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.

Bangor Daily News uses Drive API to cut production time so reporters can work from the field

Posted by William Davis, Director of Research and Innovation, Bangor Daily News  Editor's note: Today’s guest post comes from William Davis, Director of Research and Innovation at the Bangor Daily News, a 4th-generation family-owned online and daily print publication covering news from around the state of Maine. The Bangor Daily News has witnessed and reported on quite a long list of moments in American history since it first went to press back in 1889. From world wars to local fires, peace protests to suffrage laws, we’ve covered it all — keeping the people of Maine up to date and in the loop. And we’ve kept it all in the family along the way: our current publisher, Richard J. Warren, is the great-grandson of our founder, and his sister is our chairman of the board. The last decade has been especially tumultuous as our business has changed rapidly. With people reading news online instead of in print and the rise of the 24-hour news cycle, we’ve re-evaluated how we define ourselves as a newsroom. And our legacy systems were holding us back as we tried to compete with a new wave of digital-only publishers. One of the biggest issues we faced were slow, expensive systems that kept reporters in the newsroom instead of finding and researching stories in the field. With a large newsroom flung all across the state, traditional desktop and local server-based programs just didn’t cut it. To file a story, reporters often sent their editor an email with a Microsoft Word attachment, and the story would have to be copied and pasted into our local system. To push the story to our website, someone copied and pasted it into WordPress, added images and hyperlinks, formatted it, and published it. If the reporter filed a newer version of the story, the process started back from the beginning and all changes were lost. The process was painful for everyone involved. That all changed when we moved to Google Apps. Now we use the Drive API to complete the process in a single click. We connected Drive, WordPress, and Adobe InDesign to make a tedious and slow process easier and faster. In our new system, reporters and editors write their stories in Docs, using collaborative real-time editing, comments and revision history to make process quick and painless. We then use the Drive API to capture the text of the story, strip out comments and editing notes, and push it directly to our website — no copying and pasting. The text also flows into InDesign fully formatted, making the production of our print newspaper easier, faster and cheaper as well. We also use the Drive API for project budgeting, which is how our newsroom tracks and prioritizes articles using metadata like wordcount, category, story importance and estimated submission time. Editors use the budget to plan our online content strategy for the day and decide what will go in the next day’s paper. As a reporter submits a budget line to let his or her editors know to expect it, a Doc is created via the API, keeping everything tied together and easy to track. Google Apps costs next to nothing and lets us work the way we want. Instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on complex systems, we can spend that money on reporters. And in an industry where seconds, pennies and flexibility matter, Google Apps has helped our business focus on what’s really critical — breaking news that matters to Maine.

Aerospace and Defense company Rockwell Collins enters the next phase of computing with Google Apps

Posted by John Paul Besong, SVP & CIO, Rockwell Collins  Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is John Paul Besong, SVP & CIO at Rockwell Collins, a Fortune 500 manufacturer of communication, aviation electronic, and information management systems, services and solutions. In 1933, Rockwell Collins — then less than a year old and known as Collins Radio — supplied the equipment to establish a communications link with the South Pole expedition of Rear Admiral Richard Byrd. It was an exhilarating start to what would, over the next 80 years, include a number of industry milestones, including providing communications for the Apollo, Gemini and Mercury programs, pioneering GPS navigation, and more recently, developing the industry's only aviation head-up synthetic vision system. Today, we're one of the world’s leading aerospace and defence companies. Our team of about 20,000 employees builds systems to ensure pilots around the world arrive and land safely. Our aviation electronics are installed in the cockpits or cabins of nearly every commercial air transport aircraft in the world. And our communication systems transmit about 70 percent of U.S. and allied military airborne communications. Because we operate in an industry that places a premium on safety and serve clients that prioritize security, our technology — and our IT environment — has to be safe, trustworthy and reliable. Recently, I realized these priorities, along with our risk averse culture, had left us with IT tools that kept our operations secure and consistent but left our employees and our IT team frustrated. The problems were widespread. With our legacy mail system, less than 10 percent of our employees — those with company Blackberries — could check their email and calendar on the go. A majority of our engineers expressed dissatisfaction with our development tools. And we were having trouble attracting young new talent. After digging deeper, I sent out a company-wide survey, and the message came through loud and clear: our employees wanted a faster, more flexible platform that was safe and let them access their info and collaborate on the go and from multiple devices. We looked at a number of options, and after an extended evaluation process, decided that Google Apps for Business was the best solution for both protecting sensitive company information and giving our employees the consumer-friendly collaboration tools they were asking for. With the help of Maven Wave, our Google Apps implementation partner, we made the move successfully and completed our official go-live just a few weeks ago. Google Apps is moving us into the next era of user-centric computing by allowing our employees to use technology at work the same way they do at home. To start, we’ve replaced the legacy mail system with Google Apps for email, calendar, storage, documents and video chat, and all employees can access their Google Apps account on their own mobile devices — Android, iPhone, tablet, whatever they choose to use. We have also deployed a campus-wide employee wireless network so people don’t feel chained to their desks. Our employees are now exploring and adopting all of the other collaborative features of Google Apps as well. Three weeks into our deployment, 12,500 employees are using Drive for secure file storage and document sharing, with more than 750,000 files uploaded to Drive. Nearly 20,000 Google Docs, Sheets and Slides have been created. And finally, approximately 10,000 files have already been shared on a read/write access basis, enabling employees to co-author and collaborate within a single document. Rockwell Collins is a Fortune 500 company with employees located across the globe, and we need to leverage technology to collaborate better and to work more efficiently. Now that our employees can respond to each other almost instantly and work from virtually anywhere with Google Apps, I believe we’re paving the way for the next phase of Rockwell Collins’ journey.

The best of Google+ for our Apps customers

Posted by Michael Cai, Product Manager  It’s now easier to connect with co-workers and discuss important business decisions face-to-face with some new updates to Google+ and Hangouts. In the past, some of you may have noticed an admin option to enable a preview of “Google+ premium features.” Today we’re rolling out these premium features to everybody. It won’t change the way you’ve previously interacted with Google+ or Hangouts, but it will let you access several great business-specific features you may have missed out on before now. These changes will let organizations do two things: first, you’ll have a more tailored Google+ experience with enhanced control options, like making Google+ posts restricted to your domain by default or the ability to hide employee profiles in external searches. Second, you can save time and money while meeting face-to-face with colleagues using 15-person HD video calls with Google Hangouts. So the next time you need to quickly chat with a colleague or hash out a decision, you can just jump into a Hangout with one click from Calendar or an email invitation. All new Google Apps customers will see these updates from the moment they register, and current users will see these great updates in the next month. Read more about these changes in our Help Center.

FiLIp Goes Google: Keeping Kids Safe with Google Maps

Posted by Sten Kirkbak, Founder and Chief Creative Officer, FiLip  Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is from FiLIp, maker of the first smart locator for kids. See how other forward-thinking organizations are investing in mapping technology and transforming their business: Maps are Going Google.  The inspiration behind a company comes in many different forms and at FiLIp we have a unique story. It all began the day I lost track of my 3-year-old son at a shopping mall. We found him safe and sound, but those 30 minutes were heart-stopping, terrifying and something a father should never experience. No parent should ever feel that way — especially in today’s hyper-connected world. Businesses now use mapping technology to monitor of all their valuable assets. Parents need the same tools to protect the most precious assets of all: their children. This is the idea behind the FiLIp watch, a location-aware, communication device developed just for kids. Millions of people today have smart phones with Google Maps already installed. Knowing this, we developed a similarly-sophisticated piece of technology for kids — one with Wifi, a mobile network and mapping APIs that can provide real-time location data. This lets parents see exactly where their children are at all times, on the same Google Maps interface they already know and understand how to use. Kids can also call their parents directly from their watch. By combining voice capabilities with location technology, families have a simple, yet powerful way to communicate. Because kids tend to lose or forget things, it made sense to develop a product they would want to wear, rather than a device they would have to carry. That’s why we embarked on a whole new frontier — wearable technology. Partnering with Google gave my team access to developers who have been at the forefront of wearables and data analysts who could help us understand how to optimize location data and get it on a map. Using their insights, we created a product that lets parents keep tabs on their most important possession, while being fun for kids and parents to use together. My son, Filip, still remembers the day he got lost. Recently, when his teacher asked all the kids what they want to be when they grow up — Filip said he would be chairman for the company his father named after him. I love knowing my products help parents be truly connected with their children. But the thing I love most about my job is developing something my son is so connected to. As a father, that’s a great thing.

CI&T uses Google Cloud Platform to power the Coca-Cola “Happiness Flag” unveiled on the pitch at the opening match of the 2014 FIFA World Cup™

Posted by Daniel Viveiros, CI&T’s Head of Technology  (Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform Blog) Editor's note: Today's guest post is from Daniel Viveiros, Head of Technology at CI&T, a Google Cloud Platform Partner of the Year LATAM 2013. In this post, Daniel describes how CI&T in partnership with Coca-Cola built the ‘Happiness Flag’ for the Coca-Cola 2014 FIFA World Cup™ campaign in Brazil. To learn more about the Happiness flag visit this website.  As part of the ‘The World’s Cup’ campaign, Coca-Cola wanted to do something that would visually illustrate soccer’s global reach. Coca-Cola invited fans around the world to share their photos to create the Happiness Flag -- the world’s largest mosaic flag crafted from thousands of crowdsourced images submitted by people in more than 200 countries. The flag, 3,015 square meters in size, was unveiled during the opening ceremony of the 2014 FIFA World Cup™. A project of this scale calls for high performing and reliable technology, so when we started working with Coca-Cola to build the infrastructure for the Happiness Flag campaign, we knew we had to use Google Cloud Platform. By using Google Cloud Platform, we turned a big, innovative idea into reality on a global scale. To create the Happiness Flag, we leveraged the whole Google Cloud Platform stack as shown below: Google App Engine enabled us to handle the computing workload, capable of handling millions of images via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and email, to the searches for images and view requests. The architecture was scalable to meet this kind of transaction demand and the fluctuations in traffic. We stored all the images in Google Cloud Storage, where integrated edge caching support and image services made it an ideal choice for serving the images. Meanwhile, Google Compute Engine gave us the capability for long-running processes, such as the Twitter integration and advanced image transformations. We were able to show how powerful the creation of hybrid environments can be, using both Platform-as-a-Service (Google App Engine) and raw virtual machines (Google Compute Engine) in the cloud. We used other out-of-the-box Google Cloud Platform technologies like Memcache, Datastore and Task Queues to ensure outstanding levels of performance and scalability. We know that many fans will be viewing the Happiness Flag on their mobile devices, so we needed a platform that would offer different capacities of computational power. The system provides amazing user experience with high performance and low latency, regardless of the device and its location. Using Google Cloud Platform, the campaign runs smoothly 24/7 and includes redundancy, failover techniques, backups and state-of-the-art monitoring. Plus, it’s affordable. After the physical flag was unveiled before the opening match, the digital mosaic was made available with a Google map-like zoom in and out with eleven levels of detail. Anyone who submitted an image can now search for themselves on the virtual flag and the search results will show up as pins in the mosaic, like locations found in a Google map. By clicking on the pin, their photos open up in an overlay and they are taken to the maximum level of zoom in to see the "neighborhood" around their image in the flag. After the match, a link to the Happiness Flag site was sent to each participant as a souvenir. Our goal was to help Coca-Cola create a project that would celebrate the 2014 FIFA World Cup™ by enabling fans from all over the world to express their creativity in a show of unity and art. What better way to open the games than by displaying the Happiness Flag, which is a symbol of the spirit of the game and its fans.

Hayneedle takes the pain out of buying furniture online with the Google Search Appliance

Posted by David Markle, Director of Retail Experience, Hayneedle 

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is David Markle, Director of Retail Experience for Hayneedle, an online retailer of home furnishings. See what other organizations that use Google Search Appliance have to say. 

Hayneedle.com offers millions of home products, requiring a robust shopping experience to help customers discover exactly what they're looking for. The name "hayneedle" contains the seed of a promise – a perfect find for each customer's unique needs and tastes. To that end, Hayneedle has embarked on a process of continuous improvement of our site's discovery tools, including the addition of a much better search solution, powered by Google Search Appliance. 

Our previous search solutions couldn't handle the large amount of content indexing and diversity of search queries that hayneedle.com customers entered. Performance lagged, and the search results weren't highly relevant. Our customers demanded better, and we set out to fix the situation.

We considered every possible search provider in the market, grading them on a list of more than 100 features with a focus on performance and search relevancy. We evaluated each for its potential to provide us a scalable solution that could grow with our business. Google Search Appliance emerged as the leader in the areas that mattered most to our customers and clearly offered the best return on investment. 

Since we began using Google Search, hayneedle.com has seen revenue per search increase by more than 20%. In addition, the conversion rate for shoppers who use search has increased by 12%, and the average order value for shoppers who use search has gone up 5%. Google is the perfect partner as we seek to continually improve our retail search solution and help our customers find the perfect products for their home.

Bringing personalized learning to shared tablets with Google Play for Education

Posted by Emily Bernier, Software Engineer, Google Play for Education  While most schools eventually want to get to 1:1, it’s not always practical to start with a dedicated tablet for every student. Asking students to share a single account isn’t advisable either -- too often the result is one-size-fits-all technology with more than a few management headaches. That’s why we’re adding support for multiple accounts to tablets with Google Play for Education, making it possible for schools to provide personalized learning for up to five students on the same shared device. With multiple accounts, schools can test out tablets at a meaningful scale before buying hardware for every student. Here’s how it works: “Bump” tablets together as usual to get them set up -- you now have the option to specify the number of students who’ll be sharing each tablet (up to 5). Students complete setup by signing into one of the the tablets you’ve configured, then setting a pin code for individual access. From then on, each student can pick up their assigned tablet, select their account, and enter their pin to get back to all their stuff. When each student has their own account it’s easy for them to collaborate on class projects using Docs, Drive, and other Google Apps. And teachers can use Google Play for Education to instantly send students the apps, books, and videos that match their academic needs and speak to their unique interests. It's easy for your school to scale to 1:1 when you're ready -- just set up any new tablets with the student accounts you’ve already been using. The apps teachers have already assigned to each student will download automatically. You can read more about multiple accounts in the Google Play for Education Help Center or contact our sales team to learn about a starting trial at your school.

Chesterfield County Schools (VA) goes Google with 32,000 Chromebooks

Posted by Jason Katcher, Head of North America Large Customer Education Sales  Editor's note: If you are thinking about going Google with Chromebooks, complete the interest form on our website and a member of our team will be in touch. As students in the United States put down their pencils and head out for summer vacation, educators across the country are hard at work planning for the school year ahead. For some, it means putting together the summer reading list or having year-end conferences. For others, it means studying materials for a new syllabus or decorating the classroom. And for Chesterfield County Schools, one of the country’s 100 largest school systems, it means securing the best teaching materials and technology to greet students when they return to school next year -- including 32,000 new Chromebooks. Chesterfield, which serves students across 62 schools in Virginia, joins a number of other large districts who have chosen Chromebooks for the 2014-15 school year. They join Oakland Unified School District (8,000 devices), Boston Public Schools (10,000 devices), Milwaukee Public Schools (11,400 devices), Edmonton Public Schools (13,000 devices), and Chicago Public Schools (16,000 devices). Chesterfield is one of many public school districts that believe providing access to technology for every student is possible even when budgets are tight. They chronicled their journey on a website they created, called “Anytime, Anywhere Learning,” so the community could engage in the project and efforts. One of the most important steps the District took was running an in-depth pilot study where teachers, students and administrators tested 6 pilot devices in the classrooms, to determine which were best for their schools. Adam Seldow, Executive Director of Technology, letting younger students test the new Chromebooks  After testing and assessing the devices, Chesterfield selected Chromebooks for all 32,475 middle and high school students. What’s especially remarkable is that they were able to move to Chromebooks with existing funds — without requesting additional budget, since Chromebooks are nearly half the cost of PC desktops and laptop alternatives. Chesterfield also saved by reducing the amount of classroom peripheral devices such as interactive whiteboards, which they could replace with web-based tools. They selected Dell Chromebooks with local partner TIG, who committed to provide training and support for the journey to ensure students, teachers and administrators could take full advantage of the many benefits of the new technology. Choosing Chromebooks wasn’t just about selecting a piece of hardware - it was about meeting Chesterfield’s goals at the right price to bring great education to all students. As Chesterfield Superintendent Dr. Marcus Newsome explained, "anytime, anywhere learning is a tenet of our strategic plan made possible by highly trained teachers, and actionable by our students' access to Chromebooks.” And as Adam Seldow, Executive Director of Technology, said, “with Chromebooks, we are now able to provide students with more opportunities to pursue their interests both inside and outside of the classroom."

Ealing, Hammersmith & West London College connects 21,000 students to the world with Google for Education

Posted by Martin King, Head of IT Services at Ealing, Hammersmith & West London College (EHWLC)

Editor's note: Today’s post comes from Martin King, Head of IT Services at Ealing, Hammersmith & West London College (EHWLC). EHWLC is one of the largest further education colleges in the United Kingdom, with over 21,000 students and 1,000 employees across four campuses in London. 

Ealing, Hammersmith & West London College (EHWLC) is one of the largest further education colleges in the United Kingdom. Like “continuing education” programmes in the U.S., further education colleges focus on teaching post-secondary school students the skills they need to succeed in today’s competitive workforce. As a result, a lot of education takes place outside the classroom. For example, we might help students find mentors from the BBC or Michelin-starred restaurants, or show them how to produce their own music album under the College’s own record label. 

Going Google perfectly supported our approach by providing anytime, anywhere access to a productivity suite that encourages collaboration. In 2008, we rolled out Google Apps for Education to students, teachers and support staff. We give every student a Google Apps account for life, so in total, the IT team manages about 75,000 accounts. 

We began by using Google Apps in simple ways, such as collaborating on group projects in Drive or sharing assignments and feedback in real-time, even if the student isn’t in class. With our Apps account we can also use other Google products, like Google+ and Hangouts. Teachers use Hangouts to connect students to outside mentors. In one of our technology classrooms, we held a Hangout with someone at Google. That was a popular session.

Google+ has added a new social element, when it comes to learning. With nothing more than a smartphone, teachers and students across all campuses can instantly share photos of college projects, post thought provoking articles and announce college events. The teachers and students have many G+ communities where they exchange ideas and encourage each other.

From an IT perspective, Google Apps was easy to set up. Every year I can deploy over 20,000 new student accounts with 600 terabytes of storage in less than five minutes. Our environmental cost savings are substantial -- in terms of staff email alone, we will be able to save at least £2,000 ($3,365) in energy costs and reduce emissions by 16 tonnes each year, as well as eliminate expensive server disposal costs. 

Although we talk a lot about openness, our administrators would not have allowed us to use Google Apps if it didn’t meet the UK’s high standards for data privacy and security. After consultation with UK academic institutions the conclusion was that with Google, we’re actually even more secure. In the past, we had the occasional problem of someone losing a thumb drive with important information, but by storing everything in Google-managed servers, we no longer have to worry about that issue. 

It’s been six years since we began going Google and we’re still discovering new and delightful ways to use Google Apps to broaden our students’ learning horizons. This is especially important at a further education college where a lot of education takes place outside the classroom.

Maps are Going Google: Prepare, Respond, Recover

Posted by Jay Remley, Director, Google Maps for Business  Editor's note: During public emergencies, quick response and recovery is critical. That’s why forward-thinking organizations are investing in tools to help them prepare for situations in advance, including mapping technology. Read more about the six ways Maps are Going Google.  Over the thousands of years people have lived in cities, we’ve developed sophisticated infrastructure to keep things humming. Generally, we’ve gotten pretty good at creating safe places where people can work and live. So when it comes to running cities in the year 2014, what could go wrong? Rolling blackouts, spikes in population, and natural disasters drive home one very important point: We can’t control the unexpected. We can, however, plan for it. Take Pedro Junqueira, CEO and Chief Operating Officer of the Center of Operations (COR) in Rio de Janeiro. As Brazil’s second-largest city gets ready to host the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics, Pedro needs to keep this vibrant city safe and running smoothly. He heads a team of 400 people who constantly monitor the city’s activities — while integrating the efforts of nearly 90,000 employees from 30 agencies, including the Mayor’s Office and the Municipal Guard. With all of these different teams working together to minimize public risk, it’s crucial that communication be efficient. To gain a complete real-time picture of what’s happening, Pedro and his team are implementing maps to visualize information from various organizations and present it on a screen in the command center. Like Pedro, government and business leaders are tapping into the richness that real-time location data can bring to operations. From the Red Cross to Florida Power and Light Company, a growing number of organizations are using maps as part of a solution to: Spot potential crises, alert citizens to possible danger, and keep emergencies from becoming disasters. Provide the public with up-to-date, critical information, such as evacuation plans, road closures, and shelter locations. Coordinate rescue and relief efforts by seeing up-to-date status of teams, volunteers and citizens. Verify employee whereabouts in affected areas and more efficiently communicate with remote workers.  Preparedness starts with having a game plan everyone understands and can implement quickly. Today, corporations, small businesses, and municipal governments have access to practical map solutions that can ease their day-to-day operations and help them run better. We can’t control the weather or prevent every single crisis, but we can take measures to plan for the unexpected. To learn how maps can help your organization prepare, recover and respond, sign up for our exclusive “Maps are going Google” series or read Chapter 2 now.

Welsh schools are going Google

Posted by Liz Sproat, Head of Education, EMEA Around the world, schools are finding innovative ways to use technology to break down the traditional walls of the classroom, while overcoming the challenges of higher academic standards and tighter budgets. Today, we’re pleased to share the stories from two schools in Wales who’ve gone Google to help them meet the demands of a modern-day education system. Gowerton School in Gowerton Village serves 1,135 students aged 11 to 18. The IT team migrated students and educators from on-premise email to Gmail and Google Apps. Industry experts recognize them as one of the first schools in Britain to embrace cloud technologies. The school’s entire curriculum – from geography to cooking – is taught with Google Apps. Students can access assignments, lesson plans and other learning resources through Google Drive, while teachers can provide immediate feedback through Google Docs. This has brought about significant teaching and learning benefits including greater collaboration and more tailored feedback. Additionally, the move to Google allowed the school to re-invest cost savings from using cloud-based technologies. Gowerton saved £30,000 (US$50,000) in licensing and server maintenance, allowing them to buy numerous Chromebooks. Chromebooks are ideal for Gowerton because they’re easy to maintain and can be used by anyone without much training. “We’re very keen to deploy more Chromebooks. Students love them because they are intuitive to use and give them instant access to Google Apps,” said Darren Long, Teacher of ICT and ICT Coordinator at Gowerton. “They’re also great from an administration point of view. We experimented with laptops for a while but found they were too expensive and high-maintenance. With Chromebooks, we don’t need to worry about maintenance, updates are automatic, and they are good value.” Students at Gowerton School using Chromebooks Coleg Cambria in North East Wales has also gone Google. Coleg Cambria is one of the largest colleges in the United Kingdom, serving more than 7,000 full-time and 30,000 part-time students. Previously, students used Microsoft Live@edu accounts — but as the college expanded, the IT team struggled to support all the new accounts from a time and cost perspective. The problem was solved when the IT department moved everyone to Google Apps and installed Chromebooks around campus. Thanks to the remote, web-based management console, Coleg Cambria found Chromebooks easy to deploy to a large, growing body of students. Furthermore, the IT team no longer had to spend time going to each computer to install an update, since Google pushes these automatically. With Google Apps, students and teachers are more proactive when it comes to learning and teaching. Teachers find apps from the Chrome App Store and incorporate them in lesson plans. Assignments and resources are saved to students’ Google Drive accounts. As a result, students can simply log into their Google accounts to access their own virtual “classroom.” “The freedom for students and tutors to find and work with interesting applications -- anything from anatomy to mind-mapping -- has changed the way they think about learning and teaching,” said Mark Brandish, Head of IT Services at Coleg Cambria. “Traditionally students and teachers have just taken what we’ve provided. Now we’re a facilitator, giving them access to tools that allow them to be more innovative.” Students from Coleg Cambria using Chromebooks outside the classroom  You can read more stories of how passionate educators and talented students are using Google for Education in their learning environments. We’re excited to hear such stories of how technology helps prepare today’s youth for a better future.

Protecting Google Apps customers and their businesses

Posted by Amit Singh, President of Google Enterprise 

Millions of businesses trust Google to keep their data safe—a responsibility we take very seriously. We focus on protecting our customers’ data from all unauthorized access, whether from common phishing, sophisticated hacking, or state-sponsored intrusions. That’s why this spring we implemented new,mandatory HTTPS connections to secure user access to Gmail and protect email messages as they move to Gmail servers.

Our commitment to your security doesn’t stop there, which is why we’ve recently added even more business-friendly features for our Google Apps Business, Government and Education customers: 

• Mail routing, delivery controls and SMTP relay service—Control the flow of information to and from your company with policy-based routing to ensure that company messages are filtered, even if they are sent from third-party or other non-Gmail sources.
• Attachment compliance—Protect your business by blocking or rerouting messages based on what is attached to emails, providing controls over what content is sent and received.
• TLS Encryption of message content—Prevent eavesdropping and message spoofing through secure encryption and delivery.

In addition to these increased security measures, as we recently announced, we’ve now turned off ads in Google Apps services. This means administrators no longer have the option or ability to turn on ads in these services. We’ve also permanently removed all ads scanning in Gmail for Google Apps, which means Google does not collect or use data in Google Apps services for advertising purposes.

Customers who have chosen to show AdSense ads on their Google Sites will still be able to display those existing ads on their websites. However, it will no longer be possible to edit or add new AdSense ads to new or existing sites.

All this is part of our commitment to providing the best security to ensure your data is protected, while strengthening the features our Google Apps customers care about the most.

Building a small business, one scoop at a time with Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams

Posted by Jeni Britton Bauer, Founder, President and Creative Director, Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams  Editor's note: Did you know 60% of young business owners saw an increase in customer engagement after getting a professional email address? Or that 81% of young business owners said that online file sharing is critical to their businesses? That’s just a snapshot of what we learned from the Young Business Success report and infographic we released to kick off National Small Business Week. To recognize and celebrate the young businesses taking the entrepreneurial leap, we’re revisiting a few customers to hear how they got their businesses off the ground and what they’ve learned along the way. Today, we hear from Jeni Britton Bauer, Founder, President and Creative Director or Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams, who first shared their Gone Google story in 2012.  What was the inspiration for starting Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream? I was 22 when I knew I wanted to make ice cream. I had spent some time blending perfumes with essential oils, and one day, decided to mix some cayenne essential oil with a cup of chocolate ice cream. It was cold. It tasted like chocolate. After a few seconds it burst into flames in the back of my throat. I couldn’t stop thinking about it and knew I’d found my canvas. So I left Ohio State University, started Scream, and sold the delicious dessert concoctions out of the North Market in Columbus, Ohio. Scream lasted two years, and while it failed to become a profitable business, it made the foundation for what became Jeni’s just a few years later. I learned a lot in those two years, especially the importance of having a balance between being new and being consistent — I loved making new, unique flavors like goat cheese with fresh cherries each day, while customers sometimes just wanted their go-to salted caramel day after day. So I created a dipping cabinet for our signature blends, and kept another for the experimental concoctions. It worked. And here we are today, with nearly 400 employees and our ice creams being sold in over 1,200 grocery stores. How has using Google Apps helped you in building and growing your business? Google Apps makes it possible for businesses like ours to exist at all. When I started Jeni’s, I didn’t have to hire an IT guy to tell me how many servers I would need, which meant we could put that money towards our ice cream flavors instead. Equally important is how Google Apps helps our business feel like a family. Yes, being profitable is essential (I learned that with Scream), but it’s the people that make us successful, and Hangouts keep us connected as we grow and hire throughout the country. We hold company all-hands meetings, new flavor brainstorm sessions and weekly status check-ins over Hangouts, so our employees in California feel like they know their colleagues in New York, despite the distance and lack of in-person contact. Also, here’s a fun fact: I wrote two books on Google Docs. We organize recipes and track our changes and tweaks along the way in Docs, so everyone can access a single document and add their updates and comments, and it just made sense for me to do the same for my books. Any advice for other aspiring or budding entrepreneurs? Starting with nothing is a hidden blessing, so don’t let a need for scrappiness get in the way of launching your business. Having your boots on the ground from the get-go means learning about every aspect of the business — not just the fun stuff (the ice cream mixing) but the hands-on stuff (serving the goods) and the stuff you thought you’d never imagined yourself doing (financial statements). You learn the ins and outs and the nitty gritty details of running a company, which is an essential skill for any small business owner. And never distance yourself too much from the customer; they’re the ones your livelihood relies on, so make sure you keep an ear on the ground. Make sure you do something you love. I’ve gone through plenty of tough times, but I didn’t question what I was doing because I knew it was my passion. I took the plunge for something I knew I was meant to do.