Fidelity Bank Ghana Saves Time, Reduces Meetings and Improves Security With Google Apps

Posted by Suresh K L, Chief Information Officer at Fidelity Bank Ghana Limited

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Suresh K L, Chief Information Officer at Fidelity Bank Ghana Limited, a Ghanaian bank serving 450,000 customers across 45 branches. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Established in 2006, Fidelity Bank Ghana is the sixth largest commercial bank in Ghana—employing 1,200 people and serving 450,000 customers across the country. As the banking industry in west Africa continues to evolve, we’re seeing growth due to our aim to provide customers with a faster, simpler banking solution so they can focus on building their businesses and living their lives. We decided to move to Google Apps in March of 2013 because of the guaranteed uptime, high security, low operating costs, and the opportunity for better collaboration among our employees.

Our legacy email system would be down for countless hours—wasting time, decreasing performance, and compromising security. As a result of the unresolvable server outages before switching, employees started using their personal email addresses for official communication, which was against company policy. Our old system operated at 30 to 40 percent more downtime than Google Apps and I personally was losing about six hours a week from downtime.

Since Google Apps is cloud-based and updates automatically, we’re now saving 30 percent in operating costs per year versus our previous environment. The legacy email system required frequent costly upgrades and hardware maintenance. And, like many banks, the security of our account holders’ information is very important to us so we were impressed by the SAS 70 security certification for Google Apps Vault and we were comfortable with making the switch.

Employee collaboration from any device, regardless of location, was a big driver in our move to Google Apps. Many of our employees don’t have desk phones, so Hangouts—with the instant chat feature—have really helped the team stay connected. I’ve seen employees with 12 different chats open at once! Hangouts have reduced the number of meetings we have, allowing different stakeholders to collaborate without having a formal meeting. Before moving to Google Apps, we had major issues trying to access our email during trips abroad. We returned home with hundreds of emails and spent days just reading through them. With Google Apps accessible from anywhere, we can check our email inbox from virtually any device, boosting productivity and time savings.

Google Drive is helping our employees be more productive, and the transition was seamless. Since each user has 30GB of space, there’s plenty of room to have all of our documents and we can access our Docs, Sheets, and Slides from anywhere. We use Drive as our intranet—uploading everything from HR policies to compliance documents. We’re also creating microsites to serve as collaborative hubs for individual departments. For example, we have Google Sheets shared across branches and teams to manage our sales activity, our private and executive banking sales activity, our future business pipeline reports and collating weekly operational reports. Company-wide, we can attribute about 15 percent of time savings directly to Google Apps, but some individuals are saving even more time. Our head of ATM card management is now saving two days per week using Google Forms. Previously, she received 44 separate email attachments each week from various branches that she had to manually input into a master document. Now, those updates are collected using an automated Google Form that auto-populates the master Google Sheet.

Overall, I love seeing all the innovative ways in which employees are proactively using Google Apps to be more efficient and productive. We continue to explore new opportunities to leverage Google Apps to make employee collaboration and productivity better.

READ MORE - Fidelity Bank Ghana Saves Time, Reduces Meetings and Improves Security With Google Apps

Google Apps keeps JUST EAT employees around the world connected

Posted Martin Russell, Head of IT Services at JUST EAT

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Martin Russell, Head of IT Services at JUST EAT, a UK-based leading online takeaway ordering service. The company has over 1,000 employees worldwide and partners with more than 38,000 restaurants around the world. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

JUST EAT connects local hungry consumers all over the world with local takeaway restaurants that they love. Through our online and mobile app service, we enable consumers across 13 countries to get their favorite dishes delivered to them with our quick and easy online ordering system.

Since I joined JUST EAT in November 2010, our business has grown from 200 employees to more than 1,000 in a span of two and a half years. But with this incredible pace of growth, our IT services were strained. I needed to give our employees the basic tools they needed to get their jobs done that would scale at our rapid pace, while keeping our data and the data of our customers secure. Since we expanded internationally, giving them ways to collaborate regardless of location was of the utmost importance.

When I first joined the team, we were in the middle of one too many IT outages. The time and resources we wasted dealing with the upkeep of our email solution was getting out of control. I started exploring email alternatives and the cloud was a secure and scalable solution. When I looked into Google Apps, I was really excited about how collaborative, flexible and secure all the tools were. At £33 per user, Google Apps was also the most cost-efficient solution.

We now use the entire Google Apps suite. Initially, we were most interested in Gmail, but adoption of the rest of the apps spread organically across our company. Hangouts have completely changed the way we communicate. Video chat connects our globally dispersed staff, and now I can manage my entire team remotely via Hangouts. Google+ quickly gained popularity within our company for internal conversations—it’s essentially taken the place of our internal social network. As we grow, it becomes more difficult to maintain relationships but tools like Hangouts and Google+ have really kept us connected.

Google Apps has removed a lot of the stress that is traditionally associated with my job. I don’t have to wake up at 5 a.m. anymore to make sure our email is up and running or rush to restart the server because the system is down. Now, if an employee loses a work laptop, I don’t have to worry about lost or stolen files. Having the assurance that all our documents are securely stored on Drive is a relief.

The one thing I recommend to businesses switching over to Google Apps is to do the migration quickly. I wish we had migrated faster as the transition was much smoother than expected and most of our employees were eager to switch. Google Apps have saved us massive amounts of time, made our work environment much more collaborative and flexible, and have taken a lot of the stress out of my job.

READ MORE - Google Apps keeps JUST EAT employees around the world connected

Head for the Cloud: Nobel Biocare, manufacturer of dental implants, moves to Google Apps for Business

Posted by Dietmar Böhm, CIO at Nobel Biocare

Editor's note: Our guest blogger this week is Dietmar Böhm, CIO of Nobel Biocare, a leader in innovative, restorative and aesthetic dental solutions, headquartered in Switzerland. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Nobel Biocare was founded in 1981 in Göteborg, Sweden as Bofors Nobelpharma and we now have 2,500 employees in more than 40 countries. Our focus has always been on scientific innovation and developing safe and effective solutions to restore and improve our patient’s smiles. In order to provide the best dental care for our patients it’s important that our team is working together across all of our office locations.

In the healthcare industry, the privacy of our patients is extremely important. We wanted to give our employees the flexibility and mobility to work together while determining the best options for their patients, while still maintaining our data security and reducing our IT costs. As a company we had been using Lotus Notes, but I had personally been using Google Apps at work for over a year. I felt that by moving to the cloud, we would improve our ability to work together internally and with our suppliers, and offer our employees the most innovative technology available.

We believe that in order to attract the best talent and to retain the talent we have, it’s vital to provide the best technology that allows people to work together from anywhere. Today, many employees already know products such as Gmail, Google Drive or Google Calendar from using them in their personal lives. By using Google Apps for Business, we’re giving our employees the tools they’re used to and also building the foundation for years to come.

READ MORE - Head for the Cloud: Nobel Biocare, manufacturer of dental implants, moves to Google Apps for Business

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

More BYOD management features for Android devices

Posted by Heman Khanna, Software Engineer, Google Apps for Business

More than ever, people are bringing their own mobile phones and tablets to work. This "bring your own device" (BYOD) trend appeals to companies that want their employees to be productive on the go, with devices they enjoy using. As an admin, your role in a BYOD environment is to make sure users keep their mobile devices secure.

Comprehensive mobile device management is included with Google Apps for Business, Government and Education. Organizations large and small can manage smartphones and tablets - including Android and iOS - right from the Google Apps Admin console, with no need for special hardware or software.

Today we’re adding new Android device management features based on top requests from our customers.

1. Selective wipe - Remove Google Apps account data without wiping a user’s entire device. 
2. SD card wipe - During a full device wipe, wipe SD cards in addition to the internal memory.
3. Device Policy app - Ensure that security policies are enforced across all devices by requiring the latest version of the Device Policy app. 
4. Wi-Fi configuration - Enter wi-fi settings in the Admin console once -- and they'll be automatically pushed out to all managed Android devices.

Android users can stay connected on the go with mobile apps like Gmail, Drive and Hangouts. Admins can manage their domain with the new mobile Admin app. And admins can let employees bring their own devices to work while keeping those devices secure and saving their employees time with Google Apps device management.

To learn more about these mobile device management features, visit our Help Center or start managing devices right away by visiting your Admin console at admin.google.com.

READ MORE - More BYOD management features for Android devices

This just in! Canadian Broadcasting Corporation moves 12,000 accounts to Google Apps in 90 days

Posted by Jean-Martin Thibault, Senior Enterprise Architect at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

Editor's note: Our guest blogger this week is Jean-Martin Thibault, Senior Enterprise Architect at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada’s oldest broadcasting network and national broadcaster, known commonly as CBC and officially as CBC/Radio-Canada. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Deeply rooted in the regions, CBC/Radio-Canada is the only domestic broadcaster to offer diverse regional and cultural perspectives in English, French and eight Aboriginal languages. As Canada’s national broadcaster, we bring Canadians programming when, where and how they want it ― through a comprehensive range of radio, television, Internet, satellite-based services and mobile devices. Our team is stationed all over the world, which means real-time communication is key for up-to-date, consistent reporting.

Achieving this at such a large scale isn't always easy. For more than 10 years, we had been using an on-premise, corporate-wide system for email/calendar. We also had a separate system for collaboration, but neither solution was integrated and drove true inter-office collaboration.

With a company-wide goal to reduce infrastructure and a need for better messaging and collaboration, we decided to look at public cloud solutions, especially Google Apps. It was clear that Google Apps was the right solution for us based on cost, proven service level and availability guarantee and the breadth of tools the platform offered for collaboration. We also had great support from the media groups in our company (about 70% of our employees), as many of them had been using personal Google accounts to communicate already with external users. Once we decided to “go Google” we were able to complete a smooth 90-day deployment with the help of Google Apps reseller, Onix, by March 1, 2013.

Since we went live, adoption of the whole platform has well exceeded our expectations of email and calendaring. Google+ Hangouts has revolutionized the way that our employees interact with each other. Long conference calls are now becoming a thing of the past. We can now jump on a Hangout and have a face-to-face meeting with colleagues across the country via our smartphones, from home or the office, without getting on a plane. It’s cost-effective and more efficient without compromising our core business.

Additionally, Google Docs are helping our reporters become better and more efficient storytellers. For example, before, our writers and reporters in our newsroom brainstormed and drafted copy in separate Word documents, which inevitably led to version confusion and unnecessary time spent merging documents. Now, they use a single, shared Google Doc for all their stories, so the entire team can collaborate together, in real time, regardless of where they’re working. Our freelancers use Docs to make quick edits and communicate on the fly since it's simpler for them to share content and edit in real-time.

We are proud to bring the best tools to our company and see the cultural shift that is happening amongst our employees. We are moving away from managing IT and into improving our core business of content creation. We’re excited about what this means for the quality of our reporting and the happiness of our employees.

Update [May 15]: A slight edit was made to this post.

READ MORE - This just in! Canadian Broadcasting Corporation moves 12,000 accounts to Google Apps in 90 days

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.

Clear skies ahead: The Weather Company forecasts success using Google Apps

Posted by Bryson Koehler, CIO of The Weather Company

Editor's note: Our guest blogger is Bryson Koehler, CIO of The Weather Company, the parent company of The Weather Channel, weather.com and Weather Underground, the most popular sources of weather news and information on television and online. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Most people know The Weather Company from checking out the forecast on TV or from using our mobile app, but we actually do much, much more. Beyond our TV channel and online presence, we sell weather data to business and foreign governments, as well as sell graphic capabilities to local network affiliates. We’re a big, complex organization with a lot of smart people who need the right tools to do their work. It’s my job to make sure those needs are being met.

When I joined the company last summer, one of my first responsibilities was to get all our employees on the same email and collaboration platform. The Weather Company has grown quite a bit through acquisitions during the past year, leaving our 1,200 employees all over the world using a mixed bag of tools. Each business was still working as an independent entity, so getting everyone under the same technological umbrella was crucial to us moving forward.

The choice came down to Google Apps and Microsoft® Office 365. We knew there were strong allegiances to each platform within the company, so there was no clear winner at first. After taking a closer look at Office 365, though, it seemed like a set of individual tools rather than a fully integrated suite like Google Apps. On top of that, Google Apps’ single user licensing was far less complicated than Microsoft’s model. Ultimately, Google Apps was a better fit for our company.

About two months ago we rolled out Google Apps with the help of Google Enterprise partner, Cloud Sherpas. Though change management was definitely a large undertaking, we do feel that the switch brought the company together. It helped us untether people from the traditional corporate collaboration approach of searching through multiple versions and waiting as documents were passed from one to another - something I desperately wanted to do. The culture of our company and the IT department is changing, and Google Apps was a great catalyst to get that moving in the right direction.

We’ve only been live for a short time, but Google Apps has already changed how we work. Google Docs have caught on like wildfire, and people can work from anywhere as long as they have Internet. I see people bouncing around between their laptop, a tablet, their Android phone or whatever – it’s seamless. We’ve also started using Google Drive to replace personal Box and Dropbox accounts that people had been using to share documents, so we’ll have centralized control of our intellectual property. We’re going to roll out Google+ companywide to replace Yammer, although Google+ Hangouts have begun to spread organically. Our marketing, sales and PR teams all use Hangouts to meet, and one employee set up a Google Chromebox and a monitor to create a Hangout station in his office.

Google Apps has created a real sense of excitement at The Weather Company. People are really exploring and embracing it, and that’s exactly what I wanted to see. As we’re abandoning the traditional top-down IT department mindset, all I can do is provide a toolkit for people to work with. Google Apps gives them those tools and lets them work.

READ MORE - Clear skies ahead: The Weather Company forecasts success using Google Apps

Quickoffice on your Android and iPhone is here

Posted by Mark Beaton, Quickoffice Product Manager

One of the easiest ways to share old files and collaborate with others is to convert them to Google Docs, Sheets and Slides. However, not everyone you work with has gone Google yet. So to help, Google Apps for Business can already edit Microsoft Office files using Quickoffice on an iPad, and starting today they can do the same on iPhone and Android devices. From Word to Excel to Powerpoint, you can make quick edits at the airport or from the back of a taxi and save and share everything in Google Drive.

In addition to bringing Quickoffice to new devices, it’s also now easier to find and use your Drive files from within the Quickoffice app. Sign in with your Google Apps for Business account and your Drive folders view will now include Shared With Me, Starred, Recent and any subfolders.

And in case you didn’t know, iPad and iPhone users can open and edit Office files directly from the Drive app. Just open Drive and select the file, make edits using Quickoffice and save it back to Drive.

Google Apps for Business users can download Quickoffice right now from the App Store and Google Play. We hope this makes it easier to work from anywhere on any device.

READ MORE - Quickoffice on your Android and iPhone is here

Prisma Media Saves 30 percent in 45 Days with Google Apps

Posted by Franck Barlemont, Director of Information Systems at Prisma Media

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Franck Barlemont, Director of Information Systems at Prisma Media, the second largest magazine publisher in France. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Prisma Media is a French magazine publisher with approximately 20 titles in subjects such as photography, art and travel. From how to take the best photos to how to properly cook a souffle, our titles, including National Geographic, Female Current and Current Kitchen, have been informing and entertaining readers for years.

As Director of Information Systems at Prisma Media, it’s my job to keep a finger on the pulse of how our employees are using technology. Just as the publishing industry has had sweeping changes the past few years, so too has the way our employees use technology. Last year, I discovered a few enterprising employees who were forgoing our hosted corporate email system in favor of Gmail. They had reached the limit of their email storage and needed a way to stay productive.

Traditionally, bringing outside, unsupported technology into the workplace is fraught with concerns around security, lack of manageability and control. Other companies might have quickly revoked access to Gmail for the employees in question and reminded them of the standard company policy when it comes to using unsupported technology at work. Instead, we chose to look at this as an opportunity and reevaluated our technology environment.

We decided to go with Google Apps for Business for a number of reasons. First, Apps requires much less support than our previous solution. Simply by going Google, we cut our IT support calls by approximately 30 percent, which saved us money and freed up our IT department for other tasks. The second reason was cost. By switching to Google we cut our email costs by approximately one-third, which is a lot, especially when you consider we’re getting access to a much better, more modern product. Lastly, the switch itself was seamless. By working with Google Apps Reseller GPartner, we were able to continue to manage and run our business without missing a beat, while GPartner handled the switch in approximately 45 days.

Google Apps gives us a more modern, robust and flexible platform at a third of the cost and frees up our tech support resources. It also allows us to do what’s most important: focus on our business. The only drawback is I wish we would have made the move sooner.

READ MORE - Prisma Media Saves 30 percent in 45 Days with Google Apps

X-Trade Brokers invests in Google Apps

Posted by Jakub Zablocki, chairman of X-Trade Brokers

Editor's note: Our guest blogger this week is Jakub Zablocki, chairman of X-Trade Brokers, a brokerage firm founded in Poland in 2002 with locations in more than ten countries in Europe. X-Trade Brokers (XTB) is a European brokerage house specializing in financial instruments traded over both the over-the-counter market and major stock exchange. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

At X-Trade Brokers (XTB), our goal is to give our customers the information they need to make sound financial decisions. Like many industries, technology is playing a bigger role in our industry. We pride ourselves on being technologically advanced for our customers. It’s what they demand, whether its a robust online trading platform, a vibrant mobile ecosystem or the latest, up-to-the second update on a stock price. Now, we’ve decided to run our business on Google Apps.

We chose Google Apps because we noticed a gap: we were providing our customers with the latest, most cutting edge technologies to manage their money we weren't doing the same for hundreds of our employees. Our previous solution, Microsoft Outlook, was an on-premise solution. It became too difficult to run a modern, fast-paced brokerage firm on yesterday’s technology - we weren’t providing the tools that our employees needed to keep up. With Google Apps, our employees will have access to information anytime, anywhere from any connected device, allowing them to work how and from where they please. Tools like Google Sites and Google Drive will give our employees the most modern tools available so they can serve our clients in the most efficient way possible.

Google Apps offers a suite of tools we didn’t have access to before. Being in a highly regulated industry means we have to take extra precautions to ensure we save and store sensitive employee information such as email and chat records. On other platforms, this is cumbersome and requires a lot of work on both the IT side and employee side. With Google Apps Vault, that happens in the background, giving us both an enterprise-class way to store our most important information as well as a solution that doesn't get in the way. Our IT department is really looking forward to not having to store and manage this data. Many of our employees have grown up with the web and were already familiar with tools such as Gmail and Google Calendar which will make the transition seamless.

In the financial services industry, speed is everything -- trading on information that’s even five minutes old can result in a risky investment. Our customers demand real-time information so they can make some of the most important decisions in their lives. With our previous technology solution, I always felt as if we were making a bet on old information but now, with the help of Google, our stock is at an all-time high.

READ MORE - X-Trade Brokers invests in Google Apps

Japan’s All Nippon Airways now en route to the digital cloud

Posted by Mr. Aramaki, Director of Innovation at ANA

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Mr. Aramaki, Director of Innovation, All Nippon Airways (ANA) Japan. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

As Japan’s largest airline, operating around 1,000 flights per day, we know a thing or two about clouds. Today we’re delighted to announce that we’ll be embarking on a journey to a cloud of a very different kind — with Google’s cloud based tools Google Apps for Business — to communicate and collaborate more easily.

Starting in April, all our 33,000 staff across 40 company divisions, from pilots and cabin attendants to HR and finance staff, will use Gmail, Google Drive and Google Talk.

As a global business, we have people working all over the world. Now it doesn't matter if our staff are on tarmacs in Tokyo, offices in London, or on-the-go in the streets of Beijing, they’ll be able to communicate and collaborate in real time, using Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides from their PCs, smartphones or tablets. As well as removing the barriers of distance, the move to Google Apps will also help us break down language barriers with Google Talk’s translation feature.

Google Apps offers us the reliability and scalability we need. We coordinate flights for 2.7 million passengers to 81 local and international destinations every year, so it is critical we have a communication system that we can rely on. With Gmail we’ll not only have this reliability and scale, we’ll also no longer have to dedicate resources to maintaining and operating our email system as we can rely on Google’s infrastructure.

For over 60 years ANA has flown passengers around the world in comfort and safety. As we launch into our next decade were looking forward to smooth sailing into the cloud with Google Apps for Business and creating a more innovative, flexible and productive style of work.

READ MORE - Japan’s All Nippon Airways now en route to the digital cloud

City of Monterey saves money and improves employee productivity with Google Apps

Posted by Angie Blake, City of Monterey, California

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Angie Blake, Information Solutions Manager for the City of Monterey, California. See what other organizations that use the Google Apps have to say.

The Information Services team for the City of Monterey is dedicated to providing the right resources and support for our workforce. We were using an aging and expensive Novell GroupWise email platform that held us back. We faced high overhead costs, a burdensome system administration, lack of innovation, no ability to collaborate and issues around integrating with other key data systems.

We spent a lot of time troubleshooting GroupWise problems: applying software updates to servers and clients, monitoring disk space usage, spam filter maintenance, troubleshooting server errors and connections to mobile devices and providing specialized user training. This time would have been better spent building our library of support resources for city employees.

After a thorough evaluation of multiple replacement options, our IT department recommended, and our City Council approved, the purchase Google Apps for Government and associated services from Google reseller SADA Systems.

With help from SADA Systems, we moved all 460 employees in just 90 days, finishing in early January 2013. SADA provided an excellent project plan, project manager and technical assistance. I truly believe that without SADA’s assistance, this transition would not have been as easy and successful.

Our chief reasons for Going Google were low cost, 24/7 availability and security, ability to collaborate, minimal user training needed, and access to our data across different types of applications and mobile devices. We also appreciated Google’s conversion tools, which allowed us to migrate all our existing e-mail, calendar, and contact information with ease and minimize disruption to employees.

Keep in mind: Monterey has dozens of offices located across the city and in the neighboring communities we support. It’s not just City Hall where our citizens go to get things done. We have public safety professionals, public works employees, employees with multiple types of mobile devices, fire stations, and service desks in different offices and nearby cities. The coordination and communication challenges in this distributed and decentralized environment were daunting, to say the least.

Today, city employees in these dispersed locations communicate using Gmail, share documents in Drive, use Google’s instant messaging, and Sites to stay coordinated. We’re also piloting Google+ Hangouts as another way to streamline collaboration and communication among the different offices. Just recently our five fire stations, located in three different cities, successfully held their staff meeting in a Google+ Hangout.

Switching to Google Apps will save the City 30 percent in IT costs over the next five years. The Information Services team can spend more time on implementing new technological solutions across the city. Even more important, this transition has empowered employees to do their jobs faster and with greater ease and efficiency, in turn, benefiting our citizens.

Join us for a webinar on Wed, Mar 6, 2013 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM PST to hear for yourself how Google Apps is making a difference in our city.

READ MORE - City of Monterey saves money and improves employee productivity with Google Apps