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Posted by Scott Lawson, director of IT architecture, QAD

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Scott Lawson, director of IT architecture for QAD, a 1,300-employee company that delivers supply chain collaboration software to 5,500 manufacturers in 93 countries. QAD turned to the Google Search Appliance (GSA) to enable employees and customers to search across multiple databases and content repositories such as Lotus Notes.

At QAD, we span 30 different locations around the world, from the corporate office in California to operations in South Africa and Thailand. We pride ourselves on the quality of support we deliver to thousands of manufacturers in 27 languages. We offer more than 50 product modules that are installed in building blocks to support different rules, industry regulations, and manufacturing styles of various countries.

QAD must provide complex, detailed product information to customers, customer service representatives as well as other employees within the organization. We offer a secure extranet where customers can find information such as white papers, data sheets, support ticket status, and technical updates. As an additional resource, our public-facing Internet site provides everything from case studies to product demonstration videos and access to an online support center.

Historically, internal and external users found it challenging to find the right product and service information. Data is stored in many different repositories: Lotus Notes, an enterprise content management and collaboration system, knowledge bases, file shares, QAD’s own customer service and support system, and internal websites. Our content sources had grown organically and were somewhat disorganized, and we had millions of documents that needed to be indexed.

We were using an Autonomy search system for our intranet and public facing site, but it was not meeting user expectations for usability and search relevancy. Autonomy was also time-consuming and expensive to maintain.

In 2010, our employees began working with Google Apps, and wanted Google’s signature ease-of-use and power for search as well. We decided to evaluate the Google Search Appliance (GSA) and consider abandoning the Autonomy solution. The GSA can connect legacy enterprise systems and provide advanced security and multiple language support—all-important priorities for our business.

We worked with Google partner Perficient to develop a search roadmap, proof of concept, and ultimately a streamlined implementation. The GSA was simple to deploy and has been easy to maintain because the appliance features a one-stop administrative interface for configuration and index controls.

For QAD, costs related to search are down, search relevancy is up, and IT is doing less maintenance work. Customer service representatives and customers can locate details about products and services with ease.

Users are able to search through a massive, rich content library housed in many different repositories, all from a single search box. With the GSA, we are linking communities of employees and customers together with content into a cohesive experience. It has made us even more of a unified global company.
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Posted by Steve Arentzoff, VP of Marketing, VigLink

Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Steve Arentzoff, VP of Marketing at VigLink. VigLink helps site owners monetize their online content by tagging outbound links so publishers get paid when readers make purchases. New links are also weaved into content by recognizing when web page content references products and merchants. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

From the beginning, we understood the value of cloud computing for a small business. Two years ago our founder, a former Microsoft employee, chose to start VigLink with Google Apps. He felt this was an easy decision for two key reasons: first, Google Apps was built from the ground up to be a cloud solution with real-time, multi-user features; second, our business is running about 75% Apple computers and 25% PCs, so we needed a solution that would support both platforms equally. With Google Apps, we didn’t have to download any new software or buy new hardware. The tools just worked through the power of the web, no matter what devices we were using.

Google Apps was not only cost-effective for a startup, but it also equipped us with the tools we needed to communicate and work together, no matter where we were. We have nineteen employees and offices in both San Francisco and Indiana, and with Google Apps, we’re able to connect all our employees and seamlessly communicate despite the distance between us.

We use Gmail and Google Docs heavily in our business, and we also take advantage of embedded chat and other collaboration features that make it easy for us to work together. My marketing team uses Google Docs pretty extensively, especially when working on new articles and press releases. VigLink is a startup, so there are no regular hours. Google Apps provides us with a great way for people to interact at two in the morning during the nighttime marathons. Our employees also enjoy the advantages of some of the other cool features that come with Google Apps. They make their calls through Google Voice and receive voicemail transcripts in their inboxes, which are easy to read and easy to search. VigLink’s mission is to help site owners around the world monetize their online content, and Google Apps has been a key tool to our success.
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Posted by Scott Hintz, Co-Founder and Vice President of Business Development at TripIt

Editors note: Scott Hintz, Gregg Brockway and Andy Denmark founded TripIt in 2006 to simplify the Internet travel experience by bringing together travel plans from multiple online sources into a single, centralized itinerary, and allow travelers to manage and share their travel plans. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

We launched TripIt with about 10 people back in 2007. We now employ about 50 and were acquired by Concur at the beginning of the year. It took all of one minute to decide that Google Apps provided the best tools for our growing team. As a Silicon Valley startup, our employees are very familiar with Gmail and we could count on them getting up to speed quickly without any IT training programs.

We attribute a lot of our internal business success to Google’s communication tools. Google Docs has become our primary collaboration tool and makes it easy for those outside our domain to work in tandem with internal employees. We rely on Google Docs for project planning and a lot of our accounting process. Before our acquisition, we used external bookkeepers to manage our accounting, do invoicing, etc. So we created Google spreadsheets where TripIt folks could enter invoice amounts and our accountants could access the doc and issue invoices based on our entries, then add confirmation information. Because Google documents are always up to date, TripIt employees could always track the status of invoices.

Plus, having a Google Docs link removes the email clutter that results from attachments, while allowing us the certainty that we’re all looking at the most recent version of the information. Before Google Docs, project prioritization was done using Microsoft Excel, which mandated a master owner and often resulted in outdated files. I can’t tell you how many times we were in meetings with people who were looking at different versions of the same spreadsheet.

Now we know the most recent versions of all our docs and the rest of our data are automatically saved in the cloud and accessible anywhere with an Internet connection. With hard drives, too many bad things can happen to your valuable files, especially as much as we travel. Mobile Gmail works great—it’s fast and easy—and we rely quite heavily on email and shared calendars while on the road. As a travel company, the mobile capabilities have become indispensable.

We’ve moved our offices three times in just four years. Because we’re now a cloud-based organization, it’s wonderful not having to lug around hardware and servers, and the fact that we never have to worry about interrupting critical email service is huge.

As a company that believes in the power of technology to simplify things, Google Apps is the perfect fit for us.
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Posted by Jim Lamb, Director of Computer Services, Ebby Halliday Realtors

Editor's note: In business since 1945, Ebby Halliday is one of the largest independent residential real estate companies in the U.S. with over 1,600 sales agents. Ebby herself, at 100 years old, is still very involved in the business and a well-known figure in the Dallas area. Ebby Halliday joins other real estate businesses like Baird & Warner and Gibson Sotheby’s International Realty in going Google. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

As we approached our seventh decade of doing business, we needed to modernize our technology infrastructure to provide better communication and collaboration tools for our employees and sales agents.

Before Google Apps, we had an outdated, in-house email system, a continuing battle with spam, and a distributed base of real estate agents with no effective way to collaborate. Each user was allotted 1GB of email storage and email service was provided by a lone Unix server, a single point of failure that crashed every couple of weeks, frustrating agents. The web-based interface was slow, an ongoing source of complaints. Spammers, having tricked users into divulging passwords, would occasionally use the server to send spam, resulting in our email domain being temporarily blacklisted. Mobile functionality was sub-par in an industry that demands anytime-anywhere access.

Among the options, Google Apps was the best choice based on cost, simplicity, and functionality. With help from Google Apps partner Cima Solutions Group, we migrated email from the in-house server, trained 1,600 users, and got everyone operational within serveral months.

Being cloud-based, Google Apps is accessible from anywhere with Internet connectivity. Our agents can access their email, calendar, and contacts whether they’re at an open house, home or the office. That kind of access is key in a business where communication is essential.

Outages are no longer a worry and with each user having 25GB of storage, running out of space is a thing of the past. Spammers no longer bother us. However, the biggest benefit we've seen is the speed and functionality of Google Apps. Using Google Docs to compose a document, for example, is just as fast as using other word processors, and much simpler. Plus, the document is automatically saved every few seconds. We can continue working on the document at home, a coffee shop, or a field office. Little things like these add up to increased productivity and on the go access that's critical in this industry. Google Apps is the perfect suite of apps for the real estate industry. At Ebby Halliday we see this first-hand every day.
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Posted by Mark Gillingham, The Great Books Foundation

(Cross-posted on the Google Nonprofits Blog.)

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Mark Gillingham, Vice President of The Great Books Foundation, a nonprofit educational organization whose mission is to promote reading, thinking, and the sharing of ideas for people of all ages. The Foundation's 60 employees have been using Google Apps for over two years.

For the past 60 years, the Foundation has helped millions of students and adults make the reading and discussion of literature a lifelong source of enjoyment, personal growth, and social engagement.

We offer courses for teachers in person and online. The Foundation also publishes books, anthologies, and materials for all ages to provide quality texts to discuss.



We have a history of using free and open-source applications on our desktop computers and servers that are more flexible and powerful than the paid applications we had been using. Once we learned that Google Apps was available at no cost for nonprofits under 3,000 users, I gathered our IT planning committee to plan how to migrate 60 users from our existing system.

We had been using an onsite email system for years because it was part of our file system. Although we upgraded the system every two years, it never seemed up-to-date. We had issues reading certain types of documents and viewing images and web sites. Using the system away from the office caused problems because we needed special applications, which varied by operating system. The calendar was not compatible with our mobile devices and the document repository was difficult to manage. As a result, most staff did not utilize the IT solutions we were offering.

We planned our deployment with a local developer Rachel Baker, whom we met through NTEN (Nonprofit Technology Network). She helped us understand what was required for a successful deployment and guided us through the process. We also used the Google Apps Marketplace to find a Google Apps reseller, Cloud Sherpas, whose specific migration knowledge and software helped us move all of our data.

At launch in 2009, our staff was thrilled to finally use a modern email program with highly reduced spam. Years later, some of us have still not gotten over this giddy feeling. More teams are using Google Docs to share internal and external documents. Google Calendar is the official way we schedule our meeting rooms.

Now in 2011, we're excited to try out Google+ in our organization to find new ways to collaborate. We are considering using Google+ to provide technical support for our employees. Also, we think our remote workers could use Google+ as an easy way to communicate with their peers and home base while travelling.



Part of my job is seeing the future so I can help direct the Foundation toward technology that will work for them. Google is always improving its products and launching new features. I love it when I can show someone the next new thing. It makes them smile, which makes me smile too.

If you are a U.S. 501c3 nonprofit interested in using Google Apps, please apply for our Google for Nonprofits program. If accepted into the program, you can receive up to 3,000 users for free, or a 40% Business discount on more than 3,000 users.

Non US-based organizations can sign up for a free Google Apps account with 10 users, or you are welcome to purchase Google Apps for Business.

To help you setup Google Apps quickly, Google provides many deployment resources, plus a simple in-product Setup Wizard.
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Posted by Franck Hémont, IPSEN

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Franck Hémont, Group Informatics Engineering & Development Director at Ipsen, who is leading the company’s project to deploy Google Apps. Ipsen (Euronext: IPN, ADR: IPSEY), is a global specialty-driven pharmaceutical company.
See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

IPSEN is a truly global company, with over 4,500 employees spread across almost 50 countries. We work collaboratively across borders and teams, and with a recently implemented restructure it has become even more important to allow the organisation to work together seamlessly.

It was these challenges we had in mind when we evaluated our messaging and collaboration tools earlier this year. When we met with Google, we were looking for a secure, efficient and innovative solution that would allow the IT organization to focus primarily on value creation and the business to more effectively work together.

We’ve been gradually migrating to Google Apps for Business since September this year, after a successful six-month pilot phase. It involved 180 users spread across divisions such as R&D, Purchasing, HR, Manufacturing and across numerous locations in Spain, China, France, United States and United Kingdom. The pilot has allowed us to evaluate how the solution will work in our organization, and how it will bring value to the company.

Revevol, a Google Apps implementation partner, assisted us for the deployment, both for the technical integration and change management.

We’ve been impressed by the sophistication of cloud computing and by the additional functionality Google Apps will bring to our business. The ability to collaborate within a 100% web environment will be invaluable, especially for our researchers spread over distant sites in France and the U.S.

With Google Apps, our employees will be able to access their working environment from anywhere, at any time and from any device, bringing major organizational benefits and allowing our teams to work more effectively together.
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Posted by Immad Akhund, Co-Founder and CEO of HeyZap

Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Immad Akhund, co-founder and CEO of HeyZap. HeyZap is a social network for mobile gamers and a platform for mobile and online games. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Games are our business, but our business is certainly not a game. We take running our business seriously, and a key part of this is our IT. From day one, we set up our email on Gmail and have since been running our business on Google Apps. For a company of 18, working efficiently and communicating fluidly is extremely important. When it was just three of us, we used our personal Gmail accounts for work. Then as the company scaled, it became difficult to separate work from our personal lives. We moved to Google Apps where all our work information could be neatly kept under one company domain.

As we grew, we needed the ability to share and work together on documents. Google Docs provides the infrastructure to create and share documents through the cloud. Even better, the collaboration features let us work on the same docs together in real-time from anywhere. Sometimes we have up to 10 people working on a doc, an ability which has enabled us to be much more productive in our work.

For our 10 engineers, Google Docs has also served another purpose. Instead of a wiki, they use Google Docs to store technical materials for others to use. They take advantage of labels and folders to sort the information by topic. Wikis can be hard to maintain, but with Google Docs, it’s easy to create new documents and edit content. Our sales staff has also used Google spreadsheets to manage a lot of our client information and data.

Google Apps has been a powerful tool to help grow our business. As we focus more of our attention on the mobile space, where we already have a very successful app with over two million installs, I’m sure it will continue to enable our business and allow us to keep working quickly and efficiently, whether we’re at the office or on the go.
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Posted by Eliot Danner, Reperio Concepts

From large Government departments through to small local realty companies, geographic information can be extremely valuable to organizations. However, this useful information often ends up trapped in files or databases, inaccessible to the average employee or user. Many organizations make use of a geospatial tool that presents information in a geographical context.

Behind the scenes, it can be an expensive process to get to this stage because the data needs to be found and “geocoded.” Geocoding is the process of examining a piece of information containing geographic references and adding information about the map coordinates within the document. Once geocoded, a piece of data is available to be shown in a geospatial tool. To put it simply, it is the connection made between address information and map coordinates. This is often a manual process which can be expensive and time consuming.

For us, automating the search and geocoding process was the next logical step, so we developed a tool called GeoFind, which enables an end-user to easily find geospatially relevant data and show it on a map. GeoFind offers an on-the-fly geocoder combined with the Google Search Appliance (GSA) to locate and present information through Google Earth or Maps. The GSA can connect to multiple large document stores and securely crawl all of the content. GeoFind uses the GSA to process a search query and sends the results to the geocoding engine to look for geographic clues, such as addresses, city references, or landmarks. After it identifies the clue, GeoFind displays the search results via the Google Earth Globe or to Google Maps.



This is all done automatically without an administrator having to do manual data processing. For example: Imagine a police department wanting to make police reports accessible to the public on a map. The traditional approach would be to individually read and geocode the reports. Using GeoFind, it isn’t necessary to perform this expensive and time consuming data preparation. Instead, they can point their Google Search Appliance at the reports and have them immediately displayed on the map.

You can find out more about GeoFind at ReperioConcepts.com or contact me.
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Posted by Steve Walker, IT Director and Google Apps Product Manager at Trinity Mirror

Editors note: Over the last couple of years some of the world’s biggest and most prominent media organisations have moved to Google Apps. The Guardian, The Telegraph and News International in the UK, Agencia EFE in Spain, Berlingske and Borsen in Denmark, and many others. The latest is Trinity Mirror, and today’s guest blogger, Steve Walker, IT Director and Google Apps Product Manager at Trinity Mirror, has told us why.

Trinity Mirror Group publishes many leading UK titles including Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, People, Daily Record and Scottish Sunday Mail, as well as 240 regional newspapers.

We’re a company spread across 60 different locations and we recently decided to move all of our 6,500 employees to Google Apps. This decision was driven by a real desire to improve collaboration, innovation and to enhance productivity within the group. Google Apps was evaluated as a product suite that could help us do just that.

The move to Google Apps will free people from mundane daily administrative tasks, such as managing busy inboxes, merging document changes or keeping track of the latest versions of documents and sending around numerous attachments. It will be easier and quicker to schedule meetings, coordinate work and search to find the information they need. For the many journalists in the business who work on tight deadlines and need to find the latest and most relevant information at the drop of a hat, this should prove invaluable. Those employees that need to keep in touch with their email from outside the office will now be able to check their inboxes via their mobile devices or even their home laptops.

One of the triggers to consider Google Apps was the fact that our staff was already using the consumer version of Gmail and Google Calendar to help them work more efficiently. We expect the real-time, collaborative features of Google Apps to will enable us to make some real changes to the way we work, leading to a more productive workforce and helping us to become more profitable and innovative.

The migration to Google Apps will be finalized this month, and at the same time we’re planning to release a new intranet built in Google Sites. We’ll fully deploy Google Docs and Sites early next year. We anticipate this move will help our employees become more creative and innovative across the organisation and, in turn, will allow the IT department to focus on other business critical and strategic projects.
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Posted by Darrell Benatar, Founder and CEO of UserTesting

Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Darrell Benatar, founder and CEO of UserTesting. UserTesting provides fast and inexpensive website usability testing by giving website owners on-demand access to a large panel of users who will record their screen and voice as they use a specified website. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Everyone talks about how important usability testing is, but 99% of website owners have never done it. We started UserTesting three years ago to make it so fast and easy that no one would have an excuse not to do it. Traditional usability testing involves recruiting users, hiring a moderator, and renting a facility where users perform website tasks while being videotaped. Big companies can afford all this, but most small ones can’t. So at UserTesting, we assembled a nationwide base of articulate users who are available on-demand and who can quickly deliver valuable information and results.

We’ve seen amazing growth since 2008, and I consider Google’s technology an integral part of that success. We now have 15 employees, four of whom work offsite. IM, voice, and video chat, which are built right into Gmail, allow us to easily bridge that physical gap. I was an early adopter of Gmail and saw right away the benefits of cloud-based communication.

Throughout our business, we’ve made use of many of the other parts of Google Apps as well, including Google Docs and Google Tasks, which is also built into Gmail. Our intranet runs on Google Sites, and it allows us to embed Google Docs and Google Calendar items right into pages. Having everyone interact on a task spreadsheet streamlines the process and allows managers to keep track of projects. We even make use of canned responses to address standard emails from customers with questions. And now, we are actively using Google+ to share what’s going on in our office with each other.

I feel strongly that any business would benefit from cloud-based productivity tools. Since start-ups are inherently open to new ideas and don’t have to deal with legacy issues, it makes sense to hit the ground running with solutions that just make your business work and don’t require an IT department. Why Google Apps? Because I have confidence that Google will keep adding more and more features that will keep making our lives easier.
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Posted by Joe Kraus, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Joe Kraus, the Chief Information Officer of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which opened in 1993 as a result of legislation unanimously passed by the U.S. Congress. The Museum’s employees went live with Google Apps for Government this Tuesday.

A living memorial to the Holocaust, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum inspires citizens and leaders worldwide to confront hatred, prevent genocide and promote human dignity. Federal support guarantees the Museum’s permanent place on the National Mall, and its far-reaching educational programs and global impact are made possible by the generosity of donors nationwide.

To fulfill this mission, the Museum employs technologies that promote online collaboration for its teaching programs and uses crowdsourcing to expand and make more accessible its collections relating to Holocaust survivors and victims. Our migration to Google Apps will enable closer collaboration with teachers, universities and institutions that are engaged in teaching the lessons of the Holocaust, preventing genocide and conducting research on Holocaust history.

This week, the Museum launched Google Apps for Government for our 500 staff and support personnel. We chose Google Apps because of its ease of use and extensive collaboration and sharing capabilities. Our educators in Holocaust programs will use Google Docs to support online development of lesson plans. Our researchers and scholars will use Google Apps to develop their material on Holocaust history and the lessons learned. The general public, youth groups and teachers will be able to easily register for our many programs using Google Forms. Our staff will use Google Sites to collaborate on the multitude of cross- departmental programs and projects that we run each year to advance Holocaust understanding.

Our transition to Google went very well. We conducted a three-month pilot with staff from across the Museum followed by a three-month transition period. Our final switchover was done overnight on October 31. The transition required a rigorous communications and training program, with about 70% of our staff participating in classroom and webinar training led by our project integrator, Onix Networking. One of the key aspects that enabled our smooth transition was the identification of “Google Guides,” people from across the Museum who volunteered to help their colleagues with the new Google Apps environment. Now that we are in the cloud we will be able to take full advantage of a dynamic ecosystem of new functionality that continues to provide our employees new and innovative ways of doing the important work of the Museum with very little additional support required from my IT team.


The Museum's Google Guides mark Tuesday’s switchover.
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Posted by Jim Ambras, Founder and CEO of JobFlo

Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Jim Ambras, founder and CEO of JobFlo (previously NotchUp). JobFlo helps small to medium-sized businesses recruit top talent through its free social-media recruiting platform. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

JobFlo came into existence to address a problem I’d dealt with for over 14 years—how to find and recruit top talent who may not be actively seeking a job. I wanted to provide employers with a creative new way to reach happily employed people without resorting to the same traditional recruiting methods. This desire has led us to provide employers with a free recruiting platform that taps into the power of social networking sites.

I started JobFlo three years ago knowing we would take full advantage of cloud computing technologies and not be tied to a traditional business model that required servers and lots of IT complexity. I knew our business model was viable and was more concerned with how to set up and run a streamlined, efficient company. Having served as Vice President of Engineering for a bunch of start-ups, I knew setting up an infrastructure for our business ourselves could be really difficult and time-consuming. In previous jobs, I would often spend my days engineering and my nights managing our IT. Starting my own company, my first rule of business was that any communication and collaboration solution we used would not rely on in-house servers.

And with that, all the problems I had had before went away. With Google Apps, IT was one less thing we had to worry about, and it just worked and worked well. We had high email quotas, great spam-filtering, and real-time collaboration. It was really important that we had a good infrastructure for collaboration. As a company with four employees all working from home, the ability to share and work together online was critical.

While we started with Gmail and Google Docs, we have since included the use of many other tools such as Google Voice and apps from the Google Apps Marketplace. We have adopted tools such as FreshBooks for invoicing and MailChimp for email marketing. JobFlo is doing great, and we’ll be integrating even more of Google’s product suite into our business as we continue to grow.

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Posted by Lena Furr, MIS Director, Mid-Atlantic Door Group. and Tom Ronayne, General Manager AIRO Tech.

Editors note: Today’s guest bloggers are Lena Furr, MIS Director for Mid-Atlantic Door Group and Tom Ronayne, General Manager of AIRO Tech, a technology services subsidiary of Mid-Atlantic Door Group, a 38-year-old specialty contracting company based in Washington, DC area. A PDF version of their case study is also available.



At Mid-Atlantic Door Group, we distribute and install everything from industrial overhead doors, door operation systems and loading dock equipment for commercial customers to garage doors and retractable awnings for residential customers. We have approximately 240 associates and operate together with our subsidiaries in Washington DC, Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania. In 1987 we created a technical services company, AIRO Tech, which designs and develops web-based business applications for outside specialty contracting companies as well as our own.

Recently, we were looking for ways to reduce IT license and maintenance costs and we wanted to get to our data easily from different devices, especially mobile ones. We had some experience building our own operational applications and our focus had been on clean, optimized interfaces developed for speed and mobility. So when it came time to upgrade our email and productivity applications we looked for solutions that embraced those elements.

Our previous environment included Microsoft® Exchange, Outlook and Office, but we found ourselves spending too much time and money on licenses and server maintenance. We had different versions on different machines and we were continually updating software on our desktops and laptops. Google Apps allowed us to to break free from those high-cost, high maintenance applications.

Our users are getting their email on a variety of devices and we’ve seen effective use of Google Docs especially for collaboration between our users. It’s just so easy to use, the collaboration comes naturally since it’s built right in. We also deployed Google Message Discovery, an email archive that provides an audit trail for our compliance needs.

By deploying Google Apps we were able to avoid $43,000 in upgrade costs we were facing in our old environment. The ability to access email in a browser also allowed us to transition many of our users to Linux-based desktops which also helped reduce our costs. Together with other license and application reductions, we saved nearly $60,000 in total.

Google Apps gives us the ability to work from anywhere on a wide variety of mobile devices. We are looking at deploying more mobile devices including smartphones, Chromebooks and tablets in the near future. Based on our encouraging experience so far, we anticipate that our Google Apps deployment will make it easy for us to do that.
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Posted by Jacob Jaber, President, Philz Coffee

Editor’s Note: To celebrate National Coffee Day, today’s guest blogger is Jacob Jaber, President for Philz Coffee based in California.


In the late 1970s, my father Phil experimented with coffee blending at a grocery store on the corner of Folsom and 24th in San Francisco’s Mission district. He combined beans of multiple origins and brewed them one cup at a time. Since then, “Philz Coffee” has opened up seven more locations, hired 120 employees, and garnered a very loyal following. By this time next year, we expect to have six more locations and twice the number of employees so it’s very important that our operations and systems keep up.

We decided to check out Google Apps because our old system tied us to individual computers and wasn’t user friendly. In 20 minutes I set up Google Apps, gave everyone their usernames and passwords, and our 30 managers across all store locations were instantly connected. From day one, we’ve used chat in Gmail to ask quick questions, just like we would if we were all in the same room. I can now go on any computer in the world and it feels like I’m in the office, without actually needing to be in the office.

Google Docs has been critical to how we work. We recently streamlined our supply chain operations, and it was very helpful to have all the planning notes in a doc, allowing the different branch managers to edit at the same time, in the same version. We also created different docs to improve the freshness of our coffee beans by tracking how long they stay in the warehouse. We do a lot of qualitative reporting at Philz too, so we’re creating a Docs template that will help us aggregate customer reviews, form focus categories, make priority lists, and establish timelines.

With Google Calendar, my assistant doesn’t waste time managing my schedule because it’s so easy for me to do it myself. For monthly management meetings, I can see everyone’s calendar, select a time that works, and easily change it later or send out updates to attendees via email. There’s no more back and forth—everything just happens much quicker. With Google Search built right into Gmail and Docs, I can find what I’m looking for almost instantly. It doesn’t matter how long ago it was written or read.

I know that Google Apps will innovate, grow with us, and let me focus on brewing the perfect cup of coffee. It’s good for us now, and it’ll be good for us when we have 1,000 employees, too.
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Posted by Dirk Marshall, IT Manager for the City of Mesquite

Editors note: Today our guest blogger is Dirk Marshall, IT Manager for the City of Mesquite, Nevada. We’ll hear from Dirk on the benefits the city is enjoying by migrating 180 users to Google Apps.

Situated in picturesque Clark County, Nevada, the City of Mesquite features a thriving community, seven premier golf courses, lush casino resorts and a growing population of happy retirees.

Faced with growing budget constraints, the City was ready to upgrade its aging infrastructure and reduce IT overhead costs. We were looking specifically for a better way to align our technology with the productivity needs of our employees and simplify our IT systems. We were already maintaining two networks, Microsoft and Novell GroupWise, to meet our needs. As you can imagine, the licensing and maintenance fees for two different sets of servers were quite high.

The City of Mesquite has 180 employees, all of whom rely extensively on email and calendar. For example, there is heavy calendar sharing between management and their assistants, and many departments rely on resource scheduling for conference rooms and technical properties. During our cloud technology evaluation process, we focused on finding a platform that could maintain or enhance these features. Google Apps proved to be a cost-effective suite of applications that supported our work flows.

The switch to Google Apps has been widely accepted by city employees. Compared to Novell GroupWise, email management is easier and we have improved collaboration. Employees can co-edit documents in real time from different locations using Google Docs, which greatly reduces our need to meet face-to-face for certain projects. They also benefit from being able to access applications, emails and files from their mobile devices. The city departments used to send monthly PDF reports to the Mayor and Council, but now they are using Google Sites to share department news updates and statistics in a more graphical and easily accessible way.

The Google Apps platform has been both flexible and incredibly easy to use. With the help of our Google Apps implementation partner SADA Systems, we developed custom tools to easily activate important features and calendars for new users. This allows our employees to get up to speed more quickly and start collaborating productively sooner.

In addition to realizing important cost savings, we were also able to simplify our IT infrastructure and free up IT admin resources by moving to the cloud. The tedious and time consuming email backups and data recovery processes were eliminated. We were able to get rid of our Novell-dedicated servers and reduce our on-premise server count by six. With the time and resources saved, our IT team can focus on other critical missions to better support our government.
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Posted by Eric Hunter, Director of Knowledge Strategy and Technology at Bradford & Barthel, LLP

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Eric Hunter, Director of Knowledge Strategy and Technology at Bradford & Barthel, LLP, a mid-size law firm in Southern California. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

In the legal industry we have a concept called law2020 - the idea that technology and the economy are causing law firms to change the way they run their businesses to survive in the next decade. Technology like Google Apps and social applications are creating a culture where the legal industry is much more connected with clients and clients have much more access to information about the law. Our primary reason for investigating Google Apps back in 2009 was to start preparing our firm to keep up with this new culture of constant communication and to help employees enhance client relationships through better sharing and collaboration.

Since we migrated to Google Apps in April 2010, we’ve made collaboration much easier and more efficient through the use of Google Sites, Google Docs, and shared Google calendars. Our attorneys have found Google Apps to be intuitive and flexible. With Google Apps, constant innovation comes with the package and we’re pleased by how many new features have been introduced over the past year and a half: priority inbox, offline access and page-level permissions in Google Sites, to name a few. As part of our competitive strategy moving forward, our goal is to use Google’s video, voice, and social tools to enhance collaboration both internally and with our clients.

We use Google Sites and Docs as our intranet and portals with our clients. As a result of this improved communication, we’ve seen improved efficiency across our departments, areas of practice, and externally with our clients. Teams are collaborating directly with clients when developing new business and during trials and depositions.

As a law firm handling confidential information for our clients, Bradford & Barthel takes security extremely seriously. We’re responsible for private information on individuals and companies and our best security option is Google Apps. Google has many security features - SAS70 Type II certification and two step verification included - that allow us to feel confident our data and the data of our clients is much safer than if we hosted it on premise.

Google Apps allows Bradford & Barthel to adapt and succeed in the digital age as we move towards the year 2020. We’re continually improving our knowledge sharing and collaboration tools. We’ve already seen a lot of productivity improvements and stronger relationships with our clients, and our firm’s approach to business is evolving as we continue to realize the benefits of technology in the legal industry.
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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.
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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”.
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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.

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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.
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