Standard Parking Adds Capacity with Google Apps

Posted by Keith Evans, EVP Strategy & Process at Standard Parking

Editor's note: Our guest blogger today is Keith Evans, EVP Strategy & Process at Standard Parking, the leading national provider of parking facility management services. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

At Standard Parking, we help people park their cars safely and quickly. We employ over 23,000 people across 4,200 facilities – that amounts to over 2 million parking spaces – across the country. To help serve our clients and customers better, we merged with Central Parking nine months ago to become the largest parking management company. In order to manage this large scale operation, we use Google Apps for Business to stay connected and consistent across our company.

Last year, we decided to replace our old Microsoft Exchange Server 2003. We needed a solution that focused on mobile and collaboration, and was cost effective and scalable. We looked at Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365, but never seriously considered 365 because of the cost alone. Upgrading our current on-premise system would’ve been nearly four times more expensive than going Google. Our CEO demonstrated his commitment and helped with our change management efforts when he told the pilot group during a training session, “If I can do this, you can do this.” With the help of Google Apps reseller MavenWave, we made the initial switch for Standard Parking in February of 2012.

After our merger with Central Parking in October of 2012, we had a highly distributed organization with employees at headquarters in Chicago and Nashville, as well as at thousands of facilities across the country. Google Apps let us move the entire Central Parking organization off of Exchange and on to our domain quickly – it was like we simply flipped a switch. We also created an intranet using Google Sites that became the company’s primary means of communication to employees, both old and new, during the merger. All departments have pages on the site for policies, procedures and other documentation. We also created an "Operations Playbook" that outlines the company processes. It's a great resource for employees, managers, and executives.

Google Apps gave the company a single platform for our 4,200 users to communicate with each other, maintain personal and shared calendars, and the flexibility and access that they didn’t have before. We’re a field-based organization, but remotely connecting to our old email system was incredibly hard. Employees had to connect to a VPN or use a non-intuitive Outlook web interface. Google Apps lets anyone log in to their email on any device at any time.

We want our business to be as simple and efficient as possible, so that our customers’ only worry is about getting their car in between the lines. We’ve gone through a lot of changes and growth over the past year, but Google Apps has helped us turn two companies into one, and keep thousands of garages under one technology roof.

READ MORE - Standard Parking Adds Capacity with Google Apps

Mobile updates and a new API for using Google+ at work

Posted by Joël Kalmanowicz, Product Manager, Google Apps Team

If you're a Google Apps for Business, Government or Education customer, today we're releasing a few new features designed to make it even easier for you to get things done with Google+. Over the next few days new business-focused features for the Google+ app on Android and general availability of the Google+ Domains API will be rolling out.

Share with coworkers on the go
First, the Google+ app on Android now supports multiple accounts, so you can log in to both a personal and a work account, and easily switch between them as you can in other apps such as Gmail.

Next, you can now create restricted posts from the Google+ app on Android. Restricted posts can’t be shared outside your organization, so your private conversations are only visible to your coworkers.

Finally, new domain labels in both the mobile app and on the web help you quickly identify your coworkers’ profiles so you’re connecting and sharing with the right people.

Develop business apps that integrate with Google+
At Google I/O in May we announced a limited preview of the Google+ Domains API. Starting today the Google+ Domains API is available to all Google Apps customers. The API allows Apps customers to integrate Google+ into their existing tools and processes, and allows enterprise software vendors to access Google+ from their products.

For example Ocado, a Google Apps customer, is using the Google+ Domains API to sync Active Directory teams with employees’ circles. This will ensure that every employee always has an up-to-date circle containing all the other members of their team.

Cloudlock, an enterprise software vendor in the Google Apps Marketplace, is using the Google+ Domains API to add support for Google+ to its suite of data loss prevention, governance and compliance applications.

Learn more about the Google+ Domains API on the Google Apps Developer Blog and read the documentation on the Google+ developers site.

These changes will be rolling out to Google Apps customers over the next several days. To use the new mobile features, download the Google+ app from the Google Play Store. Stay tuned for more Google+ features built for businesses.

READ MORE - Mobile updates and a new API for using Google+ at work

Email alerts for admins

Posted by Rishi Dhand, Product Manager, Google Apps

If you’re a Google Apps for Business administrator—or if you know one—you know it’s not just about managing users, services and devices. It’s also about keeping users secure and productive—and, after receiving some great feedback from our customers, we’ve found a way to make that easier.

Now, admins can elect to receive customizable email alerts when certain events of interest occur. By subscribing to alerts, admins can stay informed and, when needed, take prompt corrective action. These alerts are also helpful when multiple admins work together and want to stay informed on these changes.

There are two kind of alerts:

• User Alerts: Generated when our systems detect suspicious or unusual login events as well as on user-level administrator actions such as additions, deletions or suspensions. Real-time alerts allow admins to review the changes and take corrective action.
• Settings Alerts: These alerts are automatically generated when any change by administrators to applications, device management or service settings is detected.

To see the latest alerts – and to subscribe to emailed alerts – simply login to your Admin console (admin.google.com) and go to Reports > Alerts. Questions? To learn more, visit the help center or contact our support team that is available by phone or email 24/7.

READ MORE - Email alerts for admins

BDP International Delivers Success with Google Apps

Posted by Jason Bullock, Infrastructure Director, BDP International

Editor's note: Our guest blogger is Jason Bullock, Infrastructure Director at BDP International, a global transportation company with operations in 115 cities throughout the world and a network of subsidiaries in 122 countries. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Whether it’s moving a tractor to Jakarta, sending a blood pressure monitor to Milan or putting a beer in someone’s hand, at BDP International, we manage logistics for international transportation from start to finish. We run everything from documentation to shipping, making sure all the regulatory requirements are met along the way. We depend on technology to orchestrate the freight logistics and transportation globally on air, land, and sea, so we need to have an email system that’s dependable and tools that are collaborative.

In the past, we used Microsoft Exchange. Maintaining the Exchange environment was costly, and without significant investment our reliability issues would’ve continued. We needed to be able to monitor the mobile devices that connect to our systems and better predict usage patterns. We considered upgrading our on-premise Exchange environment or moving to the cloud on either Microsoft Office 365 or Google Apps for Business. The Exchange upgrade was three to four times more expensive than both cloud options and, while Office 365 offered familiar features, the pricing was not within an acceptable cost structure at the time of our evaluation. Google Apps gave us a complete set of tools for a single per-user fee, with the highest reliability and security overall. In April of this year, Google Apps Reseller Cloud Sherpas helped us move our 3,600 employees over to Google Apps.

Although we’ve only been on Apps for a few months, we are already seeing how Google Apps is helping our employees work better together. First, our compliance team is using a Google Site as an internal regulatory information hub, and our VP of Compliance uses the automatic translation feature in Gmail to communicate with our office in Mexico in seconds, without the hassle of finding a translator or leaving the original message. We moved an entire process around event planning from a paper form to a Google Form, which allows our event coordinator to collect and share all the details with the planning staff seamlessly and much faster than before. Finally, we’ve moved off of our company Blackberries onto Android and iOS smartphones with Google Apps. This allows our teams to work faster since everyone can edit and collaborate in Google Drive from anywhere, while giving our IT team better visibility into our network thanks to the mobile management console.

Moving to Google Apps helps our employees view technology as a tool, not an obstacle, and is making us a more nimble company. We can get work done from anywhere while moving around as freely as our cargo. We had talked about making this happen at BDP for a long time, but Google Apps really helped us kickstart the change.

READ MORE - BDP International Delivers Success with Google Apps

Google Apps helps the cloud become a reality for Imagination

Posted by Tim Smith, Vice President of Digital at Imagination

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Tim Smith, Vice President of Digital at Imagination, a Chicago-based content marketing firm. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Imagination is a content marketing agency that helps companies connect and engage with their target audiences. Businesses like Wells Fargo, General Mills and US Foods turn to us when they want to reach their customers, and we make it happen by creating interesting and engaging content and distributing it across print, digital, broadcast and social media. We place a premium on creating smart strategies and executing on them quickly, so efficient and clear communication matters to us.

Last summer, we realized our technology was getting in the way of our ability to connect and engage with our own customers. We’d recently switched to Microsoft Office 365 as part of a larger company-wide move to the cloud, but ran into a number of problems we couldn’t ignore. Server connection issues prevented us from accessing our documents and Outlook crashes kept us from reading or sending email. Fifty percent of our help desk tickets were for email alone. And whenever a problem arose, we had to hire an expensive Microsoft consultant to fix the issue. When I stopped and realized we had a managed service provider in our office two to three times each week, it struck me: this was not the right IT solution for our agile, quick-moving and collaborative company. So we turned to Google Apps.

Once we had the support of the executive team, I reached out to Cloudbakers, a Google Apps Reseller based near our office in Chicago. They had done numerous deployments for companies like ours before, so they had a well-informed, specific step-by-step plan in place when we first sat down to talk details. They came on-site and ran in-person training for our employees, so everyone felt properly prepared to tackle their work using the new technology without skipping a beat.

Moving to Apps made our IT headache disappear. Help tickets have decreased by 50 percent and we’re on track to save $24,000 per year in help desk and downtime reduction alone. Employees no longer complain about VPN logins or email client configuration; now they can sign on to their account from any device and have everything they need at their fingertips. We don’t encounter hardware issues that make work come grinding to a halt; employees can simply sign into a spare device and instantaneously access their email and files.

Our employees have really embraced Apps, and we've seen a strong trend where teams are adopting new products and features organically. Everyone stores their important documents, presentation and spreadsheets on Google Drive. There’s also been a massive drop in the use of Microsoft Excel in the past few months as people start picking up Google Sheets and Docs. As a data enthusiast, I can’t get enough of the Drive dashboard. It’s revealed a fascinating trend where use of Excel and Word is dropping while the number of Docs and Sheets is shooting up.

We’re in the midst of evaluating a new CRM system, and our COO has one requirement: it has to integrate with Google Apps. Now that’s a success story every IT manager likes to share.

READ MORE - Google Apps helps the cloud become a reality for Imagination

Monroe Restoration has gone Google with help from TechKnowledgey, Inc.

Posted by Jeremy Davidson, CEO of Monroe Restoration

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 Jeremy Davidson, CEO of Monroe Restoration, a disaster restoration company based in South Bend, Indiana. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

When I first joined Monroe Restoration, the company couldn't afford to pay me, but I took the job anyway. I'd seen enough homes destroyed by tornadoes, floods and fires that I was willing to take a personal risk helping people get their lives back together after disaster. It didn’t take long to realize I wanted to run the company myself. I saved enough money to buy out the owner and took over as CEO in 2003. In the last ten years, Monroe has grown from a three-person operation to 27 employees across two locations. At that kind of scale, we can help a lot of people: when a tornado hits, we receive 150 to 200 calls in just a few hours, and on any given day, we’re managing between 50 and 100 projects.

Two years ago, we found ourselves in the face of a different kind of disaster: our Microsoft Small Business Server crashed, effectively stripping us of the tools we needed to help our customers. I turned to Boyd Smith, the founder of Google Apps Reseller TechKnowledgey Inc., for help. I’ve known Boyd for over a decade - we live in neighboring towns, we’re both training for our pilots licenses and he’d been our go-to IT guy for a few years. I told him we needed a new and reliable platform that would help streamline communication between branches and keep our field techs connected while they traveled on-site. He told me we needed Google Apps. We started migrating the entire company the next week.

TechKnowledgey didn’t just help us move to Apps - they’ve helped us become a better business. We buy a lot of materials from the road, so Boyd and his team built a custom purchase order system using Google Sites and Forms that lets our field techs request POs directly from their phones, wherever they are and whenever they need something. Our accounting team receives the requests and can approve them immediately, letting our employees buy the tools they need on the spot.

We’re always looking for new ways to grow the business and TechKnowledgey is continuing to show us how to use Apps to make it possible. When we opened our second office, I wanted our employees to feel a sense of camaraderie regardless of where they sat. Boyd and his team introduced us to and trained us on Google+ Hangouts. Now we can’t get enough of them. I’ll fire up a hangout to catch up with my General Manager or host an all-hands without even thinking about picking up a landline.

I know how to help someone whose roof has been torn off by a tornado or whose basement has been filled with water by a flash flood. I also know that Google Apps makes us better at saving and restoring these homes, and that TechKnowledgey helps us get more value from Apps than we could have on our own. And anything that makes it possible to get more people back on their feet after a disaster is a win for everyone.

READ MORE - Monroe Restoration has gone Google with help from TechKnowledgey, Inc.

Sweetgreen keeps things fresh with Google Apps

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.

READ MORE - Sweetgreen keeps things fresh with Google Apps

New mobile Admin app

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.

READ MORE - New mobile Admin app

Boutique London Lets goes global with Google Apps

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.

READ MORE - Boutique London Lets goes global with Google Apps

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

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.

READ MORE - SulAmérica Seguros connects employees, brokers, and customers with Google Enterprise

Google Apps helps Celio keep up with the speed of fashion

Posted by Laurent Rousset, Chief Information Officer of celio*

Editor's note: Our guest blogger is Laurent Rousset, CIO of celio*, a leading French men’s clothing retailer. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Fashion moves fast: what’s new, hot and fresh one season is old, tired and done with the next. Celio is a men’s retailer based right outside Paris and we sell clothes in more than 1,000 stores across 70 countries all around the world, and because apparel moves quickly, our email and collaboration tools need to keep up.

We had been using Microsoft Exchange for years and it wasn’t serving our needs anymore. We didn’t have the right tools for sharing sales, marketing and procurement information between our French and Belgian headquarters and our office in Hong Kong or our subsidiaries in India and Bangladesh. We wanted to move our email and collaboration to the cloud to offer a connection capacity all around the world. We evaluated Office 365 but chose Google Apps because of its simplicity and ability to instantly connect any of our users around the world through Gmail, Google Chat, Google+ Hangouts and Google Docs, simply through a browser or a smartphone. By making the switch to Google Apps, we were able to save a tremendous amount of money. For the price it cost us to host email for our entire Belgian headquarter, we were able to provide Google Apps access to 1600 employees.

Google Apps gave our organization the speed we need to compete in the fashion industry by helping us automate a lot of our important processes like collecting sales data during the busy Christmas season or other peak sales periods when it's even more important to keep our stores properly stocked. Our operational teams collect this information using Google Forms, which our store managers fill out daily, and the information is automatically collected, centralized and shared internationally through Google Sheets and turned into dynamic graphics using Google Scripts. In the past, our regional directors collected this information by hand, fielding more than 4,000 calls per day from our store managers around the world. Now, it’s shared instantly between our headquarters, stores and distribution centers, so our clothes go out to stores and into our customers’ hands more quickly.

Using Google Drive and Google Sites, we were able to create an extranet that centralizes our manufacturing, textile purchasing and logistics documents. Before, this used to be shared using email, FTP server or external sharing services like Dropbox, creating constant problems with clogged email and version control.

Fashion moves fast - we have to move faster and Google Apps helps us do that. Google Apps gives us the tools we need so we can focus on getting next season’s designs out to our customers rather than worrying if we’re sending the latest file version to the right person.

READ MORE - Google Apps helps Celio keep up with the speed of fashion

New Google Admin console

Posted by Muzammil Esmail, Product Manager, Google Apps

Every day, millions of businesses, schools and government agencies rely on Google Apps to get their work done. And each of these organizations has an administrator (or a team of admins) responsible for tasks like creating new accounts, managing mobile devices, and specifying exactly which products and features their employees can use.

Starting today, we’re introducing a few changes to the Google Admin console to make it easier for admins to do their jobs:

• Accomplish tasks faster: Navigating to the right setting should be fast, and with new logical groupings admins can find settings like delegated administration right under the Admin Roles control.
• Customize the Admin console: Drag and drop the controls you need into the place that makes sense -- and remove the ones you don't need.
• Get to the Admin console more easily: There is no need to remember a long URL like google.com/a/domain.com or search for the “manage domain” link in Gmail. Just type the new URL (admin.google.com) and log in directly to the Admin console.

These changes to the Admin console will be rolling out to existing customers over the next few weeks. To learn more about the new Admin console, visit the what's new site or contact our support team that is available by phone or email 24/7.

READ MORE - New Google Admin console

Add events to Google Calendar from Gmail

Posted by Boris Khvostichenko, Product Manager, Google Calendar

(Cross-posted on the Gmail blog.)

If you do a lot of scheduling over email, it's now a little bit easier to create events directly from your Gmail. Starting today, dates and times within emails are lightly underlined: click them to schedule that conference call or lunch date without ever leaving Gmail.


When you click on one of these underlined dates, you’ll be able to preview your schedule for the day and change the title, date or time of the event. Clicking “Add to Calendar” will do exactly that -- add the event to your calendar, and for extra convenience, the calendar event will include a link back to the original email.

This new feature is rolling out over the next week to Rapid Release domains with the English (US) language. We'll be adding other languages soon, so stay tuned.

READ MORE - Add events to Google Calendar from Gmail

Bringing people together in Drive

Posted by Eric Zhang, Drive Software Engineer

(Cross-posted on the Google Drive blog.)

More often than not, you need to work with others to get things done. Today, working together in Drive is getting even easier with new profile pictures and one-click group chat.

Now when you open a file in Drive, you’ll see the profile pictures of other viewers at the top instead of just their names, making it easy for you to do a quick scan of who else is in the file. You can hover over a photo to see details about the viewer and add them to your circles on Google+ — all without ever leaving Drive.

In addition, you can now start a group chat with just one click. Simply select the new chat button at the top right and a chat box will appear, making it easy for you to quickly message everyone in the file. 

These new features will roll out over the next few days to Rapid Release domains, and we’ll be adding support for more file types (like Google Sheets) soon, so stay tuned. 

READ MORE - Bringing people together in Drive

Royal LePage’s new website: giving Canadians a better way to find real estate

Posted by Phil Soper, Royal LePage Real Estate Services

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Phil Soper, President & CEO, Royal LePage.

Buying a home is typically the largest purchase a family will make in their lifetime. It is no wonder that prospective buyers approach the task of finding their perfect place with such fervour. Today’s house-shoppers seek detailed, current and useful information on prospective properties and neighbourhoods. They are sophisticated users of search technology, but have traditionally been frustrated by the tools available to them. It is with this as a challenge in mind that we tackled a major redesign and rebuild of our popular real estate website, www.royallepage.ca, using Google technology.

The website integrates a new service from the Canadian Real Estate Association called Data Distribution Facility or DDF. Utilizing DDF, which our firm played a significant role in bringing to market, we will more than double the number of home-sale listings on www.royallepage.ca. For the first time, our website will showcase home listings from multiple property brokerage companies, not just Royal LePage, providing consumers with their one-stop real estate resource.

A good part of the magic behind the new www.royallepage.ca is hidden in the site’s architecture. While many real estate websites use Google Maps and Google Places, Royal LePage went a step further by constructing the website with Google Cloud Platform using Google App Engine and Google Cloud Storage. Real estate websites tend to store a large number of property records and photos, and require a large amount of location-based processing to render consumer search results. Utilizing Google Cloud Platform allows us to deliver that critical consumer information quickly and accurately. It will also allow us to scale our performance and our costs effectively as our real estate data and consumer base grows.

Uniquely, the site also employs cutting edge search technology from Google Cloud Platform, which enables consumers to go beyond traditional search to hunt for homes near local landmarks. For example, consumers can search for homes near the CN Tower, near Stanley Park or near Olympic Stadium. This innovative technology brings industry-leading search to the real estate consumer.

Relying heavily on a number of Google technologies, we were able to create an online experience unlike anything previously seen in Canadian real estate. The revamped website utilizes Google Maps and Street View for map-based search with visual assist. Many properties will display a Walkscore® ranking, which helps families understand what can be easily accomplished on foot in the area they are investigating. Additionally, tailored information is available for property listings, including Wikipedia neighbourhood photos and information, agent-produced video and descriptions, an overview of local amenities via Google Places and a list of other properties for sale in the area.

We are thrilled to unveil the new www.royallepage.ca in this, Royal LePage’s centennial year. Our website, powered by Google tools, will enable Canadians to explore their real estate dreams as never before. It will provide quick and efficient delivery of more listings, fresh neighbourhood insights, and extensive property details. It’s all there. Happy home searching!

READ MORE - Royal LePage’s new website: giving Canadians a better way to find real estate

Titans of Japanese business embrace the cloud

Posted by Shinichi Abe, Managing Director, Enterprise Business Japan

Since launching Google Apps for Business in Japan in 2007, we’ve seen some of the country’s best known companies embrace the simplicity and freedom of working in the cloud. The likes of Casio, Benesse and Kewpie Corporation are now using Google Apps for Business products, to work more collaboratively and efficiently.

Today, two of Japan's most venerable companies Kubota and FUJIFILM are making the leap to the cloud too. This news comes just a month after ANA announced that its 43,000 staff across 40 company divisions will soon use Google Apps for Business and Nikkei ranked Google as the nation’s number one cloud service provider.

Established in 1890, Kubota is an international leader in agricultural machinery manufacturing, with more than 20,000 staff across 20 countries. Overseas sales make up more than 50% of its business. As Kubota looks to increase its business abroad to 70% in the next five years, it will adopt Google Apps as an IT and communications solution. Google Apps will help Kubota facilitate a smooth overseas expansion by enabling employees to connect and collaborate real time across borders.

FUJIFILM is also on a path of international expansion. A household name in photography and imaging, FUJIFILM is now applying its world-class technology to the medical systems and life sciences sectors. As their business evolves they want an IT platform that is its fast and flexible so plan to move their 30,000-strong workforce to the cloud, Gmail and Google Drive.

Kubota and FUJIFILM join over 5 million businesses worldwide that have moved to Google Apps for Business. Enhanced with the features and controls that businesses need to be productive, innovative and successful, Google’s workplace tools are giving some of the world’s oldest and most established businesses a 21st century edge.

READ MORE - Titans of Japanese business embrace the cloud

Enterasys has gone Google.

Posted by Dan Petlon, CIO of Enterasys

Editor's note: From the founding of Faneuil Hall in 1740 to the opening of Franklin Southie in 2008, Boston’s businesses have embodied an enterprising and entrepreneurial spirit. Today, we’re wicked excited to hear from Dan Petlon, 2012 Boston Business Journal CIO of the year and CIO of Enterasys, a global provider of wired and wireless network infrastructure and security solutions with a strong Boston presence. See what other companies that have gone Google have to say.

Change in information technology (IT) can be tough. Employees have to learn a new interface and get used to a different way of doing everyday things. But that change is often tougher for CIOs and IT managers since we also have to manage migrating data, handling questions and buying or upgrading hardware. So when we started switching the majority of the company’s infrastructure over to the cloud, I prepared for an uphill battle.

We had been using Microsoft Exchange for more than 14 years and it was starting to outlive its usefulness. Tools that we relied on in Exchange 2007 didn’t work when we upgraded to the 2010 version, calendaring was messy and mobile syncing was even tougher. Our Sharepoint server – the center of collaboration for the company – was just not working.

Our search for a cloud-based email and collaboration system came down to Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps. While our 1,200 employees were used to Microsoft's tools, we weren't convinced their solution fully understood the cloud; Office 365 still required us to install software and hardware. Google Apps was entirely cloud-based and offered everything we needed with a single license - it was the right way to go for us. We switched last summer with the help of Google Apps reseller Cloud Sherpas.

Our staff quickly adopted Gmail and Google Calendar and also tried out Google Docs, finding that it makes creating presentations and sharing information with each other and outside partners much easier. Our sales managers have started using Google+ Hangouts for preliminary interviews with remote job candidates in order to get a more personal first interview with them before bringing them into the office. We’re also in the process of finally getting rid of our Sharepoint server by migrating the information over to Google Sites and Google Drive. Our Quality Assurance team has about 100 people who all use Sites and Drive to store, organize and share every document they create. Now it’s become company policy: every document that’s created internally is made using a Google Doc!

Google Apps has also helped us make mobility simple for our employees. Their email and calendars are always synced, there’s never any downtime or connectivity issues, like there were with Exchange, and they have all their Docs with them anytime they need them. Almost a year later, our support tickets have dropped over 60 percent and we’ve saved more than $300,000.

In about one year of running Google Apps, 272 new features have been pushed out to our company. That’s an impressive pace and something that would have seemed impossible before, but I see it as the luxury of cloud computing. While change can seem daunting, we’re really happy to have Google Apps as our guide.

READ MORE - Enterasys has gone Google.

Dick Smith switches on to Google Apps

Posted by Linda Venables, Director of IT at Dick Smith

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Linda Venables, Director of IT at Dick Smith, an electronics retailer in Australia and New Zealand. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

As an electronics retailer, you can imagine that staff at Dick Smith have a real passion for technology. They not only want to keep customers up-to-date with the latest innovations and gadgets — they want to use them too. This is key to our culture and as our company evolves we want to ensure that our highly mobile, tech savvy workforce have the flexibility to work in ways that suit them.

With more than 4,500 staff in 323 stores across Australia and New Zealand, we have a lot of people to communicate with. Connecting with part-time staff who don’t have corporate issued devices or email accounts, managing the rise of personal mobile devices at work, and trying to introduce more collaboration are some of the main challenges we’ve faced.

When we looked for solutions to these challenges, we decided on Google Apps because it was a great cultural fit, and it was intuitive, easy to maintain and packed with features. As many of our staff already use Gmail for their personal email account the training time is really minimal.



The sharing and collaboration features built into Google Apps and Google Docs are real pluses too. Whether our teams are in Sydney or Wellington, they'll be able to share and collaborate on documents in real-time, faster and more easily than ever before. We’re also looking forward to storing videos in Drive so when our CEO has an important announcement, we can record this for all our staff to review at a time that suits them. This is a great way to overcome some of the logistical challenges of having a part-time workforce in different time zones.

Overall, we see building community and fostering a collaborative culture as the greatest benefit to ‘Going Google.’ We’re looking forward to using Google Forms to get staff feedback and comments via regular staff engagement surveys and we’re even looking to extend our new collaborative approach to our interactions with suppliers and partners. Ultimately it’s about using the right tools so we can get down to running our business – and Google Apps lets us do that.

READ MORE - Dick Smith switches on to Google Apps

Improved Gmail search for Google Apps customers

Posted by Raviv Nagel, Gmail Software Engineer

At work and school, being able to find things quickly is important. So today, Google Apps customers will have access to autocomplete predictions in your Gmail search boxes to make getting the information you want faster than ever before.

When you start typing in the Gmail search box, you’ll now see predictions display. Those predictions are based on the content of your email as well as past searches and contacts. So, if you always look for messages from your business partner or the title of your current project, you won’t wear out the keys on your keyboard by repeating the same search. For example, you may now see your coworker named Anna, your past search of annual report and announcement from a recent email you received after typing "ann" into the search box.

If Anna is in your contacts, you’ll see a picture of her and any other contacts to quickly make sure you’re choosing the right person, such as someone at your company and not a reporter or competitor who has the same name.

These features will be available globally over the next few days to Rapid Release domains.

READ MORE - Improved Gmail search for Google Apps customers

Pure and Proven Cloud: Gmail Availability in 2012

Posted by Venkat Panchapakesan, Vice President of Engineering

Millions of businesses around the world rely on Google Apps to get work done every day. So, much like keeping Google search up and running, it’s a top priority for us to make sure Google Apps is available whenever (and wherever) you need it. For customers using Google Apps for Business, Education or Government, we offer a 99.9% availability guarantee, with zero scheduled downtime for maintenance. In 2010 and 2011, the actual availability for Gmail was significantly better than this guarantee. This was true again last year. In 2012, Gmail achieved 99.983% availability while at the same time adding dozens of new features. This translates to an average of just over seven minutes of service disruption per month over the last year, and most users experienced no disruption at all.  

We’re proud of our track record, but we know our work is never done. All our products are built by people -- and because humans aren’t perfect, no technology is ever perfect either. We work hard to make sure any disruptions are rare, limited in scale and quickly resolved. And in the unlikely event something does go wrong, it’s important for our users to know. To that end, you can see the current status of any Google Apps service on the Google Apps status dashboard, a public website, at any time.

READ MORE - Pure and Proven Cloud: Gmail Availability in 2012