Posted by Denise Stephens, CIO, Idaho National Laboratory

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Denise Stephens, CIO and Information Management director of the Idaho National Laboratory (INL). INL joins a growing number of government agencies that have made the switch to Google Apps for Government.

Located in southeastern Idaho on nearly 900 square miles of desert, the Idaho National Laboratory is the lead lab for nuclear research for the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE). Employees at INL work on diverse projects that include making batteries used on United States space missions, developing new technologies for nuclear reactors, protecting critical infrastructure and operating the world’s 64th fastest supercomputer.


System integrator Unisys recently completed the migration of nearly 5,000 INL employees to Google Apps for Government from Lotus Notes. INL has not taken this transition lightly. We have spent the better part of a year developing requirements, engaging in internal pilots to mitigate risk and overcoming emerging challenges as a cross-organizational team to smooth our move to the cloud. Google Apps is the right investment to move the laboratory forward while meeting the lab’s important requirements.

Due to our remote location, having a reliable, redundant email system is paramount. Google Apps’ track record of 99.9% uptime gives INL employees’ confidence that their email will be there when they need it. Some INL employees work in facilities in the city of Idaho Falls, while many others work at our complex in the desert, some 30 miles away. In the past, this geographic separation made it harder for employees to share information. Google Apps is improving communications by allowing employees to work together in real-time with voice and video chat, calendar sharing and simultaneous document editing.

In this case, INL simply couldn’t afford not to go to the cloud. This move is less expensive, and allows the lab to take a flexible, nimble and cost effective approach to lab communications. Instead of managing infrastructure, INL has chosen to invest in capabilities that support the lab’s critical mission areas.

Posted by Tom Mills, Enterprise Director, Education

One of the many great promises of technology is its ability to help level the playing field in education. It can give students the tools and skills they need to prepare for work in a world where technology will be integrated in our lives. But few schools today have the opportunity to provide computers in every classroom, or access for every student. Budget cuts and limited resources at many schools are real challenges; but devices can be more affordable and valuable than you might think.

Google worked with IDC¹ on a sponsored white paper to quantify the value of Chromebooks for Education based on data from schools using Chromebooks. The key findings show promise for schools looking to implement technology without breaking their budget or asking teachers to serve as IT help desks.

• Chromebooks require 69 percent less labor to install and 92 percent less labor to support, reducing the need to hire additional IT staff
• Chromebooks reduce the per-device cost of ownership up to $935 over 3 years – a Chromebook deployed in school starts at $13.30 monthly

In addition to being affordable and easy for schools to manage, Chromebooks are also secure, fast and simple for students and teachers to get online and start collaborating using thousands of educational apps. They start up instantly, so they’re minimally disruptive to students when a great idea strikes (or when a teacher says “close your laptop”). They also have long battery life so creative minds aren’t tethered to a charger all day.

Teachers and administrators have told us that they have enjoyed knowledge sharing with other Chromebook schools around the country. In the spirit of expanding this community, we’d like to welcome a few of the newest members of the Chromebooks family:


Del Mar Union Elementary School District in California has implemented 700 Chromebooks in their eight elementary schools. This year 4-6 graders in two elementary schools have Chromebooks and the district plans to expand to all 4-6 grade students by next school year. Because Del Mar – one of the top-performing districts in the state – is focused on writing and the writing process to support “21st century skills” aligned with common core standards, they chose Google Docs as their primary curriculum tool. Docs allows students to easily share, communicate and collaborate on essays, responses to literature, and projects with their peers and teachers.


Milpitas Unified School District in California has purchased 1100 Chromebooks for students grades K-12. This year, Milpitas High School’s Digital Business Academy students have each been assigned their own Chromebook for the year that they are able to use in school and at home, replacing traditional textbooks. The district has also rolled out a true blended learning program in which elementary students rotate from a traditional classroom to a computer lab with Chromebooks throughout the day.


Lastly, we’d like to extend a warm welcome to Fort Sam Houston Independent School District in Texas, which will add 450 Chromebooks to students grades 9-12, the majority of whom are the children of military personnel living on the Fort Sam Houston Military Installation. And also to Chequamegon School District in Wisconsin, which has gone 1:1 with more than 380 Chromebooks in grades 4-8, including in their special education classroom, where students are engaging with educational web content such as YouTube and Khan Academy.

Learn more about how other districts and schools are harnessing the power of the Web in the classroom with Chromebooks for Education. Here’s to a happy, healthy, productive school year!

¹IDC White Paper sponsored by Google, "Quantifying the Economic Value of Chromebooks for K-12 Education," Doc #236459, August 2012.

Editor’s note: Today’s guest post is authored by Reynaldo D. Laguda, Assistant Secretary and ICT Chairperson of the Philippines Department of Education (DepEd)

Here’s a problem to solve: How do you connect 45,000 schools, 200 divisions and 600,000 staff across more than 7,000 islands? (Hint, it’s not with lots of boats). The answer we came to at the Philippines Department of Education (DepEd) was to move our systems into the cloud with Google Apps for Education. DepEd was looking for solutions to solve the day-to-day challenges of managing a large and complex national education institution with less than perfect technology. DepEd didn’t have a central email system — staff used personal email accounts. And although DepEd sent memos to district offices or posted website updates, we lacked a unified and reliable channel to communicate and connect with each other.

The benefits of moving to Google Apps for Education extend beyond improving our communications. Many of our teachers working in remote areas without reliable internet infrastructure access the web via mobile devices or Internet cafes. Moving content back and forth can be difficult and disk corruption or computer failure is common. With all DepEd’s content now in the cloud — 17 petabytes of storage devoted to teachers alone — staff no longer need to worry about keeping track of their data across multiple devices. They’ll now be able to access all the material they need from any device that has an Internet connection.


The days of physically sending reports or curricula across the far reaches of the archipelago and hoping for the best are gone too. Switching to cloud based collaboration tools means everyone, from the DepEd Secretary to teachers in Kalinga province, will be able to access whatever they need from wherever they are. What’s more, they’ll be able to work together in real-time using Google Docs, Google Groups and Google Sites.

As the nation’s educators, we understand the importance of technological literacy for our students and believe that teachers should lead by example. And moving to Google Apps for Education comes at the right time. Going Google gives us the technology we need to meet the goals of "GO! Education" – a national initiative designed to improve educational access and quality in the Philippines. We’re delighted to be joining 16 million teachers and students around the world who are already using Google Apps to work more efficiently and collaboratively, and to be bringing 7,000 islands into the cloud with us.

Posted by Ronen Lapidot, Senior Vice President of Information Technology, Perry Ellis International

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Ronen Lapidot, Senior Vice President of Information Technology at Perry Ellis International, a designer, distributor and licensor of apparel and accessories for men and women. Perry Ellis International joins other retail organizations in going Google. See what they have to say.

Far from a typical fashion house, our apparel spans a variety of categories including men’s and women’s clothing, accessories, children’s apparel, even evening gowns for the red carpet. In total, we manage a portfolio of some of the best known brands in fashion, including Perry Ellis®, Original Penguin®, Jantzen®, Laundry by Shelli Segal®, Nike® Swim, Callaway® and more. With 2,600 associates spanning across 65 store locations and 30 offices worldwide, we rely on technology to stay connected.


The increasingly fast-paced global economy of the past several years has made it even more important to be able to work together efficiently, act quickly and share information across the company to help us all understand the state of the business and act as one global team. We were using a popular, premise based email solution, but with so many offices around the world, we knew the only way to keep our brand fresh and our business agile was to move to the cloud.

With the help of Cloud Sherpas, we moved the entire company to Google Apps. Now our global teams are able to connect through Gmail’s video chat feature to meet “face to face” about upcoming projects, designs and merchandise. With so many offices in different time zones, it’s great to be able to give our associates the option to work where they’re comfortable, even if it’s just going home to have dinner with their families before a jumping on a video chat with colleagues in China or Indonesia. This has been especially helpful for offices with eight or ten hour time differences between them and has made us feel more like one cohesive team instead of siloed offices.

Being able to work together easily across offices not only brings the team closer together, it also saves significant time and costs. We recently opened two international offices in Indonesia and Bangladesh. Usually I travel to each location for weeks at a time to interview and hire employees and oversee the regional office openings. With Google Apps, we were able to interview job candidates via video chat and work with regional managers on important policies and resources that needed to be in place for these new offices and associates. I was elated to discover that what normally takes significant travel time and costs could be done right from my desk. I sat there amazed as I watched documents fill in with information from my colleagues across the world. I think that’s when I realized we were all going to be able to do things very differently, now that we were in the cloud.

Posted by Christina Wallace, Co-founder and CEO of Quincy

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Christina Wallace, Co-founder and CEO of Quincy, an online retail store for professional women. Quincy joins other retail organizations in going Google. See what they have to say.

At Quincy, we understand that every woman’s body is different. After years of struggling to find boardroom-appropriate clothes that really fit, my business partner Alex Nelson and I realized that typical size charts are often the root of the problem and decided to take matters into our own hands. That’s why we started Quincy. What sets us apart from the competition is that our clothing sizes are defined by height, bust, and hip-to-waist ratios -- three areas of the body that women have the most trouble with when purchasing clothing.

When Alex and I decided to go into business together, I was living in Washington D.C., while she was in London. That didn’t stop us, but we needed a simple and inexpensive communication solution that would help us stay efficient and organized while working in two different time zones. Using Google Apps for Business we were able to get our retail brand off the ground in less than a year. Today, Alex and I have built an office in New York and have grown to seven additional full-time staff and six interns.

Over the past year, Google documents and spreadsheets have become some of our most important tools. Docs makes it easy for us to write shared documents like our business plan together, and we can be confident we don’t have to worry about version control when we reference it later. We keep all product development information in spreadsheets, including the textiles, trims, colors and more. We’re able to easily keep track of each product in real time, and if we have a merchant issue, we know about it immediately. We also keep track of all our costs in spreadsheets, which makes it easy to manage and share with our accountant.

Google Chat has also become an important tool for the company. We work in an open-concept office, so Chat provides some privacy in conversations between Alex about sensitive business matters, for example. We also like the option to go "on the record", in case we want to go back to reference chats later. We also use Chat to connect with our customers. While browsing our website, shoppers are able to chat with someone from our team if they need help navigating our site or understanding how our size chart works. And what’s great about Google Apps is that we are able to chat with customers from our office, home, or mobile device.

While we are busy making the perfect fit for our customers, Google Apps has been the perfect fit for our young and growing business.

Posted by Eran Feigenbaum, Director of Security, Google Enterprise

Security is incredibly important to our users and we’ve invested many millions of dollars to help keep them safe online. For our Apps and Cloud Platform customers, we provide transparency and visibility to those protections through our Google Apps Security Whitepaper and our data center video tour.

While our descriptions of what we do are valuable to customers, we’re also committed to conducting independent 3rd party assessments of our security and data protection practices. Building on the SSAE 16 audit we completed last year and the ISO 27001 certification for Google Apps that we received in May, we’ve successfully completed a new SSAE 16 / ISAE 3402 SOC 2 Type II audit that covers the following products:

• Google Apps 
• Google Apps Vault 
• Google Apps Script 
• Google App Engine 
• Google Cloud Storage

This year, we’ve added Google Apps Vault to the audit, and performed a SOC 2, Type II audit that's more detailed and comprehensive than last year’s SOC 1 audit. The SOC 2 audit uses a standard set of controls including security, availability, processing integrity, and confidentiality of the data that is stored in our services.

The audit was conducted by Ernst & Young, a leading independent auditor. For Google Apps and Cloud Platform customers, this audit helps verify the data protection technologies and processes we have in place and demonstrates our commitment to protecting users’ data.

Posted by John Edelman, CEO of Design Within Reach

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is John Edelman, CEO of Design Within Reach, a national retail operation that sells modern design for homes and offices. Design within Reach joins other retail organizations in going Google. See what they have to say.

At Design Within Reach, we make authentic modern design accessible. Rob Forbes founded the company in 1999 when he tried to furnish his apartment with the clean, simple classics he’d come to appreciate while living in London, but found that many of his favorite designers weren’t accessible in the United States. Design Within Reach quickly took off and today has 44 retail locations across the U.S. and Canada.

In 2009, my partner and COO, John McPhee, and I decided to move the corporate office from California to Connecticut, it gave us the opportunity to reevaluate our internal operations. Our previous technology platform required us to maintain multiple servers, and moving them across the country and setting them up again would have been costly. Plus, an on-premise solution was never going to provide the ease of collaboration across our store locations and headquarters that is essential to our success. With the help of Google Apps reseller Cloud Sherpas, we decided the move was the perfect opportunity to implement Google Apps.

Before Google Apps, it wasn’t easy to share important materials like store promotion schedules, store layouts, or PR updates quickly and efficiently. Instead, we relied heavily on email for communication. In retail, things change all the time and emailing about employee schedules, promotional timelines or new merchandise availability meant that the information was quickly out of date and risked employees having inaccurate information. Google Apps changed all that. Now, our marketing team is able to track in-store promotions via shared calendars. Employees can track inventory through Google Docs, so when we have a floor sale and someone wants 4 red chairs and we only have one, we can easily hop onto Google Docs and find the chairs at another location. The customer is happy – and we’re happy because we’ve made a sale and cleared the floor.

Easily collaborating across headquarters and all our store locations helps us provide a much more consistent and inviting experience for our customers, and that’s really important to us. We want our customers to linger, bring their dog or kids, and explore and learn about design. We want our customers to be a part of something bigger than just shopping, and that’s the same way we feel about our employees. Google Apps and the ease of communication and sharing that it brings has helped us do just that.

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Google Apps for Education Team

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog.)

Josh remembers the old days at college, when working on a group project meant trekking through the snow (uphill both ways, of course) to meet with his team in the library, followed by endless rounds of back-and-forth revisions (in red pen, no doubt). And by old days, he means last year. As Josh—a rising senior at Princeton University—heads back to campus this fall, he and his classmates will be getting a whole new experience with Google Apps for Education.

Princeton is just one of the many colleges and universities now using Google Apps. In fact, seven of the eight Ivy League universities and 72 of this year’s top 100 US Universities (as determined by 2013 U.S. News and World Report’s ranking) have gone Google, too.

We’re also welcoming 14 other new schools to the Google Apps for Education family, just in time for back-to-school:

• Bates College
• Carnegie Mellon University
• Georgetown University
• Princeton University
• Rice University
• Smith College
• Stony Brook University
• University of California, Berkeley
• University of Colorado, Boulder
• University of Dayton
• University of Mississippi
• University of Pennsylvania, School of Arts and Sciences
• Vassar College
• Virginia Tech

By going Google, students and teachers have access to a whole new way of doing things: They can better collaborate in and out of the classroom; office hours can be held via hangouts; e-portfolios can be created and maintained in a Google Site; professors can give real-time feedback in a Google document (no red pen necessary); and group projects can take place across continents instead of side-by-side in a library.

And this is just the beginning. As more schools go Google, we continue to be amazed by the creative ways students and teachers are using technology to work better together, and we’re looking forward to the surprises in store this school year.

Posted by Gautam Godhwani, Simply Hired

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Gautam Godhwani at Simply Hired, one of the most comprehensive job sites with over 30 million users, headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

As the world’s most comprehensive job site, our goal at Simply Hired is to help people find a job they love. Our 75 employees work with 30M+ job seekers each month as well as thousands of global employers to provide free access to job openings and an efficient way to reach qualified candidates.

Maintaining a database of more than eight million job listings, working with thousands of employers and managing a remote sales team requires a lot of internal organization. In 2011, we started running into issues with our in-house technology implementation. Employees were wasting valuable time dealing with spam and at the same time, storing and saving company information on a single internal drive was limiting mobility and collaboration for the team. We were also concerned about disaster recovery if our system suffered an outage. All of these factors made it clear that another solution was needed.

With Google Apps, our information is now available in the cloud. Thanks to Gmail, Google calendar, Google Docs, and more recently, Google Drive, important documents and calendar information is now always up-to-date and accessible to all employees – no matter where they are located or which Web device they are using. When our sales team is on the road, they can now easily access presentations and product information from our internal Google site and send it to potential customers. Accessing data and files without being in the office or connected to a local network has helped us provide a better experience for our customers. And, Google Chat makes it easy to quickly reach a colleague while out of the office or on the road. In addition, moving our data to the cloud helps us save resource allocation toward and disaster recovery procedures.

In addition to accessibility and reliability, sharing information as a team has never been easier. Rather than emailing large attachments, we can easily upload large files to Google Docs or Drive. For example, our marketing team is constantly creating new presentations and collateral which include images and video, resulting in large file sizes. In the past, we’d have to email large files, which created numerous issues including slow upload time and unreliable deliverability. Sometimes, the files would be too large to even send. Now, we can upload materials easily to Docs or Drive and simply click the “Share” button.

With Google Apps there’s a new level of transparency and collaboration among teams at Simply Hired. We’ve also seen a reduction in expenses as fewer resources are needed to manage a cloud-based solution. We look forward to seeing ongoing enhancements from the Google Apps team to further improve productivity across our organization.

Posted by Anil Sabharwal, Senior Product Manager, Google Drive Team

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog.)

Every day, more and more people are choosing to live online and get things done in the cloud. Helping to make this experience as seamless as possible, Google Drive is one place where you can create, share and keep all your stuff. Drive is available on the web, as well as Mac, Windows and Android and iOS.

Updates for iOS
Starting today, if you’re using the Drive app on your iOS device you can also edit Google documents, just as you can with the Android app. From your iPhone or iPad, you can create a new document, edit an existing one or format text. And just like on your computer, you’ll be able to see other people’s edits instantly as they’re made.


You’ll also notice other new improvements to the iOS Drive app. For example, you can now view Google presentations on your iPhone or iPad, including speaker notes, full-screen mode and the ability to swipe between slides. You can also create new folders, move files into folders and upload stuff (like photos and videos) from your device directly in the Drive app.

Updates for Android
We’re also updating the Drive app for Android phones and tablets today. You can now add comments, reply to existing comments and view tables in your Google documents. And you’ll have the same new abilities to view presentations and organize your stuff as your friends with iPhones do.

More to come...
Looking ahead, we have plenty more planned for the Drive mobile apps—including native editing and real-time collaboration for Google spreadsheets. Stay tuned.



Get Drive in the App Store for your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch and visit the Play Store to get the latest on your Android phone or tablet. To learn more about Google Drive, visit drive.google.com/start.

Posted by Jack Halprin, Head of eDiscovery, Google Enterprise

Google Apps Vault helps businesses of all sizes easily and securely manage their most important information. It can help businesses prepare for the unexpected and reduce the cost of litigation, regulatory investigations and compliance actions.

We launched Google Apps Vault to provide easy-to-use, enterprise-class archiving, retention and eDiscovery capabilities to our Google Apps customers. Until now, many small and medium-size businesses were unable to deploy solutions like Vault due to cost and complexity. But starting today, Apps customers can purchase Google Apps Vault online directly from the Control Panel.

Google Apps Vault can be added to your Google Apps account for an additional $5 per user per month. For information on how to add Vault to your Apps account, please visit the Google Apps Help Center. If you are not yet a Google Apps customer, you can get more information and start a free trial of Google Apps and Google Apps Vault.

Editor’s note: Google Apps Vault is available for new and recent Google Apps for Business and Education customers. We’re working to enable Vault for existing customers, and we’ll announce availability when it is ready.

Posted by Divya Agarwalla, Product Manager, Chrome for Business

Since launch, our vision for Chromebooks has been to bring the simplicity, flexibility and affordability of cloud computing to the personal computer. Auto-updates, the Chrome management console, and browser sync have brought us closer. Today, we’re bringing the cloud model to the hardware itself by trialing a Chromebook rental program, in conjunction with financing partner CIT.

Imagine you’re setting up shop for a local political campaign and will have an influx of new, temporary workers. You can rent a Chromebook for each worker for the next few months, and return them when the campaign is over. Chromebooks meet the needs of most workers, making this rental program a great option for companies with seasonal workers, larger organizations who want to pilot Chromebooks, fast-growing startups and any company looking to preserve cash.

Organizations in the US can rent a new Chromebook starting at $30 per month or rent a Chromebox starting at $25 per month. Rentals are month-to-month, and there’s no long-term commitment. The rental includes Chrome hardware with 3-year limited warranty, the web-based Chrome management console to centrally set-up and control users, devices and apps, and 24/7 support. And the monthly payments actually decrease the longer you keep the device.

If you’re a Google Apps business customer, today we’re also making it possible for you to purchase up to 10 Chromebooks – including web-based user, device and app management – online from Google. You can manage your fleet of Chromebooks right from the Apps control panel, giving you a unified view across your organization and enabling you to get users up and running quickly.

We’re seeing some great uses for Chromebooks in business and government:

• As part of its HTML5 web app strategy, transportation firm QDI is giving Chromebooks to operational managers in truck depots to coordinate driver loads.
• School of Rock, a music school with over 90 locations, has adopted Chromebooks to reduce the costs, administrative overhead, security and reliability issues that came with managing traditional PCs at remote sites.
• And the City of Palo Alto library system has pioneered an innovative new program where patrons can checkout Chromebooks for a week, just like a library book. Given shrinking budgets, this initiative was only possible due to Chromebooks' ease of use and minimal maintenance needs.

We’re excited to see how the next wave of Chromebook customers puts their devices to use and hope that the flexible rental and online purchase options make it even easier for you to bring Chrome devices to your organization.

Posted by Patrick Donelan, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted from the Google Drive blog.)

Getting things done with others would be much easier if everyone was sitting right next to you. But since that’s rarely the case, we’re always updating Google Drive to make it easier to collaborate with others, no matter where you are or who you’re with.

Today we’re bringing the discussion functionality that’s already in documents and presentations to spreadsheets. If a cell has a comment in it, you'll see an orange triangle in the upper right corner and when you hover over the cell you'll see the full discussion.


The total number of comments are also tallied up at the bottom of the screen on the sheet tab, and hovering over the comment icon shows all the comments on that sheet.


And just like you’re used to with comments elsewhere, you can +mention someone to automatically include them in a discussion and send them a notification via email – and they can even reply to the comment without leaving their inbox.

Any comments that were created in spreadsheets before today are still available and saved as “Notes”. These are shown in your spreadsheet using a black triangle in the corner of the cell to differentiate them from the new discussion-style comments. You can also create new notes from the “Insert” menu if you need to leave a quick annotation on a cell.

We hope discussions makes working in spreadsheets with others more fun and productive, and we look forward to making even more improvements to collaboration in Google Drive.

Posted by Ego Obi, Program Manager – Google Apps Supporting Programs, Sub-Saharan Africa


Today, over 30 universities across Africa are partnering with Google to bring students, faculty and staff online to help them work better together. Through initiatives like the Google Apps Supporting Programs (GASP) and attendance at events like the 18th Conference of Commonwealth Education Ministers, Google is working with Sub-Saharan and South African universities to improve Internet access, strengthen campus infrastructure, and adopt Google Apps for Education through a combination of grants, technical consulting and training.

The GASP program is partnering with African universities in a variety of ways, including offering 65,000 University of Pretoria students (South Africa) a university Gmail account for life through Google Apps for Education. Makerere University Business School (MUBS) in Uganda also integrated Google Apps for Education into their core processes such as the payroll system, and Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) in Kenya, the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, and the University of Ghana adopted Google Apps for Education to improve cross-campus collaboration. And Inoorero University in Kenya extended their campus network infrastructure through grants and technical consulting offered through the GASP program.

At Google, we’re firm believers that we can work better together on the web. We’re excited to continue to partner with universities around the world to build out their infrastructure and get their students, faculty and staff online. Learn more about Google Apps Supporting Programs.

Posted by Mark Abbott, Regional Director of IT at O’Neill Hotels & Resorts Ltd.

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Mark Abbott, Regional Director of IT at O’Neill Hotels & Resorts Ltd., a hotel management company based in Vancouver, British Columbia. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

O’Neill Hotels & Resorts Ltd. was founded nearly twenty years ago by two brothers, Rob and John O’Neill, who spent their entire lives in the hotel business. Today, the company manages world-class resorts and hotels in Canada and the U.S., including several Westin and Embassy Suite resorts, and is continuing to expand its property portfolio. Our job as a management company is to help our property owners run their hotels smoothly, including everything from front desk customer service to back office operational support.

With our growing portfolio, we needed a better way to provide IT support to each property and to ensure that our corporate team could work together from anywhere. Since we are often traveling to different properties, providing easy and secure access to email, calendars, and documents was a priority. While the hotel industry isn’t known for its use of cutting-edge of technology, we were excited to go against the grain and began exploring cloud-based solutions. Google Apps gave us exactly what we needed.

We use Google Apps to help provide hotels with IT support from our corporate office. We maintain detailed notes and pictures of each hotel’s IT infrastructure in shared Google Docs, so anyone can provide support to the properties at any time. If there’s a network issue, we can easily access information about the property from anywhere – our corporate office, a property location, or even our homes -- to help the hotel immediately resolve the problem. We set up a Google Form for hotels to submit network issues or IT inquiries directly to our team. Form submissions are automatically populated in a shared spreadsheet, and a Google Apps Script helps us automatically respond to basic questions. This process has improved our response time and saved our IT team valuable hours.

Google Apps gives us the tools we need to be more efficient in our back office, so our hotels can stay focused on the front desk and providing the best possible service to their guests.