Google Data » Julia

Auto manufacturers take a new turn with Google Maps

Julia — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 14:42:00 +0000

Posted by Mickey Kataria, Senior Product Manager, Google Maps for Business

You should have access to comprehensive, accurate and useful information no matter where you are – including when you're behind the wheel. Today, Hyundai Motors Groups joins the ranks of leading auto manufacturers making Google Maps technology available to their drivers.

Using Google Send-to-Car, local search and voice search, Hyundai and Kia owners in the United States can access a variety of maps features through Hyundai’s Blue Link technology and Kia’s second generation UVO eServices telematics system. Voice search enables drivers to easily find destinations, while Google Maps and Google Places APIs – used to power additional trip planning services – give drivers even more ways to find restaurants, stores and other points of interest while on-the-go.

In addition to Hyundai Motors Group, these automakers are also creating familiar experiences based on the Google Maps drivers know and love from their computers, smartphones and tablets:

Audi: Audi connect™ brings Google local search, satellite and Street View imagery directly to drivers and passengers, providing real-time, real-life images of the world around you – from California’s Highway 1 to Chicago’s "Magnificent Mile." Combined with voice search, you can safely explore and discover local destinations.
Daimler: With Google Street View imagery, Mercedes-Benz A-Class drivers can be sure they’re going to the right destination. The Mercedes-Benz “Digital DriveStyle App” gives you access to Google local search, as well as Zagat ratings to make it easy to find anything from a Michelin-rated restaurant to your favorite fast food joint.
Tesla Motor Co: A 17-inch, high-resolution touch screen display brings Google Maps to life in the Tesla Model S. Drivers can see topographic satellite images with overlaid roads and real-time traffic updates from Google Maps.

Including Google local search, Google Earth and Google Street View in cars makes maps even more comprehensive, useful and accurate for automakers and their drivers.

A year in review: work the way you live

Julia — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 21:38:00 +0000

Posted by Amit Singh, President, Google Enterprise

Ten years ago, business technology was at the forefront of innovation and productivity. But there’s a fundamental shift underway: in the last few years, consumer technology has begun to outpace business technology. People have fallen in love with the simplicity and freedom of living in the cloud with the help of modern browsers and smartphones—and they want to bring that experience to the workplace.

This is where Google comes in. For the better part of the past decade, we’ve worked to extend our popular consumer products—everything from Gmail and Google Drive to Maps, Google+ and Search—to meet your business needs. It should be easy for you to work better together, from anywhere, with secure (and simple!) tools. Here’s a look back at some key highlights from 2012.

Work securely...
Keeping your information secure is one of our top priorities. To that end, domain administrators can now require their employees to use 2-step verification, an additional layer of security that reduces the chance of unauthorized account access. Your company can also use Google Apps Vault, a solution for managing and archiving critical information for legal and regulatory reasons. If your business operates outside the U.S., we now offer Model Contract Clauses as an additional way to comply with the European Commission’s Data Protection Directive. Finally, Google Apps received ISO 27001 certification, ensuring our systems meet one of the most widely, internationally accepted independent security standards.

… anytime, anywhere...
It should be easy to get work done – anytime, on any device, with anyone. With offline editing in Chrome, you can now create and edit Google documents and leave comments even when you don’t have an Internet connection. Any changes you make will be automatically synced when you get back online. When you’re travelling, you can also edit Google documents and spreadsheets using the Drive app on your iPhone, iPad or Android device. Just like on your computer, you’ll be able to see other people’s edits instantly as they’re made.

If your business has workers on the go, Google Maps Coordinate combines the power of Google’s mapping technologies with modern smartphones to help you improve communication with employees in the field. In addition, the Google Play Private Channel lets you distribute internal apps to your employees who use Android devices. The new Chromebooks and Chromeboxes we launched with our partners are secure and easy to manage, which makes them especially great devices for 1-to-1 programs in schools, additional laptops for office workers, or desktop units for multiple users in a call center. (And we’re honored that Inc. Magazine named the Chromebox one of the best business gadgets of 2012.)

...with simple tools...
We’ve also focused on making our products simpler and easier for you to use – both at home and at work. We introduced Google Drive as a single place for you to create, share, collaborate and keep all your work. You can now insert files (up to 10GB) from Drive directly into an email without leaving your Gmail inbox, and you can share work from Drive on Google+. You and up to 14 colleagues can join a Google+ hangout directly from a calendar entry or your email inbox. Once inside a hangout, you can open a Google Doc for everyone to see and work on simultaneously. And if your company uses Chrome along with Google Apps, you can now call or email us for help with Chrome.

With the Google Search Appliance 7.0, you can search for a document on your company’s intranet just as easily as you’d search for a holiday recipe on Google.com. And if your business relies on geographic data—say, to map gas pipelines or help customers locate your store—you can use Google Maps and Earth Enterprise to visualize your data on the Google Maps interface you’re already familiar with.

...supported by partners and Google infrastructure
Whether it’s Apps for Business, Maps Coordinate, or just a Google search, most Google services you use are possible only because of the powerful and energy-efficient infrastructure we’ve built over the years. This year, we worked to bring you more direct access to this infrastructure to help run your businesses and applications in the cloud. Compute Engine lets your business run virtual machines in Google’s data centers and BigQuery helps you quickly analyze big sets of data to gain business insights. Google Cloud Platform also offers more European datacenter support and lower prices for Cloud Storage.

The new Google Cloud Platform Partner Program ensures that partners have the tools and training to help your business meet its IT needs. And the Google Enterprise Partner Search makes it easy for you to find one of our 6,000 Google Apps Resellers with the services you’re looking for – from setup and user training to email migration, management services and support.

* * *

Work doesn’t always need to feel like work. Leaders in every industry—from retail, media and manufacturing to transportation, education and government—are adopting this notion, which we call “going Google.” Going Google means something different for everyone: starting a wine business with your two best friends, trying to build a bear-proof cooler, or keeping citizens safe. But we all have the common goal of bringing our organization into the future so we can work the way we live.

Cloud computing enabling entrepreneurship in Africa

Julia — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 17:34:00 +0000

Posted by Zafir Khan, Google App Engine Team

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog.)

In 2007, 33-year-old Vuyile moved to Cape Town from rural South Africa in search of work. Unable to complete high school, he worked as a night shift security guard earning $500/month to support his family. During the rush hour commute from his home in Khayelitsha, Vuyile realized that he could earn extra income by selling prepaid mobile airtime vouchers to other commuters on the train.

In rural areas, it’s common to use prepaid vouchers to pay for basic services such as electricity, insurance and airtime for mobile phones. But it’s often difficult to distribute physical vouchers because of the risk of theft and fraud.

Nomanini, a startup based in South Africa, built a device that enables local entrepreneurs like Vuyile to sell prepaid mobile services in their communities. The Lula (which means “easy” in colloquial Zulu), is a portable voucher sales terminal that is used on-the-go by people ranging from taxi drivers to street vendors. It generates and prints codes which people purchase to add minutes to their mobile phones.

Today, Vuyile sells vouchers on the train for cash payment, and earns a commission weekly. Since he started using the Lula, he’s seen his monthly income increase by 20 percent.

Vuyile prints a voucher from his Lula

Nomanini founders Vahid and Ali Monadjem wanted to make mobile services widely available in areas where they had been inaccessible, or where—in a region where the average person makes less than $200/month—people simply couldn’t afford them. By creating a low-cost and easy-to-use product, Nomanini could enable entrepreneurs in Africa to go to deep rural areas and create businesses for themselves.

In order to build a scalable and reliable backend system to keep the Lula running, Nomanini chose to run on Google App Engine. Their development team doesn’t have to spend time setting up their own servers and can instead run on the same infrastructure that powers Google’s own applications. They can focus on building their backend systems and easily deploy code to Google’s data centers. When Vuyile makes a sale, he presses a few buttons, App Engine processes the request, and the voucher prints in seconds.

Last month, 40,000 people bought airtime through the Lula, and Nomanini hopes to grow this number to 1 million per month next year. While platforms like App Engine are typically used to build web or smartphone apps, entrepreneurs like Vahid and Ali are finding innovative ways to leverage this technology by building their own devices and connecting them to App Engine. Vahid tells us: “We’re a uniquely born and bred African solution, and we have great potential to take this to the rest of Africa and wider emerging markets. We could not easily scale this fast without running on Google App Engine.”

To learn more about the technical implementation used by Nomanini, read their guest post on the Google App Engine blog.

K-pop goes global with Google Apps

Julia — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 16:07:00 +0000

Posted by Jeff Son, Strategy Manager, YG Entertainment

Editors note: Today's guest blogger is Jeff Son, Strategy Manager at YG Entertainment, a record label and talent agency based in Seoul, South Korea.

YG Entertainment is a record label and talent agency based in Seoul, South Korea, specializing in R&B and hip hop music. We represent some of the biggest names in Korean music including BIGBANG, 2NE1, Lee Hi — and of course, rapper PSY, whose “Gangnam Style” recently became the most popular YouTube video of all time.

Over the last few years, we have been working hard to bring the best of K-Pop to the world. In the last two weeks alone, PSY has been busy touring the United States, 2NE1 have been touring South East Asia, and Big Bang has been touring Japan.

With artists all over the world and a third of our staff out of the country all the time, we need a communication system we can rely on. Prior to moving to Google Apps, our email system was run from a local Korean server. This was fine while we were in Korea, but was unreliable when working internationally. When looking for alternatives, we wanted mobility, speed and stability for teams and artists on the go. As a creative business using both Macintosh and Windows, we also wanted something which would be compatible with both operating systems.

Google Apps worked well with all these requirements. Since making the switch to Gmail in June this year we’ve noticed a big increase in email reliability. We’ve also found the mobile experience is much better. Staff use smartphones and tablets to access Gmail and Calendar and find it much more intuitive than our previous system. We also like that Google Apps is priced according to the number of accounts, not the amount of storage that you use, so we only pay for what we use.

As we continue to expand globally, nurturing Korean talent and bring stars like PSY onto the world stage, we’re confident knowing that Google Apps can scale with us.

Google Apps for Education in Latin America

Julia — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 16:26:00 +0000

Posted by Carlos Gonzalez, Google Apps Team

At Google, we’re always excited to see how educators around the world use technology to transform teaching practices and models. In Latin America, for example, thousands of schools and universities have already adopted Google Apps for Education to teach and collaborate in the cloud.

One such university in Latin America is Universidad Austral, a higher education institution in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In 2007, the University’s Law School migrated to Google Apps for Education so students could access course materials anytime and anywhere, whether in class, in the library or at home. Faculty members use Google Drive to distribute lesson materials and Google Calendar to keep students informed about any changes in the location, time and agenda of lectures. Also, all Law Degree students receive a tablet configured with their Google Apps account and syllabus, which reduces the use of photocopies, provides a digital repository of reference materials, enables mobility and encourages class participation during case study discussions.

After the Law School's positive experience with Google Apps for Education, the Education School at Universidad Austral also decided to go Google. Since migrating in 2011, the Education School has been using Google Sites to build course portals, which house lesson plans, resources, class calendars, videos and presentations. These course portals serve as virtual learning environments, which educators tailor with resources of the Web 2.0, like interactive gadgets embedded in Google Sites.

But Universidad Austral is just one example of how schools in Latin America are using Google Apps for Education. Servicio Nacional de Aprendizaje (SENA) and Corporación Unificada Nacional (CUN) in Colombia, Instituto Lux in Mexico, and Universidade Federal de Pernambuco in Brazil also use Google Apps to integrate technology into the classroom.

We're inspired by educators around the world who are reinventing the way we teach and learn with the use of technology. This motivates us even more to continue working on our products to help educational institutions shape the future of education. Learn more about Google Apps for Education.

Chromebooks for student assessments and more

Julia — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 21:14:00 +0000

Posted by Vidya Nagarajan, Product Manager, Chrome for Education & Business

Next February, approximately 1 million students from nearly 10,000 schools in the United States will participate in pilot tests developed by the American Institutes of Research (AIR) for the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. We’re happy to share that AIR will now support Chromebooks as secure assessment devices to take these tests.

Photo Credit: American Institutes of Research

This development follows our earlier announcement that the PARCC and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortia, as part of the U.S Department of Education Race to the Top initiative, verified that Chromebooks meet hardware and operating system requirements for online student assessments in the 2014-2015 school year.

An increasing number of schools are finding Chromebooks to be cost-effective and secure devices to administer testing. According to John Jesse, Director of Assessments at Utah Department of Education, several schools in Utah used Chromebooks to securely administer their summative online state assessments this past spring.

New features and web apps
The Chromebook management console—like Chrome OS—is constantly getting better. The newest features help make Chromebooks more secure as assessment kiosks. With the latest OS release you can disable external storage (e.g., USB flash drives), screenshots, audio output sources (e.g., speakers), and audio capture sources (e.g., microphones).

Likewise, we’re adding more educational apps to the Chrome Web Store all the time. New apps available include OER Commons and CK12 for curated web content, Agilix Buzz for customized learning paths and the Hapara Teacher Dashboard for effortless maintenance of a classroom’s Google Apps activity.

We’re excited by how educators continue to find new ways to use the web and discover web resources to help them teach and engage with students. We look forward to sharing more of your stories in the new year.

Swiss railway SBB monitors mobile radio infrastructure in 3-D with Google Earth Enterprise

Julia — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 15:51:00 +0000

Posted by Kurt Metzger, Project Manager, Swiss railway SBB Infrastructure division

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Kurt Metzger, Project Manager within the Swiss railway SBB Infrastructure division. His team needed a geo-information system for documenting and monitoring the internal GSM-R platform to visualize infrastructure data in 3-D.

In a single year, 357 million travelers catch their trains at more than 800 train stations run by the SBB, the largest travel and transportation company in Switzerland. To make sure that our travelers reach their destinations safely and on time, a major part of our strategy is the digital Global System of Mobile Communication-Rail platform (GSM-R). This technology covers all mobile voice and data services for rail communication. But to control the functionality of such a mobile communication system, we need technical configuration information and infrastructure data, which can best be visualized using a geographic information system (GIS) like Google Earth Enterprise.

The GIS solutions we used previously had one critical disadvantage: they didn’t support 3-D components, so any attempt to visualize the data was unsatisfactory and only two-dimensional. For example, we could not represent radio antenna geometries such as height, elevation and mast lengths. We needed a solution that would allow a high quality 3-D visualization that was clear to understand and easy to use for everyone.

We found Google Earth Enterprise to meet these requirements, and we’re using it as part of our solution for documenting and monitoring SBB’s own GSM-R network. For example, Google Earth Enterprise draws specific parameters from our existing database, generates geographical 3-D objects dynamically, and visualizes them on the Google Earth Globe. Google Earth Enterprise also simplifies our interdepartmental cooperation and our reporting to supervisory authorities. As it is intuitive to use, it provides us with valuable support in the areas of network operation and optimization, rollouts and general network upgrades.

Using Google Earth, our team can literally fly over the GSM-R infrastructure as if we’re in a plane. Thanks to this, I have the ability to observe each GSM-R location’s masts and antenna systems from every perspective. Because this is all done remotely from my computer, I don’t have to set up a security measure in advance – like closing the tracks – as is usual in the railway business.

We at SBB are more than happy with our choice to adopt Google Earth Enterprise. Over the long term, we are seeing a considerable savings in time and are able to significantly improve the quality of our data and thus our decisions, too.

Chromebooks for classrooms: $99 for the holidays

Julia — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 17:42:00 +0000

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Group Product Manager

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog.)

For many students and teachers, the hassles of traditional computing often prevent them from making the most of technology in the classroom. Schools that have adopted Chromebooks, however, have been able to bring the web’s vast educational resources—whether it’s conducting real-time research or collaborating on group projects—right into the classroom. Chromebooks are fast, easily sharable, and require almost no maintenance. Today more than 1,000 schools have adopted Chromebooks in classrooms, including some school districts like Richland School District Two (S.C.), Leyden High School District (Ill.), and Council Bluffs Community School District (Iowa) who have deployed Chromebooks to tens of thousands of students.

To help budget-strapped classrooms across the country, we’re working with DonorsChoose.org, an online charity that connects donors directly to public school classroom needs. For the holiday season, teachers can request the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook—the most widely deployed Chromebook in schools—at a special, discounted price of $99 including hardware, management and support.

If you’re a full-time public school teacher in the U.S., visit DonorsChoose.org and follow the instructions to take advantage of this opportunity by December 21, 2012. Your request will be posted on DonorsChoose.org where anyone can make a donation to support your classroom. When you reach your funding goal, you’ll receive your Chromebooks from Lakeshore Learning, DonorsChoose.org’s exclusive fulfillment partner for this program.

If you’re not a teacher, please share this opportunity with the teachers who have made a difference in your life! Or if you’re interested in supporting a classroom directly, read through the list of Chromebook projects and donate what you can. Be sure to check back often for new projects.

Thank you for your support in giving the gift of hassle-free technology to teachers and students. Working together, we can ensure “The virus ate my homework” is never uttered in a classroom again, and we can help classrooms get off to a strong start in the New Year!

Happy holidays.

The National Archives is going Google

Julia — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 16:05:00 +0000

Posted by Anne Billak, Federal Civilian Account Manager

The National Archives and Record Administration preserves a broad range of this country’s most important historical documents, ranging from the Emancipation Proclamation to maps of the Louisiana Purchase to Thomas Edison’s patent applications. Together with Google reseller Unisys, the Archives will move its 4,500 employees and contractors to Google Apps for Government in 2013.

Known as the nation’s record keeper, the Archives protects and provides public access to more than 10 billion pages of textual records, in addition to maps, photographs, videos and more than 133 terabytes of electronic records. The National Archives Building in Washington, DC gives visitors the opportunity to come face-to-face with significant documents in United States history, such as the Declaration of Independence. The Archives also manages Presidential libraries across the country for every president dating back to Herbert Hoover.

Memorandum of a fee paid by Thomas Edison for a patent on "Electric Lamps."
(image courtesy of the National Archives)

The Archives joins a growing list of federal agencies including the General Services Administration, NOAA and Idaho National Laboratory who have chosen Google and Unisys to provide their employees with cloud-based email and collaboration tools.

Google Apps will improve the ability of Archives employees in 44 locations nationwide to collaborate with one another, as well as with their customers and partners outside the agency. Archives employees across the nation will also get anytime, anywhere access to their data. What’s more, the FISMA-certified Google tools will keep the Archives’ data safe while also providing a reliable system with built-in failover and disaster recovery.

Building a better map of Europe

Julia — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 00:12:00 +0000

Posted by Brian McClendon, Vice President, Google Maps and Google Earth

Whether your business is building a solution to map gas pipelines or developing an easier way for people to locate your store, incorporating Google Maps into an application or website can help your customers get the information they need. As part of our ongoing effort to build the most comprehensive and accurate maps of the ever-changing world, today we’re releasing updated maps for 10 countries and regions in Europe.

New maps are available in Andorra, Bulgaria, Estonia, Gibraltar, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain. Today’s launch includes updates to core map elements like roads and addresses in each of these locations, but that’s not all: we’ve also added important new details like walking paths, ferry lines, building outlines, park boundaries, university campuses and more.

We believe that this combination of new and updated data provides a richer and more realistic Google Maps experience for both consumers and enterprise users. With up-to-date data and maps features, your business can rely on the Google Maps API to enhance your custom mapping applications. Learn more about the Google Maps API for Business.

Introducing online sign-up for Google Maps Coordinate

Julia — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 19:43:00 +0000

Posted by Dan Chu, Senior Product Manager, Google Maps for Business

Google Maps Coordinate makes it easy to manage mobile teams more efficiently. To help businesses get started with Maps Coordinate, we’re introducing an online store where businesses can enroll in a 30 day trial or contact sales for more information.

Maps Coordinate combines the power of Google’s mapping technologies with modern smartphones to help organizations improve communication with employees in the field. Employees can download the mobile app on their phone to share real-time location data and any information they need to record about a particular job. Meanwhile, dispatchers in a central office can use the web app to see the locations of the employees in the field, create new jobs at specific locations, and assign new jobs to nearby individuals or teams.

Visit our online store to start using Maps Coordinate today.

Google Cloud Platform: new features, lower prices, extending European datacenters

Julia — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 17:57:00 +0000

Posted by Jessie Jiang, Product Management Director

(Cross-posted on the Google Developers Blog.)

We're constantly making updates to our Google Cloud Platform products—Google App Engine, Cloud Storage, Big Query, Compute Engine and others—based on user feedback and to improve the overall experience. For example, two weeks ago we introduced a major update to Google Cloud SQL providing faster performance, larger databases (100GB), an EU zone, and a no-cost trial. But, we know there is more to do. Today, we’re continuing to improve the platform with new storage and compute capabilities, significantly lower prices, and more European Datacenter support.

Lower storage prices and new Durable Reduced Availability (DRA) Storage
To give you more flexibility in your storage options and prices, we’re reducing the price of standard Google Cloud Storage by over 20% and introducing a limited preview of Durable Reduced Availability (DRA) storage. DRA storage lowers prices by trading off some data availability while maintaining the same latency performance and durability as standard Google Cloud Storage. DRA can be used for things like batch compute jobs that can easily be rescheduled or for data back-up where quick access to your data is important. DRA achieves cost savings by keeping fewer redundant replicas of data. Unlike other reduced redundancy cloud storage offerings, DRA is implemented in a manner that maintains data durability so you don't have to worry about losing your data in the cloud.

And, to automatically keep a history of old versions of your data, we’re introducing Object Versioning. You can also use it to help protect against deleting or overwriting your data by mistake or due to an application error.

More European Datacenter support
We are continuing to roll out our European Datacenter support. Now, customers using Google App Engine, Google Cloud Storage, Google Cloud SQL and (soon) Google Compute Engine can deploy their applications, data and virtual machines to European Datacenters. This helps bring your solutions even closer to your customers for faster performance and enables international redundancy.

36 New Compute Engine instance types and overall reduced prices
Earlier this year we introduced a Limited Preview of Google Compute Engine with four standard instance types. Today, we are announcing 36 additional instance types and are reducing the price of our original 4 standard instances by about 5% for those currently in our preview. In the coming weeks, the following will be available:

High Memory Instance - High performance instances tailored for applications that demand large amounts of memory.
High CPU Instance - Reduced cost option when applications don’t require as much memory.
Diskless Configurations - Lower cost options for applications that do not require ephemeral disk and can exclusively utilize persistent disk.

We are also introducing Persistent Disk Snapshotting which makes it simple to instantly create a backup of your disk, move it around Google datacenters, and use the snapshot to start up a new VM.

We want to thank you, the community of developers and businesses who are pushing the platform into new areas and building innovative applications. We look forward to seeing where you take it next. Find out more about the new Cloud Storage pricing and Compute Engine instances. Sign up now and get started today.

Larger hangouts in Google+ for businesses, governments and schools

Julia — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 20:10:00 +0000

Posted by Ronald Ho, Product Manager, Google Apps

Like Google Apps, we think Google+ can help colleagues collaborate more easily and get things done. Google+ Hangouts in particular make it easy to hold face-to-face meetings with others from any device with a camera and an internet connection. Starting this week, you’ll be able to invite up to 15 people to a hangout, compared to the previous 10-person limit.

It’s still simple to get the most out of your hangouts: schedule a hangout in a calendar entry, join a hangout directly from Gmail and open a Google doc inside a hangout so everyone can write or edit together.

Finally, more schools will be able to use Google+. Until now, Google+ has only been available to verified higher education institutions. Now, any school using Google Apps for Education can enable Google+ and access the same features that businesses and government can.

These new features will be rolling out to Apps for Business, Education and Government customers over the next few days.

Garden Fresh empowers employees with Google Apps

Julia — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 21:03:00 +0000

Posted by Eric Rosenzweig, CIO of Garden Fresh Restaurant Corp.

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Eric Rosenzweig, CIO of Garden Fresh Restaurant Corp. Watch to the webinar recording to hear them discuss why the time was right to switch to Google Apps and how the change benefited their business.

With 129 restaurants in 15 states, Garden Fresh Restaurant Corp. has grown quickly since we acquired the first two Souplantation restaurants in 1983. Since then, over 300 million guests have experienced the all-you-care-to-eat dining experience at our restaurants, jam packed with fresh, high quality ingredients.

Early in 2012, we found that the upkeep of our email system & servers was becoming unsustainable. It slowed down collaboration and execution of plans across the business. After evaluating various solutions, switching to Google Apps with the help of SADA Systems was a ‘no brainer’.

Introducing shared Google Calendars and Google Docs simplified day-to-day tasks. Before the move to Google Apps, branch auditing, a quality control process, was a particular pain point for us. Auditors would share branch videos with 18 general and district managers via email. Managers often missed key details in the ensuing email correspondence and ended up with many duplicate copies of important documents. Now, the videos are added to a shared Google spreadsheet, on which each branch has its own tab. Analysis & actions items are captured on one live, master document, erasing information duplication and ensuring that important insights are not missed. The new auditing process requires 80% less time on this team’s part to effectively manage.

Our marketing team has also seen the benefits of real-time collaboration. The process to launch new marketing endeavors, such as coupon schemes across multiple locations, has been streamlined. In the past, problems with in-store coupons were surfaced via phone or email, on or after the launch date. Now, prior to a campaign launch, each restaurant receives a Google Form containing test codes. They use the form to report whether the codes are scanning correctly. If they aren’t, they can open the response spreadsheet to see who’s fixing the issue and when it’s expected to be fixed. This allows for speedy troubleshooting that leads to a much better customer experience.

For me, the most important thing about these examples is the lack of IT involvement. The switch to the cloud has empowered Garden Fresh employees to share information & collaborate in ways that suit them, placing very little strain on IT resources. My team now has the time to focus on projects that will move the business forward as a whole, which is exactly as it should be.

Quality Distribution Inc. saves money and increases productivity by going Google

Julia — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 17:24:00 +0000

Posted by Cliff Dixon, Vice President of Information Technology, Quality Distribution Inc.

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Cliff Dixon, Vice President of Information Technology, Quality Distribution Inc. (NASDAQ: QLTY), North America’s largest bulk transportation company headquartered in Tampa, Florida. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Quality Distribution, Inc. (QDI) provides safe, efficient and responsible bulk transportation services across the country. What started as a small trucking operation hauling lime and milk in 1913 has grown to more than 125 small offices, many franchises, and 3,000 truck drivers across North America. With multiple offices and employees scattered throughout the United States, having a reliable technology solution is imperative to ensure that we’re providing the best service to our clients.

For years we used traditional PCs company-wide in a Microsoft Exchange environment, which did not foster easy collaboration, communication or access to applications – and employees felt the pain. In 2011, after a pilot session with the IT department, QDI rolled out Google Apps company-wide with the help of Cloud Sherpas. In just a few months, I knew going Google was the right move for QDI. It allowed employees to connect to all of our locations and all of our drivers from anywhere without intensive IT support, and Google Apps was less than half the cost of Microsoft Exchange.

Around the time we deployed Google Apps, our computers started to slow down and break due to age. We refurbished older computers, but their value was minimal since they couldn’t run newer versions of the Windows operating system. In 2010, we started looking into purchasing new devices, including Linux and Chrome OS devices. Ultimately, we decided to move forward with Google Chromebooks and Chromeboxes, deploying 500 devices across 125 locations in the last year.

With Chrome devices, we can spend less time worrying about hardware, and software security patches, and more time focused on optimizing the user experience of our systems. Not only are the devices easy to manage from an IT perspective, but we also expect to save $500,000 on hardware alone over the next five years. As part of our move to Chromebooks, we also web-enabled some of our existing Windows-based apps using HTML5-based virtualization software from Ericom, making them easier to maintain.

Going Google has helped QDI improve collaboration, save money and eliminate IT headaches. Most importantly, our employees are more productive with easy-to-use technology. We’re looking forward to continued growth and providing the best service to our clients with help from Google.

Search. Click. Call. Get connected with your local expert today.

Julia — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 18:27:00 +0000

Posted by Amit Singh, Vice President, Google Enterprise

Whether you’re evaluating Google Apps, ready to make the move, or already a current user, we’re making it simpler for you to find the local, specialized, and trusted help you may need with the new Google Enterprise Partner Search. Search, click, and make the call to see how Google Apps Resellers can make your experience with Google Apps even better.

With over 6,000 Google Apps Resellers around the world, Enterprise Partner Search lets you preview the capabilities of a partner and find one that offers the services you’re looking for – from setup and user training, to email migration, management services, and support.

It’s simpler than ever, search for a partner today.

About today’s App Engine outage

Julia — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 03:22:00 +0000

Posted by Peter S. Magnusson, Engineering Director, Google App Engine

Editors note: This morning we failed to live up to our promise, and Google App Engine applications experienced increased latencies and time-out errors. For a full report of the incident, visit the Google App Engine blog.

We know you rely on App Engine to create applications that are easy to develop and manage without having to worry about downtime. App Engine is not supposed to go down, and our engineers work diligently to ensure that it doesn’t. However, from approximately 7:30 to 11:30 AM US/Pacific today, about 50% of requests to App Engine applications failed.

During this incident, no application data was lost and application behavior was restored without any manual intervention by developers. There is no need to make any code or configuration changes to your applications.

We will proactively issue credits to all paid applications for ten percent of their usage for the month of October to cover any SLA violations. This will appear on applications’ November bills. There is no need to take any action to receive this credit.

We apologize for this outage, and in particular for its duration and severity. Since launching the High Replication Datastore in January 2011, App Engine has not experienced a widespread system outage. We know that hundreds of thousands of developers rely on App Engine to provide a stable, scalable infrastructure for their applications, and we will continue to improve our systems and processes to live up to this expectation.

Helping SMBs save money with the cloud

Julia — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 17:16:00 +0000

Posted by Rich Rao, Director of Sales and Operations, Google Enterprise

Working with Google and Analysis Group, MIT research scientist Andrew McAfee recently conducted a study to understand the comparative costs of a business moving to the cloud versus remaining with a traditional on-premise IT system. In this comparative cost model, McAfee finds that the typical small- to medium-business (SMB) will significantly reduce its IT costs by doing away with its on-premise technology and moving to the cloud.

For example, a business with 16-100 computers can expect to save 37% by moving to the cloud – even if there’s no IT labor reduction. With savings achieved by moving to the cloud, these businesses are able to invest in areas that help expand or strengthen their business, whether it’s opening a new branch, starting a new product line, or hiring more people.

Bill Hipsher, Director of Business Development at USstoragesearch.com confirms, "Over a one-year period, Google Apps cost one-quarter of what we were spending on our on-premise IT before moving to the cloud – and over our business lifetime, it drops to just one-tenth of the cost. The hardware, software and time savings helped us expand our call center, which led to the creation of more than 30 new jobs this year."

In his study, McAfee also notes that SMBs' technology use is a strong indicator for the future of IT. Because SMBs are more flexible in their decision-making and aren't bogged down by legacy costs, they're able to choose an IT system that best suits their business. Thus, moving to the cloud frees up money for SMBs to drive business and job growth, and can set a precedent for how large businesses adopt cloud technology.

At Google, we’re proud to work with SMBs across the country to help them save money and move to the cloud. Visit our website to learn more about moving your business to Google Apps and explore McAfee’s comparative cost model in Google Sheets to adjust and tailor the model to your business.

Google’s data centers: an inside look

Julia — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 15:17:00 +0000

Posted by Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Technical Infrastructure

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog.)

Very few people have stepped inside Google’s data centers, and for good reason: our first priority is the privacy and security of your data, and we go to great lengths to protect it, keeping our sites under close guard. While we’ve shared many of our designs and best practices, and we’ve been publishing our efficiency data since 2008, only a small set of employees have access to the server floor itself.

Today, for the first time, you can see inside our data centers and pay them a virtual visit. On Where the Internet lives, our new site featuring beautiful photographs by Connie Zhou, you’ll get a never-before-seen look at the technology, the people and the places that keep Google running.

In addition, you can now explore our Lenoir, NC data center at your own pace in Street View. Walk in the front door, head up the stairs, turn right at the ping-pong table and head down the hall to the data center floor. Or take a stroll around the exterior of the facility to see our energy-efficient cooling infrastructure. You can also watch a video tour to learn more about what you're viewing in Street View and see some of our equipment in action.

Finally, we invited author and WIRED reporter Steven Levy to talk to the architects of our infrastructure and get an unprecedented look at its inner workings. His new story is an exploration of the history and evolution of our infrastructure, with a first-time-ever report from the floor of a Google data center.

Fourteen years ago, back when Google was a student research project, Larry and Sergey powered their new search engine using a few cheap, off-the-shelf servers stacked in creative ways. We’ve grown a bit since then, and we hope you enjoy this glimpse at what we’ve built. In the coming days we’ll share a series of posts on the Google Green Blog that explore some of the photographs in more detail, so stay tuned for more!

Dong-A Pharmaceuticals gets on the road with the Google Maps API

Julia — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 18:45:00 +0000

Posted by Jungil Lee, Dong-A Pharmaceuticals

(Cross-posted on the Google Korea blog.)

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Mr. Jungil Lee from Dong-A Pharmaceuticals. Dong-A Pharmaceuticals is one of many local businesses featured at Korea’s Geospatial Expo in Seoul. This event puts the spotlight on Korea’s growing geospatial technology sector and the businesses that are embracing maps and mobile work solutions to work smarter.

Being mobile is critical when you work in a mobile sales force, but prior to moving to the Mobile Smart Office and Google Maps API, our sales team faced some major challenges to being genuinely mobile. With only desktop PCs, our fleet of 1,000 sales staff had to look up hospital and clinic locations and check client records before heading out on the road. With each staff member making between 10 and 20 client visits per day, this meant lots of trips to the office to update records and look-up upcoming client locations.

To improve this process and place location and client information into the hands of staff where and when they need it, we decided to upgrade to the Mobile Smart Office in March 2012. A genuinely mobile sales support system, the Mobile Smart Office is a mobile application suite comprising of 10 apps on an iPad.Using Google Maps API, we integrated two apps, including the Mobile Sales Navigation app with Google Maps. Staff now use the Mobile Sales Navigation app to map out routes to multiple clients and add appointments to the system as they’re on the road throughout the day.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Google Maps is at the heart of Dong-A’s Mobile Smart Office and is indispensable for our field staff. It’s not only increased our team’s overall productivity, but has given staff the autonomy to choose the best routes and client schedules for them.

Bitro connects with the world with the Google Maps API

Julia — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 17:18:00 +0000

Posted by Junghoon Lee, Bitro

(Cross-posted on the Google Korea blog.)

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Mr. Junghoon Lee from Bitro. Bitro is one of many local businesses featured at Korea’s Geospatial Expo in Seoul. This event puts the spotlight on Korea’s growing geospatial technology sector and the businesses that are embracing maps and mobile work solutions to work smarter.

Losing cell phone reception is annoying. Not having the situation rectified quickly is even more annoying. The cellular and wireless network testing software that we make works to prevent cell network outages and to get you re-connected fast when they happen. We sell this technology to telecommunications companies who deploy mobile workers to conduct testing and respond to incidents. For them, it’s essential that they can map and track the locations of incidents and their workers in the field quickly and easily.

IDC estimates that by 2015 there will be 1.3 billion mobile workers worldwide. That’s a lot of people and businesses that will need reliable and real-time mobile and location-sharing solutions. As a fast expanding business with increasing numbers of international customers, we wanted a mapping API that had global coverage and was recognised internationally. Prior to moving to integrating the Google Maps API into our smartphone-based software in late 2011, we used local mapping software that limited our competitiveness in markets like North America and Europe.

After researching the options we found that only Google had a truly global map service that could support the multiple smartphone, tablet and browser platforms that our customers require. A versatile and affordable option, it’s been a smooth transition to Google Maps – it’s both intuitive for our customers and flexible for our developers.

Reselling Google Apps becomes even easier

Julia — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 15:30:00 +0000

Posted by Jaideep Mirchandani, Product Manager, Google Enterprise

For IT service providers and channel tools developers looking for a way to scale their businesses, we built a new Reseller API to let you integrate and automate components of the Google Apps reseller tools into your own customer and sales systems. This new API supports Google Apps for Business, Google Drive storage, and Google Apps Vault.

Here’s what you can do using the API, without even having to sign into the reseller tools:

Add new customer accounts
Transfer customers
View customer subscription information

For example, Megazone, a Korean-based domain and hosting provider, implemented the Reseller API as part of their existing domain name purchase process to make it easier for their web-based customers to sign up for Google Apps. If a customer opts-in for a Google Apps trial, they’re automatically set up in Megazone’s reseller console with a trial subscription. The customer can then sign in and start using Google Apps right away. This is a more scalable and easier way for customers to sign up for Google Apps through Megazone.

To learn more about the Reseller API, visit the Developer’s Guide in the Google APIs Console.

Communicate more easily across languages in Gmail

Julia — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 16:03:00 +0000

Posted by C. Andrew Warren, Product Manager

(Cross-posted on the Gmail blog.)

Finding the right words can be difficult, especially across languages, and once you choose them, finding a way to type them can be even harder. Try emailing family in Germany, chatting with friends in China or adding a Russian business partner's name to your contacts and you may find yourself limited by the language of your keyboard.

That's why today we’re adding more than 100 virtual keyboards, transliteration and IMEs—collectively called input tools—in Gmail. These tools enable you to type in the language and keyboard layout you’re accustomed to, making it easy to keep in touch with family, friends and coworkers from any computer. You can even switch between languages with one click.

To try it out, check the box next to Enable input tools under Language in Settings.

Once you’ve enabled it, you’ll see the Input Tools icon next to the Settings button in your toolbar, and you can turn on and off any Input Tool from there.

With these new virtual keyboards, Gmail supports typing in 75 languages—a big jump from the five languages that were initially supported when we introduced Indic transliteration in Gmail in 2009.

Gmail’s users are from all over the world—and language should never get in the way of a good conversation. If you'd like to use Input Tools in other places, try out the Chrome extension, the Windows desktop client or the Android app.

Education On Air: Connecting teachers and learners across the world

Julia — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 18:55:00 +0000

Posted by Tia Lendo, Google in Education Team

Twelve years ago, in my first year teaching, I often felt very isolated. Not only was my fourth grade class housed in a mobile trailer outside of the main school building, putting physical distance between me and my peers, but I also rarely had time or ways to connect with other teachers outside the school day.

Thankfully, educators and schools today aren’t limited to the resources they have within the 4 walls of their classroom. The web is bringing students and educators together with information and opportunities that we never dreamed were possible in the year 2000. For example, today over 20 million students, faculty and staff engage in real-time collaboration and communication for free using Google Apps for Education.

Today, on World Teachers’ Day, we celebrate all of the amazing teachers around the world by offering them two new ways to connect with and support each other using Google+:

Education On Air: We have organized a series of over 100 Hangouts On Air that will be led by educators and Googlers. Topics range from “Flipping Your Classroom” to “Weekly Office Hours staffed by “Tech Sherpa” High School Students” to “A Conversation with Sal Khan”, founder of the Khan Academy.
Topics-of-the-day: Starting Monday we will begin a program of daily content aimed to help educate and inspire. We’ll reshare posts from educators on the following topics:

“Magic Moment Monday” - Inspiring, magic moments in schools
“Tutorial Tuesday” - Google Apps tips and tricks
“Web Apps Wednesday” - Web-based resources and apps
“Chrome Tip Thursday” - Chrome Ninja tips to make the most of the browser
“Fabulous Find Friday” - Any fabulous Education resource
“Show it Saturday” - YouTube EDU content
“Search for it Sunday” - Google Search Education tips

We encourage you to follow the Google in Education Google+ page and to visit the Edu On Air site to sign up for Hangouts and add them to your calendar. We hope these provide a way for educators to link with their peers so that they can collaborate even after the sessions are over.

In the meantime, check out the highlight reel from some of the 46 Education On Air Hangouts that educators held on May 2, 2012.

#wtd2012

Handsome Coffee brews its way to success with Google Apps for Business

Julia — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 16:17:00 +0000

Posted by Mike Hudson, Creative Director of Handsome Coffee Roasters

Editors note: To celebrate National Coffee Day, today’s guest blogger is Mike Hudson, Creative Director of Handsome Coffee Roasters, an artisan coffee company headquartered in Los Angeles, CA. See what another coffee company that has gone Google has to say.

I have a passion for coffee – a passion so strong that, while working at a digital marketing agency, I spent my weekends working part-time as a barista at a legendary coffee shop in Los Angeles. It was there that a few co-workers and I sat down and hatched a plucky business plan: to roast our own coffee. In 2011, with little more than our gumption, a Twitter handle, a webpage, and 1956 Ford Falcon van that carried a mobile coffee cart we aptly named the Handsome Traveler, Handsome Coffee Roasters was born.

We took the Handsome Traveler to big events and festivals in Los Angeles, and began to cultivate a large and dedicated following along the way. And we grew with them: in just one year, our company went from the original founders to 18 full-time employees. We recently opened our flagship retail coffee bar in the Arts District of downtown Los Angeles, and have plans to expand to New York City next year.

Put simply, we couldn't have grown this quickly without Google Apps for Business. We’re small but global – we have a coffee bar in Los Angeles and a travel schedule that takes us to Nicaragua, Norway and everywhere in between, and Google Apps is a tool that caters to our on-the-move team. With Google Apps, we know we can share travel and employee schedules with Google Calendar, communicate across time zones with Google Chat, and access our permits, notes and updated sales figures from Google Drive. We can do everything on the go, from any device, whenever we need to. We even hold rigorous strategy sessions on Google+ Hangouts with various participants playing along on their mobiles.

Starting a business couldn’t be any easier with Google Apps. We can manage a Herculean amount of data, documents and communications without getting bogged down and wasting hours fiddling with antiquated technology. Thanks to Google's tools, we get to focus on what we really love: roasting and serving amazing coffee.

Chromebooks for Education: Simple, secure computers for schools

Julia — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 18:46:00 +0000

Posted by Tom Mills, Enterprise Director, Education

One of the many great promises of technology is its ability to help level the playing field in education. It can give students the tools and skills they need to prepare for work in a world where technology will be integrated in our lives. But few schools today have the opportunity to provide computers in every classroom, or access for every student. Budget cuts and limited resources at many schools are real challenges; but devices can be more affordable and valuable than you might think.

Google worked with IDC¹ on a sponsored white paper to quantify the value of Chromebooks for Education based on data from schools using Chromebooks. The key findings show promise for schools looking to implement technology without breaking their budget or asking teachers to serve as IT help desks.

Chromebooks require 69 percent less labor to install and 92 percent less labor to support, reducing the need to hire additional IT staff
Chromebooks reduce the per-device cost of ownership up to $935 over 3 years – a Chromebook deployed in school starts at $13.30 monthly

In addition to being affordable and easy for schools to manage, Chromebooks are also secure, fast and simple for students and teachers to get online and start collaborating using thousands of educational apps. They start up instantly, so they’re minimally disruptive to students when a great idea strikes (or when a teacher says “close your laptop”). They also have long battery life so creative minds aren’t tethered to a charger all day.

Teachers and administrators have told us that they have enjoyed knowledge sharing with other Chromebook schools around the country. In the spirit of expanding this community, we’d like to welcome a few of the newest members of the Chromebooks family:

Del Mar Union Elementary School District in California has implemented 700 Chromebooks in their eight elementary schools. This year 4-6 graders in two elementary schools have Chromebooks and the district plans to expand to all 4-6 grade students by next school year. Because Del Mar – one of the top-performing districts in the state – is focused on writing and the writing process to support “21st century skills” aligned with common core standards, they chose Google Docs as their primary curriculum tool. Docs allows students to easily share, communicate and collaborate on essays, responses to literature, and projects with their peers and teachers.

Milpitas Unified School District in California has purchased 1100 Chromebooks for students grades K-12. This year, Milpitas High School’s Digital Business Academy students have each been assigned their own Chromebook for the year that they are able to use in school and at home, replacing traditional textbooks. The district has also rolled out a true blended learning program in which elementary students rotate from a traditional classroom to a computer lab with Chromebooks throughout the day.

Lastly, we’d like to extend a warm welcome to Fort Sam Houston Independent School District in Texas, which will add 450 Chromebooks to students grades 9-12, the majority of whom are the children of military personnel living on the Fort Sam Houston Military Installation. And also to Chequamegon School District in Wisconsin, which has gone 1:1 with more than 380 Chromebooks in grades 4-8, including in their special education classroom, where students are engaging with educational web content such as YouTube and Khan Academy.

Learn more about how other districts and schools are harnessing the power of the Web in the classroom with Chromebooks for Education. Here’s to a happy, healthy, productive school year!

¹IDC White Paper sponsored by Google, "Quantifying the Economic Value of Chromebooks for K-12 Education," Doc #236459, August 2012.

Perry Ellis International brings their global team together with Google Apps

Julia — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 19:52:00 +0000

Posted by Ronen Lapidot, Senior Vice President of Information Technology, Perry Ellis International

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Ronen Lapidot, Senior Vice President of Information Technology at Perry Ellis International, a designer, distributor and licensor of apparel and accessories for men and women. Perry Ellis International joins other retail organizations in going Google. See what they have to say.

Far from a typical fashion house, our apparel spans a variety of categories including men’s and women’s clothing, accessories, children’s apparel, even evening gowns for the red carpet. In total, we manage a portfolio of some of the best known brands in fashion, including Perry Ellis®, Original Penguin®, Jantzen®, Laundry by Shelli Segal®, Nike® Swim, Callaway® and more. With 2,600 associates spanning across 65 store locations and 30 offices worldwide, we rely on technology to stay connected.

The increasingly fast-paced global economy of the past several years has made it even more important to be able to work together efficiently, act quickly and share information across the company to help us all understand the state of the business and act as one global team. We were using a popular, premise based email solution, but with so many offices around the world, we knew the only way to keep our brand fresh and our business agile was to move to the cloud.

With the help of Cloud Sherpas, we moved the entire company to Google Apps. Now our global teams are able to connect through Gmail’s video chat feature to meet “face to face” about upcoming projects, designs and merchandise. With so many offices in different time zones, it’s great to be able to give our associates the option to work where they’re comfortable, even if it’s just going home to have dinner with their families before a jumping on a video chat with colleagues in China or Indonesia. This has been especially helpful for offices with eight or ten hour time differences between them and has made us feel more like one cohesive team instead of siloed offices.

Being able to work together easily across offices not only brings the team closer together, it also saves significant time and costs. We recently opened two international offices in Indonesia and Bangladesh. Usually I travel to each location for weeks at a time to interview and hire employees and oversee the regional office openings. With Google Apps, we were able to interview job candidates via video chat and work with regional managers on important policies and resources that needed to be in place for these new offices and associates. I was elated to discover that what normally takes significant travel time and costs could be done right from my desk. I sat there amazed as I watched documents fill in with information from my colleagues across the world. I think that’s when I realized we were all going to be able to do things very differently, now that we were in the cloud.

A new way of doing things on campus

Julia — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 18:10:00 +0000

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Google Apps for Education Team

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog.)

Josh remembers the old days at college, when working on a group project meant trekking through the snow (uphill both ways, of course) to meet with his team in the library, followed by endless rounds of back-and-forth revisions (in red pen, no doubt). And by old days, he means last year. As Josh—a rising senior at Princeton University—heads back to campus this fall, he and his classmates will be getting a whole new experience with Google Apps for Education.

Princeton is just one of the many colleges and universities now using Google Apps. In fact, seven of the eight Ivy League universities and 72 of this year’s top 100 US Universities (as determined by 2013 U.S. News and World Report’s ranking) have gone Google, too.

We’re also welcoming 14 other new schools to the Google Apps for Education family, just in time for back-to-school:

Bates College
Carnegie Mellon University
Georgetown University
Princeton University
Rice University
Smith College
Stony Brook University
University of California, Berkeley
University of Colorado, Boulder
University of Dayton
University of Mississippi
University of Pennsylvania, School of Arts and Sciences
Vassar College
Virginia Tech

By going Google, students and teachers have access to a whole new way of doing things: They can better collaborate in and out of the classroom; office hours can be held via hangouts; e-portfolios can be created and maintained in a Google Site; professors can give real-time feedback in a Google document (no red pen necessary); and group projects can take place across continents instead of side-by-side in a library.

And this is just the beginning. As more schools go Google, we continue to be amazed by the creative ways students and teachers are using technology to work better together, and we’re looking forward to the surprises in store this school year.

Google spreadsheets, now with Discussions

Julia — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 16:35:00 +0000

Posted by Patrick Donelan, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted from the Google Drive blog.)

Getting things done with others would be much easier if everyone was sitting right next to you. But since that’s rarely the case, we’re always updating Google Drive to make it easier to collaborate with others, no matter where you are or who you’re with.

Today we’re bringing the discussion functionality that’s already in documents and presentations to spreadsheets. If a cell has a comment in it, you'll see an orange triangle in the upper right corner and when you hover over the cell you'll see the full discussion.

The total number of comments are also tallied up at the bottom of the screen on the sheet tab, and hovering over the comment icon shows all the comments on that sheet.

And just like you’re used to with comments elsewhere, you can +mention someone to automatically include them in a discussion and send them a notification via email – and they can even reply to the comment without leaving their inbox.

Any comments that were created in spreadsheets before today are still available and saved as “Notes”. These are shown in your spreadsheet using a black triangle in the corner of the cell to differentiate them from the new discussion-style comments. You can also create new notes from the “Insert” menu if you need to leave a quick annotation on a cell.

We hope discussions makes working in spreadsheets with others more fun and productive, and we look forward to making even more improvements to collaboration in Google Drive.

Helping to bring African universities online

Julia — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 21:53:00 +0000

Posted by Ego Obi, Program Manager – Google Apps Supporting Programs, Sub-Saharan Africa

Today, over 30 universities across Africa are partnering with Google to bring students, faculty and staff online to help them work better together. Through initiatives like the Google Apps Supporting Programs (GASP) and attendance at events like the 18th Conference of Commonwealth Education Ministers, Google is working with Sub-Saharan and South African universities to improve Internet access, strengthen campus infrastructure, and adopt Google Apps for Education through a combination of grants, technical consulting and training.

The GASP program is partnering with African universities in a variety of ways, including offering 65,000 University of Pretoria students (South Africa) a university Gmail account for life through Google Apps for Education. Makerere University Business School (MUBS) in Uganda also integrated Google Apps for Education into their core processes such as the payroll system, and Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) in Kenya, the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, and the University of Ghana adopted Google Apps for Education to improve cross-campus collaboration. And Inoorero University in Kenya extended their campus network infrastructure through grants and technical consulting offered through the GASP program.

At Google, we’re firm believers that we can work better together on the web. We’re excited to continue to partner with universities around the world to build out their infrastructure and get their students, faculty and staff online. Learn more about Google Apps Supporting Programs.

Summer Camp 2.0 – camping moves to the web

Julia — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 15:01:00 +0000

Posted by Anna Agishtein, Google Apps Team

Summer vacation is heading into the final stretch, but summer camps are still going strong. At the end of the summers that I spent as a camper, I always came home with new friendships and a renewed sense of confidence – not to mention a lifetime of memories. Here are three summer camps that use technology to make camp more accessible to more kids and create a memorable experience for their campers.

While outdoor adventures are fun, they’re not for everyone. SuperCamp is a camp that's more focused on the classroom, with programs for middle and high school students to increase their grades, confidence and motivation. While living on some of the nation’s most known university campuses like Stanford, Brown and Wake Forest, campers can improve their test taking and studying techniques, practice their writing, develop their communication skills, and more. Starting in 2001, founder Bobbi DePorter wanted to reach more parents whose kids who would benefit from their summer programs, so she turned to her husband Joe, who found that Google AdWords could do just that. Since using AdWords, Joe and Bobbi have seen a 37% increase in camp enrollment, translating to an average return of $14 from every $1 spent on AdWords. By transitioning from traditional marketing techniques to web tools, Bobbi and Joe have grown SuperCamp into a comprehensive program that spans four continents.

For younger kids interested in science and technology, there is a summer camp designed just for them. Ideaventions is a science and technology program in Virginia for kids ages three to thirteen. Husband and wife duo Ryan and Juliana Heitz founded the program in 2010 to encourage kids to pursue their passion for all-things science in a hands-on environment. As the couple personally invested in getting the camp up and running, they needed a cost-effective communications solution, which they found with Google Apps for Business. By choosing Google Apps, Ryan and Juliana save money on computer software, and they’re quickly and easily able to share lesson plans with employees through Google Docs. Managing everything in the cloud means that campers aren’t tied to a particular computer, so they can go back to their projects at any point in time. And parents like that they are able to login and engage with the content their kids are reading. Google Apps allows the Heitz’s to reallocate the time spent on back office work to working side-by-side with the kids.

MAKE magazine’s Maker Camp brought summer camp to the web this summer with a free, virtual DIY camp for teens. This online “summer camp” on Google+ encouraged 13- to 18-year-olds (as well as their parents and teachers) to get creative with up to 30 different types of fun projects themed around creativity and “the art of making.” From junk art robots to potato cannons, Maker camp counselors posted projects on the MAKE Google+ page and hosted Hangouts On Air with campers to review the day’s project and chat about tips and tricks. On Field Trip Fridays, participants get behind the scenes access at locations like the research and innovation lab at +Ford and +National Geographic. It was a wonderful way to connect with fellow campers around the world and to get inspiration for new project ideas.

Google tools give these summer camps new ways to communicate, collaborate, grow and stay focused on what matters the most: the campers. See you around the campfire!

Palo Alto Library pioneers a Chromebooks check-out program

Julia — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 16:40:00 +0000

Posted by Monique le Conge, Department Director, Palo Alto Library

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Monique le Conge, Department Director for the Palo Alto Library, a municipal library funded by the City of Palo Alto, California. Join Monique on September 12th at 1pm PST for a webinar via Google+ Hangout On Air to learn how you can replicate these successes at your organization and ask her questions directly during a live Q&A.

The Palo Alto Library has been providing our community with resources to enrich lives since the early 1890’s. With five libraries located at the heart of Silicon Valley, we witness the role technology plays in advancing life-long education, and we actively make it our mission to facilitate learning in the community by providing the latest tools. In an effort to abide to by our mission, we launched a Chromebooks lending program in November 2011, becoming one of the first libraries to do so.

We launched the Chromebooks program after piloting a few of the devices as an alternative to the laptop lending program that we developed more than five years ago. The old laptop program gave library patrons the ability to use laptops in one of our branches for up to two hours. While it was helpful for some, the program didn’t provide our library patrons with the time and flexibility they needed to explore the Web. Additionally, the administration was concerned about the security of patrons storing local files on the machines.

Today, members of our community, both young and old, are able to check out one of our 60 Chromebooks and take it home for up to seven days to research material for school reports, educate themselves on health matters, or simply watch videos. The possibilities are endless.

What’s great about the Chromebooks is that they are simple for our patrons to use, regardless of their technology experience, and they’re small enough for anyone to easily carry. Users can save their documents and favorite apps to their Google accounts, so that they can retrieve their information at another time from any Chromebook they check out or from any device running Chrome – like an iPhone or Android tablet. And all user data is wiped out after individual use, protecting each user’s privacy. But perhaps my favorite thing about the Chromebooks is that they don’t require any manual software updates or maintenance. Due to shrinking budgets and reduced library staff, IT maintenance is something we pay close attention to when providing new technologies to our patrons, and the Chromebook program has been a breeze to manage.

Our lending program has become so popular that we are expanding the program to include all of the library branches in the coming year. We’ve also received several phone calls from other library systems who are interested in adopting a Chromebooks lending program. We’re thrilled to be able to provide members of our community with Chromebooks because we know they’ll be able to use a Chromebook to grow and learn no matter what their level of technology experience is.

Genesis Medical Education Consultants gives Google Apps and Chromebooks an A+

Julia — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 16:41:00 +0000

Posted by Richard Birdsall, Co-founder and Co-owner, Genesis Medical Education Consultants

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Richard Birdsall, the co-founder and co-owner of Genesis Medical Education Consultants, a continuing education provider offering state of the art courses to California's health care professionals, headquartered in Orange County, CA. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Since 2007, Genesis Medical Education Consultants has provided continuing education for California health care professionals in a safe, professional, and hands-on environment. For an industry that prides itself on being at the forefront of technology, it seems that many healthcare education providers are still behind the times. My mother and co-owner, Shari, and I saw this as an opportunity to set ourselves apart from existing companies.

We started using Google Apps for Business when we opened shop, and it has not only helped us keep pace with companies that have been around for years, but to outperform in multiple areas. We use Google Docs to assemble faculty schedules, create student rosters, and draft manuals and course syllabi. Google Drive ensures every file is available from anywhere we sign in, and all of these materials are easily shared with our instructors. Calendar helps keep us all organized, and we even post a schedule of classes on our website, making it easily visible to both our current students and potential students. With three full time employees, we could customize the exact size of the services we needed with Google as opposed to a one-size-fits-all approach many companies have – all at a very small fee.

In addition to Google Apps, we have two Chromebooks in our office, which we find incredibly easy to use and dependable. Before we had the Chromebooks, teaching at other facilities would keep us offline for the entire day – our old PCs were too clunky to take with us and didn’t have 3G access. Chromebooks changed all that. Now, we’re able to take our Chromebooks with us to any location and get connected in seconds, and we’re able to check email and interact with our students and any time. Chromebooks also save us a ton of money since we don’t have purchase additional software – a savings sent directly back to our students. We are able to charge a fraction of the price as the other guys due to a reduced overhead. And I've saved so much time not having to update every program on our computers since it updates on its own!

With a marriage of Chromebooks and Google Apps, our productivity on back-office processes has increased by at least 40-50%. We’re enrolling new and returning students every day and plan to open another facility in San Francisco next year. As we expand, we plan to purchase more Chromebooks, which we will give to our instructors to use in and out of the classroom. Without a doubt, in helping us establish our business and continue to compete with other companies, Google Apps for Business and Chromebooks ace the test.

Google Apps domain registration has gone global

Julia — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 17:21:00 +0000

Posted by Hugues Vincent, Google Apps team

A country code top-level domain (ccTLD) such as .com.es or .jp helps companies build a local footprint on the web, and ccTLD support is one of the most-requested features for Google Apps. We’re delighted to announce that today – thanks to a partnership with domaindiscount24.com – that we now offer 30 top-level domain (TLD) options, including 22 ccTLDs, with prices starting at $8 per year.

Now, businesses that wish to sign up for Google Apps but don’t yet have a domain name have plenty of local options to choose from during sign-up. Your new domain comes configured with all Google Apps services, including Gmail for your custom email addresses (@yourcompany.com). Your domain will be registered with domaindiscount24.com.

Here is the full list of TLDs now available when you sign up for Google Apps:

Global	Asia-Pacific	Latin America	Europe
.com	.in	.co	.be
.info	.co.in	.com.co	.ch
.org	.org.in	.com.mx	.cz
.net	.net.in	.mx	.de
.mobi	.co.nz		.es
.biz	.com.tw		.com.es
.name	.jp		.me
.cc			.nl
.tv			.pl

We hope this gives new Google Apps customers more flexibility in their domain registration to help boost their local presence on the web.

Editors note: domaindiscount24.com is a member of the KeyDrive Group. All registrars of the KeyDrive Group manage together more than 6 million domains for more than 300,000 customers worldwide.

A financial perspective on moving to the cloud

Julia — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 17:45:00 +0000

Posted by Alandha Scott, Google Apps Team

Editors note: Chief Financial Officers are key decision-makers in any organization’s move to the cloud. For a financial perspective on cloud computing such as Google Apps for Business, visit our United States and Europe websites or download the research reports.

We often hear from CIOs and IT leaders about the benefits they've seen since moving their organizations to the cloud. The role of the CFO in this decision is sometimes overlooked, but it's an important one.

We wanted to learn more about what CFOs consider to be the benefits of moving to the cloud, as well as their concerns. We recently surveyed over 800 CFOs in the United States and Europe, and we learned that almost 81% of our U.S. respondents say that they think completely implementing cloud technology would improve employee productivity, and 71% say it would reduce the time required to bring new products and services to market. In fact, in Europe 67% have adopted or are making plans to adopt cloud computing and 52% of American CFOs surveyed say their companies always include cloud-based systems in their IT decision-making processes.

Some of the benefits CFOs highlight include significant capital and operational savings, better security, and productivity gains that come from the ability to work from any device or together with others using tools like Google Docs. In our webcast, even self-described "archetypal CFOs" highlighted their hopes for improved productivity when employees can work from home or elsewhere, as well as reduced costs when moving to a service model. Furthermore, 69% of surveyed CFOs in Europe believe that cloud computing increases the IT department’s ability to innovate.

But it’s not just this research that shows how CFOs can benefit from adopting cloud technology. Since adopting Google Apps for Business, Milwaukee-based Journal Communications' VP of Finance has used Google spreadsheets to do his company’s acquisition models and financial reporting, saving time and ensuring that decisions are made with team input and the most up-to-date information.

Announcing Google App Engine education awards

Julia — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 17:33:00 +0000

Posted by the Google App Engine Team

(Cross-posted on the Google App Engine blog.)

In addition to the startups and businesses we frequently highlight on our blog, we have seen educational institutions and their students build amazing applications, using Google App Engine as a platform for teaching and groundbreaking research.

Earlier this year we announced funding for researchers looking to use App Engine for scientific discovery. Today we are introducing the Google App Engine Education Awards to foster continued innovation from educational institutions in areas outside of research. Through this program we are inviting faculty members, initially from the United States, to submit proposals for using App Engine for their course development, educational research, university tools or for student projects. A selection of the proposals we receive will receive $1,000 in App Engine credits to assist in making the proposal a reality.

App Engine allows you to build scalable applications using the same technology that powers Google’s global-scale web applications. With no hardware to setup, App Engine makes it simple to learn how to write a simple web application or to build an application that handles millions of hits a day. If you haven’t already tried App Engine, we encourage you to download the SDK, follow the Getting Started Guide and take advantage of our free tier to deploy your first application.

If you teach at an accredited college, university or community college in the United States, we encourage you to apply. You can submit a proposal by filling out this form. Applications must be received by midnight PST August 31, 2012.

Want to do more with Google Apps? Tap into a community of over 6,000 experts.

Julia — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 17:08:00 +0000

Posted by Prajesh Parekh, Google Apps Reseller Team

While Google Apps for Business is built for simplicity, many businesses and organizations have found a way to go beyond the basics with Google Apps. How? These companies have taken advantage of the expertise of a Google Apps Reseller. Google Apps Resellers have invested people, time, and resources into becoming an expert on and providing specialized services for Google Apps – so you don’t have to.

When should you engage a Google Apps Reseller? Here are some ways that Resellers have assisted businesses to date:

Assessing the initial move to cloud-based solutions
Helping set up and manage Google Apps
Training employees to fully explore and use the many features of Google Apps
Data, data, data – migrating data, implementing data policies, managing storage with Google Drive, and more
Integrating Google Apps with other business applications
And more, including support, network and security management, and building Google Sites

This community has grown to over 6,000 resellers, serving businesses, government agencies, and educational institutions around the world. Our resellers have always been the trusted face of your relationship with Google Apps, managing everything from billing to your support needs. Within the community is a set of Google Apps Premier Resellers. These experts have proven an exceptional level of success helping Google Apps customers, and they have staff who are officially certified in deploying Google Apps. We named one Premier Reseller, Cloud Sherpas, Partner of the Year earlier this year for their track record and strong customer references.

Want to get connected with a Google Apps expert? Let us know and we’ll put you in touch.

A new future: hitting “Refresh” on business technology

Julia — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 19:30:00 +0000

Posted by Amit Singh, Vice President, Google Enterprise

Over the last two months I had the opportunity to spend time with hundreds of CIOs as we took Atmosphere – our annual cloud event – to 20 cities globally. What I heard from them boiled down to one simple idea: they’re looking for a better way to do things. Their employees want to work in collaborative environments without being tethered to their desks, and their IT departments are eager to shift resources from maintaining old technology to developing new ones.

These business leaders have experienced the power of living in the cloud and they want to bring that experience to the workplace. The cloud has certainly transformed my life by allowing my family to stay connected from all around the world. For example, at the São Paolo Atmosphere event, I joined a Google+ Hangout from my Android phone to wish my dad a happy birthday. This magic doesn’t need to be constrained to our personal lives. After all, we’re the same person at home and at work, and we like having access to the same devices and tools regardless.

A fundamental shift...
There was a time when business technology was at the forefront of innovation and productivity. Industries began to standardize around certain platforms that automated an individual’s work. But with complicated enterprise agreements, customer lock-in and limited competition, business technology lost its edge. IT professionals stopped innovating and relied on a handful of vendors who designed bloated software that was released every few years. At the same time, consumer technology took off. With the power of massive data centers, modern browsers and smart mobile devices at their fingertips, people found it easier than ever to communicate, create, and collaborate. Many people have fallen in love with the simplicity and freedom of these services, and they want to use them everywhere.

…to working in the future
This is where Google comes in. To provide a seamless transition from home to work (and back to home), we extended our popular consumer products–like Gmail and Google Drive–to meet the needs of businesses. For instance, Google Apps for Business provides an additional layer of enterprise features like delegated mailboxes, granular administrative controls, a 99.9% SLA, 24x7 support, migration tools, and an ecosystem of certified resellers.

We’ve also applied the same formula to other products that were born in the cloud: Google Maps Coordinate helps companies easily manage mobile workers; Chrome for Business gives you a consistent, personalized web experience on any device; Google App Engine lets you to build and host your own applications in the cloud; and Google Compute Engine allows you to rent Google’s infrastructure to operate at scale. With each of these offerings, you can access the latest innovation by clicking “refresh” in your browser.

We’re humbled that 5 million businesses (including BBVA and Roche), 66 of the top 100 U.S. universities, and government institutions in 45 of the 50 U.S. states have gone Google by choosing Google Apps to live and work in the cloud. We hear from these customers that alongside improving IT administration and individual productivity, Google Apps also helps teams of employees work better together. For example, Google documents let users collaborate in real-time and see each other’s edits as they happen. And now, with offline editing, users can continue working even without an internet connection.

As people have begun to embrace the cloud, some legacy enterprise vendors have started to offer their own cloud-labeled offerings. They claim to offer a bridge between legacy solutions and the cloud. But these offerings still rely on desktop products and on-premise servers, require heavy IT investment, have limited support for mobile devices, come with complicated pricing and licences–and ultimately they’re still focused on individual productivity. If anything, they offer a bridge to the past.

With the explosion of computing devices, ubiquitous high-speed internet, and mobile workforces, there’s a fundamental shift happening in business. The question is: do you want to cross a bridge to continue working in the past...or move to the cloud so you can live and work seamlessly in the future?

Get started with Google Apps or collaborate in real-time today with literary masters: Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Poe and more.

Gmail log search feature enhances visibility for domain admins

Julia — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 15:00:00 +0000

Posted by Priya Mathew, Google Apps Senior Strategist

Google Apps domain admins have access to a new tool – Gmail log search – that increases visibility into their email traffic. This feature in the Apps control panel allows domain admins to search through the Gmail delivery logs to investigate email delivery and traffic questions. Many domain admins have requested a self-service tool like this, and Gmail log search will make it easier to answer questions like: What happened to an inbound or outbound message? Was a message sent to my domain and marked as spam? Which users sent or received a specific message?

The information that is available in the log search feature includes:

Basic message information like Sender, Recipient, Subject, Date and Message-ID
Attachment size
Total transit time
Delivery status

This Gmail log search feature was built using Google BigQuery, a Google Cloud Platform product that allows developers to store and query large amounts of data. We chose BigQuery because it can analyze multi-terabyte data sets with billions of headers to deliver precise results in just a few seconds. Gmail log search will help domain admins have the same type of visibility into the operations of Google Apps that they are used to from the legacy, on-premise email systems.

Gmail log search will be available starting today to Google Apps for Business, Education and Government customers, and will roll out to all domains over the next few weeks. Learn more about the feature in the Google Apps Help Center.

Google Compute Engine: Computing without limits

Julia — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 18:01:00 +0000

Posted by Craig McLuckie, Product Manager, Google Compute Engine

(Cross-posted from the Google Developers Blog.)

Over the years, Google has built some of the most high performing, scalable and efficient data centers in the world by constantly refining our hardware and software. Since 2008, we've been working to open up our infrastructure to outside developers and businesses so they can take advantage of our cloud as they build applications and websites and store and analyze data. So far this includes products like Google App Engine, Google Cloud Storage, and Google BigQuery.

Today, in response to many requests from developers and businesses, we're going a step further. We're introducing Google Compute Engine, an Infrastructure-as-a-Service product that lets you run Linux Virtual Machines (VMs) on the same infrastructure that powers Google. This goes beyond just giving you greater flexibility and control; access to computing resources at this scale can fundamentally change the way you think about tackling a problem.

Google Compute Engine offers:

Scale. At Google we tackle huge computing tasks all the time, like indexing the web, or handling billions of search queries a day. Using Google's data centers, Google Compute Engine reduces the time to scale up for tasks that require large amounts of computing power. You can launch enormous compute clusters - tens of thousands of cores or more.

Performance. Many of you have learned to live with erratic performance in the cloud. We have built our systems to offer strong and consistent performance even at massive scale. For example, we have sophisticated network connections that ensure consistency. Even in a shared cloud you don’t see interruptions; you can tune your app and rely on it not degrading.

Value. Computing in the cloud is getting even more appealing from a cost perspective. The economy of scale and efficiency of our data centers allows Google Compute Engine to give you 50% more compute for your money than with other leading cloud providers. You can see pricing details here.

The capabilities of Google Compute Engine include:

Compute. Launch Linux VMs on-demand. 1, 2, 4 and 8 virtual core VMs are available with 3.75GB RAM per virtual core.

Storage. Store data on local disk, on our new persistent block device, or on our Internet-scale object store, Google Cloud Storage.

Network. Connect your VMs together using our high-performance network technology to form powerful compute clusters and manage connectivity to the Internet with configurable firewalls.

Tooling. Configure and control your VMs via a scriptable command line tool or web UI. Or you can create your own dynamic management system using our API.

At launch, we have worked with a number of partners - such as RightScale, Puppet Labs, OpsCode, Numerate, Cliqr and MapR - to integrate their products with Google Compute Engine. These partners offer management services that make it easy for you to move your applications to the cloud and between different cloud environments.

You can learn more about Google Compute Engine here. We’re going to pace ourselves and start with Google Compute Engine in limited preview (sign up here), but our goal is to give you all the pieces you need to build anything you want in the cloud. Whether you need a platform like Google App Engine, or virtual machines like Google Compute Engine, these days, you define your limits. We’re just at the start of what the cloud can do.

In schools, all you need is web

Julia — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Posted by Vidya Nagarajan, Product Manager, Chromebooks for Education

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog.)

While students in the northern hemisphere say goodbye to each other and another school year, we’re in sunny San Diego meeting with thousands of educators and administrators at the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference. While on break from teaching, these folks are here to teach others how they’re bringing innovation into their classrooms—a lot of which centers around the web.

While the web was developed well before today’s students were born, it’s come a long way even since a year ago. Today you can access the web on any device, use the web offline and take advantage of amazing graphics. For example, you can get a powerful graphing calculator on the web today, for free.

It’s been really amazing to see how the web is impacting schools. We’ve heard great real-world stories about Google Apps for Education, but lately we’re hearing more and more about schools extending the functionality of Google Apps with educational apps available on the Chrome Web Store. There are tens of thousands of apps in the Chrome Web Store, and today we’re adding some new ones: ST Math, VoiceThread and Acheive3000.

To give you an idea of what’s possible on the web: Leyden High School District from Illinois is rolling out Chromebooks to their 3,500 students and are using apps like WeVideo, EasyBib, Vernier Labquest2, SlideRocket, Geogebra and Pearson’s OpenClass as part of their 1-to-1 learning initiative.

Students at East Leyden High School work together on their Chromebooks. Photo credit: East Leyden Art Teacher Anna Reed.

Chromebooks as a tool for 1-to-1 learning
It’s great to see that many schools are choosing Chromebooks as an effective and affordable 1-to-1 education tool. There are more than 500 districts in the U.S. and Europe actively using Chromebooks, and today we’re pleased to welcome a few more to the community, including Rockingham Country Schools, N.C., Transylvania County Schools, N.C., and Fond du Lac School District, Wis.

Chromebooks are always new—just last month we announced new devices, an updated, app-centric user interface and new pricing for schools. Chromebooks also make it just as easy for administrators to distribute 10, 100 or 1,000 Chromebooks, saving precious summer vacation time previously spent installing software and policies on computers. And great news for schools looking to make hardware purchases: the PARCC and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortia confirmed Chromebooks meet hardware and operating system requirements for student assessments in the 2014-2015 school year.

Applications for education
Today at ISTE, we are introducing some new features for schools using Chromebooks that make it even easier to find, use, install and manage web apps for your entire school:

Grade-level application packs are groups of Chrome Web Store apps that integrate tightly with Google’s suite of Apps for Education, divided by grade levels to meet different classroom needs. These packs are installable from the Chromebook management console. Many of them are free and we’ve worked with the app makers to offer discounts for bulk purchases.
Organization-specific web app collections in the Chrome Web Store give administrators the ability to recommend apps to students, teachers and staff. The collection is visible only to the school, and admins can curate apps from the Chrome Web Store, application packs and web apps purchased elsewhere or private apps developed by the school. (This feature is also available to Chromebooks for Business customers from the control panel.)

We’ve enjoyed being a part of ISTE the past several years, and always look forward to hearing about new ways that students and teachers are using the web to do amazing things. (If you’re at the conference, come see us at booth 2603 and listen to or share a story!)

School of Rock tops the charts with Google Apps for Business and Chromebooks

Julia — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 17:46:00 +0000

Posted by Evan Trent, Vice President of Digital Strategy and Technology, School of Rock

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Evan Trent, Vice President of Digital Strategy and Technology at School of Rock, a national music program headquartered in Burr Ridge, Illinois. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

For more than a decade, School of Rock has been inspiring kids to rock on stage and in life. We offer music lessons on guitar, bass, piano, vocals and drums in a performance-based environment at over 90 company-owned and franchised schools in the U.S. and Mexico. Our goal is to inspire our students to learn, motivate them to excel, and, as a result, help them to gain confidence.

We’ve been growing rapidly in recent years, primarily been through franchising. We ran Microsoft® Exchange for years, but as the number of franchise schools continued to grow, we found it more and more difficult to offer a simple start-up process and manage and deliver remote support. We needed to move to a web-based solution that didn’t require multiple installations, software updates, and desktop support. After researching a few different options, we found Google Apps for Business had the tools we needed to rock on. We also found that many of our franchisees were already big fans of Google products and were using them outside of School of Rock.

We began the transition to Google Apps in January 2012 through our implementation partner, Cloud Sherpas. The migration was straightforward, and Cloud Sherpas offered training sessions for our employees and franchise partners to ensure a seamless transition. Google Apps completely transformed how we work with our franchisees and how each location works together as a team. Sharing information with students, faculty and parents has become much easier with Google Docs and Google Groups. We also find Google’s mobile-friendly approach in tune with our younger and more mobile employees.

Since we struck an amazing chord with Google Apps, we also decided to rethink our PC-based culture. We no longer wanted to deal with the administrative overhead and the security and reliability issues that came with traditional PCs. So in March, we deployed Google Chromebooks to about one quarter of our locations, and we’ve been rolling them out to increasingly more schools. We use them for just about everything, from accounting to video conferencing to putting on shows. The Chromebooks are extremely fast, require zero support, are easy to manage across multiple remote locations, and they cost only a few hundred dollars each. They’ve also been incredibly helpful for those of us who travel often since the battery life often lasts much longer than our previous PCs and they have built-in 3G access.

Google Apps for Business and Chromebooks have greatly reduced the time, money and energy our franchisees need to invest in technology, and that’s music to our ears.

Energy efficiency in the cloud

Julia — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Posted by Urs Hoelzle, Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure

(Cross-posted on the Google Green Blog.)

At Google, we’re obsessed with building energy efficient data centers that enable cloud computing. Besides helping you be more productive, cloud-based services like Google Apps can reduce energy use, lower carbon emissions and save you money in the process. Last year, we crunched the numbers and found that Gmail is up to 80 times more energy-efficient than running traditional in-house email. We’ve sharpened our pencils again to see how Google Apps as a whole—documents, spreadsheets, email and other applications—stacks up against the standard model of locally hosted services. Our results show that a typical organization can achieve energy savings of about 65-85% by migrating to Google Apps.

Lower energy use results in less carbon pollution and more energy saved for organizations. That’s what happened at the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), which recently switched approximately 17,000 employees to Google Apps for Government. We found that the GSA was able to reduce server energy consumption by nearly 90% and carbon emissions by 85%. That means the GSA will save an estimated $285,000 annually on energy costs alone, a 93% cost reduction.

How is the cloud so energy efficient? It’s all about reducing energy use for servers and server cooling. Here’s how it works:

A typical organization has a lot more servers than it needs—for backup, failures and spikes in demand for computing. Cloud-based service providers like Google aggregate demand across thousands of people, substantially increasing how much servers are utilized. And our data centers use equipment and software specially designed to minimize energy use. The cloud can do the same work much more efficiently than locally hosted servers.

In fact, according to a study by the Carbon Disclosure Project, by migrating to the cloud, companies with over $1 billion in revenues in the U.S. and Europe could achieve substantial reductions in energy costs and carbon emissions by 2020:

US companies could save $12.3 billion and up to 85.7 million metric tonnes of CO2

UK companies would save £1.2 billion and more than 9.2 million metric tonnes of CO2

French companies could save nearly €700 million and 1.2 million metric tonnes of CO2

We’ve built efficient data centers all over the world, even designing them in ways that make the best use of the natural environment, and we continue working to improve their performance. We think using the super-efficient cloud to deliver services like Google Apps can be part of the solution towards a more energy efficient future.

Google Apps for Business helps Pratt Industries save time and money, while it saves the environment

Julia — Wed, 16 May 2012 18:38:00 +0000

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Juan Merelo, technical services manager at Pratt Industries, America’s 6th largest recycled paper and packaging company headquartered in Conyers, Georgia. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

At Pratt Industries, we’re all about recycling, and we take pride in playing such a big role in maintaining a healthy environment. Every day, we collect thousands of pounds of paper from cities, schools and supermarkets across the country to create recycled packaging. More than 3,500 employees in 70 locations nationwide work together to make this happen, and we rely on technology to keep our operation organized and running smoothly.

In 2009, we ran into some problems when our Microsoft® Exchange server started failing. Since email is a critical communication channel for our business, we had to find a quick solution. We wanted a stable cloud-based network that would help us run our business more efficiently. The 99.9% uptime and cost savings associated with Google Apps made it a clear choice. And it’s a good thing we decided to switch because shortly after we signed up for Google Apps, our Microsoft® server unexpectedly crashed and we were forced to migrate all our employees immediately. In less than three days, we were able to set up nearly 2,000 Google Apps accounts, a task we thought would take weeks.

Google Docs has also saved us time and money – and helps us get things done more quickly. When parts of Alabama were hit by tornadoes, one of our mills went offline. To get the facility back up, we needed an IT person on the ground. I had to drive several hours and spend valuable time to fix the network. After the tornado, we used Google Docs to sketch out plans for restoring our systems. Now, if a facility goes down, we can easily share step-by-step instructions and photos with on-site employees to rebuild the network. And because we use Google Docs to share these instructions, they can access the plans on any device with an Internet connection.

More recently, we had to change network circuits at 60 of our plant facilities. Previously, we would fly an engineer to each location to gather critical data for the changeover. Now we’re able to coordinate the project remotely with shared spreadsheets in Google Docs. We provided on-site contractors with secure access to our spreadsheets, so they could collect and organize data at our facilities. Google Docs saved us two months of work and close to $60,000 in engineering costs, and we collected more accurate data because it was input directly at the project site.

Google Apps has given us new ways to make our business significantly more efficient. I’m constantly amazed at the ways our employees are using the products, and I’m looking forward to seeing even more innovative uses.

Find facts and do research inside Google Documents

Julia — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:23:00 +0000

Posted by Sarveshwar Duddu, Software Engineer

Cross-posted on the Google Docs blog.

Today we’re introducing the research pane—a new feature that brings the web’s wealth of information to you as you’re writing documents.

The research pane taps into Google Search directly from Google documents, so whether you want to add a cool destination to your itinerary for an upcoming trip to India or you're looking for the perfect presidential quote for a political science paper, you don’t even have to open a new tab.

You can access the research pane from the Tools menu by right clicking on a selected word that you want to learn more about, or by pressing Ctrl+Alt+R on Windows or Cmd+Alt+R on Mac. From the research pane, you can search for whatever info you need to help you write your document. With just a couple clicks you can look up maps, quotes, images, and much more.

If you find something you like, you can add it by clicking the insert button or, for images, by dragging them directly into your document. If appropriate we’ll automatically add a footnote citation so there’s a record of where you found the info.

Hopefully bringing knowledge from the web to Google documents will make your writing process just a little bit more efficient.

Sperry Van Ness goes Google

Julia — Thu, 03 May 2012 15:56:00 +0000

Posted by Kevin Maggiacomo, CEO of Sperry Van Ness

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Kevin Maggiacomo, CEO of Sperry Van Ness, one of the largest commercial real estate advisory firms in the world. They employ over 1,400 advisors and staff in more than 150 markets. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

As CEO of Sperry Van Ness, I’m constantly looking for ways to improve the work our 1,400-strong workforce does and how we do it. Implementing Google Apps across the entire organization allowed us to bring efficiency to an industry that isn’t traditionally known for being collaborative or efficient. Google Apps helped us solve workflow bottlenecks and process inefficiencies to move us beyond best practices to next practices. It has been a huge win for us.

There’s an old saying related to technology that “usability drives adoptability.” Getting everyone transitioned onto a single platform can be a challenge for any organization, but the learning curve for Google Apps was almost non-existent. Since all our tools -- Docs, Sites, Calendar, Gmail and more -- are all easy to access, they smoothly and seamlessly became part of our operating culture. Our entire organization went from implementation to total adoption in less than 30 days.

Creating a culture of teamwork and collaboration has been a key driver of our business model for years – it was just more difficult and costly prior to using Google Apps. Aside from email, chat, and conferencing, Google Sites allowed us to quickly replace our intranet. Additionally, Google Docs gives us an easy and secure way to collaborate on documents in real-time throughout the entire sales process.

In addition to the efficiency and productivity gains, the cost savings was a driver in our decision to use Google Apps. By moving our platform to the cloud, we dramatically reduced the cost and complexity of our IT infrastructure in favor of a system that’s faster and more robust. The frosting on the Google Apps cake is that we’ve been able to eliminate dependency on Microsoft products, allowing us to grow and scale faster. The discussions we used to have about platform scalability and synchronization have faded away, allowing us to spend more time on our business.

With great confidence, I can say that implementing Google Apps can resolve many of the workflow management, collaboration, and process automation issues that companies still struggle with -- it did so for Sperry Van Ness.

Google BigQuery brings Big Data analytics to all businesses

Julia — Tue, 01 May 2012 17:05:00 +0000

Posted by Ju-Kay Kwek, Product Manager, BigQuery

Cross-posted on the Google Developers Blog.

BigQuery enables businesses and developers to gain real-time business insights from massive amounts of data without any upfront hardware or software investments. Imagine a big pharmaceutical company optimizing daily marketing spend using worldwide sales and advertisement data. Or think of a small online retailer that makes product recommendations based on user clicks. Today, we are making BigQuery publicly available, an important milestone in our effort to bring Big Data analytics to all businesses via the cloud.

Since announcing BigQuery in limited preview last November, many businesses and developers have started using it for real-time Big Data analytics in the cloud. Claritics, a social and mobile analytics company, built a web application for game developers to gain real-time insights into user behavior. Crystalloids, an Amsterdam-based analytics firm, built a cloud-based application to help a resort network analyze customer reservations, optimize marketing and maximize revenue. This just scratches the surface of use cases for BigQuery.

BigQuery is accessible via a simple UI or REST interface. It lets you take advantage of Google’s massive compute power, store as much data as needed and pay only for what you use. Your data is protected with multiple layers of security, replicated across multiple data centers and can be easily exported.

Developers and businesses can sign up for BigQuery online and query up to 100 GB of data per month for free. See our introductory pricing plan for storing and querying datasets of up to 2 TB. If you need more than that, contact a sales representative.

We hope you'll be able to gain real-time business insights using BigQuery. Share your BigQuery use cases and feedback in our user forums or on our Enterprise G+ page.

Google Apps for Business helps keep business flowing at Pure Energy

Julia — Tue, 01 May 2012 14:41:00 +0000

Posted by Zachary Curry, Manager of Information Systems at Pure Energy Services Ltd.

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Zachary Curry, Manager of Information Systems at Pure Energy Services Ltd., a publicly traded oilfield services company headquartered in Calgary. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Since 2001, Pure Energy has provided equipment and services for oil- and gas-producing companies in Canada and the U.S. In recent years we’ve grown nearly 20% per year, and today Pure Energy employs over 1,500 people based in our corporate offices and at more than 20 field locations. With 90% of our staff working outside of our corporate office, we needed a system that could better manage our expansion, easily accommodate new users and provide access to our staff in the field.

Using Google Apps helped transform some of our internal processes, allowing us to work more efficiently. Our business requires a lot of safety and task documentation, and each employee in the field must complete training for hundreds of tasks. Even though we’ve implemented multiple systems to help manage these tasks, there were still operational gaps and paper-based processes. Google Docs helped us simplify the tedious and time consuming task of managing these processes and tasks. Now that we’re moving the majority of our documentation to Docs, our station managers can more easily provide up-to-date information to their field staff and our corporate executives in shared files. In certain business units, we’ve also started to use Google Forms to track job training completion for each employee, making it easy for station managers to see exactly which employees can complete certain jobs at a glance.

Google Apps Scripts has helped us streamline our equipment utilization tracking processes. In the past, our corporate office had to compile 20 individual spreadsheets sent in from our field locations that was then manually inputted into a single spreadsheet. By the time the main corporate spreadsheet was updated, the information was usually out of date and therefore largely irrelevant for decision making purposes. Using Apps Scripts, we now get real-time updates of our equipment utilization through automatic email notifications to our managers at corporate office, saving us time in completing this important operational task.

With a growing company, particularly one that’s as geographically dispersed as ours, it’s important to have a dependable and easy-to-use Information System in place. Google Apps has helped us streamline numerous internal processes all while keeping us connected and collaborating efficiently.

Sompo Japan Goes Google

Julia — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 05:49:00 +0000

Posted by: Akihito Fujii, Google Apps Team, Japan

Google Apps has customers all over the world from Spain to Canada, and today we’re bringing you news from Japan. Sompo Japan Insurance Inc. announced that they’re moving all 30,000 employees to Google Apps by May 2013, becoming the largest Google Apps customer in Japan to date. Sompo is the largest property and casualty insurance company in Japan, operating 700 offices across 28 countries. Through a network of 45,000 agencies, they help a large base of customers with damage insurance, life insurance, and asset management.

Using Google Apps, Sompo will make strengthening its internal communication the centerpiece of their strategy, which will be critical for their planned merger with Nippon Koa Insurance in early 2014. Additionally, Google Apps will make it easier for employees to work remotely, stay connected to overseas offices, and seamlessly communicate using mobile devices.