Posted by: Scott Johnston, Director of Product Management, Google Drive

Since we launched Drive for Work 9 months ago, we've watched as more and more businesses moved to the cloud — and seen that they prioritize data security as much as we do. Security ranks at the top of the list of concerns that companies have about moving to the cloud, which is why we’ve put security front and center in our products from the beginning. And to keep your company’s data even more secure in Drive, we’re launching new sharing controls, alerts and audit events to Google Drive for Work and Google for Education over the next several weeks.

For Google Drive for Work customers:

Set sharing settings by department
Sometimes different file settings make sense. You might, for example, have a research department that needs to keep information confidential and a sales team that needs to share presentations with their clients. To help manage these different sharing needs, now when you make selections in Drive settings from the Admin console, you can turn off sharing outside the domain for one organizational unit, while still allowing others to work and share files with anyone they need to.

Create custom Drive alerts and track more events with Drive audit

To keep track of when specific actions are taken in Drive, you can set up custom Drive alerts. So if you want to know when a file containing the word “confidential” in the title is shared outside the company, now you’ll know. And there are more events coming to Drive audit, including download, print and preview.

For all Google Apps for Work customers:

Set up custom admin alerts to find out when things change

There are lots of moving parts to running a company, and now it’s easier for IT to find out about the things they care about with custom alerts — like when a new app is installed or a shared calendar is deleted — and get those right in their inbox.

Let people reset their own passwords
Recovering passwords isn’t the most pleasant thing we do in our lives. But now IT can let employees securely reset their own passwords, so they don’t lose valuable time being locked out of their account. If this doesn’t make sense for your organization, admins can simply turn this ability off.

Available for all to use:

Disable downloading, printing and copying of any file with IRM
With Information Rights Management (“IRM”) you can disable downloading, printing and copying from the advanced sharing menu – perfect for when the file you’re sharing is only meant for a few select people. This new option is available for any file stored in Google Drive, including documents, spreadsheets and presentations created in Google Docs.

Share quickly with anyone outside your organization
When it comes to sharing, like giving final inventory lists to your caterer or last minute logos to your design agency, you want to make sure people can see it right away — whether they use Drive or not. Now, you can share with any email address and they’ll be able to view the files you share —without having to sign-in to a Google account. Admins can disable this feature for certain departments that want to require sign-in before , while enabling it for others.

All the above are rolling out over the next month.

Stay tuned for more
We’re also working on the ability to establish trusted domains, so businesses and schools that have multiple Google Apps domains or want to work with trusted partners or customers, can select multiple Google Apps domains that are OK to share with from Drive and Classroom. And on expiring access, because occasionally you only want to share files for a temporary amount of time. With expiring access you can set a future date when access will be removed. Stay tuned, there's more to come from Drive and Drive for Work.

Posted by Kevin Brookhouser, Director of Technology, York School

(Cross-posted on the Google for Education Blog.)

Editor's note: Leading up to Education on Air, we asked you what topics you’d like to discuss at the conference. The clear winner was “innovation in schools,” so we asked Kevin Brookhouser, a Google Certified Teacher and director of technology at York School, to share his innovative practice of giving students freedom in what and how they learn. Kevin is the author of the new book The 20Time Project and will share his methods during an Education on Air session on May 9. Register here for the free online conference today.

The 20Time Project stemmed from the collision of several fortunate events: I met a number of inspirational teachers through the Google Teacher Academy, spent time at the Google campus, and read a book by Daniel Pink called Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us about how to encourage innovative thinking. Inspired by Pink and Google’s “20 percent time”— a practice that allows employees to take time out of their “day job” to work on a side passion project— I created my own version and applied it to the classroom.

Guest blogger Kevin Brookhouser speaks around the world about empowering students with time and choice. He'll lead a conference session at Education on Air on May 9th

20Time is a simple concept that anyone can execute, as long as you give students the choice to design their own learning experience and support them throughout. Give students one day a week to work on a project of their choosing — one that serves a real audience and solves a real-world problem. Help students discover great ideas, write a thoughtful proposal, blog about their progress, craft an elevator pitch, and demonstrate their work through a final presentation.

20Time affords students the opportunity to follow the three critical ingredients essential to innovation as described in Drive:

1. Autonomy: freedom in what they learn and how they learn it 
2. Mastery: the ability to track their learning growth 
3. Purpose: meeting the needs of an audience outside the walls of the classroom

When given the freedom to control their own learning, it turns out that students can come up with incredible ideas. The experiences they created are bigger than any I could’ve imagined — like Maria’s YouTube channel, which inspires young people to love books, or Maddie’s Recycling Closets project, which spreads awareness about sustainable consumerism.

I’m fortunate to work at a future-oriented school that supported the experimental project from day one. But wherever they teach, I recommend that teachers who want to try 20Time give it a go — dive in and present the reasoning behind it. Transparent communication to parents, students and administrators can go a long way toward getting buy-in. For example, I send this letter to students and parents at the beginning of the year, and welcome other teachers to modify it to fit their needs.

I’ll be sharing more about what I’ve learned about innovating in schools during my session at Education on Air on May 9. Register here to get updates about the conference. You can find 20Time resources, including five steps to get started, at 20Time.org. The 20Time Project is now available on Amazon, and if you’re looking to purchase multiple copies for your school or would like me to speak about 20Time or Google for Education, I welcome you to contact me directly. See you on May 9!

Posted by Andrew Jessett, IT manager at Xero

Editor's note: It’s been just over a year since we launched Chromebox for meetings, and to celebrate the milestone we’re sharing stories about our customers and their approaches to business, culture and productivity that are bringing them success. In today’s post, online accounting software provider Xero tells how it manages to keep its startup-like efficiency, innovation and feel while expanding globally. To learn more about Chromebox for meetings, join us online at Chrome Live on April 22 and see how companies scale face-to-face meetings across the globe.

Xero was started by several developers nine years ago in an apartment above a coffee shop in Wellington, New Zealand. Today, we have more than 1,000 employees in 15 cities across the U.S., U.K., Australia and New Zealand and provide online accounting software to more than 400,000 global customers. With more than 200 percent five-year average sales growth as of June 2014, our biggest challenge now is managing the fast-paced growth while maintaining our nimble, tech-forward startup culture.

We like to keep work in small groups and move quickly. Our teams work closely on projects even when they’re located in different offices around the world. And since we like to stay on the cutting edge of technology, we’re using Google Apps, which allows us to stay coordinated and productive.

Our pain point in IT was finding a way for teams in different cities and offices to meet and collaborate at the same time. We used a variety of video conferencing technologies, including PCs, HDMI/VGA and projectors. They were difficult to set up, meetings were delayed and productivity suffered. As we continued to grow, this struggle intensified, and we realized that we needed to find a solution fast. We needed to streamline our meeting room setups and get the most out of Hangouts. When we heard about Chromebox for meetings, we jumped at the chance to try it out.

We started with six Chromebox for meetings units. Today, we have nearly a hundred. They’re in every meeting room. We use them for room-to-room conferencing and all hands meetings. The global team uses them to connect every two weeks and the CEO addresses the entire company via Hangout on Air.

Chromebox for meetings allow us to keep things simple. There’s very little infrastructure or wireless connections needed on our side, so no cables necessary. Setup is fast and the integration with Gmail makes joining Hangouts as easy as clicking a button. It’s easy to share documents and work on them together. Then there’s the cost savings. Instead of spending between $40,000 and $60,000 on a video conferencing system, we spent one-tenth of that on a Chromebox and a display.

We may be a larger company now, but we still want to move and act quickly. No matter how large we become, our values align with those of fresh innovative companies that respond rapidly to market demand, customer needs and competition. Thanks to Chromebox for meetings, we can keep the startup feel and agility while growing at breakneck speed.

Posted by Daniel Scrivano, lead developer for EV Explorer, and currently a developer for Insikt, Inc.

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Daniel Scrivano, former lead developer for the UC Davis EV Explorer. See how EV Explorer and other developers rely on Google Maps APIs to bring unique location experiences to their users.

Most people know they can help the environment by driving an electric vehicle, but they often don’t realize they can save money, too. As a student at UC Davis, I started a research project to make these savings clearer. The EV Explorer website, launched last summer, lets drivers compare fuel costs for electric and gas-powered vehicles.

EV Explorer uses the Google Maps APIs and a database called fueleconomy.gov to give drivers information about the fuel economy of 34,000 different vehicles. EV Explorer visitors enter their commuting starting points and destinations, along with how often they commute. Based on that data, the site calculates the annual energy costs for up to four vehicles.

We built EV Explorer using several of Google’s mapping APIs: JavaScript, Directions, Places and Geocoding. EV Explorer downloads the appropriate map and helps people visualize the data they’re inputting. If people don’t know their work address, they can type in the name of their business and Places API geolocates it. The Geocoding API converts any address into latitude and longitude. We query the Directions API when we’ve got the specific points for home and work. The app then draws the route using polylines between the two locations.

We chose Google Maps APIs because Google’s mapping database consistently ranks among the most comprehensive, up to date, and user-friendly. With Google Maps, a user can type in “Safeway” and “San Francisco” to see all the Safeway locations in the city and choose among them. If they mistype something or include incomplete information, auto-correcting tools offer suggestions and corrections.

In building the site, I kept one thing in mind: You won’t make it until you break it. That means you need to experiment, try new things, get your hands dirty, and make random stuff. You’ve got to push the APIs to their limits. And by doing just that, we delivered what we set out to do: Help people understand the wider benefits of electric vehicles and show them how much they could save by switching to electric.

Posted by Saurabh Gupta, Product Manager

A year ago, we partnered with loads of great developers to showcase their add-ons for Google Docs. Add-ons have opened up a world of extra features for our users, from a student needing a powerful tool for diagrams to a project manager looking for a handy way to keep their team on track.

Today we’re releasing a couple of updates to help developers share their add-ons with an even wider audience and give Google Apps IT admins more consistent control over which add-ons are used in their organizations.

Developers can now choose to make their add-ons for Docs, Sheets and Forms available for installation across entire domains, which automatically creates a Google Apps Marketplace listing that's easy for customers to find. It also means that admins can install these handy add-ons for their whole organization using just a couple of clicks.

And speaking of admins, we want to make sure they have the control they need when it comes to deciding which add-ons are best suited for their organizations and teams. For example, in particular cases — like in education — it might not be desirable to let all end-users install their own add-ons. With this update, admins will continue to have a “disable add-ons” option for their users, but they can also whitelist add-ons via the Google Apps Marketplace for their entire domain or a specific team.

With these updates, customers can now get all the add-ons they want with all the control they need. Learn more about managing Google add-ons for your organization.

Posted by Brian Goldfarb, Head of Cloud Platform Marketing

Today at Enterprise Connect in Orlando, Avaya announced their new OnAvaya™ cloud-based contact center solution, built exclusively on Google Cloud Platform. Avaya provides solutions that help companies increase their engagement within a contact center across multiple channels and devices. Their new product – Customer Engagement OnAvaya™ Powered by Google Cloud Platform – provides a low-cost solution that allows customer service agents to work from anywhere, right in the browser. Aiming to meet the specific demands of a communications platform, Avaya chose Google Cloud Platform for its reliability, performance and scalability – and our simple pricing structure. OnAvaya™ runs on Google Compute Engine and utilizes Google's advanced networking capabilities to provide Unified Communications services running in the public cloud. The Chrome device based agent endpoints communicate using WebRTC with their cloud infrastructure.

“Google is one of the world leaders in cloud environments,” says Tony Pereira, director of business development at Avaya. “They have built an impressive architecture with security features that they are constantly evolving to make the most of cloud efficiencies.”

OnAvaya™ takes advantage of the unique capabilities of Chrome devices. You simply provision a Chromebook and headset and your customer service agents can work from home or wherever there's an Internet connection and have full Avaya contact center functionality. In the event of a snowstorm or network interruption, you can shift your support operations to any site that has Wi-Fi. Since employees no longer need a physical phone, you'll save costs on additional hardware.

With Customer Engagement OnAvaya™ Powered by Google Cloud Platform, customers will be able to support growth in their business and seasonal spikes without huge capital investments. And since we manage the technology on our end, implementation time for OnAvaya™ customers should drop from months to weeks – or even days.

The solution will be available to certified Avaya business partners as well as Google for Work service partners starting in the spring of 2015. Learn more about the OnAvaya™ solution on their blog.

We’re thrilled to welcome Avaya to the Cloud Platform family!

Posted by Ben Fried, CIO

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog.)

When you visited Google today, we’re pretty sure you didn’t type 173.194.113.18 into your browser. This string of numbers separated by periods—an IP address—isn’t nearly as easy or memorable as typing google.com. Domain names ending in things like .COM, .NET and .EDU make browsing the web and telling people where to find you online easier. Since this month marks the 30-year anniversary of .COM and several other domain endings, we’re taking a minute to celebrate these often-overlooked suffixes that have changed the way we use the web.

Though they were introduced in 1985, domain names didn’t gain much awareness and use amongst the public until the World Wide Web became available to all during the ‘90s and it became clear they were an important part in unlocking its power. Using these online addresses, people began to spread messages, start businesses and access information that otherwise would have been nearly impossible to find. Popularity and demand for these names grew so much that people were soon willing to pay millions of dollars for the perfect one.

Today there are 270+ million registered domain names; in fact, about 17 million were added just last year. To create more naming options for people online, hundreds of new top-level domains are being added, and many, like .TODAY, .NINJA and .BIKE are already available. We wrote about this back in 2012, and since then we’ve launched three of our own: .HOW, .SOY and .みんな.

As .COM turns 30, we’re looking back on the history of domain endings and all they’ve made possible. Today there are more choices than ever before for people to find the perfect name for their businesses, projects and ideas on the web. If you’re interested in learning more about this history, or you’d like to register your own piece of the web, head over to Google Domains to claim your .DOMAINS from a .COM to a .GURU.

Here’s to .COM’s 30th, and all that’s yet to come in how we name destinations on the Internet.

Posted by Anthony Casalena, Founder and CEO of Squarespace

Editor's note: We sat down with Anthony Casalena, Founder and CEO of Squarespace, to talk about how they get work done with the help of simple and modern tools, including Google Apps for Work and Chromebox for meetings.

In 2003, Anthony Casalena had the idea to simplify the process of creating a website and started building Squarespace out of his dorm room at the University of Maryland. Today, millions of people use Squarespace to share their stories online. Here, Anthony shares how the company creates simple, powerful products and continues to grow their global team with the help of Google Apps and Chromebox for meetings.

How does Squarespace work and create?
As a company, we’re committed to respecting the intricacies of the creative process at work. It means waiting to release software until we’re happy with it, having respect for delicate ideas before they reach maturity, and tightly integrating small, multi-disciplinary teams on projects from the outset. As a company that believes in the benefits that technology can bring, we’re also highly reliant on modern tools and development processes. We integrated Google Apps with Squarespace 7, as we already use it to run so much of our own company.

When did you start using Apps at Squarespace? Why?
We started using Apps seven years ago, when the company was around four people. Before that, we used a mix of things I set up myself – such as a tiny mail server run off a box in our office and very basic shared file storage. We were overwhelmed with spam, concerned about security, and constantly had to upgrade our software. I used Gmail for my personal mail and knew it was fast and had great spam filtering. When Google Apps became available, it was a very natural move for us.

How do you continue to share information as the company scales?
Information sharing at scale is something we’re constantly iterating on as an organization. By integrating lightweight solutions such as Google Docs and Sheets for many processes, we’re able to seamlessly share information throughout the org without worrying about something getting out of date. Everyone can see live updates. If someone goes on vacation or transitions to a different role, it’s easy to transfer information and pick up loose ends.

Open communication seems really important to your culture. How do you maintain it?
Right now, we have more than 450 employees spread out across three offices. To keep connected to our remote offices, we use Hangouts. After being frustrated by endless IT issues and wait times when setting up basic conferencing across our offices, we started using Chromebox for meetings a few months ago. Now I can walk into a room, press a button and have a meeting right away. This works for us because we’re minimalists when it comes to the tools we want in our ecosystem. We want to use tools that are modern and simple — and we want to use as few of them as possible.

Posted by Vidya Nagarajan, Product Manager, Chrome for Work

Editor's note: Chrome offers secure, customizable and easily manageable devices and apps for today’s business. Join us for Chrome Live, April 22-24, to learn how web-based solutions can help maximize your company’s productivity. Register here.

Since last year’s Digital Signage Expo and the introduction of Chrome’s single app kiosk mode, many customers and developers have built digital signage applications on Chromeboxes. Chromeboxes are secure, easy to manage and cost effective, making them ideal to display content and engage customers in any location. Chicos chose Chrome to manage and display content on over 5000 screens across more than 1500 stores.

We’ve done more with the Chrome platform to make signage even easier, adding new features that make it seamless to plan signage content and manage device health. Today, we’re announcing these capabilities:

• The Chrome Sign Builder helps you create intelligent digital signs that are easy to build, schedule and deploy. You can add and manage content for any number of screens, and schedule that content to run when needed, across many screens at different times of day. A great example of this in action: displaying breakfast, lunch and dinner menus at various restaurant locations across multiple time zones.

• The Chrome App Builder makes it easy to build third-party kiosk apps. You can set up applications to eliminate the “first-run” configuration process and rapidly deploy across multiple screens. We have several third party partners who've built solutions for signage including Stratos, Rise, Arreya, Wondersign, Four Winds Interactive, Scala, and Industry Weapon; and we're adding more to this ecosystem.

• Ongoing reporting monitors the health of your kiosks and signage at all times. You’ll get alerts from Chrome device management if a screen goes down, and can remotely reboot the device to get it back online without dispatching a technician. You can also get live updates about system usage and capture screen grabs to see exactly what viewers see.

In addition, today AOPEN announced three new commercial Chrome OS devices that will add more durability to digital signage. By working with AOPEN, we can offer more rugged hardware equipped to handle harsh conditions — like a hot and greasy back-of-house line at a restaurant.

If you’d like to learn more about these new devices and management features, visit us at the Digital Signage Expo in booth 2218 to see them in action or online. You can also register now for Chrome Live, a digital conference we’re hosting April 22-24.

Posted by Elizabeth Schreier, Director of Digital and Social Engagement at Allstate Insurance

Editor's note: This month Google Maps turns ten! Since launching ten years ago, use cases for maps have come a long way. To celebrate a decade of mapping, we’re highlighting new and innovative ways developers are deploying maps. Read how guest blogger, Elizabeth Schreier, Director of Digital and Social Engagement at Allstate Insurance, is relying on Google Maps APIs to bring unique mapping experiences to their users.

Imagine looking at a map of your house and seeing a visual diagnosis of the biggest risks in your area — whether the risk is fire, theft or even freezing pipes. Then imagine getting helpful tips that could help you protect your home against those risks. That’s what we’ve done with GoodHome, a project we created at Allstate with our agency, T3.

We built GoodHome to make a tool that anyone would find useful, whether or not they were an insurance customer or even a homeowner. We realized we could use our proprietary information about insurance claims to help people identify the most common and costly claims in their respective ZIP codes. We decided to visualize this information, along with relevant property statistics, on an interactive map that included tips to help people mitigate potential risks.

We built GoodHome using the Google Maps APIs because of its familiarity, ease of use and comprehensive features. The development team at T3 created the GoodHome prototype using three Google Maps APIs: Static Maps, JavaScript and Street View Image APIs. They customized the maps by drawing layers, integrating a weather API and using CSS to create animations that brought the experience to life. The development process went smoothly and took just three months from concept to completion.

GoodHome is more than informative, it’s compelling. A visitor who uses the GoodHome tool is over 350% more likely to request an insurance quote than one who doesn’t. Forty percent of people type more than one address into the map, and on average, visitors stay on the site for six to seven minutes.

GoodHome also helps our agents build better relationships with customers. When an Allstate customer receives a link to the GoodHome website from their agent, the map automatically opens up to the customer’s home address. The personalized interaction helps agents connect with their clients and provide a great consulting tool that opens the door for a conversation. We plan to introduce GoodHome to all 10,000 Allstate agents across the country so they can spread the tool to their customers.

We’re excited to play a role in enhancing the home insurance experience for consumers. The power of Google Maps has helped us make a product that we hope will help people see their homes in a new way and think differently about what it means to protect what matters to them.

Posted by Robin Züger, Product Manager, Google Calendar

Since the ancient Sumerian calendar that recorded a new month by the sighting of a new moon, calendars both physical and digital have helped us keep track of important moments. Today, we're bringing the new Google Calendar app to the iPhone, so you can spend less time managing your day and more time getting stuff done.

The new Google Calendar app for iPhone comes with Assists, which make suggestions that save you time when creating events. For example, if you regularly meet with your teammate Rena for coffee and a catchup, Calendar can quickly suggest that entire event when you type ‘c-o-f-’. With Schedule View, a quick glance gives you a snapshot of how your day is shaping up with images and maps that make your calendar easy to scan.

To get started simply login with your Google account, and with one click, the new app works with all the other calendars you’ve already set up on your iPhone.

With Google Apps for Work, you can update your team about how that client meeting just went from Gmail, chat with your manager in Hangouts about specific questions the client had, add those questions to a Google document so the team can start researching back at the office, and now, schedule the follow-up meeting in Calendar, all from your iPhone.

And if you end up leaving your phone in the taxi on the way back to the office, Google Apps Mobile Management has you covered. Apps Mobile Management allows admins to set up mobile security policies, like requiring passwords and remotely wiping data when necessary. And it’s included with Google Apps and Google Drive for Work, so you can keep your work data safe.

10 minutes and counting until your next meeting . . . download the new Google Calendar app for iPhone before it starts.

Posted by Ashley Chandler, Head of Brand Marketing, Google for Work

We all have women in our lives that inspire us. Our mothers, daughters and sisters. Our friends, coaches and teachers. Our favorite soccer players, computer programmers and thought leaders.

These women teach us how to code, how to shoot three pointers under pressure, how to deliver a flawless speech to a packed auditorium (imagining them in their underwear doesn’t work for everyone). There’s one thing they all have in common: they help us be more confident. And because confidence helps us turn our ideas into action, it’s an essential quality in helping us succeed.

However, in a recent study, half of female respondents reported self-doubt about their job performance and careers, compared with fewer than a third of male respondents. The root of this gap starts early: between elementary school and high school, girls’ self-esteem drops 3.5 times more than boys’.

Research shows that in order to close this confidence gap, girls need to see other successful women who do what they love. Whether it’s starting a business, joining the Army, being a construction foreman, playing sports in college or raising a family, having these role models and receiving encouragement from them assures girls that they can chase — and catch — their dreams. No matter how tough that might be, no matter what kind of obstacles get in the way.

That’s why this year, in honor of International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month, we want to inspire the next generation of female leaders to dream, hack, hustle and create. We want to think about the future Sandra Day O’Connors, Oprah Winfreys, Edith Clarkes and Amelia Earharts. Eighty years from now, who will we celebrate during Women’s History Month? Who will we applaud and commemorate for changing the way we look at science, technology, business and education? They could they be our granddaughters, nieces, mentees. Let’s inspire them now. We invite you to join the conversation and share your own stories on Twitter and Google+ using #InspireGirls.

Posted by Michael De Blauwe, Project Leader of the Innovation Lab at VDAB

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Michael De Blauwe, project leader of the Innovation Lab at VDAB, the public employment bureau for Belgium’s Flanders region.

In the past, clients walked into one of our employment offices and waited to meet with one of our consultants. Today, they don’t have to leave home to get face-to-face feedback on their resumes or participate in mock interviews. Timing is critical for job seekers, and at VDAB – the public employment bureau for Flanders – we’re using Google Apps to more quickly and efficiently help people in need of job services and training. We’re also reaching more people while saving money by reducing the number of physical employment centers by nearly 30%.

What used to take a week for an in-person resume workshop followed by a practice interview, now happens in less than 24 hours. Our thousands of employment specialists use Google Hangouts and Google Docs to review customers’ resumes and coach them on interview skills. This digital transformation has been a hit with job seekers. In 2013, we had 4,920 people use our new e-coaching services, and 83% said they would recommend it to friends.

We’re not just using Apps to serve more people — we’re delivering better service. VDAB job coaches now use Google Drive to store resources and Docs to comment on clients’ resumes while speaking with them on Hangouts. All of a client’s job-related files are stored in one place, with all feedback contained within the document.

Our team also works together more efficiently. Because our coaches work from different locations throughout Flanders, it’s helpful to have a central repository that allows people to share information and work together from different locations. We use Google Drive to share information about job openings and Google Sheets to track customer queries in a single document that everyone can access. Before Google, we’d send thousands of emails back and forth to share resources, respond to customers, and schedule appointments.

When we made a company-wide push behind Apps in 2012, using our early Google adopters to inform others, we found that it was already taking hold. Now that all of VDAB has switched to Apps, we’re moving faster, helping more people build their job-seeking skills and matching more employers with qualified candidates.

We worked with Capgemini, a Google Apps Premier Partner in Belgium, who performed this successful migration.

Posted by Andrew Ure, Communications Manager, Google Australia

(Cross-posted on the Google Australia Blog.)

Collaboration lies at the heart of Google for Work. It helps people work together and achieve great things; not just for work, but also for society.

That’s why, as Australia celebrates Mardi Gras this week, we teamed up with local nonprofit Twenty10 to raise awareness of homophobia and transphobia by creating a nationwide musical collaboration.

We went to a community day, opened a blank Google Doc, and asked people to help us write a love song. More than 1,000 people added their own lyrics, as did well-known local musicians Guy Sebastian, Megan Washington and the Jezabels.

Google volunteer Tom van Gessel collects another love song lyric

As the lyrics came through on the Doc from multiple locations and devices, Toby Martin, a local singer-songwriter, chose his favorite lyrics and turned them into a beautiful song, which he performed at the end of the day.

Watch the story of the collaboration here:

You can download the song for free on Google Play. For every time it’s downloaded until Mardi Gras ends, we’ll donate $1 to Twenty10 (up to $50,000)

As Toby sings, love is for everyone.

Posted by Tia Lendo, Head of North America Education Marketing

(Cross-posted on the Google for Education Blog.)

Editor's note: Educators, read on to learn how you can access new work tools at our free online conference, Education on Air.

When I was a teacher 15 years ago, I loved my students, teammates and the work, but I wished I could work more closely with other teachers and observe their classrooms. Luckily, technology helps us connect more easily, and educators don’t have to feel isolated. We have tools, many of them free, that allow us to share with each other.

We’ll put these tools to work on May 8-9, when we host Education On Air, a free online conference about leading for the future and shaping the classroom today. All you need is a web browser and an Internet connection to join from the best seat in the house — your own. Whether you’re a school leader, teacher, administrator, parent, student or just someone who cares about education, we hope you can join us.

Here’s what we have planned:

Day 1: Leading the future
On Friday, May 8 from 10am-3pm EST, hear from educators, students and business leaders on the topic of leadership in education. Short keynotes and panels will help answer the question “how do we prepare our students for a future that is ever-changing?” Topics will include creating student ownership, leading change and fostering innovation in schools.

Day 2: Shaping the classroom today
On Saturday, May 9, join any of the 90+ sessions, run by educators for educators and held throughout the day across time zones. These sessions are designed to help you immediately in your school. We’ll have tracks for four groups: teachers, leaders, IT and general interest. Topics will include supporting literacy in early learners, successful device deployment and empowering digital citizens.

Even if you can’t attend on the scheduled dates, do register to stay informed. We’ll share the conference schedule and list of speakers in April. We’ll also be recording the sessions, so you can check out anything you missed.

In the meantime, tell us what sessions you want to see by responding to this Tweet or this Google+ post using #GoogleEduOnAir.

Posted by Clayton Jones, Product Manager, Google for Work

With just the phone in your pocket, you can email your boss in Gmail and then ask your kids when they’ll be home using Hangouts. You can follow up with a new client in Salesforce and pull up your tax documents in Drive. Everything you do, whether it's for work or your personal life can all be done from the device you always have by your side. That’s pretty powerful and can save a lot of time. But with great power comes great responsibility, and keeping that information secure requires some attention — whether it’s keeping your tax documents private to yourself or your email conversations secure within your company.

That’s why last week we made Android ready for work — making it easier for the more than one billion Android users out there to access the apps they need to be productive on their phones and tablets. Today we wanted to highlight the ways Google Apps Mobile Management let’s you take full advantage of Android for Work.

If you use Google Apps you already have a Mobile Management provider Phones get lost. Tablets stolen. People leave the company. Things happen. We believe you should have the tools to keep your work data safe, and that this safety should just be built in to the applications you choose. That’s why mobile device management — across Android and iOS — is included with Google Apps and Google Drive for Work. Apps Mobile Management allows admins to see what devices are connected, require device passwords and remotely wipe data when necessary.

Security that’s easy to manage As the domain administrator, with today’s launch, you can now choose the level of data separation that works for your organization. Whether it’s a personal device or a corp-issued one, with Android for Work, you can have all your employees create a Work Profile that isolates and protects work data from other activity on their phone. Or make it a choice, and let employees continue to switch accounts within Gmail and other Google mobile apps, while using the Work Profile for non-Google work related apps. Either way, all their work information is encrypted and can be remotely wiped.

The Work Profile keeps all work approved apps separate from the rest of the phone.

Easy to use Google Play for Work makes it easy for employees to see what apps are approved by their company and install the apps they want onto their device. Once an admin enables Android for Work, anyone can choose to use the Work Profile, even if not required to. So their own information stays private while the company can enforce Mobile Management policies for work accounts if needed.

Install work apps from Google Play for Work and keep them on your homescreen.

With Google Apps Mobile Management, you can have choice and security at the same time. Your employees can choose the device they’re comfortable with that helps them get work done, and you have peace of mind that company information is secure. Android for Work and Apps Mobile Management is available for all Google Drive for Work and Google Apps for Work, Government and Education organizations. Learn more in the Admin Help Center.

Posted by Ed Bindl, Senior Software Engineer and Jacinda Shelly, Lead Platform Engineer, Doctor on Demand

Editor's note: Since the launch of Google Maps ten years ago, maps have come a long way. To celebrate a decade of map innovation, we’re highlighting unique maps built by our developer community. Read how guest bloggers, Ed Bindl and Jacinda Shelly, Software Engineers for Doctor on Demand, use the Google Maps APIs to bring unique mapping experiences to users.

Maps can do much more for an online business than help people get from point A to point B. You might not think that a website for making video appointments with medical professionals would benefit from mapping — but at Doctor on Demand, maps connect our patients to physicians faster and allow physicians to prescribe medications at the right pharmacies. Google Maps make our user experience much more satisfying, which means patients will use our service again.

We use the Google Maps APIs, including the Geolocation and Javascript APIs, to show patients a map of nearby pharmacies before they start a video call with a medical professional. For our users, maps make it easy and convenient to connect with physicians and pick up prescriptions at the pharmacy. But maps can be helpful for other businesses in other ways. And now that we see the great value of incorporating reliable map functionality into our app, we'd love to share how you can do the same:

• Choose a familiar interface. Use a map that’s easy for people to navigate – if it’s hard to understand and requires extensive instructions, they won’t use it. We picked Google Maps because our patients know them well.

• Configure maps for many platforms. If your users find maps helpful on your desktop website, they’ll want to use maps from any browser or device. We’ve made sure our maps work just as well on iOS and Android devices as they do on a desktop computer.

• Maintain accuracy. In our case, we have to update the geolocation information for about 65,000 pharmacies across the country every evening. We use the Google Maps Geocoding API, which minimizes the time it takes to keep our map accurate. We keep a database of all pharmacies from Surescripts, a healthcare network, and each night we get an update to that database that adds, removes, and updates pharmacies and their locations. We use the Google Maps Javascript API to place the pharmacies on our map when a patient is asked to select a pharmacy.

• Meet compliance standards. In order to comply with medical regulations, Doctor On Demand must connect patients with physicians licensed in their state. We use the Google Maps Reverse Geocoding API to accurately determine the state a patient is located in before connecting them with a physician.

• Help users save time and make better choices. Before we built our pharmacy map, patients had to tell doctors which pharmacy they wanted to use. Then doctors emailed us the details. However, our support team had to follow up with doctors and patients to make sure we had the right pharmacy, since patients might say something like, “the drugstore down the street from my house.” Today, there’s no doubt about which pharmacy is the right one, since patients can clearly see their local outlets on the map.

Our pharmacy map inspires us to think about new ways to use maps in the future – like plotting the movement of cold and flu outbreaks and sharing this data with patients and doctors. We see a direct connection between maps and improving patient care. In the greater scheme, Google Maps improve the health of our patients, and, the health of our business.