Birds of a Feather Flocking Together: Google Apps Regional Groups

Posted by Jordan Pedraza, Google Apps for Education Community Manager

In 2010, Northwestern University, Brady Corporation, and Motorola Mobility came together as organizations using Google Apps for Education or Business to share best practices, showcase custom solutions with Apps Script and APIs, and discuss common issues. The initial meeting was so successful, these customers formed the Google Apps Northcentral User Group and organized several followup meetings for other regional enterprise and education Google Apps customers to connect with each other and share feedback directly with Google.

Since then, we’ve helped to launch additional Google Apps Regional Groups for colleges and universities, businesses, governments, non-profit organizations, and large K-12 school districts. We continue to hear more productive and cross-industry conversations, from Boise State and Genentech exchanging deployment tips in the Northwest Group, to SUNY IT and Ahold discussing migration best practices in the Northeast Group. And these discussions aren’t limited to talks about the transition to Google Apps; group members are also sharing creative and innovative uses of Google Apps: UNCG's Google Calendar mashup has inspired other organizations to adopt and customize Calendar with APIs more broadly for easier discovery of events.

We’ve already seen great communities with the K-12 user groups and now the trend continues for higher education, business, government, and non-profits. These regional groups join the existing K-12 user groups and are designed for Google Apps administrators and managers to network, learn, collaborate, and share resources through discussion forums, events, and webinars. While no industry is the same, we’ve heard from regional group members that it’s better to “flock together like birds of a feather” and share how they’re taking advantage of the tools and platform.

If you’re a Google Apps administrator and your organization is located in the United States or Canada, please check out the list below – as well as appsusersgroup.com – to find and join your group. International groups in Australia-New Zealand and Europe are also coming soon!

North America http://groups.google.com/a/appsusersgroup.com/group/northamerica
Mailing list for all regional groups in the US and Canada

Northwest http://northwest.appsusersgroup.com

US: Alaska, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Wyoming
Canada: Alberta, British Columbia, Northwest Territories, Saskatchewan, Yukon

Southwest http://southwest.appsusersgroup.com
Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah

North Central http://northcentral.appsusersgroup.com
US: Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota, Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota, Wisconsin
Canada: Manitoba, Ontario, Nunavut

Southeast http://southeast.appsusersgroup.com
Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee

Mid-Atlantic http://midatlantic.appsusersgroup.com
District of Columbia, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia

Northeast http://northeast.appsusersgroup.com
US: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont
Canada: New Brunswick, Newfoundland & Labrador, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Quebec

Australia-New Zealand http://australia-newzealand.appsusersgroup.com
Australia and New Zealand

Europe http://europe.appsusersgroup.com *
Europe

* Update 3/22: Due to recent feedback from Google Apps customers in Europe, we have decided to roll our initial UK-Ireland and Spain user groups into a larger Europe Users Group. We will establish regional aliases in the near future. Thanks to anyone who has reached out to us or shared feedback.

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A look back at NACo 2011

Posted by Wendy Wu, Google Enterprise Team

A week ago the Google State and Local Government team and our partner SADA Systems were out in force at the National Association of Counties Annual Conference in Portland, Oregon. The conference provided a platform for over 2,000 county leaders and industry experts from across the nation to discuss innovative programs and technologies impacting county governments.

Our team was honored to moderate a session entitled “Counties Saving Money in the Cloud,” which featured three counties of different sizes using Google Apps for Government: Multnomah County, Oregon; Larimer County, Colorado; and Amador County, California. Leaders from these counties discussed their first-hand experience going Google, offering unique insight into the challenges they faced and the success they’ve seen. We developed a case study to recap the key points from the panel: Google Apps improves employee productivity while dramatically lowering IT costs.

In the evening, we had the chance to meet many more conference attendees at our tent in South Park (seriously, that was the park’s name). We’d like to extend a huge “thank you” to everyone who stopped by to say hello, play interactive games, make funny faces in our photo kiosk and pose for caricature portraits. It’s because of you that NACo 2011 was informative and fun!


To hear more from Multnomah, Larimer, Amador and other counties that have gone Google, visit our website.

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Security First: Google at the Security Confab Conference

Posted by Adam Swidler, Sr. Manager, Google Apps Team

Last week the Google Enterprise team participated in the 5th Annual Security Confab in Monterey, CA, from July 12-14. The Confab event brought together information security leaders from public and private sector organizations to discuss thought-provoking topics around information and cyber security issues.

At the conference, John Collins, Google’s Sr. Global Trust Product Manager, presented a talk entitled “Private Insecurities and Public Transparency.” John compared the attributes of public clouds and so-called private clouds in an attempt to dispel the myth that private clouds offer cost and productivity benefits without security concerns. In fact, the opposite is true: private clouds do not deliver the same benefits as public clouds, but they still require significant investment to secure and protect.

For more information about how we protect the data our customers store in Google Apps, visit our Google Apps Trust page. Many of the protections are highlighted in our security white paper and data center video tour. We take extreme measures to protect our users’ data and we are constantly innovating to develop new features and capabilities in these areas.

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See you at the National Association of Counties Annual Conference

Posted by Wendy Wu, Google Enterprise Team

From big cities to small towns to suburbs, from forests to tundra to islands, Americans live in diverse habitats. No matter where we live, we all have county governments. Today, members of Google's government team are flying from Santa Clara County (home of our Mountain View headquarters) to Multnomah County in Oregon to talk to county leaders from across the country at the National Association of Counties Annual Conference, NACo 2011, from Saturday to Monday, July 16-18.

This year’s NACo conference is hosted by Multnomah County, one of our Google Apps for Government customers. Due to tight budgets, counties across the nation, like Multnomah, have been forced to look for innovative ways to save money while maintaining critical services.


Our team will moderate a panel session featuring three distinguished county government leaders who will discuss their experiences moving their email and workplace collaboration to the cloud. Please join us if you’ll be at the conference.

Counties Saving Money in the Cloud
Time: July 17, 1:30 - 2:45 PT
Location: Room 113 (level 1), Oregon Convention Center

Speakers:

• Sherry Swackhamer, Chief Information Officer, Multnomah County, Oregon
• Lew Gaiter, Commissioner, Larimer County, Colorado
• Jeff White, IT Director, Amador County, California
• Scott McIntyre, Director of State and Local Government, Google

Be sure to stop by our booth 601 to learn more about our technology offerings for governments. Even if you can’t attend the conference, you can visit our website for more information about Google Apps for Government.

We hope to see you there!

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Security First: Google at the Cyber Security Strategies Summit

Posted by Adam Swidler, Sr. Manager, Google Enterprise Team

This week the Google Enterprise team is excited to be participating in the Cyber Security Strategies Summit (CSSS) in Washington DC on May 10th-12th. At the summit later today, I’ll be presenting a session on cloud security at scale and the data protections that are in place for our Google Apps customers.

If you’re not able to attend the conference, you can visit our Google Apps Trust site and find more information on the security and data protection measures in Google Apps. Many of them are highlighted in our security white paper and data center video tour. We take extreme measures protect our users data and we are constantly innovating to develop new features and capabilities in these areas.

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Google Data Center Efficiency Summit 2011

Posted by Joe Kava, Data Center Construction & Operations Team

Back in 2009, we hosted our first conference on data center efficiency at the Google campus in Mountain View, CA. Colleagues from the industry joined us in sharing best practices and laying out the path to improved efficiency in large-scale computing infrastructure. In the past two years we’ve continued to work hard at improving our own efficiency, and we’ve been impressed by the advances others in the industry have made as well. Leaders in the tech sector have managed to achieve and surpass what seemed like stretch goals at the time.

Data center efficiency isn’t just for the big guys. Improving the energy efficiency of your facility – large or small – reduces your organization's total environmental impact. It also makes financial sense for computing infrastructures at any scale, as the most effective efficiency best practices are actually quite straightforward. Whether you run a facility of a hundred kW or a multi-MW data center, there are simple, immediate steps you can take to deliver rapid environmental and economic returns.

We’re happy to announce that we’re hosting a second data center efficiency conference, this time in Zurich, Switzerland, on May 24th. We’ll be gathering industry leaders together again to share and discuss the latest energy efficiency best practices. The agenda includes:

• Keynotes on data center sustainability
• Best practice case studies from Google and other leading organizations
• Practical implementation strategies for local cooling solutions and geo-independent approaches to efficiency
• Time for networking with peers, including a relaxed cocktail reception after the Summit.

Limited space is still available. Find out more and register to attend here.

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