Datalot Dials In Call Center Success with Chromebooks

Posted by Adam Varga, lead engineer at Datalot

Editor's note: Our guest blogger is Adam Varga, lead engineer at Datalot, an online customer acquisition platform. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Customers like hearing a human voice on the other end of the phone line, not a distant, automated recording. At Datalot, we provide cloud-based call centers so that our client's potential customers always encounter a real person when they have a question, need help and make a phone call. We help companies in all lines of business, from health insurance to home improvement, find and connect with their customers because person-to-person interactions are a key ingredient in customer acquisition.

We built our first call centers using Windows computers, but that setup created headaches. I constantly had to adjust settings, restart machines or delete drivers that slowed down the call center computers. I felt like I was spending all my time troubleshooting Windows when I really wanted to focus on developing the software that would make our call centers more efficient. I needed to find a new approach.

Chromebooks were just the ticket. They’re simple for us to set up from anywhere and easy for call center agents to use. The Chrome management console allows for no touch deployment. It lets us lock down user permissions, set up the agent login page as a default homepage, monitor usage, and set the apps and extensions we want our agents to use. Standardizing on a single browser, Chrome, which powers Chromebooks also eliminates any app/browser compatibility surprises.

IT doesn’t need to worry about major problems slowing us down. Google ships the machines to the call center location and we set them up from our Brooklyn headquarters. It takes us very little time to establish a working call center anywhere.

The frequency and quality of Chrome OS updates also make it easy for us to focus on our clients, not our hardware. It’s especially crucial that these OS updates are sent to our machines automatically, so I don’t have to dial up the call center and tell agents to click the “update” button myself.

We’ve just touched the surface of what’s possible with Chromebooks. In the near future, we’ll leverage the User Management API to provide single sign-on for our agents and we hope to power entire call centers using only a Chrome extension. Chromebooks let us get our call centers up-and-running fast, so we know the human element that’s so important to our business isn’t getting lost because of IT issues. We can focus on building out our services and growing the company, and let Chromebooks handle the rest.

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St. Joseph students create their own education with Chromebooks

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.

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Chromebook kiosks for customers and employees

Posted by Vidya Nagarajan, Product Manager, Chrome for Business

With easy personalization and built-in security, Chrome devices were made for sharing. The new Managed Public Sessions feature delivers a highly customizable experience for both customers and employees without requiring a login.

Because Chromebooks are low cost, easy to set up and manage, and require virtually no maintenance, Chromebooks with Managed Public Sessions make perfect shared kiosks. You could use a Chromebook with Managed Public Sessions to:

• Order out-of-stock items online while at a retail store 
• Search for books and browse the web at the library 
• Update machine and inventory info from the manufacturing floor 
• Access the company portal and update HR info from the employee break room 
• Catch up on work in a hotel business center

Administrators can easily customize any Chrome device to be a public session device using the web-based management console. The features that you'll find in the console include the ability to set the default sites and apps a user sees at login, custom brand the homepage, block sites and apps that shouldn't be accessed, configure device inputs and outputs, and set timed log-out sessions. For security reasons, public session data is cleared on logout so the next user starts fresh.

We’ve tested public sessions with a few customers and here’s the initial feedback:

• Dillards, Inc. - “We have many more employees than computers at our retail stores, so being able to share devices is key. With Managed Public Sessions, employees can walk up to any machine and get immediate access to their corporate email and important internal systems. And since Managed Public Sessions wipes all data at logout, it supports our PCI compliance requirements.”
  - Woody Chin, CIO, Dillard’s

• Multnomah County Library - “Our Community Chromebooks program was funded by a grant from the Mt. Hood Cable Regulatory Commission. We have about 160 Chromebooks in 19 neighborhood libraries that patrons can check out for 2 hours of in-library use. The program’s been hugely popular - in the last year, we’ve loaned Chromebooks over 30,000 times. With Managed Public Sessions, we can get patrons online and productive faster, by pre-configuring the devices with a terms of service agreement, the library homepage, and popular apps like Google Maps, Evernote, and the Kindle Cloud Reader. Public Sessions also makes the program easier for library staff to support, as the session count-down timer will help get Chromebooks turned in on time, and preinstalling the most popular apps will reduce setup questions.”
  - Lucien Kress, Project Manager, Multnomah County Library

• Hyatt San Francisco - “I’ve been running Chromeboxes with Managed Public Sessions in employee break areas. We really like Chromeboxes’ speedy browsing, easy management and security. Employees use Chromeboxes to access Hyatt payroll system, request time off, and stay up to date on internal news. They can also access personal email and social sites during breaks and I don’t need to worry about viruses and malware infecting Chromeboxes.”
  - Victor Povzner, Sr. IT Director, Hyatt Regency San Francisco

Learn more on the Chromebook site or contact us if you have any follow up questions.

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Mollen Eliminates 16 Million Pieces of Paper with Chromebooks

Posted by Chris Behling, President at Mollen

Editor's note: Our guest blogger is Chris Behling, President at Mollen, a national healthcare services company specializing in the delivery of remote and local healthcare services. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Mollen enables clients and patients to access and deliver healthcare services in the most convenient and cost effective ways possible. We do this by leveraging a network of over 200,000 healthcare professionals to deliver services wherever people live, work, play, worship and shop. Mollen is also the largest independent mass-immunizer in the country and last year we conducted over 100,000 healthcare events across all fifty states.

The healthcare services we provide typically require a lot of physical documents: in 2011, we used 20 million pieces of paper for everything from patient records to insurance verification to credit card processing. Paper gave everyone problems. It was an imposition on our patients, who had to spend time manually filling out forms, our nurses, because it slowed them down, and finance, because it delayed billing. It was also a drain on the environment.

We knew we needed to move away from paper and go digital, so we explored a number of different avenues - tablets, laptops and smartphones, among others. Ultimately we decided to go with Chromebooks with 3G, for a number of reasons. The first is security - with the Chrome Management Console, we could centrally configure the devices so they gave users access to just those sites and apps necessary for them to provide services. Second, Chromebooks enabled us to reduce our paper consumption by 80%, while providing our customers better service through a faster digital experience. And third, they’ve speed up our internal processes. Our nurses can now look up a patient’s medical history and determine if they’re eligible and covered for a given procedure, a process that previously would have taken days. And we’re able to accept credit cards and handle insurance billing onsite, ensuring that we’ll get paid for our services.

While security and paper reduction were the primary reasons we chose Chromebooks, we realized quickly there were additional benefits. Chromebooks have helped us more easily adhere to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) by using 3G instead of WiFi. Using WiFi would have required us to audit each of the thousands of networks we would have been operating on. Whereas, since 3G’s built in to each Chromebook and communicates with our cellular carrier, Verizon, directly, we didn’t have an additional local area network we needed to audit, saving us time and resources.

By moving to Chromebooks, not only are we able to increase the number of people we’re able to serve, but we’re able to do so better, more securely and at a reduced cost. And by reducing our reliance on paper, we’re happy that we’re helping reduce our environmental impact, as well.

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Chromebooks now available to schools & businesses in six more countries

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Group Product Manager for Chromebooks

Today we announced that Chromebooks are now available in six more countries around the world. Hand-in-hand with several reseller partners, we’ve worked so that you can also purchase Chromebooks for businesses and schools in these same countries.

Students from Richland School District Two in South Carolina using Chromebooks

More than 2,000 schools are now using Chromebooks for Education. Chromebooks help educators improve teaching and learning, whether it’s in one classroom like Mr. Hathorn’s History Class in Vermont or for 17,000 students in an entire school district in Richland Two, South Carolina. To start your school’s journey you can tune into one of the Hangouts On Air next week on the Google in Education Google+ Page. During these Hangouts we’ll provide more information about Chromebooks for Education and will answer audience questions.

• Australia - Event on March 28th at 10:00 EST
• Canada - Event on March 28th at 14:00 EDT
• France - Event on March 29th at 16:00 CET
• Germany - Event on March 28th at 17:00 CET
• Ireland - Event on March 26th at 17:00 GMT
• The Netherlands - Event on March 27th at 17:00 CET

Businesses around the world are also using Chromebooks where they need greater security and increased shareability. For example, Chromebooks enable employees like those on retail shop floors, manufacturing lines and out in the field, giving them access to central information and providing more timely updates on remote conditions. This is helping businesses to make better decisions faster.

We are excited to see what schools and businesses in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, and the Netherlands do with Chromebooks. If you are interested in learning more about Chromebooks for your school or system you can visit the Chromebooks for Education website and click the “Contact Sales” button to complete the short form. Businesses can contact our business team to learn more.

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Egan Construction connects Minnesota with Chromebooks

Posted by Jim Nonn, CIO at Egan Company

Editor's note: Our guest blogger is Jim Nonn, CIO at Egan Company, a Brooklyn Park, MN-based commercial contractor. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Egan Construction is an approximately 800-person construction company in Minnesota currently working on the Central Corridor Light Rail, the biggest construction project in the history of the North Star State. The Light Rail will stretch 11 miles through five major areas of interest, and is expected to be done in 2014. As CIO of Egan, I want to provide my organization with technology that helps connect the job site with the main office, the tools and parts warehouses and our executives.

A year ago, we were looking for a solution that would avoid having a fleet of expensive, quickly outdated and slow Microsoft Windows laptops that constantly break or need replacing. I’ve heard stories from other construction firms that Monday mornings were like the movie Groundhog Day, with the IT team tackling the same four-foot high stack of malware-infected laptops over and over while work ground to a halt. I didn’t want to experience that.

After surveying the market, we decided to move to Chromebooks for our 140-person foreman staff. They’re lightweight, turn on and off in an instant, and provide easy access to business apps that we use every day.

Chromebooks also integrate nicely with Google Apps, which we use to run our business in the field. The workers love the Chromebooks because they aren’t afraid to use them on the job. If one does get damaged, we can swap it out for another one in a matter of minutes, with zero time wasted or data lost. Also, we’ve saved so much in moving forward with Chromebooks instead of Windows laptops - about $200 per machine.

Rolling out Chromebooks to our staff was extremely easy. We have two people and an intern in our IT support department, and I wanted the intern to manage the deployment process. I figured he’d only get so far, then my IT guys would have to jump in, but he did it all on his own. If I would have rolled out the same number of Windows laptops, I would have had to hire additional staff just to manage that. And with Chromebooks, we haven’t been plagued with ongoing support requests.

The scale of the light rail project really brings to light how valuable the Chromebooks have become to our organization. At Egan, we take pride in the fact that we’re building something that so many Minnesotans will use. The light rail will bring people together that didn’t have an easy way to connect previously. I like to think Chromebooks have done the same for Egan.

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A Look Back at 2012: The Expansion of Learning on the Web

Posted by Jaime Casap, Global Education Evangelist at Google

2012 was a year of opening doors to learning on the web for more and more students each day. With the web, students and teachers are using new technology and devices to collaborate with each other in class, from home, and around the world. We want Google in Education to help open more doors and we’re pleased to announce there are now 2,000 schools using Chromebooks for Education–twice as many as 3 months ago. And with several Chrome devices available today, there is a device for any school, any student, anywhere.

The most recent schools to join the fray include: Transylvania County Schools in rural North Carolina deploying 900 devices; top Catholic prep school St.Thomas Aquinas High School in Florida going one-to-one with 2,200 devices; and urban charter network Rocketship Education in the Bay Area of California using 1,100 Chromebooks as part of their blending learning approach. The Google Apps for Education community also continues to grow, with Chicago Public Schools bringing 270,000 students, teachers and administrators into the cloud.

Connor and Meg at Spring Valley High School are two of the over 14,000 students in Richland School District Two in South Carolina who are now using Chromebooks for 1:1 learning.

This week I had the opportunity to speak with many in the global education community as I traveled from the FETC conference in Orlando, Florida to the BETT Show in London, U.K. I’d like to share some thoughts from my journey.

Looking back in Florida one year later with Chromebooks for Education
This week at the FETC 2013 conference, we hosted a panel where school leaders reflected on this past year. In January 2012 some of the first districts announced that they were moving “one to one” with Chromebooks and that they were choosing the web as their learning platform. On the panel Tuesday, these educators talked about the impact the web has had in their schools: enabling tech support internships, allowing homebound students to collaborate remotely, and teaching students to become digital leaders. The results of the hard work of educators and students shows clearly in the impact at Leyden and the changes at Richland Two one year later.

Learning with the web in London
Yesterday morning I landed at London’s Gatwick airport, straight from the redeye and into the exhibition hall of the world’s largest education technology conference, BETT. Steve Philp, one of the first educators to use Chromebooks in the UK, shared his views on his year with Chromebooks and the web. Bruno Reddy of King Soloman Academy in London also spoke about how the web has impacted his classroom and how it will help his students in the long term:

"In an increasingly digital age, it’s great to see that the students I teach have been able to harness these skills in such a way, and it puts them in good stead for the years ahead.”

On Saturday, I fly out of London, and onwards to the next educator event with even more of the Google in Education community. You can find upcoming live and virtual events on the calendar page of our website. I hope to see you soon – in person or on the web.

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For schools: The new Lenovo ThinkPad Chromebook

Posted by Caesar Sengupta, Director of Product Management

Learning online is transforming today’s classrooms. More than 1,000 schools are using Chromebooks, opening the door for their teachers and students to take advantage of the web’s vast educational resources. Today, our newest partner Lenovo has announced a Chromebook based on their popular ThinkPad laptop. Meet the new Lenovo ThinkPad X131e Chromebook.

Classrooms have unique hardware and software needs and this new Chromebook combines the hassle-free experience of Chrome OS with the ThinkPad’s rugged design for the classroom environment. With specialized features like a rubber bumper around the top cover, stronger corners, reinforced hinges and hinge brackets, and a high definition (HD) LED anti-glare screen, the Lenovo ThinkPad X131e Chromebook is ready for schools. Lasting up to 6.5 hours* with a latest-generation Intel processor, the ThinkPad Chromebook will keep up with even the most active students and teachers.

Like all Chromebooks, the ThinkPad Chromebook delivers a simple computing experience with built-in security and automatic updates. It’s a fast computer that’s easy to share among multiple students with Google Apps for Education, and it includes over a thousand web-based educational apps from the Chrome Web Store.

Chromebooks can be managed and deployed centrally through the Chrome management console so schools can easily setup and manage users, apps, and policies across an entire school or district.

The new Lenovo ThinkPad X131e Chromebook will be available for $429 in the United States starting on February 26, 2013. Schools can add management and support from Google for a one-time cost of $30 per device. If you’d like to learn more, contact the Chromebook for Education team or visit our Google in Education booth (#1109) at FETC in Orlando from January 28-31, 2013.

*Actual battery life depends on usage and other factors.

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A year in review: work the way you live

Posted by Amit Singh, President, Google Enterprise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

* * *

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

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Chromebooks for student assessments and more

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

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

Photo Credit: American Institutes of Research

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

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

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

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

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

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Chromebooks for classrooms: $99 for the holidays

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Group Product Manager

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog.)

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

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

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

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

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

Happy holidays.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Playworks Transforms more than Recess with Chromebooks and Apps

Posted by Richard Ng, IT director, Playworks

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Richard Ng, IT director at Playworks, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving children’s health and well-being through increased physical activity and play. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

For more than 16 years, Playworks has been working with elementary schools in urban communities to help increase students’ physical activity during recess and throughout the day. We are the only organization in the country to send trained adult program coordinators into low-income schools, where they turn recess into a fun, positive experience that helps kids and teachers get the most out of their school day.

Headquartered in Oakland, California, Playworks has coaches and staff deployed at 380 schools, reaching 170,000 students in 23 cities across the country every day. In addition, our training staff serves another 400 schools each year all around the country. As the director of IT, my job is to make sure that every one of our staff has access to the resources they need to be successful at their schools. For our program staff, who visit 2-3 different schools every week the ability to get to their documents, and share and collaborate with each other is vital. Playworks relies on flexibility, mobility and access to information anytime, anywhere – Google is helping us achieve that.

In 2011, I attended Google I/O, where I had my first encounter with the Chromebook. I knew immediately that Chromebooks and Google Apps could be the answer our tech needs. We deployed a small, successful pilot program in early 2011, and today we have nearly 80+ Chromebook devices in use in the field, with more planned next year. With a simple two-page instruction document that we created internally, our team could work, share and collaborate from any of our 23 cities virtually overnight. Because Chromebooks don’t require manual software updates or an IT support staff to troubleshoot, my team can focus less on maintenance and more on strategic IT projects, and ultimately, the kids.

As a non-profit organization, cost is a major factor in every technology decision. The value that Google Apps and Chromebooks have delivered is unprecedented. Playworks has been able to save tens of thousands of dollars since we implemented Google Apps and deployed the Chromebooks. Based on estimates of what we previously spent on software and maintenance versus what we are spending now, I estimate we will save $50,000 - $70,000 per year. That translates to tremendous savings that can be redirected to improving our programs for kids.

At the end of the day, while we are working to improve the health and well-being of children by increasing opportunities for physical activity and safe, meaningful play, Google is helping our team access the technology they need to transform recess in the communities that need it the most.

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The new Chromebook, for every student

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Group Product Manager, Chrome for Education & Business

Today on the Chrome blog we announced the new Samsung Chromebook for $249, an even more affordable way to bring the the web’s vast educational resources and apps to your students.

At only 2.5 pounds and 0.8 inches thick, the new Chromebook zips along, booting in under 10 seconds and playing high resolution video beautifully. It automatically receives the latest security updates from Google and doesn’t require any manual IT set-up, so additional devices won’t mean skyrocketing support costs. A recent IDC sponsored white paper showed that Chromebooks for Education require 69 percent less labor to install and 92 percent less labor to support, delivering big cost savings by reducing the need to hire additional IT staff.

Our goal is to make computers more accessible to everyone and we hope that the new Chromebook makes it even easier for you to bring the power of the web to your classroom.

Editors note: Join us for a Hangout On Air on Tuesday, October 23 at 11:00 am PDT/ 2:00 pm EDT/ 7:00 pm BST off of the Google in Education Google+ page. We’ll do a quick review of the details of the new device, compare it to other models, and take your live questions.

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Chromebooks for Education: Simple, secure computers for schools

Posted by Tom Mills, Enterprise Director, Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Trying something new: Rent a Chromebook for $30 per month

Posted by Divya Agarwalla, Product Manager, Chrome for Business

Since launch, our vision for Chromebooks has been to bring the simplicity, flexibility and affordability of cloud computing to the personal computer. Auto-updates, the Chrome management console, and browser sync have brought us closer. Today, we’re bringing the cloud model to the hardware itself by trialing a Chromebook rental program, in conjunction with financing partner CIT.

Imagine you’re setting up shop for a local political campaign and will have an influx of new, temporary workers. You can rent a Chromebook for each worker for the next few months, and return them when the campaign is over. Chromebooks meet the needs of most workers, making this rental program a great option for companies with seasonal workers, larger organizations who want to pilot Chromebooks, fast-growing startups and any company looking to preserve cash.

Organizations in the US can rent a new Chromebook starting at $30 per month or rent a Chromebox starting at $25 per month. Rentals are month-to-month, and there’s no long-term commitment. The rental includes Chrome hardware with 3-year limited warranty, the web-based Chrome management console to centrally set-up and control users, devices and apps, and 24/7 support. And the monthly payments actually decrease the longer you keep the device.

If you’re a Google Apps business customer, today we’re also making it possible for you to purchase up to 10 Chromebooks – including web-based user, device and app management – online from Google. You can manage your fleet of Chromebooks right from the Apps control panel, giving you a unified view across your organization and enabling you to get users up and running quickly.

We’re seeing some great uses for Chromebooks in business and government:

• As part of its HTML5 web app strategy, transportation firm QDI is giving Chromebooks to operational managers in truck depots to coordinate driver loads.
• School of Rock, a music school with over 90 locations, has adopted Chromebooks to reduce the costs, administrative overhead, security and reliability issues that came with managing traditional PCs at remote sites.
• And the City of Palo Alto library system has pioneered an innovative new program where patrons can checkout Chromebooks for a week, just like a library book. Given shrinking budgets, this initiative was only possible due to Chromebooks' ease of use and minimal maintenance needs.

We’re excited to see how the next wave of Chromebook customers puts their devices to use and hope that the flexible rental and online purchase options make it even easier for you to bring Chrome devices to your organization.

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Palo Alto Library pioneers a Chromebooks check-out program

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In schools, all you need is web

Posted by Vidya Nagarajan, Product Manager, Chromebooks for Education

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

READ MORE - In schools, all you need is web

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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