Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Fox & Roach, REALTORS® powers home sales with Google Apps and Drive

Posted by Scott Crowley, SVP & Chief Information Officer, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Fox & Roach, REALTORS®  Editor's note: Last week, we announced Google Drive for Work, a new premium offering for businesses that includes unlimited storage, advanced audit reporting and new security controls. To celebrate the announcement and show how Drive helps power businesses around the world, we’re sharing a few stories from a handful of customers using the product in innovative ways. Today’s guest blogger is Scott Crowley, SVP & Chief Information Officer at Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices (BHHS) Fox & Roach, REALTORS®, a part of HomeServices of America, the nation’s second-largest provider of total home services. Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Fox & Roach, REALTORS®, is the largest REALTOR® in the tri-state area of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. We’re constantly looking for competitive advantages to recruit and retain experienced agents, while also appealing to the next generation entering the workforce. Because our more than 4,000 sales associates spend most of their time on the road, all the tools need to be available on mobile phones and tablets. They need to access important information at their fingertips, whether they’re in the car, a property site or at one of our 65 offices. A little over a year ago, we realized that not only was our technology platform lacking the mobility our workforce needed, but our sales associates and employees were not solely using the technology we provided them. They were looking elsewhere for IT solutions, forwarding work email to personal third party accounts for additional storage and using third party cloud storage providers. We needed a solution that could provide the same quality of technology tools to our users without them going outside of IT -- and knew Google Apps was the answer. After running a pilot with our IT department last July, we migrated our more than 5,000 users to the new platform throughout with winter with the help of Cloud Sherpas, our Google Apps reseller. The move to Google has enabled us to provide our users with an all-in-one communication and collaboration platform to increase productivity and efficiency by bringing our tools together in one place, with one login. Among the additional benefits that Google Apps provides, it’s easy to use, works seamlessly with mobile devices, and offers significantly more storage space. Google Drive allows us to share documents instead of sending attachments back and forth, making it easier for teams to work together on projects more effectively and collaborate on live documents. Not only is Drive transforming how we collaborate and collect information from around our footprint, but it also provides a great cloud backup, especially as a personal disaster recovery solution in case hardware fails or mobile devices are lost or stolen. Google Drive works for any kind of file type, not just Google Sheets, Slides and Docs — which is important in a business where we still work heavily with PDF contracts and photos for listings. Today, everything is automatically stored in the cloud for access from any device, anywhere. We’ve been using the shared Google calendar to revamp our closing process. Instead of calling remote offices to book rooms, our coordinators can now schedule the settlement, invite all parties involved and book the room all at the same time. If the settlement gets postponed or moved, all participants are notified immediately, saving critical time and making us more efficient. With the flexibility of Google Apps, it’s much easier for us to integrate with other systems. Via Google Sync, we can push and pull contacts directly to and from our CRM, providing our sales associates constant access to all leads as they arrive, particularly on their mobile devices. Our transaction management system allows documents to be uploaded directly from Drive, which eliminates the need for local storage and makes working from a mobile device a true advantage. We’re constantly growing our usage of Google Apps products. Our IT department uses Hangouts to help diagnose problems for remote staff, allowing them to resolve issues faster and provide better support. Later this year, we plan to use a combination of Google+ and Sites to replace our existing Sharepoint based intranet. With Google, we get a technology partner, not just a vendor. We receive several updates a month, instead of waiting for bi-annual releases, each providing new innovative functionality to our company. No one asks “what version of Google apps are you running” -- everything is up to date without IT intervention. Our sales associates and employees now have the ability to work and communicate in one platform, making the entire company more efficient, integrated, and successful.

Education tools help teachers do more

Posted by Jaime Casap, Global Education Evangelist, Google for Education As giddy students in the US are beginning to enjoy their summer break, we're feeling nostalgic looking back on the school year and are equally inspired by all the teachers we've had the chance to work with. For example, the educators at Fairfield County Schools -- a rural district in South Carolina -- are committed to helping each and every student achieve success in academics and dedicated to helping them pursue their personal passions. The IT team may be small, but their achievements are not. And while the district is using Google for Education tools, it’s really the teachers there that make the difference. It's because of inspiring educators, like those at Fairfield, that we work closely with teachers to build new tools made just for the classroom — to enable them to spend more time teaching & less "tech-ing". And we’re now expanding the availability of these tools, giving even more teachers new ways to engage students when school starts in the Fall. One destination to find the right content for students To make it easier for teachers to find content that inspires their students, we announced last week that we expanded Google Play for Education — creating a single destination for US K12 schools to find and distribute educational content — whether students are using Chromebooks, tablets, or both. Schools that use Chromebooks can start using the site for flexible book rentals, to distribute a selection of free Chrome apps and to share YouTube EDU videos. Administrators for Chromebooks can enable Google Play for Education today by visiting google.com/edu/play. If you do this by July 15 you’ll get a $20 credit for your school to use for book rentals. Learn more. New tools to enhance Google Apps for Education Last month we announced Classroom, a new tool coming to Google Apps for Education. We designed Classroom side-by-side with teachers to help them better engage their students and make time-consuming tasks like managing assignments easier. Classroom is currently in an invite-only preview but we are working to make it available to all Google Apps for Education schools in August. In the meantime, teachers can view the demonstration video. Administrators will also gain a new tool that saves them time: Google Apps School Directory Sync. It allows a school to export data from their student information system and quickly sync it to their Google Apps for Education domain. With this tool, it’s easy to create users, organizational units, and Google Groups, and also to keep everything in sync.Learn more. More value and flexibility from tablets Based on feedback from schools, we’ve made a few changes to help schools gain more flexibility to meet classroom and student needs with tablets. Schools told us they want students to be able to share devices so we’ve made some changes and now our tablets can be shared with up to 5 students. We’ve also taken the first steps to make tablets compatible with standardized testing for the 2014-2015 school year, releasing a single-task-mode tool for developers so they can design apps that restrict the device for assessments only. Partners like Pearson (a PARCC assessment provider) have already started implementing this functionality with their on-line assessment delivery system, TestNav. Learn more. Connect with other teachers Educators at the ISTE conference can visit booth #2414 to demo Google for Education and see over 50 presentations in our teaching theater. If you are not at ISTE, follow along online by searching #googleedu. We’re asking educators to share tips each day to surface great ideas for when school starts.

Commune Hotels bets on the future of boutique hospitality using Google Drive

Posted by Mike Blake, CIO, Commune Hotels and Resorts  Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Mike Blake, CIO at Commune Hotels and Resorts, a San Francisco-based hotel management company focused on boutique hotels At Commune Hotels and Resorts, we have a clear vision for the future of hospitality. Our three brands cater to a clientele that’s diverse in its tastes, but unified in its desire for a first-class experience. From Big Sur to Hawaii, our Joie de Vivre hotels are local and quirky. The Thompson Hotels in cities like London, Toronto and Chicago have a more international flair. And our newest brand, Tommie hotels, will offer ergonomic rooms and speedy services like self check-in and gourmet food to go. We’re expanding quickly and anticipating the evolving needs of customers. We need technology that will take us forward, and fast. That’s why we’re using Google Apps and Drive. When I joined Commune as CIO in April of 2013, we were using Microsoft Exchange, but with the growth we were seeing, we were in dire need of a flexible system that would help employees collaborate better together. We evaluated Office 365 and Google Apps, and concluded decisively that Apps would put us on a path of growth and innovation. This was an essential differentiation: technology isn’t just about what’s available today, but about what will also put you in the best position for the years ahead. Google is hands down the company best suited to carry us forward. The strengths and vision of Google Drive, in particular, convinced us of the power and potential of Google Apps. It was clear to us that Drive was a particularly heavy area of focus for Google, and we loved that it was a core part of the company’s product strategy — that updates and improvements were happening all the time. In fact, I believe Drive is becoming the next new shared file structure — the next big way of saving, organizing and sharing all your files — as we move away from desktop network folders that hide behind firewalls and VPN access. Mike Blake, CIO Drive adoption has been swift and organic across our organization. For example, our development and acquisitions team has a shared Drive folder organized by state, city and hotel or location, where they store everything they need, like blueprints from architects in PDF format, which they then pass on to construction firms and other partners. Executives use Drive to share photos and video of potential acquisitions in JPG and MPEGs with each other, as well as competitive information. They don’t need a VPN and they can access the information from anywhere, whether they’re on the road or in the office. Our sales operations team also created a set of shared folders in Drive, housed on a page built on Google Sites, with key information for our salespeople, like training documents, marketing campaign materials, promotional assets and property information. This solved a huge problem we faced after growing quickly without much central coordination, where employees resorted to emailing each other for information, often leaving them with either nothing or outdated material. Now, with Drive and Sites, our entire sales team can go to one single place for all the collateral they need. It’s become a quick success: not only do our reps spend less time searching for information, but we’ve seen a significant increase in cross-selling across hotel chains since all brands are in one site. Our teams are developing a more portfolio-focused, rather than hotel-specific, mindset. Google Apps has already improved the way we work, but it’s the years ahead we’re really looking forward to. As an aggressively growing lifestyle company with an ambitious vision and big goals, we know we’re in good hands with a company like Google that’s always thinking one step (or a mile) ahead.

Google Drive helps town of Hopkinton boost productivity and inform citizens

Posted by Christopher McClure, IT director of the town of Hopkinton  Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Christopher McClure, IT director of the town of Hopkinton, Mass., home to the Boston Marathon’s starting point. Here in historic Hopkinton, Massachusetts — affectionately known as the starting point of the Boston Marathon — our small town’s civic-minded citizens are thirsty for information about local events and news. Until recently, though, they had to get it through word-of-mouth and phone calls to city offices, which was slow, inefficient and frustrating. Communication between police and fire departments, schools and town offices, and boards and committees was fragmented. Documents were siloed. Collaboration was limited to sending emails. We were wasting time tracking down information and weren’t working together as well as we knew we could if we had access to the right tools. That all changed when we moved to Google Apps two years ago. Now, our officials and citizens are getting the information they need, when they need it, and we haven’t looked back. Drive in particular has been instrumental in creating a hub for storing, finding and sharing information. City employees, firefighters and police use Drive as the central storage for files ranging from PDFs to JPEGs, Word docs to videos, and for everything from meeting agendas to department staff lists, and from research reports to contracts. Our firefighters recently used a Drive shared folder as the main repository for all files involved in a recent study on consolidating firefighting resources among our nearby communities, so everyone involved could access key files, whenever they needed them. Our police department uses Drive to share policies and procedures among officers, since it’s so easy to pull up files whether they’re on their Android devices in the field or on their laptops back at headquarters. Hangouts play a similarly major role in supporting our town’s governance. Officials use Hangouts to go over town budgets together, so they can review the numbers in Sheets while being able to see each other face-to-face. Just recently, we hosted a town meeting and used Hangouts to connect everyone from remote locations. We worked through and discuss all the motions, amendments and documents that had been distributed to citizens through Drive, Google Groups and Google+, all while feeling like we were meeting in person. Hangouts also helps in emergency planning. Our fire department recently held a Hangout to discuss our “code red” plan, and everyone involved was impressed with both the ease of use — getting connected instantly just by clicking from the invitation in Google Calendar — and the strength of the sharing function, especially compared with past experience using Skype and GoToMeeting. Google Apps has made sharing news, documents and updates with both our staff and citizens a breeze, and the impact is real and powerful. Not only are employees and residents happier, but we’re seeing quantitative results, like the 50% drop in call volume to the police and fire departments during Hurricane Sandy due to the ability to post emergency information to a public Google site in real-time. Going Google with Apps and Drive has made our town more than just the starting point of the Boston Marathon — it’s become the model of a beacon of information for citizens everywhere.

Ulster-Greene ARC improves patient care with Chromebooks

Editor's note: Today’s post comes from Bart Louwagie, CIO of Ulster-Greene ARC (UGARC). UGARC is a private, nonprofit agency offering support for intellectually and developmentally disabled individuals in Ulster and Greene counties in New York. 

At UGARC, we provide a full array of customized support and services for individuals with intellectual and other developmental disabilities, these include educational programs, vocational readiness, job training, residential options and clinical services. We have over a thousand employees helping more than 1,300 people live full and meaningful lives.

There are a lot of medically frail people in our care who need 24/7 support. At the same time, our direct support workers need to record every event that takes place when they are “on the clock” including daily activities, food preferences and behavioral events. This information is collected in different databases and pulled up by other direct support workers or nurses who might work with the same person. The challenge for our employees is multi-tasking — it’s hard to give someone your undivided attention when you’re also trying to take notes down before you forget.

For a long time, direct support workers used pen and paper and then spent time entering their notes into a computer when they had some down time. It’s not the most efficient, but paper is easy. You just slap it on the table and start scribbling. As the leader of the IT department, I wanted to introduce technology that was as frictionless as paper and as “invisible” as possible, so our employees could spend more time focusing on the individual.

As a nonprofit we didn’t have many resources to use on new technology. With Chromebooks and Google Apps we were able to create an incredibly affordable, secure and easy-to-manage system for employees to collect and share patient information. We purchased 130 Samsung Chromebooks and locked them down in Kiosk mode, via the management console, so a staff member could only access essential web-based forms. We synchronized this with Active Directory so logons are easy. Now, when direct support staff are with the people, they simply turn on the Chromebook, log into the Electronic Healthcare records and start taking notes right away. By cutting down their note taking time, our direct support staff can focus on what is most important for the person.

As a healthcare provider, we needed to meet stringent regulations around data privacy and security. Chromebooks are by far the easiest computers to manage and secure, thanks to the remote management console. Chromebooks give us granular control over who can access what data, preventing problems with confidentiality of personal information. Since we store no data, we are confident that losing a device will not lead to data loss.

Our employees love Chromebooks, but I think the IT department has felt the biggest impact. Because Google automatically sends updates to each device, all we need to worry about is managing permissions for each user. We’ve saved hours of work each week by not having to maintain laptops, their applications and managing upgrades. It takes less than 10 minutes to configure a new Chromebook just the way we want, versus the hours it would have taken with a Windows-based netbook. 

Chromebooks have truly achieved my desire for “invisible” technology that’s simple to use, easy to manage and affordable. We hope to roll out more Chromebooks in the future.