Amirsys’ STATdx® diagnostic support portal + Google Search Appliance = better medical decision-making

Posted by Roth LaFleur, Product Manager for Amirsys

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Roth LaFleur, Product Manager for Amirsys, a company specializing in delivering useful, timely medical information to physicians and other healthcare providers.

We have 40,000 users in 50 countries—top physicians, surgeons, and residents for STATdx—our imaging point-of-care, diagnostic clinical decision support portal. As you can imagine, time is a important to them and affects both the cost and quality of patient care. For busy radiologists, time spent performing diagnoses is tracked and billed on a per-minute basis and can be a critical factor in delivering care. This makes fast, relevant search a key element of STATdx. Working with Search Technologies, we integrated the Google Search Appliance (GSA) into the STATdx diagnostic support portal.

We were expending a high degree of effort to support the search capability in our STATdx portal. Even with a full-time employee dedicated to the effort, the relevance of search results continued to be unsatisfactory. The existing system lacked the ability to “learn” based on user interactions. Features such as spell correction, a “did you mean” function to recommend different terms, and translation of search terms needed to be accomplished through programming and constant tuning.

After a comparison of several service providers, we engaged Search Technologies Corporation to help us implement the Google Search Appliance. Search Technologies partnered with our team to identify the unique search needs and find an optimal approach to provide fast, relevant search for the STATdx decision support portal quickly and cost-effectively.

The Amirsys development team integrated the Search Appliance into STATdx, where now search is a central feature, accessible in every part of the user interface. Capabilities from Google such as automatic query completion greatly enhance decision-making due to improved usability, relevance, and speed. Before implementing the GSA, average response time for searches was five to seven seconds, with some very general searches taking up to 15 seconds. After integration of the GSA into STATdx, query time has been reduced to milliseconds, saving valuable time for Amirsys clients and the healthcare professionals and patients who rely on their diagnoses.

For us, integration of the Search Appliance into STATdx has enabled us to provide better, faster services and reduced costs by eliminating the need for someone dedicated full-time to the task of special programming and tuning. And for the radiologists who use the STATdx system, we are helping them by increasing speed, accuracy, and diagnostic confidence in complex cases—and most importantly elevating the quality of care.

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.

The City of Calgary does more with less for citizens through a new search-centric website

Posted by David Watson, Executive Project Sponsor for Calgary.ca for The City of Calgary.



Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is David Watson, executive project sponsor for calgary.ca for The City of Calgary. He sponsored a sweeping program to bring greater efficiencies to operations and provide enhanced and broader services to citizens. At its heart is a new search-centric website launched today, and powered by the Google Search Appliance.



Many municipalities today are under increasing pressure to reduce overhead while providing a wide array of services to citizens. In The City of Calgary, we looked to the Internet to enable us to provide enhanced citizen services as efficiently as possible. Our research showed several interesting facts:

- Over 93% of Calgarians use the Internet.

- Only 18% of traffic came directly to our home page - 55% of people came from search engines, primarily Google.

- Citizens want to interact with us online, instead of spending time on the phone or in-person - 60% noted better convenience, such as not having to drive to a city facility. Others noted speed and 24/7 availability.

- More than 40% of Calgary citizens said they wanted more services online.



Our public-facing web presence, which has 16,000 pages of content, across 28 business units, with a wide variety of applications, functionality, documents and information for our citizens, handled 9 million visits in 2010. The major drawback was that the information was difficult to find.



Forty-seven percent of Calgary citizens surveyed reported that the incumbent search engine on Calgary.ca did not work well. It required knowledge of city acronyms and terminology, something many citizens, understandably, don’t possess. Our content and our site was cluttered, out-of-date, and difficult to weed through. We struggled with maintenance as individual business units continued to add to our already packed site.



In response, we formed the Web Leadership and Renewal Program in 2007. Among the chief goals was to provide citizens with easy-to-use search and better access to city programs and services. This led us to create an entirely new, search-centric site which was first concepted and tested in November 2009, and finally launched today.



The Google Search Appliance (GSA) is the cornerstone of this new site and our efforts to improve access to services and programs and increase government efficiency. It is linked to a content management system, ESRI for interactive mapping, and to websites such as calgarymayor.ca to provide a holistic, integrated search experience.



Now, citizens can search for everything from YouTube videos on saving water to animal services and permit information, and they can easily serve themselves by finding answers to everyday questions. Calgary.ca is just as easy and effective as searching on Google.com. The search-based concept lets Calgarians type in common keywords or phrases to find what they need, without specific knowledge of city acronyms or terminology.



We can conserve phone and in-person resources for more complex requests and apply valuable government resources more strategically. Citizens benefit from the convenience of finding most of what they need online. They can avoid unnecessary driving and parking fees and have 24/7 access.



Certain search features of the GSA were very important to us. Topping the list were best bets, synonyms, and spelling correction. Related searches and content rating were also vital, as well as the ability to easily promote the relevance of a search result based on its popularity. The Google Search Appliance provided all of these capabilities, plus it had a reputation for being very easy to install and maintain.



Citizens are rapidly adopting search now. Early metrics show that only 4% of visits to the old calgary.ca used the internal search engine. In comparison, 65% of visitors to the new calgary.ca used the the GSA, and the search results page is the second most visited page after the home page.



Ultimately, our job is to provide city services as efficiently as possible. We strive to do more with less. By making the right content easy to retrieve, citizens get the convenience they seek—and we can reduce unnecessary overhead and increase the value and variety of our services and programs.

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.

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

Red Cross helps people find everything from CPR classes to disaster relief information with Google Search Appliance

Posted by Ivan Chou, Web Applications Engineer for the American Red Cross

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Ivan Chou, Web Applications Engineer for the American Red Cross. When the American Red Cross was struggling with sub-optimal search functionality, it turned to the Google Search Appliance (GSA) to improve information “findability,” both for internal and external users.

Since its founding in 1881 by visionary relief coordinator Clara Barton, the American Red Cross has been the nation's premier non-profit emergency response organization. Today, in addition to domestic disaster relief, the American Red Cross offers compassionate services, from help for the needy to educational programs.

As one of the world’s largest non-profits, we rely on our public-facing websites and our intranet to keep millions of people and tens of thousands of employees and volunteers informed about our activities. On any “normal” day, we get up to 200,000 hits on our main website – but that number swells to millions during any disaster. The main external website, www.redcross.org, receives significant traffic from people seeking everything from CPR class schedules and Blood Drive locations to information about disasters, such as the 2011 U.S. tornadoes.

With such a heavy reliance on the web for delivering information, the American Red Cross needed a faster search system that would deliver better results. We had been using a solution that came bundled with our content management system (CMS), which we implemented in 2009. That search system used a meaning-based context model, which means results were driven by questions, phrases or sentences rather than keywords – but this approach often failed to deliver relevant results. People had to know in advance, for example, if they needed to search about community services, educational programs, international relief, and so on – it was a lengthy, and not very successful process.

Slow performance and lack of relevant results prompted us to investigate search alternatives – an initiative that coincided with a redesign for www.redcross.org and creation of www.measlesinitative.org, a new site supporting a multi-agency push to help halt the spread of measles worldwide.

Working with one of Google’s solution partners, Fig Leaf Software, we began evaluating our options and calculating the costs and benefits of deploying a new search solution. We were at a tipping point – we would have to pay more in licenses for our CMS to support our sites, but we saw in evaluating different options with Fig Leaf that we could save IT costs and achieve better results by setting up two Google Search Appliance (GSA) systems rather than staying with siloed CMS-based search systems. After substantial evaluations, our outsourced data center deployed two GSAs: one for production and the other as a backup – we wanted a redundant solution so that people could reliably find information in the event of emergencies.

The Google Search Appliance systems were implemented over a single weekend, and they now power search across our employee intranet as well as on the public redcross.org and measlesinitiative.org sites.

Right away, the search results from the GSA were excellent. We did almost no tweaking on our end, and our internal and external users comment on how pleased they are that the right search results come straight to the top, whether the query is about CPR class schedules or disaster relief. Visitors to the intranet as well as to the two public websites now have ready access to information through a powerful, intuitive and familiar search experience.

When we moved to the Google Search Appliance, search just started working, and working very well. We predicted that we could save IT costs and achieve better results by setting up the Google Search Appliance, and that’s exactly how it turned out.

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.

Premier Salons goes Google with a splash of color

Posted by Andrew Muroff, CIO of Premier Salons

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Andrew Muroff, CIO of Premier Salons. Premier Salons has over 300 high-end spas and salons and almost 500 beauty supply retail stores across North America. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.



Running a chain of hundreds of retail stores and salons requires efficient coordination. We need to be able to quickly gauge inventory and share best practices while also making sure we can easily add new users and keep our data safe in an industry with a lot of employee turn over.

Before switching to Google Apps, we had multiple email systems and file shares across salons, retail stores and corporate – primarily Microsoft® Exchange 2003 and SharePoint. Substantial resources were needed to maintain these systems, yet they still weren’t supporting the level of collaboration we needed. We were dealing with license management, backups and space constraints. Our servers constantly went down. Just running SharePoint alone required a full-time administrator, yet SharePoint was never really well adopted because the check in/check out process was confusing to our employees. We realized that Microsoft’s technologies for collaboration and communication were not serving our needs.

The turning point came when we were installing a new point of sale (POS) system. The process of evaluating newer, more modern technologies opened our eyes to other possibilities. We have 6,500 employees and we realized that rolling out new versions of Microsoft Office to all of them was cost-prohibitive. After years of experience trying to support Microsoft applications at Premier Salons and other companies, we just didn’t see Microsoft as the best option for us.

That’s when we began considering Google Apps. We saw that Google would eliminate our worries about licensing, security, back-ups, space constraints and server maintenance, and adding new users would be easy. We would save hundreds of thousands of dollars in license fees and maintenance costs alone. And we could collaborate in real-time, with everyone on the same page – literally.

We rolled out Google Apps to 1,050 employees and have increased our efficiency exponentially. In order to keep the most popular products in stock to maximize sales and customer satisfaction, we need quick merchandising updates from our locations to determine what the big-sellers are, particularly over holiday weekends like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day. We had been using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to track and adjust our inventory to meet demand and we didn’t have the visibility required to quickly transfer excess, in-demand inventory from one store to another. We were also missing sales opportunities because we couldn’t provide instant feedback to our purchasing team. Now we’re able to send forms to our retail locations, see the data in real time, and get a quick update on what’s selling and what’s not across the entire company. We’ll keep our existing Microsoft Office licenses, but we won’t upgrade them. Google Docs is intuitive for our users and allows us to collaborate in ways just not possible with Microsoft Office.

Similar efficiencies are being gained in IT, where instead of managing VPNs, Google Apps lets us make information accessible to anyone – all managed through a secure log-in. With Google Apps, we’re keeping our technical support team in-house to a minimum. We have fewer people in IT dealing with email since there are no longer storage issues, server maintenance and space constraints. We’re also starting to use Google Sites so that various divisions can get corporate news and share best practices, without support from IT.

We’re very happy that we no longer have to worry about dedicating IT resources to supporting Exchange, SharePoint, or Office. The bottom line is that our employees are more productive and we expect to save hundreds of thousands of dollars with Google Apps.

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.

LXR moves its 20 resorts and hotels to Google Apps

Posted by Laurent Bortoluzzi, Vice President of IT, LXR

Editor's Note: We're pleased to welcome guest blogger Laurent Bortoluzzi, CIO of LXR. Headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida, LXR is a collection of hotels and resorts across the United States and the Caribbean. LXR joins other hotels like IHG and Delta Hotels that are already using Google Apps. Learn more about other organizations that have gone Google on our community map.

At LXR we’re committed to service and continually look for ways to enhance the comfort and enjoyment of our guests. Our 7,000 talented and hard-working employees make the difference in providing a great experience at our 20 resorts and hotels. As CIO, it’s important to me that I provide the LXR team with the best tools to optimize the way they work and ultimately provide excellent hospitality. We recently decided that one of the ways we could do this was to move to Google Apps.

With the help of Google Apps Reseller, Cloud Sherpas, we’re migrating 3,000 mailboxes to Google Apps. We’ve deployed four hotel properties as well as our sales and marketing teams and everything has gone smoothly. Based on the surveys we sent out to employees following the deployment, they’re extremely happy with Gmail and are already starting to use Google Docs. Notably, there was no negative feedback, and in fact, a majority (75 percent) of employees said they’re glad we switched to Google Apps.

Our marketing department is particularly excited about using Google Sites to share creative files. They’ve found Sites so intuitive that they don’t need any help from the IT team to set up new project sites. I also think our employees will see tremendous benefits from the ability to collaborate on documents instead of sending emails with attachments back and forth. It’s been amazing to see how many features have been added to Google Docs and how much the product has evolved since we first started evaluating Google Apps last year. Google Docs will prevent us from having to upgrade licences for most of our employees.

Our HR department is excited about video chat with Google Talk. We typically fly recruits to Florida for interviews, but by using Google Talk’s video chat for initial interviews, we’ll not only save money on travel costs, but also the time it takes to arrange several rounds of interview travel.

I’ve also started looking at the Google Apps Marketplace. There are so many applications that we can use, from work flow to expense report applications. Processes that are pretty cumbersome today could get an overhaul with applications that will integrate seamlessly with Google Apps.

Since Google Apps is web-based, our employees can get their information from any device, wherever they are and the IT team can spend less time managing software updates on company supplied laptops and Blackberries. Access to real time information is extremely important in the hospitality industry.

The way we see it at LXR, the web is the future. Google Apps allows us to focus on business-critical projects that increase revenue and save costs, while making both our employees and our executive team happy.

Run Anywhere in the World With iFit Live Powered By Google Maps

Posted by Natasha Wyatt, Google Earth and Maps Enterprise Team

Editor’s note: From time to time we like to showcase how our customers are building fun and innovative products with Google Maps. Colleen Logan, VP of Marketing for Icon Health & Fitness, explains how a Google Maps API Premier powered treadmill helps exercisers reach personal fitness goals.

Most people use Google Maps for reasons of pure function: Where is that new restaurant? How do I get there? How long will it take? We thought Google Maps could be used for an entirely different purpose – as entertainment while working out on the NordicTrack home fitness equipment.

People buy fitness equipment for a range of reasons – train for a race, lose weight or simply stay in shape – but a universal challenge for most is staying motivated and finding the time to exercise. In order to reach their goals, more people are turning to technology for time-saving, motivating exercise. We thought the visuals provided by Google Maps, combined with our fitness products and iFit website might be so compelling, consumers would have more fun and stay on track. Even if the only time you can squeeze in exercise is in the evenings when kids are asleep in or in the early, snowy mornings of winter before a long day at work, the iFit exercise equipment can bring the experience of exercising on varied terrain into your home.



For example, if you wanted to experience a run through San Francisco’s hilly terrain, you can go to the iFit website and draw a running route on Google Maps. When you get on one of our treadmills, such as the NordicTrack Elite 9500 Pro, the treadmill pulls up Google Maps on the screen with the newly drawn running route. The treadmill mimics the incline of the real world route you are running, thanks to the elevation service of the Google Maps API. The runner experiences a real life running route by seeing the runner’s location move about Google Maps with Street View images flying by a she reaches new personal records.



To learn more about the Google Maps powered “smart fitness” treadmills visit the website of NordicTrack.

HealthWarehouse.com delivers healthy growth with Google Commerce Search

Posted by Marston Alfred, Director of E-commerce, HealthWarehouse

Editors note: HealthWarehouse.com is America’s largest and fastest growing, accredited online pharmacy, which boasts an inventory of over 4,000 unique prescription drugs. The company was recently featured in Consumer Reports as one of the top drugstores in the United States. We’ve invited today’s guest blogger, Marston Alfred, Director of E-commerce at HealthWarehouse.com, to share why HealthWarehouse implemented Google Commerce Search. To read more, download the case study.

HealthWarehouse isn’t your typical pharmacy. Instead of physical stores, we rely on a website where we sell and ship medications to tens of thousands of customers throughout the country. And while an online-only presence allows us to save on typical infrastructure and personnel costs, it also presents some unique challenges.

From the beginning, implementing quality e-commerce search was critical to our business. Medication names are complicated and difficult for pharmacists to spell – let alone the consumer (amlodipine benazepril as an example) – so it’s necessary that we have a search and navigation experience that can interpret customer intent as well as a pharmacist could. But as we quickly found, e-commerce search can be very complicated.

To tackle the search problem we evaluated several third-party e-commerce solutions, but these providers would have required us to manually register thousands of common medication misspellings and synonyms – which wasn’t feasible or scalable, and would have required constant fine-tuning. Providing relevant results for our audience was also an issue. In search, our customers demand the expertise and intuition of a pharmacist, and you can imagine how this would be difficult to provide without reams of historical data related to medicine and our business. Enter Google.

Google Commerce Search utilizes the same underlying spellchecker and thesaurus of Google.com (tried and tested on over one billion queries across every imaginable category each day) to automate the display of results on retail websites. Google Commerce Search uses these signals to provide a search and discovery solution that performs phenomenally out-of-the-box, and only gets better the more people use it.

We implemented Google Commerce Search, and results for complicated prescription names were instantly more accurate, providing a 40% decrease in call-center volume (literally overnight). Clearly, visitors are now finding and discovering products much better on their own. In line with this unexpected drop in customer support calls, actual searches increased 85%, unique visitors and page views doubled, and conversions rose 19%. Search became a much more valuable component of our website.

Switching to Google Commerce Search not only increased our revenues, but also allowed us to focus and scale our core business (which, believe it or not is affordable medication and not IT). More importantly, Google’s search and navigation solution has significantly improved product discovery, putting affordable medication into the hands of more people.

Going Google in Canada: This story almost began with a server.

Editor's note: Over 3 million businesses have adopted Google Apps. Today we’ll hear from Marawan El-Asfahani, Managing Principal of Oxygen, a creative design agency based in Toronto, Canada. To learn more about organizations that have gone Google, or to share your own story, visit our community map or test-drive life in the cloud with the Go Google cloud calculator.

At Oxygen Design Agency, we offer branding services, develop retail campaigns, build corporate communication and more, helping companies market effectively, discover their voices and reach their audiences quickly. Four years ago, we were using the Apple^® product for email, and it was constantly crashing on us. I figured the solution was clear: a server and Microsoft^® Office. But then this tech buddy of mine made a suggestion. He said we could either go with a pricey server and software suite, or we could give Google Apps for Business a try at $50/user/year. “Hmm...”, I thought. That’s when we crossed over.

It was so easy to set up Google Apps, and with it, our downtime worries went away. As a business owner with 16 people on staff, I always want to make sure my teams are set to go in their jobs. When a new employee used to walk into the studio, it would take a lot of time to set them up with email and other software. Now it takes five minutes.

Google Apps also helps us stay connected. Our designers work very closely with our clients and suppliers, which requires them to constantly be on the move. Now, whether we’re at client sites or photo shoots, Google Apps keeps us in touch; we can chat right from our email and access important work files from any web-enabled device.

When we first adopted Google Apps, we did see some push-back from a few employees. There were certain features these employees didn’t see, and this made them skeptical. But then Google consistently released new features that made the products better and met those needs, and now those people are the ones who are most enthusiastic about our company’s use of Google Apps.

At Oxygen, we’re now heavy users of Google Apps -- especially Sites, which we’ve found to be an intuitive system to work from. We’ve used it to build a company intranet where we store employee manuals, health insurance policies, stock photo sources, and even a restaurant corner to showcase some of the really cool boutique restaurants we have in our city. Our designers can write reviews on local places for everyone to see -- from their desk or even from their mobile devices.

With Google Apps, we’re a much more powerful company. I’m proud to say we’ve gone Google.

Posted by Marawan El-Asfahani, Managing Principal, Oxygen Design Agency

Google Apps is a recipe for success at EAT.

Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Cesar Ramanauskas, Systems Engineer at EAT., a restaurant chain in the U.K. Learn more about other organizations that have gone Google on our community map or test drive life in the cloud with the Go Google cloud calculator.

EAT. is a fast growing and dynamic restaurant chain with more than 1,700 employees and over 100 stores throughout the U.K. We pride ourselves on serving “good, fresh, uncomplicated food” in our stores every day. It is our job in the IT Team to adapt that philosophy and provide simple, fast and uncomplicated systems to our customers and employees. In addition to free customer Wi-Fi, Twitter feed (@eat_news) and iPhone app, we have pioneered technologies such as an integrated Chip & PIN contactless payment solution in the U.K.

In preparation for our goal of doubling in size, EAT. migrated to Google Apps for Business, after more than a decade of using Novell GroupWise®. We found the GroupWise upgrade process very costly and time-consuming, and because of long release intervals between versions our users had to wait years to access new features. We needed something better.



Our research for an alternative led us to Google Apps for Business. Its innovative approach to communication and collaboration, tied to its highly scalable and secure environment, was second to none. All the steps in this transition, from seamless deployment and migration to user training, were performed by the small in-house team of experts.

I, for one, believe that the cloud is not just another buzzword, but is definitely where the future of productivity lives. Outfitting our users with software that works in a web browser means there is less need to install and update local applications. Plus, it gives them extra flexibility to take their work away from their desks onto mobile phones, tablets and other gadgets.

Furthermore, with Google Apps’ on-demand capacity, we avoided the ever growing capital and time expense of owning, running and protecting the servers ourselves. We also steered well clear of the upfront cost of building the infrastructure required to accommodate our aggressive expansion plans, without either wasting or having insufficient resources.

Time and cost savings didn’t stop there. Although BlackBerry® devices are fully supported by Google Apps, we appreciated the flexibility of Android devices with native Gmail, calendar, and the latest corporate and management apps, such as Google Apps Device Policy and Authenticator for 2-Step verification. We kept the momentum and in just one day all users were migrated to new the HTC Desire Z™. Retiring BlackBerry Enterprise Servers in the process was a welcome saving on our infrastructure!

Ultimately, it all adds up. With Google Apps for Business, our costs, risks, and storage usage shrank considerably while our user satisfaction, productivity and revenue opportunities multiplied. We are now able to allocate more time and resources to activities that really matter - good service and quality food.

Posted by Cesar Ramanauskas, Systems Engineer, EAT.

Cinram coordinates across continents, saves over 60% on messaging using Google Apps

Editor's Note: We're pleased to welcome guest blogger Andrew Murrey, Vice President of IT Infrastructure Cinram North America. Cinram specializes in optical disc manufacturing, packaging, distribution and demand planning solutions for the home entertainment, telecommunications, and retail industries. Learn more about other organizations that have gone Google on our community map or test drive life in the cloud with the Go Google Cloud Calculator.

For more than 40 years, Cinram has worked with some of the biggest names in home entertainment and retail to produce and distribute movies, music, and video games. We have grown organically and through acquisition to more than 10,000 employees and 20 facilities in North America and Europe; many locations still operate independently – including selecting their own technologies. Everything was very decentralized, and this made it difficult to collaborate and communicate. Even scheduling meetings was a challenge; we’d have to hunt to find contact information, and email back and forth multiple times just to find availability and rooms.

Decentralization meant we also had a combination of email and collaboration solutions, with 80% of our offices on Microsoft® Exchange 5.5 – 15 year old technology with no support or future updates planned – and the others using Exchange 2003 and 2007. With inbox quotas ranging from 50-500MB, many of our users were storing their mail in .PST files on their computers, making backups and restoration of critical data almost impossible, and creating a giant risk in the case of corrupt or stolen machines. Running a mail system from the mid-1990’s also meant that we had all kinds of limits on attachments, and a ton of other frustrating issues. Between server failures, incompatibilities and corrupted PSTs, we were running close to $220 per mail user per year just to keep the old system running.

Our goal was to have everyone at Cinram using the same technology for email and daily collaboration, so we explored three different options: (a) upgrading all of our internal systems to Exchange 2007, (b) migrating to hosted Exchange, (c) Google Apps. Staying on-premise and adding quite a bit of storage would require a heavy capital investment, and we would still be paying for backup agents, tapes, vaulting, patching, and still have all of the other headaches of managing a mail system. Hosted Exchange didn’t really fit our needs because we wanted to move away from paying for an Outlook client, and Gmail’s web interface was just as powerful.

However, when we looked at Google Apps, we calculated that we could be saving 60% on email alone by moving to Google Apps for Business – a clear winner when it came to price per user – but we also knew we’d save serious time on IT management, freeing my team up to do more strategic work. In addition, we would have superior disaster recovery options and best of all, our employees would be more productive. We chose to go Google.

In just four months, Google Apps is 100 percent deployed in North America and Europe – about 3,000 people so far. The positive changes we expected are now being revealed, and we’re even uncovering some unexpected benefits as well. For starters, my IT team is happier as we previously had 16 full-time people managing our messaging systems, spending about 8,000 hours per year backing up email, fixing file storage problems, or managing server issues. If one of our servers at our Toronto headquarters went down, the entire company lost email access – it seamed like we had a company-wide email delay or outage every couple of months. Google Apps provides us with disaster recovery capabilities that we could have never dreamed of. In addition, we now need only two folks to look after messaging and the other 14 are now more focused on business-critical projects. They’re so happy they wear Google t-shirts about once a week!

Our employees are also adjusting well, and are more productive. We’re working closely with our Google Partner, Onix, to provide an end-user support site using Google Video for Business for training videos and webinars. One of the biggest benefits we’ve seen is that, since all employees have one user interface with easy processes, they can collaborate more efficiently. Scheduling meetings for example is infinitely easier, we just click on Google Talk video chat, and we can easily view employee calendars to facilitate scheduling. That’s something we didn’t calculate – all the time we spent trying to do these small, day-to-day tasks across all of our employees.

We’re also really pleased and excited to see employees adopt tools like Google Docs – we’re at a growing rate of about 150 new, shared documents each day. The HR and compliance teams in particular have been using Google Docs to store their different policies and procedures. We can give them exactly what they need in Google Docs or Google Sites, whereas before we had three or four different Microsoft SharePoint sites, and we’d have to spend money on auditors to track everything down. Now that’s all moving to a central repository, and we’re already seeing significant cost savings and productivity gains there.

We have only begun scratching the surface of capabilities that Google Apps brings to us. We have an open door to bring Google Apps to all 10,000 Cinram employees in the future, from the current user employees in our distribution and manufacturing facilities, to the folks who have never had a Cinram account before, so everyone can see the benefits. With the flexibility of Google Apps, the sky is the limit. We’ve gone Google, and we’ll never go back.

Posted by Andrew Murrey, Vice President of IT Infrastructure - Cinram North America

Luxury Real Estate Company Improves Mobility, Security and Email Performance with Google Apps

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Colleen Barry, Director of Marketing for Gibson Sotheby’s International Realty, a luxury real estate company in Boston. Gibson Sotheby's International Realty joins other real estate businesses like Baird and Warner, Ray White, and Cadillac Fairview in switching to Google Apps. Learn more about other organizations that have gone Google on our community map or test drive life in the cloud with the Go Google Cloud Calculator.

We are the Boston-based franchise of an international luxury real estate company. To support sales and marketing, as well as 200 independent agents who are constantly on the go, we needed a more mobile, secure, and fast solution for communication and collaboration. We were providing email services centrally for 300 mailboxes using SmarterMail, but this solution’s capabilities were very limited. People only had 10MB of storage. The service was slow and somewhat unreliable. Everyone had to use an email client, and because many are independent contractors, they chose whatever they wanted to use. This ultimately led to complexity and a higher likelihood of data loss. With Google Apps for Business, the company now has a more secure, consistent toolset that is increasing sales productivity while reducing IT complexity.

Over the years, I have had so many agents call me on the verge of tears because their machine had crashed and they lost everything on their hard drive. If Microsoft ® Outlook is your record-keeping mechanism, you’re in trouble unless you back it up – and let’s be realistic – people rarely do that. They also lose their computers and phones. We wanted to move into the cloud so that we no longer had to worry about data loss or data back-ups.

Another motivation for change was the need for better mobile access. We were using POP mail so agents and others could see emails on their mobile phones, but the experience was limited and ultimately frustrating. Because the email wasn’t in the cloud, you couldn’t do much more than view it. In an industry like real estate, it’s essential that our agents can access their information instantly from wherever they are.

We were pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to deploy Google Apps. We worked with Google reseller, SADA Systems, to purchase Google Apps, but two office administrators and I completed the implementation on our own. Because Google is so great at making information available, we didn’t even need to hire anyone to migrate our data. We brought 300 email accounts to Google Apps, without needing a partner for the deployment.

The ability to share and collaborate on Google documents and spreadsheets has saved us from having to do a lot of repetitive and manual tasks. For example, we can now share “show sheets” – brochures about a property listing – in Google Docs directly with our clients. We previously created PDFs and emailed them around to agents and then the agents downloaded them and attached them in emails sent to clients.

We’re also using Google Forms for requests for services that we offer to our agents. Instead of receiving countless email requests, we can now just circulate a survey, which populates instantly into a Google spreadsheet. That spreadsheet also lets us track trends and forecast. All of the essential data is there and accessible to the entire team.

With all of the snow we’ve gotten this year, Google Talk has been a lifesaver. People can work from home yet still preserve the connected, social aspect of their work while getting questions answered and discussions taken care of in minutes. These examples may not seem like much, but they add up to big productivity gains and help our employees feel connected and part of a team, even when we’re not physically in the same office.

Our employees are happier, and our IT costs are decreasing. With Apps we are dealing with fewer IT problems and are operating at a much quicker pace. Google Apps quickly begins to pay for itself. Our employees know that we’re investing in them and giving them the tools to do their jobs better and work together. We are providing a more valuable service to our agents and, ultimately, to our clients. We believe moving to Google Apps will be one of our great achievements this year.

Posted by Colleen Barry, Director of Marketing, Gibson Sotheby’s International Realty

Our Gone Google Story: At Edina Public Schools Google Apps helps students learn without boundaries

Editor’s Note: Recently we announced the winners of our global Gone Google ad contest. Today’s featured winner is Molly Schroeder, Technology Integration Specialist at Edina Public Schools.


Google Apps has been an invaluable learning tool for students and teachers at Edina Public Schools. As a technology integration specialist for Edina Public Schools, I am Google Certified Teacher and a Google Apps for Education Certified Trainer, Over the past year and a half, my team launched Google Apps at Edina Public Schools. Google Apps has transformed our ability to help students and staff engage in learning.

Staff and students have been using Google Docs, Google Sites, Picasa, Blogger, and Google Maps to work efficiently and collaboratively. Teachers rely on Google Apps for their classroom web presence, staff development and collaborative projects. Students create state research projects, websites and online portfolios of their work. Google Apps enables them to collaborate, submit and publish their work online, allowing them to communicate with an audience broader than their classroom. Even parents benefit from Google Apps -- using Google Docs to sign up for conferences and volunteer opportunities.

At Edina Public Schools, we are excited not only about what our students learn but about how they are learning. Google Apps for Education allows our students to stay current in the evolving world of technology while engaging deeply with their academic pursuits. Students are now learning without boundaries, any time, anywhere.

Posted by: Molly Schroeder, Technology Integration Specialist, Edina Public Schools