Posted by Rajen Sheth, Director, Chromebooks for Education

The 2013/14 school year has started, with U.S. educators and their students returning to find much lower budgets available to meet ever-higher aspirations. Three districts shared their stories with us about how Google Apps and Chromebooks help them provide excellent opportunities for students, even in these challenging times.

Huntsville School District, Texas

Third grade students in Huntsville School District collaborate on a Chromebook

Last year, Huntsville Independent School District struggled with outdated equipment and poor cellular coverage. To address these challenges, they built a wireless network, established free Google Apps accounts for email and word processing, and earned a $100,000 grant, which they used to purchase 350 Chromebooks for grades 6-12. Today over 1,000 students have access to Chromebooks, and high school students even take them home. Charlie Baker, a math teacher, explained the value of Chromebooks at home: “Students can send me a snapshot of the screen to illustrate a problem they’re struggling with. I can use Google Hangouts to help them work through to a solution. Student engagement is higher, and the quality of work has improved significantly."

Merced High School District, California
Although the communities of Merced Union High School District face many economic challenges, the District provides the latest tools for learning. Information Systems Manager Anthony Thomas told us that a year ago, when the district was evaluating computers, students test-drove a range of candidate devices and “voted overwhelmingly in favor of Chromebooks as the most valuable educational tool.” The high school deployment has been so successful that the district aims to be 1:1 with more than 5,000 Chromebooks by 2016. Anthony sees students using Chromebooks in locations all around the school campus, just as they might in a work environment. “The 1:1 Chromebook environment has a major impact on districts like ours,” says Anthony. “Today’s work environment is all about teams, and that’s what these students are learning. They’re acquiring real job skills.”

A student in Queensbury School District works on his Chromebook

Queensbury Union Free School District, New York
Matt Hladun, Director of Technology for the Queensbury Union Free school district in rural New York State, faces a different challenge. Matt lost a number of IT staff to budget cuts. With 2,500 Chromebooks and just three team members, he really appreciates the minimal support that the devices require, saying “it’s hard to argue with increased student motivation, more efficient teaching processes, better communications, and a saving of tens of thousands of dollars a year in software costs. Introducing Google Apps is the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done. I’m seeing teaching change, and I want it working everywhere. It is absolutely making a difference.” Matt was also able to establish a “Technology Bullpen” of five teachers in each building who help their peers get the best out of the devices and tools.

To learn more about Chromebooks for Education, visit our website and review the IDC White Paper “Quantifying the Economic Value of Chromebooks.”

Posted by Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google

Earlier this month, I delivered a keynote at Gartner’s annual symposium and published a blog post about the rapidly evolving landscape of business technology. The rise of cloud computing and ubiquitous, powerful mobile devices means that organizations can reduce their IT bills significantly while boosting employees’ productivity and collaboration. Moving to the cloud is no longer a questionable proposition — it’s inevitable.

This led some of the organizations I work with to ask: “That all makes sense, but how do we actually get started?”

Good question. Here are five concrete steps you can take to get started:

1. Start by setting up a Google Apps account for your organization. This will allow you to move your standard productivity and communications work to the cloud: you’ll use Gmail for your email (with your own domain, like joe@joescoffeeshop.com); Google Calendar for your calendars; Google Drive to store files; Google Docs to create and edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations; and Hangouts to send instant messages and hold video calls. This will free your staff from spending time maintaining servers and installing upgrades. Google Apps is free to schools and non-profits, and costs $50/person per year for businesses and government agencies.
2. Move your other standard business applications to cloud-based equivalents. Popular apps include Workday (HR), Salesforce (CRM), Zendesk (customer service), Netsuite (Financials), and Wix or Weebly (websites). More companies are creating and launching cloud-based business applications every day — check out the Chrome Web Store for more.
3. Move your custom applications to a cloud infrastructure. Many organizations have built their own custom applications or need to be able to do very specialized programming. Most people use Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure. Choose between the first two.
4. Standardize on a modern browser, ideally Chrome. Chrome is built for speed, simplicity and security — and of course it’s free. To make sure that you're protected from the latest threats, Chrome automatically updates whenever a new version of the browser is available. You can also use Chrome on all the major desktop and mobile platforms, including Android and iOS, and sync your tabs and bookmarks between different devices. Chrome for Business includes a cloud-based management console, which lets you customize policies and preferences for your employees easily from the web, including which apps and extensions they receive, across their devices.
5. For hardware, you can now move to a flexible, “bring your own device” policy. Without servers, the only real hardware you need are computers and phones — and a true cloud architecture works well with any operating system: Windows, Mac, Chrome OS, Android, iOS. People can choose the device that suits them, and you can then reimburse their purchases and/or their own personal cell phone and internet bills. If you do decide to supply your staff with computers, consider Chromebooks: they boot up in seconds, have built-in virus protection and are dead simple to deploy and manage.

Lots of companies have already moved to the cloud successfully, from local coffee shops to major corporations with 200,000 employees. For small and mid-size companies, the transition can be made in a matter of days or weeks. For larger companies, who often have custom legacy systems built over many years, the migration may take a few months. In these cases, consider working with experts that specialize in helping companies move to the cloud using all the tools I’ve mentioned.

The world is moving to the cloud. Now’s the time for you to move, too.

Posted by Ian McLeod, Chief Executive, Ergon Energy

Editor's note: Today's guest blogger is Ian McLeod, Chief Executive of Ergon Energy. Tune into our series of webinars about how Google Maps for Business to learn more and see what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Queensland is known as Australia’s “sunshine state,” and Ergon Energy is responsible for keeping its power running all day and every day. We distribute electricity to 700,000 people across a vast expanse of 1.7 million square kilometres that reaches 97% of the state’s population. From the dry regions of the west to the tropical reaches of the north, 150,000 kilometres of power lines stretch across almost every part of Queensland, held up by twice as many poles as we have customers.

One of the most common issues we manage is tree vegetation growing close to these power lines, which, left unchecked, causes power outages and safety issues for customers. Managing vegetation to fix and prevent these outages used to cost us $AUD90-100 million each year. With a distribution network this large, we had a good understanding of the condition of our assets, but we could not see the risks to the assets from the surrounding environment or measure the value customers got from our vegetation management plans. With long distances to travel inspecting, cutting and then auditing vegetation, workers often have their hands full.

We decided that there must be a better way, and undertook a project called ‘Remote Observation and Automated Modelling for Economic Simulation’ (ROAMES) to uncover it. ROAMES collects high resolution digital photographs and accurate 3 dimensional LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) scanning data to model every wire and power pole across the whole of regional Queensland. We collect this data by flying specialised high-tech aircraft fitted with high-tech gear over the top of these power lines.

To create the ROAMES imagery and integrate it with customer and network reliability information, we turned to the Google Maps for Business and the Google Maps API to incorporate ROAMES’s high resolution 3D imagery with Google Maps and Street View to provide a view of our entire infrastructure. This allows us to identify and predict when trees are growing too close to their power lines and send our field crews out to cut intruding branches. This has significantly reduced the environmental impact of our vegetation management activities and minimised the number of outages for customers.

With Google Maps, we are not only delivering better customer service, but also saving money and handling huge amounts of data. It enables our field workers with a reliable, intuitive tool that helps our bottom line. We expect to save up to $AUD59 million over the next five years using this technology.

Posted by Ryan Hogan, CEO at Australian Fitness Network

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Ryan Hogan, CEO at Australian Fitness Network, a member-based fitness organization in Australia. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Fitness is all about variation. You have to push harder and switch up your exercises to get real results. You could say the same about my company, Australian Fitness Network. Our 22-person team in Sydney provides our 10,000-strong network of trainers, gym managers and other industry professionals with a healthy mix of new exercise ideas and resources to keep them motivated and focused on feeling the burn.

In 2011, we realized our IT environment was out of shape (and we really don’t like being out of shape). We were running Microsoft Exchange 2007 and did most of our work in Microsoft Word and Excel. As we grew increasingly mobile, we found that simple tasks, like sending a calendar invite from the phone or pulling up a doc on the go, felt like slogging through an ultramarathon uphill in the rain.

We turned to Perth-based Fortix, a Google Apps Reseller, for help. They carried us through a seamless, two-day migration so our work didn’t skip a beat while our technology got a major makeover. They also implemented a custom solution that integrates Google Apps with our Human Resources, CRM and project management tools so our operations are in sync instead of in silos. Having our email, documents, sales conversations and recruiting efforts tracked across multiple platforms means we can finally look at our business holistically.

Google Apps has vastly improved our team’s efficiency. Our fitness class instructors can create customized workout plans in Docs and share them directly with their clients, rather than putting them in Word and printing or emailing each updated version. They even link to the docs in the Calendar invites they send their clients to remind them of their appointments, so each fitness regimen is easy to find and track.

Google Drive helps our team get more work done with less. Every year, we host an annual industry convention called FILEX for 2,500 members of the fitness community. Nearly everyone contributes to the event including our sales, marketing, events, design and editorial teams each share some of the weight, so having our key documents in one central repository is essential. This means folks can organize and share planning information from a single spot, rather than having to email a chain of contacts to hunt down the keynote speaker points or seating plans they need.

Albert Einstein once said that “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” That’s as true for creating a fitness regimen as it is operating a business. Using Google Apps hasn't turned us into Einstein, but getting our infrastructure in shape has helped us work much smarter, and that’s good enough for me.

Posted by JJ Van Oosten, Group Chief Information Officer, Travis Perkins

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is JJ Van Oosten, Group Chief Information Officer for Travis Perkins plc, the largest supplier of building and home improvement materials in the United Kingdom. See what other organisations that have gone Google have to say.

Travis Perkins has been in business for more than two centuries, and one reason we’ve endured is our ability to form lasting relationships with our customers. We work with builders for 20-30 years, and get to know them and their families well. And when builders retire, we continue relationships with the sons and daughters who take over the family business.

We create a sense of family within our company, as well, and that’s why so many employees stay with us for a long time. But because our company holds fast to traditions, and our processes have worked so well for so long, Travis Perkins is not always quick to innovate or react to trends. As an example, we still make our customers – who now prefer to do a lot of transactions via mobile devices – collect up to nine paper forms before they can leave one of our branches with the materials they need.

When I took over the Group CIO role at Travis Perkins, I got to thinking about our culture and heritage, and wondered how we could embrace the efficiency, productivity, and mobility of the digital world while also maintaining our tradition of building deep relationships. When embarking on a major journey, you need a guide. Google was my natural choice for an innovation partner. Their products promote interaction and collaboration, they understand mobile, inside and out, and their technology is web-based and cloud-based. And Google’s rapid consumer-centric innovation keeps the business moving fast.

Within a few weeks of contacting Google, we worked to launch our Google Apps gateway and our IT department began using Google Apps. The transformative power of these tools soon became clear. Meetings with my IT team took only 15-20 minutes instead of an hour. We collaborated on documents in Google Docs, so there was no need to review that content when we met – we could focus instead on core issues. The time savings and efficiencies Google enables are undeniable.

The company decided to bring in the whole suite of Google products, including Google+ and Google Chrome. To help with the transition, we trained 2,000 internal Google “champions.” The training, conducted in person or via Google Hangouts, was fun and emphasised collaboration and the ideas of “space” and “freedom” – that with Google, you could access what you need anytime, anywhere.

The champions, on their own, created a community on Google+. As we rolled out Google to 8,000 people at a time across 17 businesses and central functions, employees started to consult the community for advice. It was company wide collaboration evolving naturally, in real-time, and it was amazing to see. This collaboration appealed to the core values of our people, including those who’ve been with us for 40 or more years. They could see positive relationships forming between colleagues through Google and wanted to be part of it. We even bought 5,000 new Android phones because employees who hadn’t been using smartphones now wanted to be more connected and mobile.

Next year, we plan to use the Google platform to help our branches move away from outdated paper-based processes to approaches that are far more digitised and customer-friendly. We expect our Google champions to help us drive this change, and others, so we can improve the ways that we do business.

You don’t just move to Google for email or calendars. That’s basic. You do it to embrace the digital world, and for mobility, and to release the creativity and collaboration that every human being wants to experience. Google has unleashed a great deal of energy and potential in our team at Travis Perkins. Importantly, the drive for change in our organisation is not being mandated from an executive’s office, but growing from the grassroots up. It is originating from the employees at Travis Perkins who are now innovating with Google.

Editor's note: Colorado has enticed all sorts of pioneers since its Wild West beginnings. We’re excited to highlight a handful of these trailblazers - the intrepid entrepreneurs, aspiring micro-brewers and ambitious thought leaders - who have helped create the adventurous and innovative culture the Centennial State is known for. Today, we hear from Steve Jones, co-founder of Fort Collins-based Pateros Creek Brewing Company.

Can you tell us about Pateros Creek Brewing Company?
My dad and I spent years making, tasting, talking about, and investing in craft beers before taking the plunge and starting Pateros Brewing Company in 2011. The evolution from casual enthusiasts to full-time brewers happened slowly: I started producing my own small batches at home in 2004, asked my dad to join me to start a family brewery in 2008, wrote up a business plan and started making larger batches from a shared space at Grimm Brother’s Brewhouse in 2010, then finally opened the doors to Pateros Creek in June 2011. We’re now a team of 12, and my dad and I are loving every minute of it.

Why did you decide to use Google Apps for your business?
We went straight to Google Apps as soon as we decided to make Pateros Creek Brewery a reality. We needed email that showed we were a real business — that we really did, after years of talking about starting the company, mean business. We considered alternatives, but Google was so simple and easy to use that it made perfect sense for us.

What’s your favorite thing about being on Google Apps?
I don’t have any downtime. You hear people complaining about email issues or IT problems and we don’t have any of that. Everything just works seamlessly, which is extremely important because we’re a small business and don’t have an IT department. I’m the co-founder and president, but on any given day I may also be the head brewer, operations manager and janitor. Thanks to Google Apps, I don’t have to deal with IT issues; instead, I get to focus on crafting tasty brews and making our customers happy.

What’s one unique way you’re using Google Apps?
Our brewing tanks have their own Google calendars. So do our fermenters, our brew house, our tap room and our Outpost Room where we showcase live music and events. Shared Google calendars keep us organized and help us stay on track when it comes to planning events, getting new blends ready for market and knowing who and what equipment is available at any given time. Sure, calendars are traditionally meant for personal scheduling, but we get so much value from using them for our internal operations and event planning.

How does Google Apps help the company stay mobile?
Google Drive is a lifesaver for a team like us that’s always on the go. Whether it’s checking the fermenter tanks, serving our customers in the tap room or traveling to new cities to grow our distribution footprint, we’re on our feet all the time. We know we can always access important documents from our phones, tablets or laptops without sitting down to a desk. Our employees can pull up one-sheeters about beer profiles in front of a customer if they’re curious about what goes into a certain blend, its ABV value or how hoppy it is — no laminated (and quickly outdated) documents necessary.

Editor's note: Colorado has enticed all sorts of pioneers since its Wild West beginnings. We’re excited to highlight a handful of these trailblazers - the intrepid entrepreneurs, aspiring micro-brewers and ambitious thought leaders - who have helped create the adventurous and innovative culture the Centennial State is known for. Today, we hear from Bruce Palmer, Admission and Marketing Director at the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS).

Can you tell us about NOLS and its connection with Colorado?
The National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) runs wilderness-based experiential courses from the Yukon to the Himalayas as a way of teaching environmental ethics, technical outdoor skills and leadership to students of all ages. We’re based in Wyoming and have courses and employees all over the globe, but when it comes to Colorado, our relationship is about much more than a shared state border. We run wilderness medicine courses in Boulder and partner closely with community organizations like the Outdoor Nation, a group headquartered in Boulder that helps youth get access to the outdoors.

What’s the role of technology at a company like NOLS, whose mission is all about the great outdoors?
We’re a geographically-dispersed and on-the-go group of outdoor enthusiasts, so it’s important that our technology is easy to use and doesn’t get in the way of our adventures. We love hiking, rock climbing and kayaking, but we also recognize the ways that Google Apps and the cloud can help us operationally. Our teams are always on the go - hiking, rock climbing and kayaking - so we wanted a platform that supports our mobile lifestyles. That’s exactly what we get with Google.

When and why did you start using Google Apps?
Our system before Google Apps was a nightmare — our email, calendar and chat were hosted on separate servers that went down constantly and left us in the dark in the middle of a work day. Our employees had a simple ask: they wanted to be able to check their email and access their documents whenever they needed to. Google Apps has let them do exactly that. It’s reliable, it’s easy to use, and it just works without a ton of training.

How does Google Apps fits in with the way NOLS employees work?
An average instructor may be at headquarters one week, in Patagonia the next, and Yukon the one after that, and they need to be close to their email and files wherever they are. Because our Gmail messages and Google Docs are all stored in the cloud, our employees can access everything they need no matter where they are or what device they’ve got with them. It's great having our data stored securely in the cloud so we don't lose work when someone accidentally drops a laptop and drives over it - it's happened. Luckily, it is easy for all employees to pick up right where they left off, on any computer.

What are some of the surprising benefits you’ve realized since moving to Google Apps?
We have many off-the-grid locations, so we had concerns about a cloud-based solution, but Apps is actually a lifesaver for the offices when phone lines go down every time a storm hits. We may not be able to call or text each other, but we’re just a ping away. Hangouts has become the go-to tool for quick communication across branches when telephones aren’t an option and email messages are too slow-moving and formal.

What are you most excited about when it comes to thinking about your future with Google Apps?
I can’t wait to move all of our course descriptions onto Google Apps - all 102 of them. Right now, they’re built in Word and emailed back and forth between the dozen or so stakeholders until they all agree on the final version, then they’re uploaded to our website as PDFs. Shifting these to Google Docs will save hours for our instructors and make the process transparent, inherently collaborative and efficient. The real reason this change excites me is because I view it as one of the many major operational shifts we’ll see next year and beyond as we embrace and take advantage of the extensive Google Apps suite.

Posted by Dan Israel, Google Enterprise team

Each decade, the U.S. Census Bureau has the lofty challenge of counting every single person in America—308,745,538 of us as of 2010. Census employees go to great lengths to get the count as precise as possible because this data is used for everything from setting voting districts—from local school boards to Congress—to directing all government spending based on population.

In addition to the widely-known decennial census, the bureau does many other surveys of U.S. households and businesses. As a result, the Census has become a massive data warehouse with terabytes of data about social and economic conditions in the country. This data belongs to the American people, so the goal is to make it as accessible as possible to them. Once upon a time, this data used to be presented in spreadsheets or statistical tables, which were extremely useful to people who were familiar with the Census data, but less accessible to the general public.

Starting with the 2010 Census, the Bureau decided to put the data on a map to make it interactive and easy to use for everyone from a fourth grader working on a research report to a city planner looking for housing trends in their town. The Bureau chose Google Maps as the platform upon which to publish the Census data. The familiar search box and intuitive navigation tools make it easy for visitors to its website to find the information they’re looking for. In the background, Google Maps quickly searches through the large volume of Census data and renders the desired map to a website visitor in milliseconds. The Census data comes alive as visitors zoom, pan and explore the different types of data on the map.

Google Maps enables the Census Bureau to paint a rich portrait of the country, which is available to anyone who visits census.gov. Hear more from the Census Bureau in this video:

Posted by Brian Morrissey, Head of Web Services, IT Services department at University College Dublin

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Brian Morrissey, Head of Web Services, IT Services at University College Dublin, Ireland’s largest university. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

University College Dublin is the largest university in Ireland and one of Europe’s leading research universities. Founded in 1854, UCD has 6,000 staff and more than 30,000 students. Being able to get accurate information quickly, even when on the go, is important for faculty and students in a highly competitive learning environment. Google Apps and Google Search Appliance are helping us stay connected and informed.

Before Google, we weren’t always able to respond to service issues quickly, particularly if they happened on the weekend when IT administrators were off work. Google’s tools make service issues less frequent and easier to manage when they occur. Because we don’t have all that hardware and software to manage, we can now focus our IT staff on bringing new services to the UCD community. These include collaborative and communications services such as Google Plus and Hangouts, together with improved services through UCD Connect and UCD Mobile.

The ability to integrate Google Calendar and Drive with Gmail was another huge benefit for us. The big game changer for us is Google Calendar. We’re delivering class schedules and other events to students directly in their calendars, so they are easy to update and accessible via mobile devices. With 40,000 smartphones and tablets on the UCD network this is key to helping students make it to class on time.

In addition to Google Apps, UCD is using Google Search Appliance to make all of its publicly available documents searchable through its website, and internal documents searchable by university staff on the intranet. More than 500,000 documents are in the index and people are conducting more than 60,000 searches per month. We’ve implemented numerous custom search display pages and targeted directory searches with specific keywords to make it easier for people to find what they are looking for.

Google’s initial appeal was service availability, coupled with storage improvements, easy mobile access and cost savings. We’re saving about $330,000 a year that would have been spent on servers, maintenance, personnel and power to manage the previous email system, SunMail. Storage was a big concern for us before going Google. We had about eight terabytes of staff emails alone and were always worried that we’d run out of storage and have to buy more. Now, each person has seven times more storage for mail and concerns about exceeding quotas have disappeared. Through the use of Google Apps and Search Appliance, UCD now has a scalable solution for mail, collaboration and search which drives better communication, collaboration and information retrieval throughout our university.

Posted by Xiangye Xiao, Product Manager, Handwriting input

(Cross-posted on the Gmail blog)

Gmail and Docs offer wide language support, however in some cases using the keyboard is less than ideal. Whether you’re a student trying to include a foreign phrase in your paper or an international consultant hoping to begin your message with a friendly local greeting, now you’ll be able to use your own handwriting to input words directly into Gmail and Google Docs with your mouse or trackpad.

To try it out, enable input tools in Gmail or Docs and select the handwriting input (represented by a pencil icon) of the language you want to use.
        You can write single or even multiple characters at once in the panel to see them show up in your message or document. Currently, handwriting input is available in Google Docs for over 20 languages and in Gmail for over 50 languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Hindi and Russian.
Handwriting input makes the internet easier to use by people worldwide and is also part of a larger effort to break the barrier between languages, check it out in Google Mobile Search, Google Translate (Web, Android and iOS), and the Chrome browser.