Google Data

Posted by Shannon Sullivan, Head of Defense & Intelligence, Google Enterprise

Improving efficiency and innovating are ongoing missions for the U.S. Army, the largest and oldest branch of the U.S. military. The Army’s continuous adoption of new, digital technologies is part of its effort to realize these goals, along with another: cost-efficiency. Bringing modern commercial cloud capabilities such as Google Apps helps the Army to reduce IT costs, while giving troops access to always up to date, web tools for productivity, collaboration, and communication.

The Army’s rollout of Google Apps is part of a transformational program to improve collaboration, information sharing and mobile access for an initial group of 50,000 Army and Department of Defense (DoD) personnel. Leading the rollout is the Army Program Executive Office for Enterprise Information Systems (PEO EIS), which is responsible for providing infrastructure and information management systems to the entire U.S. Army. This includes enterprise-level IT services that enable secure end-to-end communication across the organization.

The accessibility of Google Apps from any device including thin clients was a primary driver for selecting Google. Mobile technology not only makes the Army more nimble, it is imperative for efficiency while personnel are in the field. Tablets are used by the Army for education and distance learning because they equip personnel with access to training materials anytime, anywhere. A soldier can review a lesson in Google Drive, complete an assignment with teammates in Google Docs, or attend a class via video Hangout, all from their tablet, smartphone or desktop. In addition, Army organizations can set up their own Google Play Private Channel for distributing mobile apps internally.

The 50,000 personnel who will have access to Google Apps can use text and video chat, as well as real-time document, slide, and spreadsheet co-authoring and editing. These capabilities are ideally suited for today’s modular teams and immediately scale to any number of Army units and users on demand. The Army anticipates rapid adoption of Google Apps because many Soldiers and Army personnel already use Google Apps in their personal lives. Gmail and Hangouts, for example, are popular ways to keep in touch with friends and family while deployed. Google Apps also enables seamless and high fidelity interoperability in their existing work environment with Google Quickoffice.

What’s more, Google Apps runs on multiple operating systems and browsers providing more device options, plus works with existing Army security policies and DoD directory and authentication services. Google’s completion of FISMA certification and accreditation gave the government a complete understanding of the security controls Google Apps has in place and how they meet the Army’s stringent criteria.

Consistent with the DoD’s better buying initiative, other DoD organizations can also benefit by buying off the Enterprise Software Initiative (ESI) contract the Army instituted. We look forward to collaborating with the U.S. Army and DLT Solutions, a Google Apps Authorized Reseller, to make this project a success.

Posted by A.V. Dharmakrishnan, Chief Executive Officer, Madras Cements

Editor’s note: Today’s guest is A.V. Dharmakrishnan, Chief Executive Officer at Madras Cements, the flagship company of the Ramco Group in India. Madras Cements is the sixth largest cement operator in India with over 3,000 employees. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Madras Cements began in 1961, with a production capacity of 200 tonnes. Today, we have a capacity of 14 million tonnes for both the Indian and export market yearly, through five cement production plants and seven other plants covering grinding, packing, ready mix concrete and dry mortar production.

Cement is a low-cost commodity sold in high volumes. Our market is extremely competitive and fast-moving, and the business is very much driven by logistics. We promise cost-savings for our customers by continuously innovating our production process, optimizing our logistics strategy and ensuring we have a presence in construction hotspots.

We manage our inventory and business process using a proprietary Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution developed by Ramco Systems. This system generates lots of useful information about our supply network that we could not access easily. We used to do our reporting on Microsoft Excel spreadsheets – a complex and time-consuming process requiring constant manual extraction of data to prepare for our business reviews. On top of that, it was difficult to pinpoint where we could improve our processes or identify new business opportunities, and the reports were not available online.

We wanted to identify patterns across our national network of suppliers and glean better insights from our reports. We turned to Google Maps to display this data on a map. Today, I can easily access these reports and insights online, using my tablet.

By integrating Google Maps with the Ramco ERP system, we superimposed data onto Google Maps. The result was a rich data visualization tool. With Google Maps, our field sales teams have visibility into the competitor distribution networks in their areas, allowing them the ability to tailor sales strategies for better market penetration. They can also view dealer performance data, enabling better control on customer service deliveries. Best of all, we can access this information on mobile devices which allows for decision-making anytime, anywhere – a critical success factor in our fast-moving industry. Since implementing Google Maps, our consignment clearance time has improved up to 40%.

With the ability to visualize our data on a map, our management team now has a clear view of our business — from distributor performance comparisons to location mapping of wagon movements — helping us to improve our overall competitiveness and map out strategies for business growth. Since implementing Google Maps, our EBITA has improved to about 7% higher than our immediate competitors – quite a feat considering the competitive landscape.

Google Maps has provided Madras Cements with a winning business differentiator, in a fiercely competitive commodity market. More importantly, we have continued to give the best returns to our investors, in line with the wish of our founder, Shri P A C Ramasamy Raja, when he opened the first factory in 1961.

Posted by Brian McClendon, VP of Maps and Earth, Google

(Cross-posted on the Google Lat Long Blog)

Maps are a part of our daily lives—from finding the best local Italian restaurant to planning a trip abroad. Maps are also a valuable tool in the workplace. Businesses use maps to help customers easily find their store locations or help travelers get to their final destination.

Today we’re announcing a new professional mapping tool, Google Maps Engine Pro, which lets businesses visualize their data on a map. By importing data like addresses, names, office locations and sales leads from various file formats onto a map, businesses can edit, analyze and share their information in a simple format. Google Maps Engine Pro can be as easy to use as creating a document and it gives businesses an added productivity tool to help make decisions, organize information, and plan operations using Google Maps.

With the ability to collect business information, visualize it on a map and share it across multiple devices, organizations can make better sense of data in relation to real-world surroundings. For example, Pure Fix Cycles, a distributor of custom, fixed gear bikes, uses Maps Engine Pro to identify sales opportunities across target markets, helping to expand their business throughout the U.S. and around the world.

Google Maps Engine Pro was built as an application on top of the Google Maps Engine platform, which provides businesses with cloud based technology to help them organize large datasets and create more complex maps. Today, in addition to introducing Maps Engine Pro, we’re also announcing several new features to Google Maps Engine:

• Mobile App: The new mobile app allows individuals to access their maps created in Google Maps Engine, Maps Engine Pro and Maps Engine Lite. Once a map has been shared, users can access their data on-the-go and from any Android device.
• Connector Tools: It’s now easy to migrate data from legacy systems, such as SAP, into Maps Engine using a connector tool that can be downloaded for free. There are more than 300+ business and geospatial applications available through the connector. To make data migration even easier, the Maps Engine now features an ESRI Toolbar that lets you transfer your ArcGIS maps to Maps Engine.
• Introductory Account: Want to test out Google Maps Engine for your business? The introductory account is an easy way to introduce Maps Engine to your organization’s geospatial infrastructure. The free account supports the product’s full platform capabilities, including API access, but limits the number of map queries per day.

By providing better ways to easily integrate maps into your organization’s operations, businesses now have the ability to use powerful mapping technologies that were once only available to the mapping experts. With the launch of Google Maps Engine Pro and the new Google Maps Engine platform features, now every enterprise and business professional can visualize their data on a map.

Customers using Google Apps Vault can now activate the new Hangouts in the Admin console. An amendment has been added in the Admin console that allows you to activate the new Hangouts on acceptance of the terms. This amendment outlines the change in Vault functionality that will exist until we complete the roll out of full compatibility. You will still have eDiscovery and legal-hold capabilities for your on-the-record/history-on chats, but the retention-purge function will not be available. To agree to the amendment, please log into the Admin console, go to Apps, click on Talk/Hangouts, go to Advanced Settings, and click “Enable Hangouts”.

Editions included: 
Google Apps for Business and Education

For more information:
https://support.google.com/a/answer/3094760

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Editor’s note: Colorado has enticed all sorts of pioneers since its Wild West beginnings. We’re excited to highlight a handful of these trailblazers – the intrepid entrepreneurs, aspiring micro-brewers and ambitious thought leaders – who have helped create the adventurous and innovative culture the Centennial State is known for. Today, we hear from Amanda Johnson-King, Marketing and Branding Manager from Odell Brewing Company, one of Ft. Collins’ many craft breweries.

How did Odell Brewery get started?
Doug, Wynne and Corkie Odell opened Odell Brewing Company in Fort Collins, Colorado in 1989. Over the last 23 years, the husband-wife-sister team has released its fair share of uniquely named craft beers while also cultivating a work environment that celebrates collaboration, passion and, of course, beer.

When and why did you start using Google Apps?
We started using Google Apps back in 2011. We’re a pretty small team and we didn’t have an IT department at the time so trying to maintain our Microsoft Exchange server was expensive and time-consuming. Plus, our team collaborates extensively in person and online. We realized that we wasted time emailing Word documents as attachments back and forth and dealing with locked documents. We needed a new platform that would let us work together online the same way we did in person. When we found out about Google Apps and learned that multiple team members could work on a single doc at the same time, as well as see all the changes in real-time without having to deal with servers, and we thought it was a good fit for our growing company.

Since moving to Google Apps, have you seen any unique uses by certain employees or groups?
Everyone uses Gmail – email is the foundation of our operation – but we’ve seen various groups adopt the products in different ways based on their needs (and creativity). Our product development committee tracks key information for each and every brew in a shared Google sheet. This includes everything from alcohol content to taste profile to the name and when and where the beer will be poured. This lets them stay organized and helps stakeholders from other teams keep tabs on key information, since they know the information in the sheet is always up-to-date.

Have you stumbled across any unexpected benefits since moving to Google Apps?
Absolutely. We knew Apps would help us internally, but it’s been cool to see how it’s helped us work with other local businesses. We frequently partner with nearby restaurants, like Jax Fish House, to create special collaboration brews for their customers and use Google Docs to manage the process. We do this so that all the requests are automatically centralized in a single Google sheet that our team can access at any time. We use the same sheet internally for any of our employees who want to use the pilot system to make their own custom beers for special events like their weddings or holidays.

Odell is known for its green initiatives. How does technology play into your sustainability efforts?
By 2014, our goal is to be a zero landfill brewery. Sustainability matters all the way from our recycling methods to our IT – not having a large on-site server means we’re decreasing our environmental footprint.

Overall, how has technology helped Odell grow?
We’re in the business of brewing beer and that’s what we love. We’ve been very deliberate and strategic in how we expand the business and where we sell our beer. We’re not aiming to go nationwide or grow faster than we can manage. Ultimately, the role of technology at Odell is to help us work together, engage our fans and beer lovers, and to help us make great beer. Whether it’s posting our daily food truck calendar on our website, managing the pilot system schedule through Google Docs, or just knowing that we won’t have to spend time or money dealing with email servers, Google Apps has helped us focus on what we care most about — making great beer.

Posted by Ron Schneider, Engineering Director, Google Drive

Editor’s note: Colorado has enticed all sorts of pioneers since its Wild West beginnings. Over the next few weeks, we’ll highlight a handful of these trailblazers – the intrepid entrepreneurs, aspiring micro-brewers and ambitious thought leaders – who have helped create the adventurous and innovative culture the Centennial State is known for.

I was raised in the cornfields of Illinois, but I call the foothills of the Rockies in Boulder, Colorado my home. I’ve lived here with my family for the last 15 years and can’t imagine being anywhere else – I can’t think of another place that combines my love of the outdoors with a culture of innovation and technology. And it doesn’t hurt that it all happens with a set of gorgeous snow-capped peaks right outside the window.

I joined Google’s Boulder office seven years ago, right after Google acquired Writely, which is the program that would become Google Docs. The first Google office in Boulder was a small space above the Starbucks on Pearl Street Mall – the 800 yard walk from my front door to work was a major perk. Since then, the Google Drive team has grown to about 50 people, the Boulder office now calls 250 employees its own, and together we all sit at a new office at 26th and Pearl. It’s been fun being part of the Google Docs team, and now Google Drive team, as it has taken off. I remember showing my daughters Google Docs back in the early days and now both their schools use Google Docs as a part of Google Apps for Education at Boulder High and CU Boulder. Even though the Drive team is still growing rapidly, it’s a close knit group – over half of our team members have been here at least 3 years.

California’s Silicon Valley and New York’s Silicon Alley may be the two hubs that come to mind when thinking about innovation hotspots, but it’s actually Boulder that is home to the highest number of tech startups per capita. Colorado has a unique ecosystem that fuels and funds innovation. Promising startups don’t have to look far to find people and organizations willing to provide mentorship and funding. Techstars, one of the world’s leading accelerators, was born in Boulder in 2006, and has nurtured a strong community of graduates in the area that supports each other in their entrepreneurial endeavors, along with an equally strong network of local mentors.

The fact that innovation touches nearly every industry here isn’t a coincidence. The state of Colorado itself leads by example. Last year, the Governor’s Office of Information Technology announced it had gone Google to better align with its priorities: customer success, innovation, information security, people, service excellence, and trusted partnerships. The shift to Google Apps for Government is helping state workers communicate and collaborate more effectively while keeping Colorado at the forefront of innovation.

Over the next month, we’ll be highlighting some of the people and businesses that make Colorado an inspiring place to live. We’ll also show how local leaders are embracing cool technology – like Google Apps – to make it all happen. Because it’s pioneers like them whose work behind the scenes (and desks) help drive the culture and innovation across the state that people like me are so proud to call home.

Posted by Henk ten Bos, Chief Information Officer at Ageas Insurance Company (Asia) Limited

Editor’s note: Today’s blogger is Henk ten Bos, Chief Information Officer at Ageas Insurance Company (Asia) Limited, part of the Ageas Group, with nearly 3,000 agents based in Hong Kong. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

As one of Hong Kong’s largest insurance companies, Ageas recognizes the need to constantly deliver the best services to our clients. To compete effectively in our business, our agents need to be able to respond speedily to customer requests. Our email and communication platform is key to our daily business.

As we continued to grow over the years, our previous email and calendaring solution did not keep up with our business growth. We became aware of the need for a more sophisticated tool. So we began to consider a cloud-based application since the agents wanted a way to share and work on documents easily, on top of the simple email and calendar functions.

Henk ten Bos, CIO

To make sure we were on the right track, we consulted Master Concept to see how Google Apps would fit in our business. We also had to ensure that Google Apps could be easily integrated into our current environment and would meet our strict security standards. Our agents were enthusiastic about the move, especially since many of them were already using Gmail for their personal needs. This supported us in the decision to transition to Google’s cloud solution. The transformation was quick and hassle-free, with no data loss or downtime. In fact, the entire migration process, which took place in under a month, went almost unnoticed by agents.

Google Apps for Business has changed the way we work. Our agents are now finding themselves more productive with communication tools such as Gmail and Google Chat. Collaboration has become so much easier as we can now access documents and videos from anywhere and at any time. Concerns about capacity from our own servers are a thing of the past. In fact, we don’t even have to worry about adding capacity with growing agent numbers, as Google offers us easy provisioning and scalability.

Another major advantage is Google’s mobile device management tools. We had been considering a separate solution to manage the growing prevalence of mobile devices that our agents started to use. Now, we don’t have to. Google provides us with basic management and security tools, so our agents are free to access their email, calendar and documents through the device of their choice.

With all of these capabilities now in our hands, we are certain that we have made the right choice with Google. We are now a more efficient organization and with the constant stream of innovation from Google, we are confident that Google Apps will remain relevant and vital to our business in the years to come. Learn more about the story here.

Posted by Mr. Saleh Al-Sagabi, Information Technology Director, Spimaco

Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Mr. Saleh Al-Sagabi, Information Technology Director at Spimaco, a Saudi Arabian medical and pharmaceutical business, which develops, manufactures and sells pharmaceutical products and medical appliances. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

As one of the leading Saudi Arabian pharmaceutical companies, Spimaco works tirelessly to register new products with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the fastest time possible. Previously, this involved a team of a hundred people from across the world creating, accessing and editing thousands of documents individually. This meant staff were spending an hour a week inputting into documents, sending them as attachments for others to edit and merging changes from multiple contributors. Across the organization, this added up to 52,000 hours a year spent on managing different versions of the same document and combining changes from individuals.

We’d heard about other large pharmaceutical businesses, Roche and Genentech, moving to the cloud-based communication service Google Apps so we understood its collaborative potential. As an experiment, we decided to offer 50 of our staff access to Google Apps and found that, all of a sudden, teams were no longer wiping out several hours a week on making changes in attachments, sending these to colleagues and merging changes into a single document. They were using Google Docs to work together in the same document simultaneously, seeing each other’s changes as they typed and sharing ideas, comments and feedback instantly across multiple countries. This really showed us the potential of Google Apps for teamwork and collaboration.

We now have 1,100 people using Google Apps and the benefits are widespread. Through Gmail’s search capabilities, finding an email in the labyrinth of folders and attachments has gone from up to ten minutes to seconds, speeding up daily communication.

Not only is our information easier to access from anywhere but it is also more secure. Having used Lotus Domino since 1998, we ended up with over four terabytes of confidential data that needed to be managed and protected by our own teams. This was both time-consuming and challenging. Today, by storing everything in Google’s data center, we benefit from the cutting edge security Google can offer and, if needed, can remotely wipe accounts or devices. Our employees can also see exactly who has access to a document and whether they can edit it or not – all without complex file sharing processes, which used to take IT at least an hour a day to manage. We’ll soon be adding Google Vault to help us further with archiving, e-discovery and improve the information governance capabilities.

We’ve also cut our IT costs by 75% by moving to Google Apps – that’s hundreds of thousands of dollars we can spend developing better medical solutions instead. More importantly, we now have a more productive, better connected, more collaborative workforce. As the largest company in Saudi Arabia to make the move to Google Apps, it is great to think we’re leading the way for others in our country.

Posted by Dr. Adisak Sukul, Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, KMITL

Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Dr. Adisak Sukul, Ph.D., from the Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, KMITL. Dr. Sukul served as a consultant on the working group to develop Thailand’s largest Digital Library of legislative documents. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

The Parliament of Thailand houses over 350,000 pieces of journals, newspapers, e-books and videos, some dating back from as early as 1932 ‒ the year Thailand’s Constitution began. Over the years, the amount of information we accumulated grew substantially and we sought a powerful system that would help us manage the repository effectively. This culminated in the development of Thailand’s largest Digital Library, where the repository of legislative documents was made available for public referencing over the Web.

The Digital Library collated various document collections from different research libraries into a single searchable archive. We also developed a search engine to help users locate information but we found that the engine was not generating accurate search results due to the complexity of the Thai language. The problem was further compounded by the multitude of complex official documents with several different metadata structures. Users had to run 10 different search queries in order to retrieve the complete information they were looking for. It became evident that a more efficient and user-friendly solution was needed if we wanted members of the public to gain value from the National Assembly’s collection.

Google Search Appliance (GSA) met our requirements perfectly. It integrates easily with our back-end database solution and the information from multiple platforms is now consolidated and condensed into one single repository. It is simple to use and delivers complete and accurate search results to users. Now, users can conduct searches 10 times faster than they used to.

The GSA is also equipped with a built-in dictionary that intelligently recognizes the Thai language. The GSA’s auto complete and spell checker are incredibly useful for us. The Thai language is complex, and it is not uncommon for words to be misspelled. We knew that working with the Thai language on a search engine can be highly challenging, but Google’s dedicated team worked hard to ensure that this was not a barrier to the success of our project.

Once the system went live to the public, Google’s easy-to-use interface attracted many new users to the Digital Library. This was a plus point for us as we have been receiving increasing requests for access to non-sensitive legislative-related information. I am pleased that we are now able to share this repository of knowledge with lawyers, students and non-governmental organizations. To date, the Library has logged a 200 percent increase in user traffic.

We also noticed that searches conducted using Google.com or other search engines will point to documents in the Digital Library. This means that we are now reaching out to more people. It is gratifying to know that we are finally able to share and put to good use the rich history and heritage we have stored over the years.

Throughout the project, Google’s Enterprise team and Google’s Developer Group were supportive and professional. In fact, it was this open working relationship that helped ensure the project’s success. Thanks to Google, we now empower our searchers with a wealth of knowledge at their fingertips.

Posted by Chris Chance, Director of IT, Speedway Motors

Editor’s note: Today’s blog post is from Chris Chance, Director of IT at Speedway Motors, the world’s largest manufacturer, distributor, and retailer of street rod and racing products. See what other organizations that use Google Search Appliance have to say – and watch the recent Hangout On Air with Speedway Motors and Google Enterprise.

For a business that’s based on speed, we had to admit that our Speedway Motors website search was rather slow. That’s not acceptable for a company that’s on the fast track: We fill thousands of orders a week, and our website gets more than 500,000 unique visitors every month. The solution to the speed problem was Google Search Appliance, which fueled faster search for Speedway and also drove big increases in conversions and revenue.

Our previous search product, Mercado’s e-Commerce search and merchandising suite (now Adobe® Search&Promote), didn’t just go slow on delivering results: It took 10 hours a week to manually tune results and build workarounds. But even with all that work, search results took as long as four seconds to appear. We started to realize that our competitors all had better search functionality than we did. Exit Mercado, enter Google Search Appliance.

With more than 60,000 products, many of which have unique names that require inputting for synonyms and alternate keywords, we expected a long implementation. We were wrong – it took just a few weeks. Now that feeds are automatic, we spend only 10 minutes a week checking search results.

Now Speedway Motors really is speedy: Customers typically receive search results in 500 milliseconds, a performance improvement that contributed to a 45% increase in our conversion rate, and a 116% increase in search-attributed revenue. The Google Search Appliance is giving back to our customers and our Ecommerce team – customers are able to quickly find the parts they need and the reduction in search maintenance allows our Ecommerce team to spend more team focusing on what matters – helping our customers build their dream cars.

Posted by Mark Larson, Director of Engineering and Superintendent of Public Safety, Google Chrome

(Cross-posted on the Google Chrome Blog)

On April 8, 2014, after more than a decade of powering many of the world’s computers, Windows XP will officially retire. Like all technologies that come to their end-of-life, the XP operating system and most of its desktop applications will no longer receive updates and security patches. Since unpatched browser bugs are often used by malware to infect computers, we’re extending support for Chrome on Windows XP, and will continue to provide regular updates and security patches until at least April 2015.

We recognize that hundreds of millions of users, including a good chunk of current Chrome users, still rely on XP. Moreover, many organizations still run dozens or even hundreds of applications on XP and may have trouble migrating. Our goal is to support Chrome for XP users during this transition process. Most importantly, Chrome on XP will still be automatically updated with the latest security fixes to protect against malware and phishing attacks.

If you’re an IT administrator and your employees depend on web applications built for older browsers, you can use Legacy Browser Support to set Chrome as the primary browser and limit the usage of the unsupported, legacy browser to only specific web apps. See Chrome for Business to learn more about how to deploy and manage Chrome for an organization.

Posted by Tony Keusgen, New Zealand Country Manager, Google

(Cross-posted from the Google New Zealand Blog)

As students and teachers go back to school in the northern hemisphere, educators and students in New Zealand are in the final term of their school year. From publishing reviews on the World Cup to collaborating on papers, technology is giving teachers and students new ways and platforms to create, share, and learn.

For example Stephanie Thompson, a teacher from Tawa Intermediate School in Wellington, has her students use Blogger to publish their work and views. As she explains, the ability to personalize the content they create is a great way to keep the students engaged. “My students are Year 7/8 so being able to personalize their blogs is an essential part of this process. For example my kids had the opportunity to take part in a ‘beautify my blog’ session. This is important for them to gain ownership over their blogs.”

By bringing in an element of competition with technology, Physical Education Teacher Tim Gander of Gisborne managed to ignite his PE students’ appetite for literature. During the World Cup he had students submit article reviews using Google Forms. The public nature of Google Forms meant that his students were more conscious of the quality of their work. “The boys could see the quality of work which was required and knew that everyone was reading their responses- this led to a bit of competition, with each group trying to outdo each other!”

Last year we told you about Pt. England School and one of their leaders of Professional Development, Dorothy Burt. After learning more about the impact that the team there is making using Google Apps and Chromebooks to empower both students and the community, we visited to learn more. The video below gives you more insights into the passionate teachers and motivated learners and families who make up Pt. England.

We wish everyone the best with their final term and we look forward to hearing and sharing more stories from our teachers and schools. If you’d like to learn more about Google in Education tools you can complete the form on our website to talk to a member of our team.

Editor’s note: We’re excited to announce that Keller Williams Realty International, the largest real estate franchise company in North America, is going Google. We sat down with Jason Tang, Executive Director of Technology, to learn about what drove the move and what they’re looking forward to. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Can you tell us about Keller Williams and your decision to move to Google Apps?
Keller Williams is the largest real estate franchise company in North America. We have 200 employees in our Austin, Texas headquarters and support 90,000 agents across our 670 franchise locations throughout the U.S. and Canada. Having a central corporate team and a vast network of independent associates puts us in a unique position from an IT standpoint: we’re responsible for making decisions that help both our internal employees and our agents in the field, whose day-to-day roles differ quite a bit.

Our path to Google Apps was driven by two immediate features both groups needed: a better email platform and a more integrated calendar system. We ran on-premise Microsoft Exchange in our headquarters and a separate system built on an open source platform for our associates. It was an antiquated solution, to say the least. We evaluated Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365, and what clinched it for Google Apps was the future we saw with it. At the 80,000-foot view, our decision wasn’t just about solving our two biggest problems today, but about innovating for the years ahead. We’re betting on a great platform that we know will only get better.

Real estate agents are always on the go. How did mobile play into your decision to use Google Apps?
Mobile, mobile, mobile is our rallying cry. Our agents don’t succeed sitting behind a desk, and when it comes to mobile apps, they want it to “just work” – whether they’re using a smartphone, tablet, or laptop. We’ve spent plenty of time imagining a typical day once we’ve got our associates on Apps. Let’s say an agent and her office team receive an email from a client asking to schedule a showing. The office team sets up an appointment in Calendar for 4:00 p.m. that afternoon. The agent, who is out showing properties, gets an alert on her smartphone for the 4:00 p.m. meeting and shows up at the property at the appointed time. If the meeting changes to 5:00 p.m., no problem, she’ll get an instant alert on her smartphone. What’s more, the back-office team has already uploaded a video presentation of the property and the full disclosure packet to Drive. During the viewing, the agent can pull up the video and documents on her tablet to give a very polished presentation.

That fact that this scenario can play out on whatever device our agents prefer is a game-changer for both us and them, and everyone wins.

What excites you most about the future with Google Apps?
What excites us most is the potential with Google Apps. Yes, we’re thrilled to roll out the core products, like Gmail, Calendar and Drive, with the help of Cloud Sherpas, and our employees and agents are thrilled to upgrade to a system they’re so familiar with. From where I stand, I see endless possibilities beyond the core products. I imagine agents using YouTube to feature videos of properties, Drive to upload disclosure packets, Voice to manage their client calls, and Blogger to create blogs on local real estate trends. Google Apps are the building blocks to create a whole new technology infrastructure for our company.

Google Apps Marketplace will also play a big role at our company. Keller Williams is unique, in that our 90,000 associates are independent operators, not employees. Our agents are free to use many different technology tools to run their businesses. For example, some agents use MailChimp or ConstantContact for email marketing. With the Marketplace, our agents will be able to download these and hundreds of other business apps for use within our Google Apps universe. Our agents use the tools they’re most familiar with, and we support them in their choices however we can.

Posted by Michael Thomas, Software Engineer, Google Slides

(Cross-posted on the Google Drive blog.)

Presentations give you the ability to bring a story to life in a visually compelling way—whether it’s a pitch for a new product idea, a deck for a history class assignment, or an introduction to your surfing club. Today you can take the magic up a notch with two new features in Slides—widescreen format and editable master slides.

With widescreen presentations, you get a ton of new space to fill with words, charts, tables or even a simple, beautiful image.

Since the majority of monitors and displays are now widescreen, new presentations will be widescreen by default. You can change the size of your slides using the pull down menu in the theme chooser, or by visiting Page setup in the File menu.

Every presentation you make with Slides has a theme that comes with a set of preset colors, font styles and sizes, backgrounds, etc. to give you a consistent look and feel throughout your deck.

One of your top requests has been to customize these presets throughout your presentation. With editable master slides, you can now easily tailor how content appears on every slide by selecting “Edit master” from the Slide menu. For example, you can set all of your header fonts to Alconica, make all of your first level bullets bold, and add a logo in the bottom right corner.

Voila! The thumbnail previews alongside the master show that all of these changes are made instantly across all of the slides in your presentation.

And that’s not all. Each theme consists of a variety of slide layouts, which can also now be individually customized or created from scratch.

We hope that these new ways to customize Slides help you tell better stories, and look forward to seeing the beautiful themes that you come up with. Look out for these updates throughout the course of the day.

Posted by Elliot Tally, Senior Director, Sanmina

Editor’s note: Our guest blogger this week is our long-time friend and customer, Elliot Tally, Senior Director of Enterprise Applications, Collaboration & Innovation at Sanmina, a global electronics manufacturer headquartered in San Jose, California with over 47,000 employees. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Since I joined the company over 12 years ago, Sanmina business communications have evolved from an organization into an organism. In the past five years using Google’s tools, I have seen the business transform further from a traditional manufacturing company with change-resistant IT infrastructure, basic collaboration, and a reliance on resource-draining travel for “teamwork,” into a modern company that has embraced the cloud, breathing clean air through more inclusive collaboration, and fostering a flexible and dynamic environment for employees to work effectively where and when they need to.

In 2008, when we first looked at moving to the cloud, we wanted to reduce infrastructure and cut IT costs. We were dealing with a lot of data: 112 Exchange servers across 70 locations. We create 2 Terabytes of email per month, and our Guadalajara campus alone was spending $15,000 a quarter on backups. Plus, we were spending millions of dollars on Microsoft licenses. By choosing Google Apps, we now save about $1.5 million a year, reduced our on premise email infrastructure by more than 90% and have seen a reduction in servers, refocusing of staff, licensing costs and other operating expenditures. We only need two people, instead of six, to support Google Apps for our 21,000 employees who use email.

I knew moving to the cloud would impact our bottom line, what I didn’t realize is how it would influence the culture of our business and the way we get things done. Working across time zones used to involve countless emails, crowded teleconference rooms, and expensive travel. Employees quickly and organically embraced Google Docs to work together without worrying about time zones or physical location. Now we have more than 700,000 Google Docs, 3,200 Google Sites and 4,000 Google Groups spanning all functions of the business. For example, our product engineering teams use Google Sites to track documentation, planning, and product testing for many of their projects, including leveraging the platform for customer collaboration. Using Google+ Hangouts on a daily basis has cut travel costs and we find that employees feel more connected and productive, without the jetlag.

Google Drive has also helped us grow by facilitating the discovery and information sharing process during mergers. We used to manage acquisitions using file attachments for everything from the discovery questionnaires to legal contracts. There were too many attachments to create a record for everything. The draft content was usually shared via email or FTP and version control was a challenge. So when we purchased BreconRidge in 2010 we decided to use a Google Site and Google Docs for the majority of the documentation. The advantages were threefold: active collaboration, inherent version control with synchronization, and ease of sharing. We shared docs internally and with BreconRidge throughout the process to reduce some of the travel requirements, be more transparent, and to facilitate the discovery process and negotiations. The increased collaboration & document control effectiveness resulted in this model becoming the de facto choice for managing subsequent M&A transactions.

Google Apps isn’t the only Google offering helping to streamline our business. In our factories, we’re in the process of replacing thousands of data collection points – spanning each part of the manufacturing line — with commodity Android tablets. These tablets present a touch-enabled and rich interface for employees, which is readily available on their own mobile devices. Our plant managers appreciate the simplicity of the single interface and the automation; we have dramatically reduced the need for expensive PCs, paper or filing cabinets, and printed work instructions, creating instead a convenient platform for our engineers to target with innovative new apps using technology they already know. The tablets can also send notifications to supervisors and issue quality alerts, allowing for speedier resolution of problems in our plants. We’ve leveraged Google App Engine to host a machine maintenance and calibration system we developed to track equipment and spare parts, and automate the relevant business processes, reducing parts inventory and ensuring easily auditable compliance. Our Printed Circuit Board (PCB) plants even created an interface using the Google Drive API to programmatically create Google Spreadsheets from their PCB engineering design system for sharing with customers as part of the quoting process. We’ve been using the Google Search Appliance since 2009 and added 2 new Google Search Appliances 7.0 this year to index our intranet, our Google Apps content, and a few other internal content stores.

We exceeded our original goals of cutting costs and reducing IT infrastructure by more than we could have conceived of at the time, but the real benefits of “going Google” have emerged over the past four years. It’s much easier to quantify server reduction than the more intangible benefits of using Google Apps: employees working together seamlessly, testing creative solutions without investing in expensive hardware, and in the job satisfaction that I can provide my team by letting them focus on strategic projects. But, it’s exactly these types of activities that have evolved our business culture from a collection of independent teams into an agile multicellular company leading the industry with collaborative communication solutions.