Viocorp broadcasts clear signal for growth with Google Apps

Posted by Ian Gardiner, CEO of Viocorp



(Cross-posted on the Google Australia Blog)



Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Ian Gardiner, CEO of Viocorp, a leading provider of digital broadcast video solutions in Asia Pacific. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.



Viocorp has provided digital broadcast video solutions to local and global corporations, governments, and media companies since 2002. The video webcasts we host, such as the Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race or World Youth Day, often attract millions of viewers worldwide. We manage the back-end infrastructure to encode and deliver video of these events online, giving businesses an easy way to publish these digital media webcasts. Our customers don’t have to install anything on their end. They just buy a username and password and we deliver our services through the web browser.

Prior to Google Apps, we used a legacy on-premise solution to support our communication needs. Exchange had several shortcomings which became especially obvious as our business started to expand. Employees working from home and on the road had frequent problems with mobile email access and with synchronization of email across multiple devices. Our IT staff spent hundreds of hours each year managing and maintaining our email server when they could have been improving our video software solutions.

As a company that provides its services entirely online, we saw Google Apps for Business as a natural fit. Deployment was very easy and there were no major issues since Google Apps supports user choice, enabling us to have a gradual transition. Initially most of our users chose to maintain Microsoft Outlook as their email client, but today, given the option between Gmail or Microsoft Outlook, 90 percent of our employees choose Gmail.

We’ve also adopted Google Calendar to set up meetings and reserve shared resources such as conference rooms. Google Talk and Google Docs let us create, share, and collaborate faster than ever, moving projects forward as teams connected by real time information. Most importantly, Google Apps lets our employees work from anywhere with any smartphone or web-enabled tablet. When I’m in transit to client meetings, I can use my phone to email, chat, or even review my presentation in Google Docs. And every month we get new features that support innovation and efficiency within the company—at no extra cost.

Compared with our previous solution, managing Google Apps is incredibly easy. We think moving to Google Apps saves Viocorp well over 200 hours (approx. 5 weeks) of IT work annually, with no drawbacks in service or uptime. Although we definitely saved money by switching to Google Apps, the real value for us goes far beyond reduced costs. The question was, will Google Apps allow us to work more effectively? And when we ask our employees, the answer is “yes, without a doubt”.

Lamar Advertising moves to Google Apps for better reliability and collaboration

Posted by Ed Nettles, Vice President and Director of IT, Lamar Advertising



Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Ed Nettles, Vice President and Director of IT for Lamar Advertising. Founded in 1902, Lamar Advertising operates over 150 outdoor advertising companies and 63 transit companies, reaching driving audiences. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.



In 1902, when Charles Lamar and J.M. Coe decided to dissolve their business partnership, a coin toss was used to divide their assets: the Pensacola Opera House and the Pensacola Advertising Company, the small poster company created to promote the Opera House. Mr. Lamar lost the toss and was left with the less-lucrative poster company. A few years later the Opera house burned down, but that little poster company has grown into Lamar Advertising, one of the largest advertising companies in the U.S.



Prior to Google Apps, we were using Microsoft® Outlook for employees in the field, and Microsoft® Exchange for the employees in our corporate office. With this setup we were constantly facing three problems: data vulnerability, lack of reliable mobile access, and a constant need for IT maintenance.



We had employees saving Microsoft Outlook data in multiple locations, making us vulnerable to data loss and discovery requests that we couldn’t comply with. Microsoft Exchange limited our employees’ ability to get their information when out of the office. Employee smartphones couldn’t sync with calendars or contacts and while employees could get new messages on their phones, they couldn’t see emails older than a few days. We felt like once our employees walked away from the office, they walked away from their work. Even in the office, our email lacked stability so the IT department was constantly dealing with issues. We needed one centralized way of storing and managing our data so that we could provide a better service to our users, provide the business with better security and let our IT department get out of the business of managing email.



We considered upgrading to the latest version of Exchange, but the benefits of the cloud - access from anywhere, increased storage, better security- were too important to ignore. Once we decided that we were going to move to the cloud, Google Apps was the clear choice. Google Apps was affordable and many employees were already familiar with Gmail. Because Google Apps is web-based employees can work and easily collaborate anywhere, any time, making us much more productive.



Cloud Sherpas, the Google Apps reseller we’ve worked with, has been extremely helpful, deploying Google Apps to over 2,400 email users without any major hitches. We now have over 4 terabytes of data in Google Apps. That would have been too resource and cost intensive to build and maintain on our own. With Google Apps, we know our data is safe in the cloud we don’t have to continue to build out our IT infrastructure as we grow.



We’re just getting started with Google Apps, but already employees have started embracing the benefits of its collaborative features; we’ve already seen over 10,000 Google spreadsheets created in just a few months. With so many of our employees working in remote offices and on the road, the ability to access their information anywhere has greatly improved productivity. We know that this is just the beginning and we’re looking forward to seeing the impact Google Apps can have across the business.

Google Apps is big in Japan

Posted by: Akihito Fuji, Google Apps team



On July 20th we held our second annual Google Enterprise Day in Tokyo, Japan. Despite typhoon warnings, we had 1,577 attendees, over twice the number of attendees as last year’s event. The packed agenda consisted of 35 speakers across 20 sessions, including Google Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, COO of SoftBank Telecom, Ken Miyauchi, and Yasuki Sato from Toda Corporation.



Google Enterprise Day was an opportunity for Google to share with Japanese business leaders our vision for a 100% web world, where business applications are delivered via a web browser, enabling improved reliability and productivity with access from anywhere, at any time. This was a particularly important topic following the devastating effects of the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan earlier this year. Business continuity and disaster management have become real concerns in the last few months for businesses in Japan. Well known construction company, Toda Corporation, shared why they moved to Google Apps after losing access to their on-premise servers and business applications during the tsunami. Moving to a 100% web-based platform meant that Toda Corporation could be up and running quickly, with no time spent installing hardware or software.



Several new Google Apps customers announced that they had gone Google at the event, including SoftBank Group, Nortiz, Casio, and Mitsui Soko. Casio’s CIO, Atsushi Yazawa, shared his decision to move to Google Apps. “In deciding to move to Google Apps, speed of innovation was a big factor. Google Apps constantly provides new features and products with a great level of service and reliability. Google Apps also allowed us to decrease our total cost of ownership while diverting our IT professionals from repetitive maintenence tasks to more business-centric work that adds value to the organization.”



Ken Miyauchi, COO of SoftBank Telecom, SoftBank Mobile and SoftBank BB spoke about its successful deployment of 26,000 employees across the business to Google Apps. SoftBank spoke about some of the benefits they’ve started to see from this switch – a reduction in servers and the costs and resources to maintain them, more efficient email with much bigger storage limits, better access to email and documents from mobile devices, and greater creativity resulting from better collaboration across departments and teams.



Sota Umezu, Manager of Sales Strategy in the Sales Promotion Division at SoftBank says, “Google Apps has changed the way we do business. For example, when gathering information from employees, we used to email attachments to each employee, ask them to fill in their information, and manually aggregate their input in numerous attachments back into a master copy of the file. With Google Docs employees all update the same document, making a 6 hour process a 30 minute process. The ability to access data from anywhere and collaborate in real time has greatly improved productivity,”



We really enjoyed hosting such innovative business leaders at this year’s Enterprise Day. If you’d like to see some of the presentations from this event, you can watch the videos on YouTube.

Cox Schepp builds in more productivity with Google Apps

Posted by Nathanael Andrico, CIO of Cox Schepp Construction



Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Nathanael Andrico, CIO for Cox Schepp Construction, a leading provider of construction services in the southeastern region of the United States. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.



At Cox Schepp, we focus on completing our clients’ construction projects in the most cost-effective way possible. We’re based out of Charlotte, North Carolina with offices in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida with 150 employees across the region. Our team is spread out across our offices and we work on projects in the field as far west as Texas. Streamlining our operations and minimizing costs across offices is a priority for us so that we can spend more time focusing on our clients.



Prior to Google Apps, we were using Microsoft Exchange 2007. As our business expanded, we found that we were pouring a lot of time into keeping all of our offices and mobile teams up and running on the server. When we began evaluating cloud service providers, we were primarily concerned with finding an archiving solution for our growing business.



The cost of maintaining an Exchange server was growing as we wanted greater redundancy across our records. We had gotten to the point where we had to impose 4 gigabyte and then eventually 2 gigabyte limits for everyone’s Exchange inboxes. This proved to be burdensome very quickly as our project managers often send large image files back and forth containing everything from architects’ plans to photos of a job’s progress.



Cox Schepp switched to Google Apps approximately one year ago. We purchased both Google Apps and Postini Archiving and Discovery. We chose Google Apps because we saw its potential to streamline our operations and solve our email archiving challenges at a competitive price point. We wanted a turn-key experience, so we worked with the implementation partner Dito who was able to quickly and easily bring us on board. We also decided to take advantage of the Apps platform’s extensibility and integrated CloudLock from the Google Apps Marketplace as an additional layer of compliance and security features.



After deploying Google Apps, we wanted to make sure all of our offices were readily equipped to take advantage of all the useful product features. Since there’s only one of me and multiple offices, we appointed some deputies among different teams to serve as local gurus to help their colleagues learn more about how to use Apps.



Google Sites has been the breakaway hit across the company since we started using Google Apps. It’s been a really useful way to share information and manage projects. People also really enjoy using video chat, which was something we didn’t anticipate when selecting Apps. It’s been great to see that Apps has not only delivered a strong email platform with a great archiving solution, but has also helped us collaborate more effectively in ways we didn’t initially foresee.



Moving from an onsite solution to Google Apps has solved our email archiving challenges, reduced our overhead IT costs and enabled seamless project collaboration. This change has allowed us to spend less time devoted to building IT infrastructure and more time devoted to building our clients’ designs.

Journal Communications builds a new business model based on the cloud

Posted by: Michael O’Brien, CIO, Journal Communications



Editors note:Today’s guest blogger is Michael O’Brien, CIO for Journal Communications, a Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based media company with operations in publishing, radio and television broadcasting, interactive media and printing services. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.



Journal Communications owns and operates 33 radio stations, 13 television stations in 12 states, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel newspaper, and several community newspapers and publications in the Midwest. For the past several years, our IT infrastructure for those media stations and papers has been completely separate. We had 17 implementations and multiple versions of Microsoft® Exchange and SharePoint with multiple servers for each location, most of which were not backed up or redundant. The company managed for years without significant problems, until our second largest market, Las Vegas, had a catastrophic hardware crash - just weeks after we officially decided to move to Google Apps. Email, calendar and contacts were not recoverable for many. Some employees had been with the company for 15 years or longer and they lost everything. Now the future of using a redundant, web-based solution really hit home with the company leadership.



When I joined Journal Communications in May 2010, my first priority was to bring multiple IT divisions together and have them start working more collaboratively. We had 18 months left on our Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft, but we realized that if we really wanted to reach this collaborative goal, it would be very expensive and hard to do with the existing portfolio of Microsoft products. Prior to Journal Communications, I had been a CIO at a start up, and one of the decisions I made early on was not to have anything brick and mortar if we could avoid it. I came to Journal Communications and saw all this legacy hardware and software, and knew we needed to build a future business model based on cloud computing.



Despite the existing contract with Microsoft, we decided to move to Google Apps. As we all know, email and calendar have evolved from nice-to-have tools to mission-critical business applications, and everything Google has come out with so far, simply just works - the Google tool set sells itself. Google Apps make the business environment more productive and more cost effective. Instead of IT being seen as a cost center, we’ve really taken the boundaries out of a static IT organization and started to make decisions that provide current and future business value. Until we transition completely, we still have hundreds of servers surrounding MS Exchange and SharePoint, and they just need to go away. My goal is to end up with a media based company that is as much in the cloud as possible, this includes our Publishing ERP system. We are also evaluating the idea of going cloud with phones. Portions of the IT team now use Google Voice and calls through Gmail. Imagine a department and then large portions of an organization with no desktop phones - Journal Communications does.



We’re rolling out Google Apps to over 2,700 Journal Communications employees and will be done by Q1 2012. We realize that this is a significant business change, but even some people who were originally skeptical are getting on board. This is just the beginning of moving to a more digital, cloud based world where we can work together across offices, know that our data is stored in the cloud and accessible from anywhere with any device, and start to move our business systems out of our brick and mortar data centers. We’re entering a new age at Journal Communications. We’re not your grandmother’s newspaper, nor your grandfather’s TV or radio station.

ITV - UK’s biggest commercial broadcaster, transforms its workplace with Google Apps

Posted by Malgosia Rigoli, Google Apps team

ITV, the largest commercial television network in the UK is moving from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps as part of its broader strategy and five year Transformation Plan to change the ways the company works. The move will improve communication, fuel collaboration and stimulate creativity throughout the organization.

The media industry thrives on change and is constantly reinventing itself. Add to it its mobile, often freelance or contracting workforce, and you will find that old ways to communicate and collaborate simply won’t cut it any longer. With a suite of applications that are designed for teams and built for the web, ITV decided that Google Apps was the perfect match for their transformational requirements.

Google Apps will give ITV employees (up to 7,000 permanent staff and contractors) more flexibility in how they communicate and share information across the business. Gmail with the integrated instant messaging tool will make communication easier; Google Calendar will boost efficiency by helping to schedule meetings and events with shared calendars; Google Docs will allow staff to create, edit and share documents, presentations and spreadsheets in real time; and Google Sites and Google Video for Business will also facilitate collaboration.

ITV employees will also use Google Chrome as its standard browser. The company will begin to roll out the new technology over the next 18 months.

Paul Dale, ITV’s Chief Technology Officer, said, “When I arrived at ITV, one of my tasks was to implement a company-wide plan for workplace technology in order to enable our staff to deliver ITV’s Transformation Plan. The move to Google Apps will offer us the depth and scope of service we need to transform our internal ways of working across the business.”

ITV is the latest UK media company to make the move to Google Apps, following The Telegraph and The Guardian.

GSA has gone Google

Posted by Dan Israel, Google Apps for Government team

Last month, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) completed the transition of its employees to Google’s cloud-based email and collaboration applications. In a display of both speed and teamwork, it took just over six months since the decision was made to “Go Google” for GSA to migrate over 17,000 employees and contractors to Google Apps for Government.

GSA oversees the business of the U.S. federal government, managing $500B in federal assets, 9,600 federal buildings, and more than 200,000 government vehicles. Among the many services it provides to other agencies, GSA provides innovative technology solutions to enhance government efficiency and increase citizen engagement. By moving to the cloud, GSA hopes to serve as a model for other federal agencies.

The successful move to the cloud resulted from the involvement of hundreds of GSA employees who volunteered as early adopters and training buddies to support colleagues in making the switch. These efforts were supported by technical implementation experts from prime contractor Unisys and partner Tempus Nova.

This teamwork is indicative of the collaboration these new tools make possible. The teams used a Google Site to educate employees about Google Apps, Google-hosted videos to share recorded trainings, and Google Docs to share timely information among the early adopters. GSA also introduced the Google Chrome for Business web browser to give employees a faster, simpler & more secure experience with Google Apps.

Good customer service is at the heart of everything GSA does. These new tools are empowering employees to find innovative ways to improve service. Employees can collaborate both internally and externally with customers and industry partners to solve problems faster.

On top of this, these new applications are simplifying the IT experience for GSA employees, especially when employees are working remotely. As GSA Administrator Martha Johnson has said, “work is what you do, not where you are.” The added flexibility to access information and connect with colleagues while away from the office – and on a range of different devices – is helping GSA teams be more productive in serving customers.

GSA expects the introduction of Google Apps to help the agency transform its business and provide better results for its customers by promoting clearer communication and better team collaboration. What’s more, GSA projects that moving to Google Apps will lower email costs by 50%, a savings of $15 million over five years.

For GSA, this project has been far more than a new email and calendar system – it’s about enabling a whole new way for GSA employees to work.

Going Google across the 50 States: Ohio technology firm starts trusting its email again

Editor's note: Over 3 million businesses are using Google Apps. Today we’ll hear from Richard Hearn, CEO of Crown Partners, a digital sales and marketing technology firm in Ohio. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.


At Crown Partners, we help businesses implement the newest ebusiness solutions to grow their revenue and help them get ahead of the competition. We support Fortune 500 and mid-market companies all over the country and in some cases globally, so access to our email, calendars and documents while out of the office or with clients is critical.

We had been using Microsoft® Exchange 2003 and Sharepoint 2007, but we ran out of Client Access Licenses. Microsoft would not let us buy more licenses on our current infrastructure and only allowed us to upgrade to 2010. So, we made the investment in new servers and software and took the upgrade plunge (which had its own challenges). Immediately after upgrading, we began to run into problems – meetings disappeared from calendars, data didn’t sync with smartphones, and we had a couple bad outages where employees couldn’t access email for over 24 hours. On a few occasions, we missed client meetings due to calendar issues and decided we needed to start considering alternatives.

From a cost perspective, we had already paid for the servers and licenses with Microsoft, but we decided to cut our losses. We had spent nearly $50,000 on something that just didn’t work.

We called Google, and two weeks later, we had 100 employees up and running on Google Apps. Moving our entire infrastructure was not a big deal. We started with the 30-day free trial, tested it out, and after only a few days simply deployed to the rest of our employees on our own. A one-person IT team was able to migrate the business over in less than a week. If I knew how easy it would be, I would have done it a long time ago.

With Google Apps’ record for reliability, I don’t have to worry about servers going down. I know that our data is backed up in the cloud. We have tons of people on the road every week, we have had laptops stolen or lost at airports, and it’s an added benefit knowing that there isn’t data on the actual laptops.

With all the travel our employees do, we need access to information wherever we are – real time. Our employees are starting to trust their emails and their calendars again, even on their mobile devices. Gmail is lightening fast and employees love it. The added benefit of Google Docs and other benefits from Google Apps put it over the top. The only thing I regret about moving to Google Apps is not doing it sooner.

Posted by Richard Hearn, CEO, Crown Partners

Aperam reinforces infrastructure by going Google

Posted by Marie Tanguy, Google Apps Team

Aperam is one of the world’s leading stainless, electrical and specialty steel producers, based in Luxembourg but with operations in more than 30 countries.

Aperam recently decided to choose Google Apps for web-based email, shared calendars, integrated chat, automatic email translation, and greater use of video communications. The company will deploy Gmail as its global email solution for its 9,700 employees in October and will gradually switch its office software to Google’s cloud-based collaborative services during the following months. Aperam chose Google Apps to bring powerful real-time capabilities to the organization and enhance team productivity.

Moving to Google Apps will also help Aperam save on IT costs. Julien Onillon, Chief Financial Officer of Aperam, explains, “As part of our Leadership Journey, this move will allow us to make significant savings in our IT budgets.” Indeed, Aperam’s Leadership Journey aims to achieve a management gain of $250 million USD in 2011 and 2012, based on measures aimed at improving the company’s cost structure, and investments aimed at boosting its productivity and profitability in all markets.

“We see this switch to an advanced, collaborative online solution as a testimony to the company’s values of leadership, ingenuity and agility. We are looking forward to implementing it and reaping not just cost saving, but also strong organizational benefits,” adds Onillon.

The company’s migration to Google Apps is also in line with a corporate-wide commitment to find more sustainable and efficient ways of doing business.

Update: Aperam will move to Google Apps with the help of implementation partner, Revevol.

UConn Goes Google: A Retrospective

Posted by John Collins, Sr. Global Trust Product Manager

In 1992, while I was an undergraduate at the University of Connecticut, some fellow students and I started an ambitious project to connect residence halls to the campus network and the Internet. After all, the web was just being created in ’92! At the time, our Lab Sciences House (Wright Hall, now gone... sniff... sniff) had a single mainframe terminal in what amounted to a large closet. The mainframe terminal was old, clunky, and not reliable or particularly useful. We wanted more.

The UConn administration bravely allowed my friends and I to design, deploy, and manage computer labs, networked dorm rooms, and most especially our own services. Personally I was really excited about our Gopher server*, but we also offered our classmates email, FTP, Usenet news, and a few shared applications like WordPerfect. In the 19 years since, campus technology has evolved – and so has UConn.

Today I’m especially proud to announce that my alma mater – UConn – is going Google. Associate Vice President and Chief Information Officer David Gilbertson says that the switch to Google Apps for Education stemmed from the recognition that students’ expectations about technology have changed dramatically in the past few years. This move to Apps will also bring significant benefits and cost savings to the University as a whole.

We Huskies were ahead of the curve in ’92, and we’re still at the cutting edge of campus technology today with our switch to Google Apps for Education. I know the UConn community will find amazing and innovative ways to exploit the tools Google is providing. And to all those students out there: even though you can’t knock on my door at 3am so I can fix the server anymore, rest assured the teams here at Google work 24 x 7 x 365 to make sure we’ll never be the excuse for your paper being late.

* Gopher was an early system for distributing, searching and retrieving information over the Internet. I thought it was really great that I could get National Weather Service forecasts for anywhere, whenever I wanted (you can still do this** via Gopher today!). Now though, I just ask my phone. Yep, the Internet has come a long way.

** Okay, that link is cheating – it’s using HTTP to get you to the gopher server – but chances are good your browser doesn’t even support the real Gopher.

Nexteer Automotive steers employees toward Google Apps

Posted by Jay McLean, CIO, Nexteer Automotive



Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Jay McLean, CIO for Nexteer Automotive, a global leader in advanced automotive steering and driveline systems with a workforce of 9,800 people worldwide. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.



At Nexteer, we’re focused on our craft of engineering steering and driveline systems for automobiles. Electric Power Steering, is an energy-efficient product powered by specialized software that is tuned to the manufacturers specific vehicle characteristics. It’s a highly technical product requiring collaboration across teams of skilled engineers. Having the most innovative technology, like Google Apps, is one of the ways we’ve found to attract skilled, energetic engineers.



In addition to providing employees with features like better email search capabilities, mobile access to email and documents, and easy collaboration, we wanted to eliminate the cost of buying, setting up and maintaining servers. We looked at hosted Microsoft® Exchange and LotusLive, as well as Google Apps, but Google was clearly the best option.



We factored in monthly cost per user for email and collaboration, as well as easy, any-device mobility. Because we have offices and manufacturing plants all over the world, we have a lot of employees who need access to information wherever they may be working from, and it took extensive work and considerable cost to support VPN access. We wanted an easier and more affordable way to support our global teams.



With the help of Google Apps partner, Salvair, we switched 4,200 users to Google Apps over a four month period in 2009 and haven’t looked back. As a technology-focused company, Google Apps allows us to be ahead of the curve for the automotive industry, with access to the newest features as they become available. In the year and a half we’ve been on Google Apps, we’ve seen new features like priority inbox, the option to have threaded or un-threaded email, and great interoperability among multiple devices and platforms. Access to that pace of innovation is something only Google Apps could offer.



Since moving to Google Apps, we’ve cut cost of email and collaboration by 64% and we’ve easily reduced VPN costs by about 50% – all because people no longer need to go through VPN to get their email. We were also able to eliminate servers and maintenance costs required to support our internally hosted solutions.



With Google Apps we’re able to get things done faster. Instead of scheduling meetings or emailing back and forth, we’re able to use Google Talk to work across time zones and quickly get answers from co-workers. The search functionality in Gmail helps us find what we’re looking for faster and the increased inbox size lets us store that information, knowing we’ll be able to find it when we need it.



Our end-users are happy and the calls to the help desk related to email have dropped off substantially. Our IT workload is far less, and we are avoiding the cost of buying and maintaining servers, as well as the costs of VPN access. With Google Apps, we have reduced costs, increased productivity, and benefited from a constant stream of innovation.

500 reasons to consider Google Apps

Posted by Shan Sinha, Google Apps Product Manager

Monday we shared some thoughts on why you might consider going Google. Since some of you asked for more, we invited our customers and partners to help us. After all, who knows the reasons better than they do?

We were humbled by the speed and thoughtfulness with which hundreds of people responded. Within 24 hours, we received more than 500 reasons to consider Google Apps. Thank you!

Just for fun, we put all the answers into a word cloud to offer a glimpse at what’s most important to our customers. We were pleased to see alignment with the four categories we shared Monday: pure and proven cloud, designed for teams, productive anywhere, and simple and affordable. If you’re interested, you can see the full list of responses here.

Word cloud based on over 500 reasons provided by our customers and partners.

Over the course of the coming weeks we hope to share as many of these reasons as possible in a more digestible way. Feel free to share additional thoughts by completing this form.

Thanks again for all the kind words!

Quality Distribution spends less on hardware and more innovation

Posted by Dan Moore, CIO, Quality Distribution

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Dan Moore, CIO for Quality Distribution (QDI), the largest tank truck operator in North America and a major transporter of hazardous materials. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Prior to switching to Google Apps, QDI was a 100% Microsoft®-enabled shop. We heavily leveraged Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Outlook, SharePoint Portal Server 2003, and all of the Microsoft Office suite. Like many companies in recent years, our budgets were tight, and our business requirements were not getting simpler. With approximately 1,000 administrative personnel and 2,500 drivers, and an aged desktop client base, we looked to cloud computing as a silver bullet.

We compared both Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365 for several months in 2010. We decided to go with Google’s product line due to their simpler cost model, wider breadth of applications, and deeper experience at building applications for the cloud. Microsoft Office 365 did not seem as cohesive as the Google cloud offerings. The Microsoft total cost of ownership was higher, had more dependencies on the physical device, and fewer features.

We rolled out Google Apps to our all of our corporate users over the course of a month, and we’ve already received positive feedback from employees. We anticipate saving $250,000 annually in software licensing, plus the cost avoidance of future spend on data center hardware. Perhaps more compelling, is the time savings opportunity of collaborating in Google Docs. We are already seeing early adopters embracing the collaboration of Google Apps, and I believe the time savings will only increase with the users experience.

For the users that have migrated their documents to the cloud, we will be replacing their older PC’s with net-books such as Google’s Chromebook. The lower hardware requirements of web enabled applications, allow our IT department to spend more time delivering improvements to the the user experience. One of our first examples of this was our implementation of video and voice chat via Google Talk into our driver recruiting process.

Finally, as Google Apps comes with access to the Google Apps Marketplace, our team has begun evaluating apps as solutions to business problems previously prohibitive due to expensive hardware and support costs. These apps are generally priced at levels with little risk to adoption while seamlessly integrating into the Google Apps enterprise.

Our company still has a long way to go before I can say we are 100% cloud, but the trip so far has had few storms and many silver linings.

Big(ger) mail on campus

Posted by Eric Edens, Apps Edu Team

Around here, our mantra is “think big.” That’s why when we first released Gmail on April 1, 2004 we offered 1GB of free storage—more than 100 times what most other free webmail services offered at the time. No wonder people thought it was an April Fool’s joke! So you can imagine the laughs when we launched Google Apps for Education in early 2006 with 2GB of email storage, which in some cases was hundreds of times more than what schools were traditionally offering their students and staff. We continued adding more storage, and today we offer over 7GB of free email space for everyone using Google Apps for Education.

Now it’s time to think bigger yet again. Starting next week, new schools that migrate to Google Apps for Education will see 25GB mailboxes. Existing customers will see their mailboxes grow over the course of the next few weeks.

To celebrate 25GB inboxes, we’d like to recognize 25 of the schools that have recently gone Google:

1. Amarillo College
2. Anaheim City School District
3. Ann Arbor Public Schools
4. Boston University
5. Buffalo State College
6. Chaminade University
7. College of Lake County
8. College of New Jersey
9. College of the Holy Cross
10. Corning Community College
11. Fall River Public Schools
12. Harvey Mudd College
13. HEC Paris
14. Instituto de Empresa Business School
15. Nebo School District
16. New Haven Unified School District
17. New York University, Stern School of Business
18. Oshkosh Area School District
19. Queen Anne’s County Public Schools
20. Spring Independent School District
21. University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science - Center Administration
22. University of Maryland in Baltimore
23. University of Northern Iowa
24. University of Salzburg
25. University of Richmond

We know students and teachers are really busy. There’s no reason they should spend their time sifting through spam and deleting email to stay under quota. We hope bigger inboxes might offer the first step to helping today’s students think bigger.

If you’re interested in bringing Google Apps to your school, let us know.

The State of Wyoming may be the first state to go Google, but Wyomingites across the state have already gone Google.

Posted by: Jay Garg, Google Apps Team

Yesterday we announced that Wyoming became the first state to go Google. With the help of Google Apps implementation partner Tempus Nova, Wyoming moved 10,000 state employees to Google Apps in less than eight months, saving the state approximately $1 million a year. But, state employees aren’t the only ones in Wyoming using Google Apps. Today we’ll hear from other organizations in Wyoming that have gone Google.

Dubois Youth Activities - Dubois, WY
Dubois Youth Activities is a nonprofit that offers a variety of programs and activities for kids up to 18 years old. “We chose Google Apps because it was simple, and it made it easy to transfer job responsibilities from one employee to another. We also thought it would be easy to use for the parents and the teachers in our town. With Google Apps, we were able to create documents and surveys that all employees could easily access. We were also able to participate in conference calls and webinars together with Google Talk. I really love how user friendly it is.”
(Amanda Verheul, Manager)

Alpine Family Medical Clinic - Alpine, WY
Alpine Family Medical Clinic is a clinic of just 3 people, including a doctor, medical assistant, and office manager. “It was difficult to update and make changes to our lab forms, so we started using Google Apps. Now when parameters on our lab forms change, we can easily go into Google Docs and make changes. We can keep track of medication expiration dates, our inventory of crash-carts, and other types of equipment.”
(Wayne Noffsinger, Medical Assistant)

Tetra 4D - Cheyenne, WY
Tetra 4D helps support Adobe’s existing customers using 3D PDF technology, which allows 3D data to be converted into interactive PDF documents. “In 2010, Adobe asked us to form a new company that would be ready to take orders and provide customer service in less than four months. This never would have been possible without Google Apps. With Google Apps we were able to register our domain and set up email and a document management solution in a matter of minutes. Google Apps allowed us to launch our business quickly and begin taking orders from customers all over the world.”
(Greg Baker, General Manager)

Wyoming adds another first - now the first to go Google

Posted by Governor Matt Mead, State of Wyoming

Editors note: Today Wyoming Governor Matt Mead is announcing the completion of the migration of all 10,000 state government employees to Google Apps for Government. State employees now have a unified communications system that makes it easier for them to find & collaborate with one another. View the live stream of the Governor’s announcement starting at 8:00am MT.

Hello from the great State of Wyoming. We have some exciting news: our entire state government has gone Google. Wyoming is the first state in the country to make this transition. I am extremely proud to say that we are early adopters and this continues a long tradition of Wyoming firsts -- where Wyoming leads the way. Wyoming was the first state in the country where women voted. We also have the first National Park, Yellowstone, and first National Monument, Devils Tower. We had the first woman governor too. Join us online today at 8:00am MT/7:00am PT to view the live event as we make the announcement.

Wyoming and Google finalized the agreement in October of last year and so in less than 9 months we have moved 10,000 state employees over to Google Apps for Government. This is a sign of the adaptability and flexibility of our state government -- another source of pride for us.

Not only has Wyoming cut the cord and gone to cloud-based computing, allowing more mobility for and collaboration between employees, this is also the first time all of our employees have been on a shared email platform. This means greater efficiency and it will almost certainly lead to better service to the public. It also saves money in costs related to servers, licensing and staff. In addition, compared to what we would have spent for equivalent features in our previous system, we anticipate dramatic savings associated with email storage and overall security.

My office was in the first wave to transition to Google Apps, and I am pleased to say it has already made a big difference. Among its many features, Google Apps has provided efficiencies for scheduling and for keeping the office running smoothly. Our pioneer spirit is alive and well, which means great things for the state of Wyoming!

Google Apps Adventures: Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca pushes the limits of speed on the track and in the office with Google Apps

Editor's note: We're thrilled to share stories from the people and organizations that use Google Apps to explore, discover and push the boundaries. These businesses truly embody the freedom enabled by the cloud.

Our fourth Apps Adventure profiles Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, a racing organization based in Monterey, California that hosts world-renowned motorsport events at the track in Laguna Seca.

The famous corkscrew at Turn 8 defines how racers push the limits of speed at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca. One of the most challenging turns in racing, drivers experience a blind uphill approach then a dramatic drop in elevation in the second half of the corkscrew. The turn is part of a 2.238-mile long track that’s been navigated by racing professionals from around the globe.

Every season, our organization hosts world-class races at the track, bringing thousands of motorsport enthusiasts to the Monterey Peninsula. From Ferrari Racing Days to the Red Bull U.S. Grand Prix motorcycle races, our staff is dedicated to hosting events that showcase extreme speed. To accomplish this, we need the right technology behind the scenes that works for onsite employees as well as our hundreds of volunteers. As a result, last year we switched to Google Apps and it’s been a natural fit for our organization.

Before Google Apps, we used Microsoft® Exchange and it was maintained by more than a dozen volunteers. When I started at Mazda Raceway, I spent about 20 percent of my time just keeping the email servers going. We needed to speed up how we worked and Google Apps offered this with email and other productivity apps at a fraction of the cost of our old system. There are no upgrades necessary, no server maintenance, no downtime, and worldwide availability. It just works—without any effort from me or our volunteers.

Google Apps has quickly become a core part of how we run our organization. We rely heavily on Google Calendar for scheduling and have added shared resources like conference rooms and VGA projectors that can be booked at the same time a meeting is scheduled. We’re accelerating teamwork internally with Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office and are using Google Docs and Sites to improve a range of business processes.

For example, volunteers are critical to our success and Google Apps makes it easier to recruit and manage them. We now have a volunteer resource site, created from Google Sites, where we embedded a Google form to track sign-ups. Instead of having volunteers print out a form and fax or mail it to us, they submit their information online and it automatically fills an internal Google spreadsheet.

Everyone at Mazda Raceway is constantly on the move. From executives traveling abroad to staff members who are often out on the property (the track is situated on more than 500 acres), Google Apps gives everyone the ability to communicate from anywhere. Mail, contacts and calendars are automatically synced to each person’s mobile phone without any work on my part.

At Mazda Raceway, we all have a passion for racing and want to share that passion with our fans. Watch the video below to learn more about how Google Apps is helping us do this. And if you love racing as much as we do, experience our track using the Street View feature in Google Maps.



Posted by George Krieger, Technical Services Manager, Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca

Third largest newspaper in the US moves to Google Apps to centralize IT and improve collaboration

Posted by Terry Geiger, Director of Corporate IT, The McClatchy Company

Editors note: We're pleased to welcome guest blogger Terry Geiger, Director of Corporate IT at The McClatchy Company. Learn more about other organizations that have gone Google on our community map.

With headquarters in Sacramento, Calif., The McClatchy Company has more than 8,400 employees with 30 daily newspapers spread throughout the U.S. Historically, each newspaper has operated independently with on-premise software and their own various business operation departments and specifically IT. To date, our technology has been both destandardized and decentralized, but our vision is to become a more collaborative organization and centralized where it makes best sense. We want to act as a cohesive enterprise, not a collection of smaller companies.

We have 8,500 mailboxes (individual and shared) spread across all 30 of our operations. Individual newspapers had been operating using various versions of Microsoft® Exchange Server, and managing that complexity had become expensive and cumbersome. All of these separate systems also made it very challenging for us collaborate. Just seeing the calendar of a co-worker at another newspaper or having access to reliable contacts wasn’t possible in many cases. I knew that email was one of the first things we needed to standardize to promote collaboration and begin to innovate in an industry not always known for being on the cutting edge of technology.

Also, Email has become a business-critical function and with the economy and its impact on the newspaper industry, we had lost confidence in our ability to effectively manage and maintain such a distributed email environment with our diminished resources. We needed a solution that was easy to use and required little from IT to maintain.

We started evaluating technology options that could help us make collaboration across our entire organization a reality. We looked at Google Apps as well as Microsoft® Office 365 and BPOS. When evaluating our options we asked ourselves several questions: What’s the service level offered? What is their support like? Will there be people there to help when we have questions or run into issues? What is their record for uptime and reliability? We just didn’t see Microsoft providing the services aspect of “software as as service.” Their record for uptime was particularly concerning. Overall, Microsoft just doesn’t seem to have the services mindset that we found with Google.

Microsoft may still be the personal productivity leader, but Google is the team productivity leader. Google Apps and its collaborative nature are really where we want to go. Google has a better service strategy, better collaborative strategy, and a better cost structure.

In making our decision, we also calculated the cost of avoiding upgrades to our Microsoft Exchange and Office licenses. We estimate that Google Apps will cost only 67% of what we would have spent on the equivalent Microsoft technology over 5 years.

We’re currently working with SADA Systems to roll out Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, and Google Sites. We’ll then let Google Docs take hold organically, but we are no longer going to en masse upgrade our Microsoft Office licenses. As a content creation and management company, the need to collaborate is tremendous and we’re excited about empowering our team to work together with Google Docs.

In addition to “anywhere access” email, we will now be able to synchronize calendars across the organization. We have secure chat functionality, and Google Sites to create a much better connection between sales staff and customers. IT can focus on other business-critical functions that generate revenue, manage content creation and delivery and put collaboration and content creation into the hands of our users.

We worried that there would be some resistance to this change, but our announcement to move to Google Apps has been met with a lot of enthusiasm – our employees are really excited. We see this as a critical part of our overall effort to use technical innovations like Google Apps to change the way that we operate our business.

CSU Monterey Bay offers dozens of new Google tools to students and faculty

Posted by Greg Pool, Lead for Web Services, California State University, Monterey Bay

Editors note: California State University, Monterey Bay is a growing public institution that serves nearly 5,000 students. Today is the two year anniversary of CSU Monterey Bay’s deployment of Google Apps. Guest blogger Greg Pool, Lead for Web Services, shares CSU Monterey Bay’s experiences with opting into the new infrastructure for Google Apps early.

CSU Monterey Bay (CSUMB) considers itself a “pre-release” campus; we want the latest features. This isn't to prove "we're cool," but because we see an opportunity to meet our users’ needs. When we heard that Google was making more applications available to Google Apps users, we were excited because services such as Blogger fit with a number of internal initiatives we had planned for this school year. In our view, the transition to the new infrastructure represented an opportunity to get access to tools we wanted -- for less money and in a more integrated manner.

Our IT department supports 10,000 users representing distinct groups and needs (faculty, students, staff), so we decided to take the timeline into our own hands. To minimize disruption for our users we planned the transition to the new infrastructure around our academic calendar. We also chose to transition a pilot group of users from our IT staff before flipping the switch for everyone, which helped us understand exactly what our users would experience during the transition.

One issue we had to address before the full transition was conflicting accounts, which occur when a user links a personal Google account to their CSUMB email address. Using the transition wizard, we were able to reach out to the 500 conflicting accounts in our organization to educate them about the change. In the end, only one of these 500 users wanted us to walk through the changes with him personally. In early January we were ready to switch all of our users over. Everyone in our IT department is a "glutton for punishment," meaning we love to test new technology, poke around looking for bugs, and run through every possible scenario where a user might encounter a problem. With this project, our gluttony for punishment wasn’t satiated: we didn’t run into a single significant issue while testing. The transition turned out to be a total non-issue. It just worked. And it has continued to work. After the transition our help desk support volume didn’t increase at all, even though we’ve enabled almost all of the new services, including Blogger, Google Moderator and Google Reader.

Now all of CSUMB’s users can do the educational work with Google Apps that some were doing with their personal Google Accounts before. All that cool academic stuff can now be done in one place, and everyone has access to the same set of tools. We’re excited about the ways these new applications increase our users’ potential. For example, one of the applications that has seen a lot of use is Google Moderator. This tool allows students to ask questions, show due diligence, and participate in campus discussions, even if they aren’t physically present in the same place. When we made the decision to enable the new applications, some of them such as Google Moderator had clear uses for our users, but we are convinced that students and faculty will find creative ways to use these services that we never could have thought of. We are still early in our exploration of what we can do with all of these new tools and we're looking forward to tons of new possibilities.

NOAA becomes the largest federal agency to Go Google

Posted by Dave Standish, Federal Civilian Account Manager

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has selected Google Apps as the agency-wide e-mail and collaboration platform for its 25,000 employees, contractors and associates working across the country and around the world. NOAA CIO Joseph Klimavicz made this announcement at “Innovation for the Nation” today in Washington, DC.

As an agency that enriches life through science, NOAA's work stretches from the surface of the sun to the depths of the ocean—and touches the lives of every American and many others around the globe each day. NOAA provides dependable weather forecasts, life-saving storm warnings, vital climate monitoring, sustainable fisheries management, safer navigation, protection for our fragile oceans and coasts and job-creating coastal restoration.

Now the NOAA workforce will have cutting-edge email and collaboration tools to keep pace with fast-accelerating environmental change. Planners, emergency managers, health officials, citizens and other decision-makers count on NOAA's internationally-recognized science and services to help make wiser choices in a changing world.

When the need for a modern email system arose, NOAA issued an RFP in January, in keeping with the Obama Administration’s “Cloud First” policy, to find cloud-based email and collaboration solutions that would best serve the agency’s needs, including meeting its stringent security requirements.

Since NOAA wants its highly distributed workforce to enhance sharing information and strengthening teamwork as soon as possible, speed and ease of deployment were key factors in the decision to select Google and our implementation partners ERT Inc., Unisys, and Tempus Nova.

By the end of the year, NOAA's workforce will migrate to Google Apps from its existing systems, giving employees tools like video chat and real-time document collaboration, and support for a broader range of mobile devices. NOAA is also promoting new telework options; Google Apps will enable staff to access their e-mail, documents and data from anywhere, on any internet-connected device—a valuable asset for the agency. As a cutting-edge science agency, NOAA is taking a leading role in bringing up-to-the-minute workplace technologies to the federal government.