Khan Academy builds scalable education site on Google Cloud Platform

Posted by Ben Kamens, Lead Developer at Khan Academy

(Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform Blog)

Editor's note: Today’s guest post is from Ben Kamens, Lead Developer at Khan Academy, a not-for-profit that provides a free education available for anyone. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Khan Academy has an audacious mission: to provide a free world class education to anyone anywhere. With less than fifty full-time employees at the company, our small team has to take special care to work on whatever’s most critical. So we’re building a culture that relentlessly focuses on shipping code that improves students’ lives. Our team of developers relies on three simple principles that guide all the work we do:

1. Shipping beats perfection.
2. Be open. Share your work.
3. Anybody can fix anything.
 

Google Cloud Platform provides a flexible and reliable environment to put these principles into practice. With Google App Engine in particular, we get a big, enormous, whopper of a benefit — consistent Datastore performance no matter how big the product gets. Even if we have a query that returns 10 items from a set of 10,000, we can relax. We know that as our company grows over time, we’ll get the exact same speed when pulling 10 items from a set of 10,000,000,000. 

Lots of people ask, “How will you know if Khan Academy is really successful?” My answer is always the same: we of course care about data, analytics, and metrics that demonstrate provable, real learning. But in the back of my mind I’m most persuaded by the personal stories that people send us literally every day. Those stories of real lives being changed for the better are the reason why we believe a free educational resource like Khan Academy simply must exist.

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Georgia puts health care facilities and data on Google Maps

Posted by Matt Jarrard, Health Planning Director, Georgia Department of Community Health

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Matt Jarrard, Deputy Director of the Healthcare Facility Regulation Division and Health Planning Director of Georgia’s Department of Community Health, which licenses and regulates health care facilities for the state. Tune into today’s webinar at 11:00am PST to hear more about how GaMap2Care is making a difference. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.


While the State of Georgia is known for its peaches and the Atlanta Braves, it also takes pride in finding ways to make life easier for its citizens. The Georgia Department of Community Health oversees programs that serve 10 million people and regulates 7,000 health care facilities, including nearly 2,000 personal care homes. In keeping with our goals of being lean and responsive, we found a cost-effective way to serve the community with GaMap2Care, an application built on Google Maps. The app helps the public and government officials locate, visualize and monitor all the state’s licensed health care facilities.

Using the app, people can locate facilities such as hospitals and personal care homes based on specialty, location, size and number of beds. They can also see satellite views or zoom in on street views. The app shows inspection reports for many facilities and other information which had previously required an open record request. Virtual tours let families quickly see if a facility meets their needs.

GaMap2Care is intuitive to use because of widespread familiarity with Google Maps. The app’s rich features allow us to help people in a variety of ways. For example, lawmakers have often asked for the number of nursing homes in their district. Staff would have needed to manually compare lists prepared in a separate report to district boundaries. Now, GaMap2Care provides this information all on one map that allows lawmakers to easily determine which district the facilities belong to.

GaMap2Care is also helping state workers and officials serve the community better. Analysts setting health care policy can now more easily identify underserved areas. In addition, the state’s 165 health care facility surveyors investigating complaints or non-compliance issues can calculate distances and plan trips before they hit the road, saving time and improving efficiency. We also added additional map layers, such as populations and weather, that let officials see what facilities might be affected before a natural disaster.

The app was designed and developed internally by existing staff. The ease of Google Maps’ customization enabled a programmer with no previous Geographic Information System (GIS) experience to integrate data from different sources into the map. Compared to other solutions, we found Google Maps to be easier to use, faster to load and offering more customization. A license from a traditional Geographic Information System would have required extensive user training and was expected to be considerably more than a Google Maps license.

With GaMap2Care, state workers can be productive and efficient, and citizens have access to information that saves them time and helps them make critical informed health care decisions. We look forward to making GaMap2Care even more useful with the launch of the mobile version of the application in the near future, and will continue to enhance and expand features and functionality.

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Standard Parking Adds Capacity with Google Apps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Globe Telecom connects in the cloud

Posted by Ernest L. Cu, President and CEO of Globe Telecom

Editor's note: Today’s post comes from guest blogger Ernest L. Cu, President and CEO of Globe Telecom, a telecommunications company in The Philippines. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

At Globe Telecom we work to quickly and easily connect people to one another and to the information they need. As one of the country’s largest telecommunications companies, we have a vast network of mobile, fixed line, and broadband Internet services that connect 36 million customers across over 7,000 islands of the archipelago.

Filipinos love technology. In fact, we have the highest rate of smartphone adoption in South East Asia. The country is experiencing an exciting time of economic growth, and to support this growth and provide our customers with the great service they expect, Globe is going through its own process of transformation and innovation. We’re upgrading our network and systems as well as moving our headquarters to Fort Bonifacio.

To manage this change and give our customers great service, our internal communication systems need to be fast and reliable. This is why we’ve decided to make the switch to Google Apps. Moving to a cloud-based set of tools and being able to access information from any device at any time means that everyone from the head office, to store employees, to call center staff and vendors will be able to connect more easily. This will ultimately improve our customer service, as well.

By finding new ways to collaborate, we’ll not only be able to improve our customers service, but it will also help us focus on innovation. Managing projects is a large part of everyone’s work life at Globe, and now our teams will be able to coordinate their projects more efficiently with Google Calendar and Google Sites. When we ran a test with Google Apps it took just a few hours for 50 of our non-technical staff to set up team sites, add their calendars, agendas and profiles and start working together on campaigns collaboratively. This is much faster than any system we’ve used before and will open up lots of avenues to be more innovative.

A big part of our culture is having face-to-face meetings, so Google+ Hangouts will be a great way for us to connect face-to-face with our colleagues around the country instead of flying or driving everywhere. Using consumer tools like Gmail and Google Docs have other benefits too — staff are familiar with these tools from their personal lives and when given choice, 73% of our employees voted to use Google Apps.

As a company focused on driving innovation and collaboration to give our customers a great experience, we’re looking forward to undertaking this journey with Google Apps.

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

Posted by Joël Kalmanowicz, Product Manager, Google Apps Team

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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