Google Enterprise Blog

Celebrating entrepreneurship with Chrome business apps

2013-06-18T14:35:00.001-07:00

Posted by Bonny Lau, Product Manager, Chrome for Business and Education

Editor's note: As part of our series focused on celebrating National Small Business Week, we are featuring stories, tools and resources that can help small businesses grow and innovate.

American entrepreneurs have good reason to celebrate this week -- it’s National Small Business Week. Entrepreneurs all over the world, like you, have a knack for wearing many hats, being scrappy and spotting new opportunities. And the tools you use should be intuitive, scale quickly and easily, and offer ubiquitous accessibility.

Luckily, many business web apps today are perfect for small and growing businesses. Accounting apps are intuitive enough to be used by someone without a CPA. Managing customers comes with pricing that scales as your business grows. And your social media management and email campaign tools can work with each other via clever APIs. Best of all, you and your team can use these web apps anywhere, from any computer.

In honor of National Small Business Week, we’re featuring a curated list of some of our favorite business apps and extensions from the Chrome Web Store. The Gmail and Google Drive Chrome apps let you access your mail and documents even when you’re offline. And with Chrome extensions like HootSuite’s Hootlet and Zendesk Activity Stream, you can monitor your social media stream and your customer service issues at the same time, because -- well, that’s just what entrepreneurs do every day.

You need tools that work just as hard as you do. Thanks to the web, it’s easier than ever to discover the apps that fit your specific needs. If you’re on the lookout for new ways to simplify, manage, or grow your business, check out these business apps from the Chrome Web Store. And if your team isn’t on Chrome already, learn more about the security, speed and manageability of Chrome for Business.

18 New Languages for Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides

2013-06-18T12:05:00.002-07:00

Posted by Ian Hill, Project Manager, Google Localization

(Cross-posted on the Google Drive Blog.)

Google Drive lets you store and access your files anywhere -- on the web, your computer, your phone, or on the go. Whether you’re presenting slides in a boardroom in São Paulo or negotiating a Japanese contract in Tokyo, Google Drive speaks your language: 65 of them, to be exact, with the addition of 18 new ones today:

Afrikaans, Amharic, Basque, Chinese (Hong Kong), Estonian, French (Canada), Galician, Icelandic, Khmer, Lao, Malaysian, Nepali, Persian, Sinhalese, Spanish (Latin America), Swahili, Urdu, Zulu

You can switch back and forth as often as you like, and many of these languages are also supported by Drive’s spellchecker.

Love to collaborate? No matter which Drive app you’re using -- Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms -- you can work in real time in any language you choose while your fellow collaborators use another language.

To try Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides in another language, you can switch by:

Clicking the gear icon in the upper right, then select Settings.
Under General, select a language from the drop-down menu in the Language section.
Click Save. You’re done!

To change the language for Google Drive for mobile, go to your device’s language settings. If you don’t yet have Drive for mobile, you can visit the Google Play or Apple App Store to get the Google Drive app.

Sweetgreen keeps things fresh with Google Apps

2013-06-18T06:06:00.001-07:00

Posted by Nathaniel Ru, Co-Founder, Sweetgreen

Editor's note: In honor of National Small Business Week, we'll be sharing stories about small businesses that have gone Google. Today’s guest blogger is Nathaniel Ru, Co-Founder of Sweetgreen, a retail food chain focused on making healthy eating easier. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Sweetgreen started as an idea I had with two of my friends, now my co-founders, while we were studying business at Georgetown University. We were frustrated by the lack of healthy eateries in Washington, D.C. and wanted to make eating healthy an affordable and easy option, especially on our undergrad budgets. We decided to make it happen ourselves, and launched our first Sweetgreen restaurant shortly after graduating in 2007.

We sell local and organic food, but we stand for a lifestyle: being healthy and environmentally conscious while creating great experiences around food. All of our Sweetgreen restaurants are designed with reclaimed materials, use biodegradable utensils, and compost waste. Our wooden tables and seats are made from pre-1980s bowling alleys, and our bowls, cutlery and cups are all 100% plant-based.

Google Apps allows us to be more than a traditional brick and mortar restaurant. We’re constantly evolving, changing and growing, and we realized early on that we needed our technology to be as flexible as the ingredients on our menu. We’re growing quickly - we’re opening two new markets this year - and we need technology that can grow with us.

We change our menu every month to highlight seasonal ingredients and keep things fresh. Our customers are generally curious about what they’re eating and what farm the ingredients come from, so we send talking points to the store managers. Google Sheets and Docs make this all happen for us. We have a running spreadsheet with the local ingredients and plan out each month in advance. The spreadsheet is then turned into a newsletter, and the great thing about Google is throughout that process every group has a chance to jump in and contribute. Once it’s completed, we send the newsletter out to our stores.

We also use Google Drive, which allows us to collaborate between departments. Marketing, Finance and HR can all look at one document at the same time, add their thoughts, and keep track of the changes each person makes along the way with revision history. It makes transparent communication easy, especially when we’re moving really fast (which is always).

Five years after the first seed was planted for this idea, we have more than 400 employees and 17 restaurants in four cities. At Sweetgreen, we believe in creating experiences that go beyond the transaction, and Google Apps has helped make that possible.

Happy Small Business Week.

2013-06-17T08:11:00.000-07:00

Posted by Lisa Gevelber, VP Marketing, Americas

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

Our first AdWords customer was a small business selling live mail-order lobsters. It's been a long time since then, but a majority of our customers are still small businesses, who play a vital role not only for Google, but for the American economy. More than 60 percent of new jobs each year come from small businesses.

This Small Business Week, we want to celebrate you. We're grateful to you for everything you do for us and our communities. Whether you fix people’s cars, offer music lessons to aspiring musicians, or make the world’s best homemade ice cream - when you do what you love, our lives get better.

As part of the celebration, we’ll be highlighting some amazing small businesses across the country, so keep an eye on the Google+ Your Business page. And in the meantime, check out some of the Google tools that are designed to help you take care of business.

Happy Small Business Week.

Retiring Chrome Frame

2013-06-13T11:02:00.000-07:00

Posted by Robert Shield, Google Chrome Engineer

(Cross-posted on the Chromium Blog)

The main goal of the Chromium project has always been to help unlock the potential of the open web. We work closely with the industry to standardize, implement and evangelize web technologies that help enable completely new types of experiences, and push the leading edge of the web platform forward.

But in 2009, many people were using browsers that lagged behind the leading edge. In order to reach the broadest base of users, developers often had to either build multiple versions of their applications or not use the new capabilities at all. We created Chrome Frame — a secure plug-in that brings a modern engine to old versions of Internet Explorer — to allow developers to bring better experiences to more users, even those who were unable to move to a more capable browser.

Today, most people are using modern browsers that support the majority of the latest web technologies. Better yet, the usage of legacy browsers is declining significantly and newer browsers stay up to date automatically, which means the leading edge has become mainstream.

Given these factors we’ve decided to retire Chrome Frame, and will cease support and updates for the product in January 2014. If you are a developer with an app that points users to Chrome Frame, please prompt visitors to upgrade to a modern browser. You can learn more about these changes in our FAQ.

If you’re an IT administrator you can give your employees the full capabilities of a modern browser today, even if you depend on older technology to run certain web apps. Check out Chrome for Business coupled with Legacy Browser Support, which allows employees to switch seamlessly between Chrome and another browser. Chrome is secure, stable and speedy, and runs on all major desktop and mobile OSs. IT admins can also configure 100+ policies to make Chrome fit their needs.

It’s unusual to build something and hope it eventually makes itself obsolete, but in this case we see the retirement of Chrome Frame as evidence of just how far the web has come.

Synergyse Training for Google Apps

2013-06-12T08:00:00.001-07:00

Posted by Majid Manzarpour, Founder & CTO, Synergyse

Editor's note: Our guest blogger today is Majid Manzarpour, Founder and CTO of Synergyse, a company that provides training solutions for Google Apps. See what other customers that have Gone Google have to say. And learn more about Synergyse on our Cloud Platform Blog.

Synergyse is on a mission to teach the world how to use Google Apps. We built Synergyse Training for Google Apps, a fully interactive, measurable and scalable training solution that has been deployed throughout organizations and educational institutions globally.

There are new features introduced to Google Apps on a regular basis, and we take extra care to keep our customers educated whenever any product updates happen. Our solution provides in-application training that delivers lessons with audio and visual guides in your existing Google Apps account, allowing you to remain in your applications, learning how to use them simultaneously.

We aimed to build a solution that could deliver the same level of scalability, security and reliability that more than 5 million businesses have known to expect from Google Apps. In order to make sure our training software could run seamlessly, we chose Google Cloud Platform to support our backend.

We run on Google App Engine, and can automatically scale up to accommodate organizations of any size, anywhere in the world. Google Cloud Storage and Google Cloud SQL handle all of our data needs and provide cost-effective integration with App Engine. We can rely on the 99.95% uptime delivered by App Engine to ensure our customers have training available when they need it. When we deliver automatic training updates for new applications and features to our clients, they can trust us to provide the same level of security that they find with Google Apps. The Google Cloud Platform is powered by the same Google data centers that power Google Apps; it takes care of our backend infrastructure and enables us to focus on our product.

We chose to develop our solution as a Chrome Extension because we can deeply integrate with Google Apps through the browser, as well as provide IT administrators with rapid software deployment options. This allows us to layer our interactive training on top of real Google Apps and provide automatic software updates. With the Chrome Management console, the extension can be deployed to an entire fleet of Chrome browsers and Chromebooks with a few simple clicks.

When we went live with our first enterprise client, we were both impressed with how effortlessly our software deployed to the entire organization and scaled up to support them. By choosing Google Cloud Platform and Chrome, we can focus on providing scalability, security and reliability to our clients who have chosen to run their organizations on Google Apps.

How green is the Internet?

2013-06-11T09:04:00.000-07:00

Posted by Michael Terrell, Senior Policy Counsel, Energy & Sustainability

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

More than ever, people are using the Internet to shop, read, listen to music and learn. And businesses rely on Internet-based tools to operate and deliver their services efficiently. The Internet has created all kinds of new opportunities for society and the economy—but what does it mean for the environment?

We’ve been working to answer that question and enlisted the help of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) to gather more data. Their study (PDF), released today, shows that migrating all U.S. office workers to the cloud could save up to 87 percent of IT energy use—about 23 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, or enough to power the city of Los Angeles for a year. The savings are associated with shifting people in the workforce to Internet-based applications like email, word processing and customer relationship software.

These results indicate that the Internet offers huge potential for energy savings. We’re especially excited that Berkeley Lab has made its model publicly available so other researchers and experts can plug in their own assumptions and help refine and improve the results.

Of course, understanding the impact of shifting office applications to the cloud is only part of the story, which is why last week we hosted a summit called “How Green is the Internet?” to explore these questions in greater detail. At the summit, experts presented data on how the growth of Internet infrastructure, including devices like phones and tablets, can impact the environment. We also saw great excitement about the potential for entirely new Internet-enabled tools in areas like transportation, e-commerce and digital content to deliver huge energy and carbon savings. We’ve posted the videos from those sessions and invite you to take a look.

One of our goals in hosting the summit and supporting the Berkeley Lab study was to identify and encourage new research on this topic. We’ll continue to work to answer some of these questions, and we hope others will too.

Google BigQuery gets smarter with large results, productivity improvements, and updated pricing

2013-06-11T08:00:00.000-07:00

Posted by Ju-kay Kwek, BigQuery Product Manager

We know that today, more than ever, businesses need ways to store and rapidly analyze vast amounts of data and are looking for ways to accomplish this without huge infrastructure investments. To help make this possible, recent BigQuery features include the ability to join across multi-terabyte tables, and the ability to connect popular analysis tools such as Tableau®, BIME® and Excel®. In the past few months we’ve seen several interesting use cases enabled -- Shutterfly improving their customers’ experience, Gamesys understanding complex user behaviors, tracking and mapping the world’s ships, and monitoring Google I/O 2013 using a real-time sensor network.

Today we’re announcing another update to BigQuery packed with new capabilities.

Large results: run queries that return arbitrarily large numbers of rows and save them as a new table for follow-up analysis.
Window functions: take advantage of built-in functions like Rank and Partition to create sophisticated statistical analyses with far simpler SQL than before.
Query caching: now recent queries that are re-run return a cached result when the underlying table is unchanged, providing more cost-effective analysis.

Gamesys, who previewed these features, was able to efficiently identify different cohorts of gaming customers and understand how to create a better in-game experience for distinct groups of users. "Rank and Partition are our 'go to' functions for examining player behaviour over time”, said Tom Newton, Director of Social Gaming at Gamesys. “These new functions combined with large results sets and query caching, help us efficiently and cost effectively improve and scale our analysis to create actionable intelligence that drives product enhancement.”

We’ve also rolled out a host of UI improvements, including the ability to validate a query and estimate its cost prior to running it, and to save frequently used queries. And thanks to recent operational improvements, we’ve been able to double existing query quotas.

Finally, BigQuery customers will have new pricing options starting in July. Data storage costs in BigQuery are becoming even more affordable for everyone, going from $0.12/GB/month to $0.08/GB/month effective July 1st. Furthermore, in addition to the existing on-demand rate for interactive queries, customers with higher-volume usage will soon be able to opt in for tiered query pricing. This provides more economical and predictable cost for interactive queries. Customers who are interested are encouraged to contact a sales representative.

You can get details about these new capabilities and more in our Developer Blog and in our updated product documentation. Got an inspiring use case? Share it in the blog comments or with our community using the #BigQuery tag on Google+.

ILCEA Education makes global learning easier with Google Apps

2013-06-10T16:16:00.000-07:00

Posted by Jean Charles Bully, Chairman of ILCEA Education

Editor's note: Our guest blogger today is Jean Charles Bully, chairman of ILCEA Education, a leading provider of educational programs and services around the world. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

With today's technology, the world can seem pretty small. However, language barriers can still form a big obstacle for global communication. At ILCEA Education, our goal is to bring the world together by teaching people new languages. Founded in 2001, we serve 1.5 million students in 50 countries around the world. We help our students learn about new cultures and languages with diverse in-country work programs, student exchanges, internship opportunities, online training, and even coordinate vacations to help people learn new languages. We get to work with all types of students, but we find that it’s not so easy to coordinate our work globally.

To help our students learn, we partner with more than 500 international schools around the world to teach and coordinate our programs. This requires a standard platform for communication, so we’re switching to Google Apps with help from Cloudreach, a Google Apps reseller. Before Apps, our education affiliates sent out emails from various addresses, making tons of phone calls and in some cases even mailing printed letters or printed forms to communicate with us. By bringing everyone in our network onto Google Apps under a single ILCEA Education domain, we’re creating a unified internal communication strategy, ensuring that all of our partners can participate in every conversation. It gives our partners access to Google+ Hangouts, Gmail, and shared Google Docs to foster easy communication no matter where they are or what device they’re on.

Google Apps will upgrade our student’s educational experience. Learning a new language and living in a new place can be overwhelming, so we want to make sure all of our students have a smooth start. All of our students will have an ILCEA Education branded Google Apps account, providing easy access to the resources, communication and social tools they need. Students will be able to interact with course materials from anywhere with an internet connection in an intuitive way using Google Drive. Google Hangouts will also provide an important opportunity for students to practice their language skills from anywhere with an internet connection, transforming the learning experience with active participation.

Because teaching is at the heart of what we do, our learning resources will get a major digital makeover with Google Apps. Sharing lesson plans, curriculums, and other resources on Drive allows our educators have access to the materials they need, without having to worry about cumbersome downloads or printed manuals. Drive allows our teachers and partners to simultaneously edit materials with ease, so our lessons will always be current, including the latest information as well as any updates based on student feedback.

Learning requires consistency and practice. By providing easy-to-use collaboration tools and access to educational resources, ILCEA Education is helping our affiliates provide a better education to millions of students worldwide. With Google Apps, we can work toward breaking down obstacles in communicating and obstacles for learning.

Forget perks and pay: IT may be the secret weapon in the war for talent

2013-06-07T07:13:00.001-07:00

Posted by Claire Hatton, Industry Director, Google Australia

(Cross-posted on the Google Australia Blog)

Editor's note: Today's post comes to us from Down Under where a new report from Deloitte Access Economics Australia highlights finds that there is a direct link between workplace IT and employee satisfaction.

In the last few years, forward-thinking businesses have come to the same conclusion: it’s not only perks and pay that matter when it comes to attracting and keeping top talent. Up-to-date IT systems that support and encourage collaboration are also very important.

In the last year we’ve seen companies like Woolworths, Fairfax and Dick Smith move their communication and collaboration software to the cloud. These businesses cite the benefits of being able to have their remote teams work on the same document in real time, have editorial meetings via video conference or give their casual staff access to company updates and videos via their mobile phones.

Today, for the first time, we’re starting to get a clearer picture of the bottom-line benefits of giving employees the kind of IT systems that make them happy and productive. A new report from Deloitte Access Economics Australia now shows a direct link between flexible IT policies and employee satisfaction and retention.

Deloitte’s The Connected Workplace — War for talent in the digital economy shows that:

Employees who are happy with their workplace IT are one third less likely to leave the company than those who are unhappy.

Large companies with 500 employees could save up to $350,000 annually simply by investing in flexible IT policies. Over a ten year period this amounts to $2.6 million.

Similarly, small businesses could save up to $22,000 a year by investing in flexible IT policies.

The Connected Workplace report comes at a time when Australian and New Zealand business leaders are experiencing a critical shortage of skilled employees. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 20% of businesses reported that an inability to find skilled workers within the labour market or within their company was a barrier to innovation.

Deloitte found that the businesses whose employees were most satisfied with their IT policies had a few characteristics in common. They allowed people to bring their own devices to work. They permitted access to social media while on the job. They let them work from home. They encouraged them to use collaborative technology.

The report also found that when people are given the opportunity to use their workplace IT to do personal activities, they spend an equal amount of time at home doing work tasks. So every 30 seconds an employee does something besides work will be balanced out by another half-minute of productivity later in the day.

Around the world, businesses are finding that it pays to be more flexible and let employees collaborate and work in whatever way suits them best. This includes more than 5 million businesses that now use Google Apps for Business to work from anywhere, anytime on any device. Businesses looking to win in the war for talent may find the same.

St. Joseph students create their own education with Chromebooks

2013-06-06T10:49:00.001-07:00

Posted by Lisa DeLapo, Director of Technology at St. Joseph School

Editor's note: Our guest blogger today is Lisa DeLapo, Director of Technology at St. Joseph School, part of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Oakland. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Learning shouldn’t be limited to pen and paper, nor the computer lab. Rather than taking tests or filling out worksheets, the 270 students at St. Joseph’s spend most of their time creating projects using digital tools that show off their knowledge. Whether they’re telling stories of famous heroes using Google Sites, making group study guides with Google Forms, or listening to voice comments on their science fair projects in Google Docs, our students learn more from creating than they ever could from only consuming information.

My job as Director of Technology at St. Joseph’s is to make sure our educational tools are available everywhere. We have found Chromebooks to be the perfect tools – they’re portable and easy to use, have a keyboard and a large screen, and are secure. We’re piloting Chromebooks with several teachers now, and soon our entire faculty and staff will use them exclusively. We will also supply carts for the Chromebooks so students in different classrooms can share computers as freely as they swap lunches.

Because our teachers already use the Chrome browser and work largely in Google Apps, moving to Chromebooks has been easy. In addition to Google Apps, we also use Pearson PowerSchool to track grades, test scores and attendance, along with giving us a collaboration platform for parents. Accessing PowerSchool is extremely important but because it uses an older Java technology that is not supported in Chrome, I had to find a way to access it securely and easily from the Chromebook. I found out about the Chrome RDP app by Fusion Labs; it was exactly what we needed.

Chrome RDP lets users connect to any Windows desktop or server directly from within the Chrome browser. Since it uses Microsoft’s native Remote Desktop Protocol, no additional configuration or setup is needed after you install the app. It gives us secure access to PowerSchool and other legacy applications, and it’s straightforward for teachers to use. They download the Chrome RDP app from the Chrome Web Store, open up the app, and enter their login information for secure access to PowerSchool through the school’s firewall.

The introduction of Chromebooks to St. Joseph's has broadened what our teachers and students are able to achieve in the classroom. Chromebooks have helped everyone at St. Joseph’s enjoy the benefits of technology without expensive, complex maintenance. And now our students will have a new outlet for learning that helps familiarize them with technology and what we see as the future of learning.

Ocado Delivers Your Groceries with Automation... and the help of Google technology

2013-06-06T06:31:00.001-07:00

Posted by Paul Clarke, Director of Technology of Ocado

Editor's note: Our guest blogger this week is Paul Clarke, Director of Technology at Ocado, the world’s largest online-only grocery retailer based in the UK. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Ocado isn’t your typical corner grocery store. For one thing, there’s no corner as we’re the world's largest online-only grocery retailer reaching over 70% of British households, and now with a fast growing non-food business alongside. Our customers shop online using our award winning webshop or mobile apps and then their orders are picked and packed in one of our huge automated warehouses, the largest of their kind in the world; hours later, our vans deliver to their kitchens in one hour delivery slots. On a normal week we ship over 150,000 orders - that's over 1.1 million items each day. Google Enterprise solutions are playing a major, and expanding, role in helping us run such a time critical 24/7 operation across multiple sites.

Google Apps allows us to do things our way, wherever and whenever we want. Our staff use Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Drive to stay on top of their day to day work, and Google+ is helping our teams stay in touch, share information and build local communities. Ultimately, all of these tools help to make sure our customers get the groceries they order, on time and in the best possible condition.

But we didn’t stop there. We looked at other ways we could use Google’s technology to help us run our business and started using Google App Engine for building internal applications. For example, we used App Engine to create a new version of our "Where's My Order” application, which our customers will soon be using to find out where their orders are within our production cycle. Once their order is on the road, the integration with Google Maps allows them to see exactly where their delivery van is. So we’re taking what used to be a chore, grocery shopping, and making it a simple experience that you can do from the convenience of your own home, or wherever you may be.

Our most recent project was on Google Compute Engine. Within our warehouses there are certain tasks that are repetitive and arduous for humans to do, like picking heavy six packs of bottled water into customer orders. So our robotics team is developing solutions that use robots to automate these sorts of tasks and thus release staff for other more important work. But these robots need sophisticated 3D vision systems to enable them to see what they are doing. These are very computationally intensive applications and by providing the instantly flexible and scalable computing power to crunch all those numbers, Compute Engine provided the perfect solution. And, we are already using the cloud to store and process some of the huge volumes of data that our business spits out every minute. But with an eye to future growth and international expansion, we have plans to use Compute Engine and Cloud Storage to move other parts of our production systems to the cloud.

So walk into an Ocado warehouse in the future and you might run into a robot if you’re not careful. Like I said, we’re not your typical corner grocery store.

FedEx.com re-imagined with Google Maps Engine

2013-06-05T12:02:00.001-07:00

Posted by Pat Doyle, Manager IT, FedEx

Editor's note: Today we announced the availability of the Google Maps Engine API, letting organizations build their own applications on Google’s cloud infrastructure. Hear from guest blogger, Pat Doyle, to find out how FedEx helps its customers locate their nearly 50,000 retail touchpoints on FedEx.com, using Maps Engine.

Delivering packages to almost any location in the world is just another day on the job at FedEx. On average, we ship more than nine million packages daily and guarantee they’ll arrive on-time, at the right place and unharmed. However, our commitment to a superior customer experience extends far beyond delivering packages. To make it even easier for people to find the information they need online, we launched a new store locator site using Google Maps.

Using Google Maps, and more specifically Google Maps Engine, allowed us to completely re-imagine FedEx.com. We turned to Maps Engine because it gave us a powerful platform to build and share our own FedEx maps. By integrating features that so many people use everyday, like Google Street View and driving directions, FedEx.com visitors can easily find the nearest FedEx.

In addition to providing a much easier way to locate us, Google Maps Engine gives us another big advantage: global accuracy and consistency. Central to the cloud-based offering, we can rely on Google’s core infrastructure to host our always-changing and growing database of store information. By hosting attributes, such as street addresses, opening hours, holiday schedules and local pick-up times on Maps Engine, we can update details for nearly 50,000 retail touchpoints in real-time and share this information to FedEx.com visitors within minutes. This helped us replace a patchwork of region-bound store locators with a single, global site.

Providing a store locator that is easy-to-use, accurate and reliable helps us deliver a brand experience that our customers can trust. Google Maps Engine is critical to better customer service and it helps users quickly find and access our stores online. With our new store locator, powered by the Google Maps Engine, we can concentrate on what FedEx does best - delivering packages on-time.

Google Maps Engine: Changing the way enterprises create and use maps

2013-06-05T08:59:00.000-07:00

Posted by Jen Kovnats, Product Manager, Google Maps for Business

Maps tell stories about the world around us. With a single map, an organization can locate underground pipelines, decide on the best place to build their next store, or inform customers about cell phone coverage areas. Today we're announcing the Google Maps Engine API, allowing developers to bring the power of Maps Engine into their own applications.

Maps Engine lets organizations use Google’s fast and reliable cloud infrastructure to layer their data on top of a Google Map and share their custom-made Google Maps with employees, customers or the public-at-large. At the push of a button an organization can share their maps internally or publish them on the web, making it easy to access their data from anywhere.

The API provides direct access to Maps Engine for reading and editing spatial data hosted in the cloud. With the API, organizations can develop on any platform - web, Android, iOS and server-to-server - and build applications like store locators, crowdsourced maps or crisis-response maps. For example, FedEx.com uses the API to query its more than 50,000 retail locations and IRIS creates applications for utilities to track underground pipelines.

Google Maps Engine is changing the way enterprises create and use maps - replacing complex GIS technologies with accurate and comprehensive Google Maps-based tools. Contact sales if you are interested in Google Maps Engine or learn more about today’s newly launched API.

Travis County Sheriff’s Office helps to ensure officer safety with Google Maps Coordinate

2013-06-04T06:44:00.000-07:00

Posted by Jim Sylvester, Travis County Sheriff’s Office

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Jim Sylvester, Deputy Chief, Travis County Sheriff’s Office. When the Travis County Sheriff’s Office needed to track officer's positions and dispatch additional aid, they turned to Google Maps and Google Maps Coordinate. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

I’ve spent 27 years working for the Travis County Sheriff’s Office in Austin, Texas, and I’m a third-generation law enforcement officer. Since I’ve been on the job, the county population has nearly tripled in size from about half a million to approximately 1.3 million citizens today. We consider ourselves a family at the Sheriff’s Office, and my paramount concern is keeping our law enforcement officers safe so they can protect the county’s citizens.

Until recently, we didn’t have technology that could give us the precise location of our deputies, which made it difficult to ensure their safety at all times. For instance, when deputies left their patrol cars to pursue a suspect on foot, we were not able to track their movements in real-time to dispatch additional assistance. For that reason, we decided to try Google Maps Coordinate.

It didn't take long for the team to pick it up: our deputies needed less than 10 minutes of instruction before they were ready to start using the product themselves. We put it to the test during the Formula One U.S. Grand Prix weekend in Austin in November 2012, which drew more than 120,000 attendees. With Google Maps Coordinate running across all our devices, our dispatchers were able to interface and organize the deputies throughout the event in real-time. Our personnel knew the exact locations of all available law enforcement resources in the area at any given moment.

What we saw at the Formula One event has prepared us for the future, and we’re making this a regular part of our toolset to fully maximize officer safety while serving our citizens. We plan to use this product at the Republic of Texas biker rally in Travis County this June, which will draw a huge crowd. We also plan to use it for more special events and also daily to keep deputies safe while they are on bike or foot patrols.

Thanks to Google Maps Coordinate, we feel much more in sync and aware of the situation at hand, and—above all—we have better ways to safeguard our law enforcement officers.

Schumacher Homes uses Chromeboxes to help customers build dream homes

2013-05-31T06:36:00.001-07:00

Posted by Christopher Anderson, Director of IT for Schumacher Homes

Editor's note: Our guest blogger is Christopher Anderson, Director of IT for Schumacher Homes, a custom home builder based in Ohio. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

At Schumacher Homes, we design and build houses that fulfill our customers’ dreams. Building a custom home has the potential to feel overwhelming so we strive to make the process as easy as possible and deliver great value, with local teams in 20 stores spanning 14 states.

When customers walk into one of our stores, our systems and staff are ready to guide them through the home building process. Customers can access our web app on in-store kiosks, powered by Chromeboxes, where they browse home designs and options. We used to rely on PCs to run the kiosks but they were costly for what we needed, required in-person management at remote stores, and broke down often by overheating. With Chromeboxes, we get simple, easy-to-use computers that cost 60 - 65% less than our prior PCs, plus we’re saving on upkeep and administration, as we can manage them remotely via the web-based Chrome management console.

Since the kiosks run on our corporate network and are publicly accessible in our stores, we’re extra cautious about security. Chromebox’s verified boot, and OS and browser sandboxing protect us from viruses or spyware that could infect our internal systems. Also, because Chrome auto-updates, we get the latest security patches and save time previously spent manually updating our machines.

Building the home of your dreams should be easy, so we don’t want to add any complication for our customers or our team. With Chromeboxes, we can give our customers an easy, hands-on experience without worrying about security issues. And, on top of it all, we’re saving money. Now, that’s simplicity.

Google Maps Helps Trulia Put Some Heart into Home Buying

2013-05-30T06:57:00.000-07:00

Posted by Jeff McConathy, VP Engineering at Trulia

Editor's note: Our guest blogger is Jeff McConathy, Vice President of Engineering, Consumer Services, at Trulia, a San Francisco-based company that gives home buyers, sellers, owners and renters the inside scoop on properties, places and real estate professionals. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

There is an old saying in real estate: it’s all about location, location, location. With this in mind, it’s natural that maps are key to the success of any real estate business. They’re the first real guidepost that homebuyers look at when searching for a new home. At Trulia, we want our maps to do more. Maps are the canvas that let us tell the story of every property on our site – not just where it is, but what the neighborhood is like, how safe it is, the quality of the schools, how long it takes to commute to work and more. By using the Google Maps API for Business, we’re able to connect bits of data with home listings to give the 31.4 million people who visit Trulia each month a complete picture of a potential new home before they ever step inside it.

Google Maps API is core to Trulia’s user experience. It’s the common interface that lets homebuyers search for and browse through properties, explore neighborhoods, and jumpstart their home buying process. We’ve been working with Google since 2005, after we gave both Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth a trial run. Google Maps proved to be the easiest to customize and had the best functionality. Since then, our partnership has grown seamlessly – Google constantly adds new features to the API and we update our maps weekly.

Google Maps let us visualize data in a context that’s important to homebuyers. Instead of a list of crime statistics, we can create a color-coded heat map where our users can look around the city or town they’re exploring and compare neighborhoods, or even streets that are close to each other. We can present home buyers, sellers, and renters data about schools, public transit, nightlife, environmental and natural disaster risks, property valuations, and sales trends.

Google Maps also lets Trulia run efficiently on all mobile platforms. In addition to our mobile site, we have 14 different apps for homebuyers, agents, renters, mortgage representatives and more, with over 11 million mobile users each month. The Google Maps API ensures that we have full functionality across all of our apps, no matter the platform.

Trulia’s business is built on providing insights to consumers who are looking for the right place to live and then connecting them to a real estate professional. Google Maps adds color and life to that process by giving us a platform to tell a story about a particular neighborhood or property. It gives users clarity and simplicity in what can be an extremely complicated and confusing process, and that’s the absolute most valuable thing we can offer our users.

New mobile Admin app

2013-05-29T12:37:00.000-07:00

Posted by Muzammil Esmail, Product Manager, Google Apps

To make it easier for Google Apps administrators to manage their users, services and devices, we recently announced a redesigned Admin console. Two weeks ago, we made the new Admin SDK available to developers who want to build customized tools for organizations that use Google Apps.

Today we're launching the Google Admin app for Android devices. The Admin app makes it easy for admins to use their Android phone or tablet to accomplish the most common tasks—such as quickly adding or suspending users, resetting passwords, managing group memberships, and directly calling or emailing specific users.

This app is designed for admins and requires API access to be enabled. Install the Google Admin app from Google Play. To learn more or contact support, visit the Help Center.

From pest controllers to interior landscapers: Google Apps has Rentokil Initial working better together

2013-05-23T11:48:00.003-07:00

Posted by Peter Shorney, Global IT Operations Manager at Rentokil Initial

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Peter Shorney, Global IT Operations Manager at Rentokil Initial, an international services business based in the UK. The company works across 60 countries and offers services including pest control, hygiene services, workwear laundering and interior and exterior landscaping. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Whether it's getting rid of pests, cleaning up a crime scene or tending to office plants, Rentokil Initial is a service business whose primary aim is to offer customers the best possible standard. This can only be achieved if teams work closely together, sharing expertise and ideas and communicating constantly.

We used to have 180 email domains and 40 mail systems in place, so finding contact details and responding quickly to colleagues was a challenge. To tackle this, in 2009, we moved 35,000 business users, including our ‘on the road’ service technicians and salespeople onto a single communications platform, Google Apps.

Since switching to Google Apps, we’ve saved millions of pounds (£) on IT maintenance and several hundred thousand pounds by cutting the time spent on administrative tasks through using tools such as Google Docs, Sites and Forms. For senior management, Hangouts have also proved their worth, saving roughly 54 hours of the senior management’s time a week - that’s over 2,000 hours a year.

As well as maximizing productivity, online sharing through Google Apps has meant we can now use the group’s size and combined expertise to our advantage by spreading knowledge and ideas organically across countries and divisions.

Individual teams have fully embraced the opportunity for knowledge sharing, using the group intranet, powered by Google Sites, to post training videos and access technical images. But it’s not all about official documents and meetings: online sharing is helping us to become a more personal, sociable organization, which is important for staff retention and working culture. Colleagues use our intranet to share personal achievements, from sleeping on the streets for a homeless charity to boxing in international championships, giving a true flavor of the diversity within the company.

Employees at all levels are embracing Google Apps to connect with colleagues. For example our UK Managing Director uses Google+ to post updates and pictures of his ‘road trips’ across the UK and his encounters with colleagues, from the CFO to our longest standing pest control technicians, providing new insight into his role in the business. Our 35 graduate trainees also have their own Google Group to share work experiences in the company. The ability to connect directly with our executives and create communities amongst our new employees is radically changing and modernizing the culture of our company.

All in all, we’ve been amazed by the journey which Google Apps has taken us on, connecting our teams no matter where they are and no matter what they’re doing and making a difference in almost every corner of our business. Thanks to Google Apps we see ourselves as better connected, able to offer a better service to customers and more competitive on a global scale.

New European Lexus IS: Providing smarter destination information with Google

2013-05-23T04:06:00.002-07:00

Posted by Pierre Masai, VP Information Systems and Telematics, Toyota Motor Europe

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Pierre Masai, VP Information Systems and Telematics from Toyota Motor Europe. He talks about the next generation navigation system in the new Lexus IS, available from mid 2013 across Western and Eastern Europe. Hear how the company’s newest technology is using Google features to create improved experiences for its drivers.

At Lexus, we value bringing the newest technology to our drivers. We want Lexus drivers to depend on their cars for accurate, up-to-date information about their surroundings. We've entered a new generation of in-car technology and we're rolling out several features from Google Maps to enhance our driver’s navigation experience.

The Lexus IS newest in-dash system gives users direct access to Google local search, Street View and geotagged photos from Panoramio. From cafés in Rome to museums in Paris, drivers can use their navigation system to search online for points of interest. With access to continually updated local information powered by Google, this gives Lexus users peace of mind.

We're also excited to announce that Street View and Panoramio will be integrated in Lexus’ premium in-car technology. For the first time, Lexus drivers will be able to see real-life images of their surroundings, guiding them to nearby places.

As we continue to bring smarter technology to our cars, drivers will find the most relevant information they need, when they need it most. Now Lexus drivers can have access to map features with Google, ensuring a much more informed drive wherever they’re going.

A smoother Drive app for Android

2013-05-22T09:27:00.001-07:00

Posted by Denis Teplyashin, Software Engineer, Google Drive

(Cross-posted on the Google Drive Blog.)

The process of creating and accessing your stuff shouldn’t be, well...a process. Today, the Drive app for Android is getting several improvements to make creating and accessing your stuff on-the-go even easier.

To help you find the content you care about, Drive files will now be displayed in a clean, simple card-style. You can swipe between files to see large previews that let you quickly review and discover the information you’re looking for. And if you want to keep some Drive files on your Android device, you’ll now be able to “download a copy” from the actions menu inside settings.

The updated Drive for Android app also gives you to a way to keep track of important paper documents like receipts, letters, and billing statements. Simply click “Scan” from the Add New menu, snap a photo of your document, and Drive will turn the document into a PDF that’s stored for safekeeping. And because Drive can recognize text in scanned documents using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, a simple search will retrieve the scanned document later. No more frantic scrambling through drawers looking for a receipt or digging through your pockets to find that business card -- just scan, upload and search in Drive.

The editing experience in Google Sheets has also gotten some improvements: now you can adjust font types and sizes for a spreadsheet and tweak the cell text colors and cell alignment right from the app. Plus, the Drive app comes with Cloud Print support so you can print anything from Drive with a Cloud Ready printer -- perfect if you need to, say, print a contract right before a meeting.

Get the Google Drive app today on Google Play.

Boutique London Lets goes global with Google Apps

2013-05-22T07:36:00.002-07:00

Posted by Derek Gallimore, MD of Boutique London Lets

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Derek Gallimore, MD of Boutique London Lets, a provider of luxurious short-stay accommodation in London. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Our young company was founded just over four years ago, when I spotted a niche for offering luxury accommodation to business travellers and tourists looking to avoid costly hotels. Our customers come to London from all over the world for business and pleasure, and it’s our job to make sure their stay is as comfortable as possible.

Our key market is composed of international travellers who are spread across the world in different timezones, so I wanted to build an international team from the start. From day one, we’ve used Google Apps as our main form of contact, including Gmail, Hangouts, and a collaborative inbox. We wouldn’t be where we are today without it. We now have more than 20 staff spread across the world, from the Philippines, to London, to the US and Australia, and they are able to quickly respond to queries from their local markets, instead of waiting for the sun to rise in London.

Hangouts have allowed us to recruit and hire over video conference, rather than fly around the world to meet candidates. By interviewing candidates in this way, we can get a sense of their personality and experience, as well as save thousands of dollars on flights. We also started using Google Hangouts for staff training.

It can be difficult to create a sense of community with a globally distributed team. But with Google+, we’ve formed an internal social media network where employees can share their water cooler moments online. From wishing a member of the team happy birthday to sharing a funny online video, our employees are better connected.

The collaborative inbox feature within Google Apps has transformed our communication from frantic to efficient. When we first started, all email enquiries came into my inbox and I delegated tasks to staff. This was great for keeping track of everything, but quite hap-hazard. Collaborative inbox allows me to distribute and track responsibilities among the team. If a customer reaches out with a query about a specific property, a group of my employees can easily access the inbox, guaranteeing a response within minutes. I can also ensure quality control and consistency across our customer communications by storing template query responses, apartment specifications, and internal documents online in a shared folder that my teams can access.

Google Apps has helped me start and grow an international business in a way that simply wouldn’t have been possible for a start-up ten years ago. As testament to this, we’ve tripled revenue turnover every year for the last three years and I’m sure the platform will continue to be at the heart of our operations as we grow.

Google Apps helps CustomMade operate at the speed of small business

2013-05-21T12:00:00.000-07:00

Posted by Mike Salguero, CEO and Co-Founder of CustomMade

Editor's note: Today's guest blogger is Mike Salguero, CEO and Co-Founder of CustomMade, an online platform for buying custom goods from local Makers. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

CustomMade is built on quality craftsmanship. We’re an online marketplace that matches our customers with a network of nearly 11,000 of the world’s best craftspeople - we call them Makers - to give them access to high-quality, custom-made goods. My co-founder, Seth Rosen, and I started CustomMade because we love working directly with Makers to build things that matter to people. We’ve been able to make it successful because we have tools that let us maintain the high metabolism that small companies require.

We started in 2009 as a two-person company working out of my one-bedroom apartment, and by being nimble and operating quickly, we’ve grown to 45 full-time employees working out of our headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Google Apps for Business is the agility engine that helped us get there. It’s been the backbone of our communication and collaboration, letting us focus on getting work done rather than how we get it done - a crucial distinction for a small business.

Google Apps helps us smooth out the rough edges of running a small business, like onboarding employees. Teaching new hires about the business and culture is inherently difficult, but since most of our hires use Gmail on a daily basis, we don’t have to spend as much time teaching them how to use our technology. By giving them the tools they’re already familiar with, they’re able to adapt quickly and jump right into their jobs without worrying about how to set up a meeting with Calendar or share a Doc with their teammates.

With thousands of Makers selling tens of thousands of different products, we’re a very numbers-focused company. Google Apps makes tracking goals across all of our teams incredibly simple. Our sales, concierge, and product teams all work towards weekly goals, such as site traffic and requests for custom items, which they update constantly in a shared Google Sheet. This gives me visibility into each team’s performance and metrics, and I know the data I’m looking at is always up-to-date. We also use Docs and Sheets for operational tasks, like storing creative briefs and tracking licenses, contractors, addresses and funnel conversions.

Google+ Hangouts are our secret productivity weapon. We work with 15 freelancers and consultants, including 10 in India, one in the UK and the rest across the US. Hangouts make it feel like they’re right here in the office with us. Our team hosts five to 10 Hangouts each day - they’ve become an integral part of our day-to-day routine.

Moving fast and staying nimble is essential to CustomMade’s success, and Google Apps keeps us on our toes and forging ahead. Instead of spending time worrying about IT problems or outdated Excel worksheets, we focus on connecting Makers like Marv Beloff with bow tie enthusiasts and helping bring dreams of custom wood tables to life.

SulAmérica Seguros connects employees, brokers, and customers with Google Enterprise

2013-05-20T06:16:00.002-07:00

Posted by Cristiano Barbieri, CIO of SulAmérica Seguros

Editor's note: Our guest blogger today is Cristiano Barbieri, CIO of SulAmérica Seguros. Founded in 1895, SulAmérica is the largest independent insurance company in Brazil with more than 5,000 employees and over 30,000 brokers throughout the country. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

We've been in the insurance industry for more than 100 years and have continued to grow because we value high quality customer service, creating opportunities for our employees and preserving our company traditions. In today's fast-paced world, we realize that in order to continue to focus on our mission, and better serve our 6.7 million customers across Brazil, agility and innovation are key. With that in mind, we have decided to implement three of the solutions that Google Enterprise provides.

Google Apps for Business was one of our biggest steps towards technology innovation. Before, I had three people dedicated solely to managing our email on LotusNotes, which required constant maintenance because of limited capacity. Google Apps offers over 100x more storage capacity, 3x better service level availability, and is the only solution in the market that is entirely cloud-based. Since adopting Google Apps with the help of Google Apps reseller IpNet, we smoothly moved 7,000 accounts in less than 6 months and reduced our infrastructure by over 60 percent. Our goal? To have no hardware, saving more than $3 million in technical and operating costs.

The most noticeable shift that I encounter every day is how Google Apps makes collaboration easy company-wide. For example, we use Google Sites to manage mergers and acquisitions to ensure there is a historical record of the project, all of the documents are in one place, and the different teams that need help with the project (finance, legal, marketing, etc.) can all be on the same page. The end goal: no matter the division, team or location, our employees can access and edit the records in real-time.

Communication has also improved tenfold because of universal access to features like a more collaborative inbox on Gmail, Google Talk and Google+ Hangouts. Specifically, we expanded our face-to-face communication while saving money and travel time. We used to only have access to video-conference equipment in 10 conference rooms, but now our employees can chat at all times of the day with Hangouts. They can work together from anywhere: from their phones, tablets and laptops, at their desks or on the go. Mobility is key and also allows our employees to have direct contact with customers without traveling thousands of miles.

Watching the successful rollout and adoption of Google Apps motivated us to use more of Google's Enterprise products. Within a few months, we also adopted Google App Engine and integrated Google Maps. Using these tools, we built a medical reference network that uses the power of Google search so our customers can look for a doctor, hospital or laboratory. The result provides a list with names, specialities and addresses, and the accompanying map provides geolocalized results. We couldn’t do this before because it was slow, complicated and costly. With Google App Engine we were able to build this directory on the web just as easily as we did for mobile, so our customers can access the network anytime, anywhere through an intuitive, familiar interface. Now, we receive more than 500,000 searches per month, which is direct contact with our customers that we didn’t have before. We're impressed by the momentum and scalability.

By implementing Google Enterprise solutions that save time, money and are extremely scalable, we can offer easy-to-use, innovative solutions to improve our core business. Our employees work better together and we provide new avenues for contact directly with our customers. At SulAmérica, we aren’t focused solely on selling insurance. We believe that by going Google we are able to focus on what's most important: making our customers' and employees’ lives easier and safer.

Round-up: Google I/O news for business, government and education customers

2013-05-16T14:14:00.000-07:00

Posted by Amit Singh, President, Google Enterprise

Yesterday, we kicked off the 6th annual Google I/O developer conference, with over 6,000 people attending live in San Francisco and millions more around the world tuning in to the livestream. The conference this year focused on a growing trend that affects our lives at home, at work and at school: the move towards a multi-screen world. In this world, tablets and mobile phones are quickly becoming as commonplace—and as useful—as desktop and laptop computers.

As you shift between devices, your experience should be seamless. And the same tools you use in your personal life should be available in the workplace, so you can work the way you live. To that end, here are some highlights from this week that are particularly relevant to our business, government and education customers—including tools for developers, features to simplify your life, and new ways to connect and collaborate with others.

Tools for developers:

Google Cloud Platform: We announced that Google Compute Engine—which provides a fast, consistently high-performance environment for running virtual machines—is now available to anyone by visiting cloud.google.com. We also introduced Google Cloud Datastore, added the PHP runtime to Google App Engine, and added sub-hour billing charges so you don’t pay for compute minutes that you don’t use.
Admin SDK: The new Admin SDK lets developers build customized administrative tools for organizations that use Google Apps. The SDK consolidates many of the existing domain APIs into a new uniform structure and introduces new functionality with the Directory API and Reports API.
Google+ API for businesses: The new Google+ API for businesses is now available as a pilot for developers who want to build apps that handle tasks like auto-provisioning Circles and reading or writing posts.

Simplify your life:

Gmail: New quick action buttons in Gmail are designed to help you get things done faster and take action on an email without ever having to open it -- like opening a Google document that’s been shared with you or responding to a calendar invitation. And we’re beginning to roll out a new integration between Google Wallet and Gmail, so you can quickly and securely send money to friends and colleagues directly within Gmail—even if they don’t have a Gmail address.
Unified storage: Google Apps customers will now have 30 GB of unified storage to use between Drive, Gmail, and Google+ photos. Just as before, files created in Docs, Sheets and Slides don't count against your storage quota. As a result of this change, Gmail inboxes for Google Apps customers are no longer limited to 25 GB -- any additional storage you purchase can be shared and used by Gmail.
Nexus tablets and Google Play for Education: There are now 25 million students, faculty and staff around the world using Google Apps for Education. Later this year, Google will expand its education offering beyond Chromebooks and Apps to include Nexus tablets and Google Play for Education. Schools will be able to efficiently manage tablets and discover, purchase and distribute content and applications with ease. Schools who want to receive information about the program when it launches later this year should complete the interest form available at google.com/edu/android.

Connect and collaborate with others:

Google+: The new look and feel for Google+ brings a modern design to the stream and makes it easier than ever for you to connect with colleagues and quickly learn more about topics or posts that interest you. The new Google+ also looks and feels the same across all your devices.
Hangouts: Apps customers now have the option to replace chat in Gmail and Talk on Android with a new version of Hangouts that combines text, photos and live video calls across desktops, laptops, as well as Android and iOS phones and tablets. The new Hangouts is designed to help bring all of your real-life conversations online, across any device or platform. Just as before, Apps customers can invite up to 15 colleagues to a video call.

Hangouts brings video calls and messaging across all you devices

Work doesn’t always need to feel like work. Technology should make your life easier, so you can get work done more efficiently and focus on what really matters: building your business, teaching your students, or serving your constituents.

Google I/O continues through the end of tomorrow. Tune in to live sessions at google.com/io.