, sanitation and hygiene solutions, serving customers in the building management, lodging, food service, retail, health care, and food and beverage sectors. Diversey, Inc. is committed to a cleaner, healthier future. Its products, systems and expertise make food, drink and facilities safer and more hygienic for consumers and for building occupants.

This week, InformationWeek announced its annual listing of the nation’s 500 most innovative users of business technology. We’re proud to report that Diversey was recognized as being among the top 10 U.S. manufacturers for its innovative and environmentally efficient cloud computing strategy – the foundation of which is Google Apps. The use of Google Apps for email, collaboration and calendar helped Diversey reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 73 metric tons or the equivalent of taking roughly 15 passenger vehicles off the road.

In just one day, the company migrated 14,000 accounts to Google Apps in more than 60 countries and 18 languages. Since implementation in May 2009, employees have changed the way they communicate with other employees and customers. Google Apps’ cloud-based e-mail, calendars, documents and sites have improved the quality, consistency and effectiveness of communication and allows for business continuity in the event of a disaster.

The company’s migration to cloud computing was the result of a corporate-wide commitment to find more sustainable and efficient ways of doing business. Diversey’s cloud-based technology platforms allow for a collaborative working environment and helps maintain business continuity. It also reduced the company’s carbon footprint by eliminating up to 10 company servers and by decreasing the need for business travel and the purchase of redundant hardware and software.

Diversey’s commitment to sustainable IT is another example of our environmental leadership and our passion for finding new ways to reduce the environmental impact of our operations globally. In Google, we’ve found a good partner in the sustainability movement, and look forward to continuing to meet and exceed our sustainability and innovation goals together.

Posted by Ashley Chandler, Google Apps team

Ahold goes Google: International food retailer moves 55,000 employees to Google Apps

Ashley Chandler — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 16:12:00 +0000

Ahold, an international food retailing group based in the Netherlands, that operates leading supermarket companies in Europe and the United States, including Albert Heijn, Albert / Hypernova, Stop & Shop, Giant Food and Giant Food Stores has gone Google. Ahold has over 2,900 stores around the world with a local presence in the communities they serve.

Ahold made the decision to move to Google Apps to provide its global workers with a single web-based platform for communication and collaboration, replacing Ahold’s existing email domains and systems in Europe and the US. Ahold chose Google Apps for its 25 GB of storage per account, integrated IM (Google Talk) and a series of additional features that facilitate communication, including video based communication tools, automatic translation and shared calendars.

The global deployment of Google Apps will bring a number of benefits to Ahold employees, among them:

Consolidation and standardization to a single mail system and global address book

Improved productivity through the use of efficient e-mail and instant messenger tools, as well as powerful personal and shared calendars

Training support with new video based communication tools, including video IM

Improved collaboration within and between operating companies and functions

Improved international communication with features such as automatic Message Translate, allowing users to translate e-mails from and into different languages with one click of the mouse or real-time translation in Google Talk.

Posted by Ashley Chandler, Google Apps team

Security First: Google at the ISSA International Conference

Ashley Chandler — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 19:33:00 +0000

This week the Google Enterprise team is excited to be participating in the Information Systems Security Association’s (ISSA) International Conference in Atlanta, GA from September 15-17. The ISSA is a not-for-profit, international professional organization of information security professionals and practitioners. It promotes management practices that will ensure the confidentiality, integrity and availability of information resources. This year more than 500 IT and security professionals will gather under this year’s theme of “Connect and Collaborate”.

Eran Feigenbaum, Director Security for Google Enterprise wil be delivering a keynote presentation entitled “A New Security Model in the Cloud” on Thursday, September 16th, at 12:40 PM.

If you'll be at the conference, please join us for Eran’s session. If you’re not going to be at the conference, you can find more information on the security and privacy of data in Google Apps.

Posted by Adam Swidler, Sr. Manager - Google Enterprise Team

Going Google across the 50 States: Google Apps and Google App Engine are a powerful combination for West Virginia business

Ashley Chandler — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 14:35:00 +0000

Editor’s note: Over the past couple months, thousands of businesses have added their Gone Google story to our community map and even more have used the Go Google cloud calculator to test drive life in the cloud. To highlight some of these companies’ Gone Google stories, we decided to talk to Google Apps customers across the United States. Check back each week to see which state we visit next. To learn more about other organizations that have gone Google and share your story, visit our community map.

As the former VP of Technology at a major financial services firm, Ray Malone has spent most of his career focused on business intelligence, data warehousing, and development of web-based applications. So, when his wife, Tina Malone, decided to start a new business out of their home in West Virginia, Ray naturally helped her pick out the technology that best suited her needs.

Today, with Ray’s help, Tina is running MSaven.com, a successful marketing business that provides companies with text message marketing, print advertising, and the ability to offer online coupons. The technology that powers the company is an important part of its success, and Ray shares with us how Google Apps and Google App Engine play a pivotal role.

“In 2008, my wife Tina came up with the idea for MSaven.com, but there was a catch – she expected me to set up our IT infrastructure with little to no money. I had been using Gmail and almost every other Google product for a long time so it was an easy decision to use Google to build the business. Now, our entire operation runs using both Google Apps and Google App Engine, and the combination of performance and scalability has been awesome.

We use Google Apps for everything from emailing to creating online documents and spreadsheets. I recently used a Google spreadsheet to create a financial calculator showing advertisers how much they could potentially make with our firm – I shared the spreadsheet with a prospective advertiser and walked him through it over the phone. We were both able to tweak specific inputs on the spreadsheet and see the results in real-time. It was a powerful way to communicate without having to be in the same room.

I’m constantly using Gmail and Google Calendar, and access them extensively from my Android-powered device. Both allow me to coordinate with our sales reps and contractors. Some of our contractors are located internationally so the Talk feature, integrated in Gmail, has been the primary communication channel.

With Google App Engine, I’ve built our entire web application. Python was a new language for us, but within a few months we were building dynamic content and connecting to vendor systems. Here’s an example of how it works – when a consumer sends us a text message requesting a coupon, we connect to the vendor’s system through an API (this is the vendor that is providing the coupon), and the right coupon is dynamically generated and sent back. If this is the second time the consumer has contacted us, a different coupon or message is sent back. All of the logic, and the ability to generate and send coupons is built with Google App Engine.

I’ve developed many systems over the years and used other well-known email clients, and this type of performance can’t be beat. You can do everything better with Google Apps.”

Posted by Michelle Lisowski, Google Apps team

5 tips for using Priority Inbox

Ashley Chandler — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 12:21:00 +0000

Cross-posted from the Gmail blog

It’s been a week since we launched Priority Inbox, and now that you've hopefully had a chance to try it out, we wanted to share some tips to help you manage your email more efficiently. Here are five ways you can make Priority Inbox work even better for you.

1. Customize your sections
By default, Priority Inbox has three sections: "Important and Unread," "Starred" and "Everything Else.” But that doesn't mean you have to leave them that way. You can make a section show messages from a particular label (like your “Action” or “To-do” label), add a fourth section, or change the maximum size of any section. Visit the Priority Inbox tab under Settings to customize your sections, or do it right from the inline menus.

2. Train the system
If Gmail makes a mistake, you can help it learn to better categorize your messages. Select the misclassified message, then use the importance buttons at the top of your inbox to correctly mark it as important or not important.

For those of you who can't live without keyboard shortcuts, don’t worry, you can use the "+" and "-" keys to adjust importance as well.

3. See the best of your filtered messages
You can set up Priority Inbox to show you not just the best of your inbox, but also the best of messages you filter out of your inbox and might otherwise miss. Just change your Priority Inbox settings to “Override filters” and Gmail will surface any important messages that would otherwise skip your inbox.

With this option turned on, you can use filters to archive more aggressively and worry less about missing an important message.

4. Use filters to guarantee certain messages get marked important (or not)
If you read and reply to a lot of messages from your mom, Gmail should automatically put incoming messages from her in the “Important and unread” section. But if you want to be 100% sure that all messages from your mom (or your boss, boyfriend, client, landlord, etc.) are marked important, you can create a filter for messages from that sender and select “Always mark as important.” Similarly, if you regularly read messages from your favorite magazine, they should automatically get marked as important. If you’d rather they end up in the “Everything else” section, you can create a filter to never mark them as important.

5. Archive unimportant messages quickly
One of the features that can help make you more efficient is the ability to archive all of the visible messages in the "Everything Else" section at once. Just click on the down arrow next to "Everything Else" and select the "Archive all visible items" option. If you want to be able to archive even more messages at once, you can increase the maximum number of messages that show in that section from the same drop-down.

Posted by Kristen Lemons, Gmail Support Team