It's not often in life that we can get more for less. But that's just what cloud computing is offering cash-strapped governments across the country: an opportunity to upgrade their dated infrastructure to state of the art, and save money in the process.

That was the appeal of Google Apps to Conrad Cross, the CIO for the City of Orlando. Conrad is leading the migration of all 3,000 city employees from Lotus Notes/Domino to Google Apps, including the Police and Fire departments. Facing software license renewals, major upgrade costs, and a 12% reduction in staff, it was the right time for the City to consider other options. For half the cost of the alternative, Orlando is jumping onto Google's innovation curve and freeing up IT resources to focus on more important efforts. "The time was right," said Cross. "I'm delivering a better service with less resources, and that gets me ahead of the game." Just down Interstate-95, the 11th largest school district in the US, Palm Beach County, is also moving its more than 200,000 students, staff and other users to Apps.

The New Mexico Attorney General’s Office has a similar story. Its 120 attorneys and 200 full-time employees use Google Apps for email, archiving, and document management. After moving from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps, the employees no longer need to delete mail or worry about backing up sensitive information. The data's instantly available whenever they want it and they're more productive.

Fast growing cities like Canton, Georgia are also benefiting from the cloud. Strained by escalating spam and endless server maintenance, Camille Wehs, the city's only IT staffer, moved all 165 employees to Apps. With additional reliability, disaster recovery, flexibility and anywhere access to information, she sleeps better for it.

Most recently, the Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to move its 30,000 employees to Apps. If you're also interested in getting more for less, please join us for a live webcast this Thursday featuring James Ferreira, CIO for the New Mexico State Attorney General’s Office.

Join us for this LIVE Event on:
Thursday, November 12, 2009
2:00 PM ET / 11:00 AM PT / 7:00 PM GMT

Already a Google Apps customer? Submit a form to share your story.

Posted by Michael Lock, Director, Americas Sales & Operations, Google Enterprise

Editor's note: Today's guest blogger is Benjamin Doyle, Information Systems Administrator for Alta Planning + Design, a company that combines the skills of planning, design, landscape architecture and engineering to create bicycle, pedestrian, greenway, and trail projects for communities. With headquarters in Portland, Oregon, Alta has a total of 12 offices across the United States.

Benjamin talks about choosing Google Apps over both hosted and in-house Microsoft Exchange.

Scalability, without complexity Alta has 60 employees and we’re growing rapidly. We knew we needed something that could scale up without bogging us down with decisions on hardware, upgrades, and maintenance. We also needed portability and easy collaboration because our employees are constantly on the go, visiting the communities we work with around the globe. We were pretty sure we didn’t want the headache and constant maintenance of an in-house system.

Our previous email system – provided free through our website host – couldn't keep up with our needs for reliability and ease of access. Messages were downloaded to individual computers, limiting remote access and making archiving near impossible. It also left us without a way to have a shared calendar solution accessible to all our users in all offices (many of us were already using Google Calendar), and it made sense to choose a service which so cleanly integrates calendars with e-mail.

Savings We compared hosted Microsoft Exchange, in-house Microsoft Exchange, and Google Apps Premier Edition – plus their associated operating costs – and Google Apps came out way below the other alternatives cost-wise, yet provided all the functionality we were after.

Google Apps was projected to save us about 62% in the first year over setting up an in-house Exchange server and 67% annual savings compared to hosted Microsoft Exchange. For a business with no prior communications budget to speak of, Google Apps was a huge advantage that provided great cost savings.

Many unexpected benefits Google Apps was virtually painless to implement, and it’s given us fast, reliable communication and collaboration. Spread out among 12 offices, there's not another solution on the market we know of that pulls together all the tools we need as well as Google Apps. We’re pretty much using the full gamut of capabilities: Gmail, Google's instant messaging, Google Calendar, Google Sites, Google Video and Google Docs. We use the web mail interface to keep things simple.

Communication via integrated voice the video chat was an unexpected boon for us – it’s widely popular for our network of offices as a way of quickly sharing information without having to pick up the phone. We were able to create a more reliable and accessible intranet with Google Sites than we could have done with other tools.

Being able to access our documents and other data from almost any browser is also great since we all travel so much. Everyone has access to mail and calendars with their mobile devices, and they can go from their workstation to a travel laptop seamlessly.

What’s great is that Google offers constant improvement and development. New features are introduced on an ongoing basis. Some of the extra features included in Google Apps aren't available with other services. I keep up on the new features by subscribing to Apps Update Alerts (RSS feed or email alerts). Because updates and improvements are implemented by Google, and not on on-premise servers, it's fewer "off hours" working hours for me.

Our IT budget has been able to shift more dollars into data storage and networking – money that would have otherwise been spent on a mail server and user applications. Plus, with Google keeping our mail and intranet secure and running with a 99+% up time guarantee, we have less to worry about and more time to spend on other important projects. Since our information is flowing quicker between users through a range of mediums, and our users have no trouble accessing communication and internal resources on the go.

- Benjamin Doyle, Information Systems Administrator, Alta Planning + Design

Posted by Serena Satyasai, The Google Apps Team

Find customer stories and product information on our resource sites for current users of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino.

In large enterprises today, employees and administrators are trying to make sense of the volumes of content created by and living inside their companies, and quite a few of these organizations are turning to enterprise content management (ECM) systems. According to Forrester Research, ECM license revenue was projected to reach $3.9B in 2008.

When students decided to run for office in University of Notre Dame's 2008 student government elections, all candidates firmly agreed on one platform: getting their school to switch to Google Apps. Notre Dame's IT department heard them loud and clear.

We love learning about companies and schools that have "gone Google", and University of Notre Dame is a compelling example of what's possible by making the switch. The University was looking for a new email system, but they ended up getting much more. Google Apps delivered a whole new way of communicating and collaborating on campus – and it let them reallocate $1.5 million to new IT initiatives while building student satisfaction (up 36%) and cutting help desk calls by 20%.

According to Katie Rose, Program Manager at Notre Dame's Office of Information Technologies, “The tools that Google Apps offers, and the ability to provide a robust, cost-effective service, made us all wish we had chosen to move in this direction sooner.”

If you'd like to hear more about how Google Apps helped Notre Dame reclaim budget and improve satisfaction, join our free webinar:

Google Apps Education Edition at University of Notre Dame
Thursday, August 13, 2009
10:00 a.m. PDT (GMT -07:00, San Francisco)

We hope that Notre Dame's example will help you see what's possible for your school with Google Apps Education Edition.

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Google Apps Education team

Editor's Note: We're pleased to welcome Brian Bolt from Boise State University's Office of Information Technology as our guest blogger today. Boise State University recently selected Google Apps Education Edition to address messaging and collaboration needs for more than 20,000 students, staff, and faculty users, realizing drastic cost savings and reducing countless IT hours.

To hear more about how schools like Boise State are using Google Apps, Google is hosting a series of free education-focused webinars starting on Thursday, June 25 with a discussion led by Arizona State University on Thursday, June 25. We hope you'll join us!

In early 2007, we at Boise State University learned of Arizona State University's deployment of Google Apps Education Edition to their student population. At that time, we were at a crossroads between upgrading email for employees and students and pressure to change the email application that was in place since 1996. We recognized ASU's move to Google Apps for students as a shift in application delivery to supported end-users – the move to the "cloud" of Internet-delivered services and support.

By choosing Google Apps for Education, Boise State could redirect resources and personnel away from an ever increasing drain on budget dollars and support time, to other critical education-focused applications and still have a leading edge communication and collaboration platform.

Boise State administrators and faculty were visionary in agreeing with the movement of email, calendaring and document collaboration to Google. Collaboration between students, between students and faculty and between staff are all now easily facilitated. It was as big a change as the integration between email and calendaring in the late 1990s. The early 2000 mantra of "anywhere, anytime on the web" was finally a reality.

We started with the task of moving all student accounts to Google Apps in 2007. This equated to the migration of more than 20,000 accounts. The student account move was smooth and adopted with minimal support. The students were very adaptive to change. The major hurdles of a mail system migration were not seen by the end user group, as we linked authentication and account creation to the University identity management system.

Soon after we successfully implemented the student mail system, we contemplated the possibility of moving faculty and staff to Google Apps. The prospect of migrating faculty and staff from an enterprise messaging system to Google Apps was altogether different from displacing the simple mail system our students used. We accepted the idea that a transition would be more difficult than the student move, but we believed that once the tools were in place, and people acclimated to the functions and features of Gmail and Calendaring, the University would be in a better position to communicate and collaborate.

Security was the initial hurdle put in front of the move by most of the colleges and departments. We began an education campaign to explain that not only was Google a leader and innovator in the application area, they excelled at security and privacy in the services they provided to their educational partners. Google has offices of information security personnel compared to the handful at Boise State.

Now that the migration of our 3,000 faculty and staff is complete, we have a new realization: deploying Google Apps and reallocating resources is just the beginning. We have new tools to explore and share; collaboration was the unexpected silver lining of the Google Apps suite. Having Google Apps as a keystone technology establishes the foundation from which we can support the University's strategic vision of Charting the Course and its commitment to academic excellence, public engagement, vibrant culture and exceptional research.


After our migration was done, we hosted a celebratory lunch for those involved in the project. All of the dishes were delicious, but the highlight was the cake, courtesy of Tonya, our in-house pastry chef. Yes, it is entirely edible, and it tasted amazing too!

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Google Apps Education Edition team

We're passionate about learning here at Google and always revel in the innovations that educators drive when they work with Google Apps. To share some of the latest innovations we've seen in this arena, we're hosting a free, live educational webinar to show the power of Google Apps Education Edition. In this session you'll hear directly from Arizona State University, the first school to deploy Google Apps Education Edition. Learn about their 2006 decision to go with Google Apps, the results they've seen so far, and their future plans for working and teaching with Google Apps. Details follow:

Google Apps for Education
Thursday, June 25, 2009
10:00 a.m. PDT / 1:00 p.m. EDT

We hope you'll join us to learn how Google Apps can help institutions like ASU save money and IT resources, all while making it easier for teachers to innovate and for students to learn and work together.

Read today's news about Google in education, and what schools are learning as they start using Google Apps.

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Google Apps for Education marketing team

Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our RSS feed or email alerts.

With Google Apps, education can now easily move beyond the walls of a classroom. These days we see more and more teachers using Google Apps to engage students across the country, and even around the globe, in a new way of collaborative learning.

Recently, one New York school used Google Sites to hold an event bringing students, teachers, parents, and other guests from around the world together for a conversation about the future of education. The event, "Dot To Dot," was held live at IS 339, a public middle school in the Bronx, and was broadcast live through streaming video on its site.

All 67 of the school's teachers and hundreds of its students presented projects using videos, blogs, Google Docs and Google Sites. The event was a showcase of student voices, addressing topics ranging from the environment and how we affect our ecosystem, students' vision of freedom, and international human rights and genocide.

Since IS 339 started using Google Apps in 2007, it has fostered an environment of creative expression, responsibility, and collaboration among its students and teachers. IS 339 uses Google Apps for innovative educational practices such as student-run businesses, "good behavior" currency credits that can be used at the school store (also run on Google Apps), and group projects using Google Docs and Sites. Administration has also benefited from the efficiency that Google's web apps have helped accelerate.

Student progress and grading is now a collaborative process using Google Forms and Spreadsheets so that students can have a community of teachers supporting them. The results speak for themselves. In the past five years, IS 339 has moved off of New York State's failing schools list, and its students have moved from 9% to 60% on grade level in math, and from 12% to 40% on grade level in literacy.

When you combine Google Apps and inspirational educators, the results speak for themselves: ease of collaboration and innovation. Kudos to IS339 and the growing community of educators expanding what's possible in learning with the power of Google Apps.

Posted by Ashley Chandler, User Operations for Google Docs and Google Sites

Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our RSS feed or email alerts.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing manager

Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our RSS feed or email alerts.

Back in February we announced a contest challenging our customers to show us their Google Search Appliances and share a picture of where their yellow GSA boxes fit into their organizations. The prize? Tickets to the upcoming upcoming Google IO conference, to be held in San Francisco on May 27-28. We had some great entries – but when we saw this picture, from the Web Dev team at Atlanta'sWellStar Health System, we knew we had a winner.



WellStar's GSA keeps "operations" running smoothly

Congrats to Rob and the Web team at WellStar in Atlanta, Georgia. Here's their story:

Before GSA: With five premier hospitals in the Northwest suburbs of Atlanta, 11,000 employees and the largest nonacademic Physicians Group in the State,WellStar Health System has become one of the biggest not-for-profit health care systems in the Southeast. As WellStar grew, it became increasingly difficult for folks to find our stuff. WellStar’s intranet houses a physician portal containing content from over 70 different clinical sites – along with unique portals for 60+ supporting enterprise departments – andeveryone's generic material permeated our content management systems (CMS ). Employee and patient volumes intensified, organically creating a nightmare of a file library, and it seemed that our system needed 20CCs of Findability Stat! The challenge was to efficiently serve everyone at once while minimizing the impact on our own busy environment.

After GSA: Our previous intranet search limited employees to each of our internal .Net portals, meaning employees would have to be sifting through the right haystack to find a specific needle, which gave them a whopping 1.4% chance of starting in the right place. This all changed with the GSA. The GSA crawls from a central location and provides a single URL to hit when employees need fast results. Its active replacement of cached, dead-end links diminishes wasted search time, and the “Text Only” document display feature is an essential business asset for clinical employees without specific readers.

After purchasing the GSA and performing a minimal setup, our team found that the appliance was pulling several hundred rabbits out of its hat every eight hours. It was finding the one-of-a-kind policy, form, safety, and class information details from long forgotten documents – all without requiring someone to organize the material. Thin-air content was rediscovered, removed, and replaced with current information, and incoming help calls starting with “Where do I find…” have been eliminated.

We had a few other standouts. Here's one.



Two GSAs were all it took to change the "State" of search

Meet Chris with the State of Missouri in Jefferson City, Missouri.

Before GSA: The State of Missouri is made up of 16 executive agencies and various other non-executive agencies, boards and commissions. Prior to the purchasing the GSA, the state was simply a collection of data silos that provided no unified search for our citizens or the companies who wanted to do business with us. The bottom line: it was difficult (at best) for tax-paying citizens or businesses to find the information that they needed on the various State of Missouri web sites.

After GSA: After implementing the GSA as a centrally-managed device, we made search available to all of our executive agencies as well as to our other agencies, boards, and commissions. The GSA allowed us to index all the relevant information from across all of these entities and provide a unified search option to our citizens. The flexibility of the device also allowed each of the agencies to integrate the search onto their unique agency site and further refine the search capabilities they offered to their taxpaying customers. Not only have the search capabilities greatly increased, from the citizen’s perspective, the data silos are no longer there and results across each agency are much more relevant.

From all of us at Google: thanks, WellStar and State of Missouri.

In the next few weeks we will be releasing their full case studies and if you are interested in knowing how other customers are using their GSAs we have more success stories here. Thanks for your participation and don't forget to register for I/O. Congrats again to the winners!

Posted by Dave Kim, Google Enterprise search team

Editor's Note: We are pleased to welcome Michael Cohn, CEO of Cloud Sherpas, as a guest blogger. Cloud Sherpas recently helped TechCFO, a Google Apps customer, build 3 types of Google Sites - a knowledge base, a customer workspace for collaboration, and a company intranet. For this project, Cloud Sherpas developed the Google Sites Bulk File Uploader and worked out a transition plan to meet TechCFO's collaboration needs, while planning for mail migration down the road. Along with TechCFO's Neal Miller, Michael will speak at a webinar – "How Google Apps Can Unlock Information, Increase Innovation, and Streamline IT, " next Thursday, March 26.

I invite you to join us on an online seminar exploring "How Google Apps Can Unlock Information, Increase Innovation, and Streamline IT, " where Neal and I will be on hand to show you examples of what we built, and how we did so. We'll also be happy to answer your questions online.

How Google Apps Can Unlock Information, Increase Innovation, and Streamline IT
Thursday, March 26, 2009
1:00 PM ET / 10:00 AM PT / 5:00 PM GMT
Register here.



Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps Team

As you may have read here a couple of months back, we've been focused recently on the "art of findability" – or the ability to find and locate critical information quickly through the power of enterprise search. At Google, we believe that finding relevant business information through effective search should be as easy as...well, finding a yellow Google Search Appliance in your data center!
Want guidelines? Read on:
2. Submit your GSA story. Read the rules , then fill out the form to describe how your GSA has impacted your business. What do your users do better with the power of search? How much time is your IT team saving? What's easy about working with the GSA?

3. The GSA team will convene. We'll look at your pictures and read your stories, and judge on both – 50% on the quality and uniqueness of your picture (look here for inspiration!), and 50% on what you say in your story.

Come on! Enter the contest. Don't yet own a Google Search Appliance? Click here to learn more. We'll share the news here when we announce our winners, so stay tuned. We look forward to hearing your stories and seeing your GSA.

Contest Deadline: March 31, 2009. Winners will be announced on April 17.

Posted by David Kim, Google Enterprise Team Member and Avid Appliance Photographer

If you've ever looked at your existing email system and wondered if there might be a better way, tune in to Andy Nallappan's online review of his recent migration to Google Apps on Monday, March 2, at 10:00 AM PST (1:00 PM EST).

Andy, Director, IT, Engineering and Enterprise Infrastructure for Avago Technologies (which provides components and subsystems to equipment manufacturers) recently migrated 3,000 of his company's employees from Microsoft Exchange 2003 to Google Apps – and he promises to tell all.

Explore the questions and concerns he faced as he researched the migration, including global integration, technology capabilities and workarounds, feature tradeoffs, cost savings, and more. Andy will share how he found his answers, what he'd do differently, what his internal pilot revealed, and how, in the end, Google Apps is working for his users.

This will be a clear, first-hand account what it takes to move a large corporate email system over to an integrated Google solution – and what that means for email systems of any size. We hope you'll join us, no matter what email system you're currently using, for a real-world look on what's possible in email today and what it takes to get there.

The agenda includes time for Q&A, so bring your questions and learn from Andy's experience.

Register for this free 60-minute webinar . We hope that you'll join us.

Monday, March 2, 2009 10:00 AM PST / 1:00 PM EST
Webinar: Avago Technologies: from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps

Posted by Kevin Gough, Google Apps Team

Update (03/02/09): More than 200 participants joined in as Andy Nallappan, Director, Enterprise Infrastructure for Avago Technologies, reviewed how he moved 4,100 users to Google Apps, primarily for email, in Q408 through Q109.

Avago expects to realize $1.1M in annual savings from moving from Exchange 2003 to Google Apps.

Editor's note: We've had enough interest in this story, which ran yesterday on the Official Google Blog, to share it again here. If you are using (or interested in using) Google Apps and other Google solutions in education, be sure to watch the video – and use comments, below, to fill us in on Google Apps stories from your school.

You might remember reading our posts from the road when we hit the streets and headed "App to School" in our retro bio-fuel bus (below) to visit ten universities across the U.S. that used Google Apps. One of our main goals for this trip was to hear from the technology experts themselves -- the students -- about how they were using Google tools like Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Sites, and Talk to be more effective on and off campus.


Luckily we had a video camera along for the ride, and we filmed a bunch of students telling their stories. Every week we'll share a new video on the Google Students blog, so you can hear from the students themselves and hopefully learn a few new ways to use these products. If you want to make sure you catch all the latest videos, and stay up-to-date about other news and tips for students, you can subscribe to the student blog.

Here's one video from a student who uses Google Calendar to manage lab studies with his classmates:



Can't wait another week to see more videos? Check out our playlist. And if you have your own story to share, we encourage you to upload it as a response.

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Associate Product Marketing Manager, Google Apps for Education

Every month, we invite a featured customer to talk about their experience bringing Google Apps into their businesses, sharing insights and suggestions for other teams looking to bring Apps into the workplace. We invite you to join this conversation since it's a great opportunity to get "real world" answers to your questions about Google Apps.

These talks are informal and open. We share an overview from our featured customer and a brief look at Google Apps, followed by Q&A. There's a lot to say about Google Apps, and we figure that our customers are the best people to tell you how they've used Google Apps in business – what's worked, what they've learned, and what they'd recommend to other businesses who might be considering a move to Google Apps.