Posted by Eran Feigenbaum, Director of Security, Google Apps

No matter how you slice it, mobile and cloud are essential for future business growth and productivity. This is driving increases in security spending as organizations wrestle with threats and regulatory compliance — according to Gartner, the computer security industry will reach $71 billion this year, which is a 7.9 percent increase over 2013.

To help organizations spend their money wisely, it’s essential that cloud companies are transparent about their security capabilities. Since we see transparency as a crucial way to earn and maintain our customers’ confidence, we ask independent auditors to examine the controls in our systems and operations on a regular basis. The audits are rigorous, and customers can use these reports to make sure Google meets their compliance and data protection needs.

We’re proud to announce we have received an updated ISO 27001 certificate and SOC 2 and SOC 3 Type II audit report, which are the most widely recognized, internationally accepted independent security compliance reports. These audits refresh our coverage for Google Apps for Business and Education, as well Google Cloud Platform, and we’ve expanded the scope to include Google+ and Hangouts. To make it easier for everyone to verify our security, we’re now publishing our updated ISO 27001 certificate and new SOC3 audit report for the first time, on our Google Enterprise security page.

Keeping your data safe is at the core of what we do. That’s why we hire the world’s foremost experts in security—the team is now comprised of over 450 full-time engineers—to keep customers’ data secure from imminent and evolving threats. These certifications, along with our existing offerings of FISMA for Google Apps for Government, support for FERPA and COPPA compliance in Google Apps for Education, model contract clauses for Google Apps customers who operate within Europe, and HIPAA business associate agreements for organizations with protected health information, help assure our customers and their regulators that we’re committed to keeping their data and that of their users secure, private and compliant.

Posted by Jon Spruce, Google Programme Leader, Travis Perkins plc

Editor's note: A few weeks ago, we announced Google Drive for Work, a new premium offering for businesses that includes unlimited storage, advanced audit reporting and new security controls. To celebrate the announcement and show how Drive helps businesses around the world, we’re sharing a few stories from a handful of customers using Drive (and the rest of the Google Apps suite) in innovative ways. Today’s guest blogger is Jon Spruce, Google Programme Leader for Travis Perkins plc, the UK’s leading company in the builders’ merchant and home improvement market and largest supplier to the building and construction market. See what other organisations that use Google Drive have to say.

Travis Perkins plc supplies building materials for projects small and large across the United Kingdom, from home improvements to Terminal 5 at Heathrow airport. Creating quotes for a variety of different jobs and tasks, then making sure the materials get where they need to be, requires serious coordination. We chose Google Apps to enable collaboration across our 2,000 locations, 24,000 people and 17 different businesses. And since making the switch, Google Drive in particular has played a significant role in making our company operate smoothly and efficiently: we use Google Drive to store and share more than 1.3 million documents, which has reduced travel, email traffic and the time taken to get things done.

Before Google Drive, the process of creating quotes was disjointed and confusing. We’ve made a series of acquisitions over the last 30 years, and with each one, also acquired a new technology and system, which left us with a mismatched set of storage and document creation products. People created their own ‘kingdoms’ of data, and expected they’d be able to share information – with very limited success. With Google Drive, we can deliver quotes to customers at a steady pace, while making sure that employees across the Travis Perkins Group can provide and access the most up-to-date information at any time.

Drive has also taken the sluggishness out of the quote pipeline. In one of our businesses, BSS Industrial, we start by creating a document about the project at the customer’s local branch, then create a shared folder, and add in blueprints, estimates, and photos – anything the rest of the team needs to build and fulfill the quote.

As employees locate and price supplies or visit the building site to take precise measurements, everyone can update the same files. We no longer worry about which email or spreadsheet is correct, since we all work together on the same project quotes. Drive gives us an accurate, up-to-date picture of our progress at any given moment.

Posted by Alan Warren, Engineering VP, Google Docs editors

A few weeks ago at Google I/O, Docs, Sheets and Slides got a major upgrade — making it even easier for you to get work done at the office and on-the-go with Google Apps. In case you missed it, here’s a recap of how you can edit Office files, make Suggested Edits and a new ability to convert tracked changes to Suggested Edits:

Edit and share Office files — without Office
Technology is changing the way people work, but all that change can cause friction when employees are using different software. That’s why we made it possible to edit Office files directly in Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, so you can open and edit those documents in their native format using Office Compatibility Mode. No need to buy additional software or think about how to open your file. The Docs, Sheets and Slides mobile apps come with Office editing built right in, and with the Chrome extension, you can edit and share files directly from Google Drive or Gmail.

Suggest Edits in Docs
Docs makes working together easy by letting people edit files in real-time, rather than emailing multiple versions of the same document back and forth. But sometimes you want to control specific changes someone else makes in a document. Suggest Edits in Docs lets you do just that: your team can make suggestions that you can accept or reject with a single click. This feature is available for anyone with commenting access in Google Docs on the web, and is coming soon to our mobile apps.

Convert your tracked changes to Suggest Edits
While you no longer have to convert Microsoft Word files to Docs (thanks to the recent Quickoffice integrations), if you do, starting today any tracked changes in a .docx file will be automatically carried over to Docs as Suggested Edits. Once you’ve imported your changes, you can begin immediately collaborating with your colleagues in real-time.

These features are available today. So next time you’re collaborating in Docs try suggesting edits to speed up the review process.

Posted by Mike Giresi, CIO, Tory Burch

Editor's note: A few weeks ago, we announced Google Drive for Work, a new premium offering for businesses that includes unlimited storage, advanced audit reporting and new security controls. To celebrate the announcement and show how Drive helps businesses around the world, we’re sharing a few stories from a handful of customers using Drive (and the rest of the Google Apps suite) in innovative ways. Today’s guest blogger is Mike Giresi, CIO of Tory Burch, the lifestyle brand known for its iconic bright colors and eclectic prints, available at 120 boutiques around the world and online at Toryburch.com. To learn more about how Tory Burch’s move to the cloud helped them build a thriving retail business, join our Hangout on Air with Mike and Google’s Head of Industry Solutions & Retail on Wednesday, August 6th.

Before opening a new Tory Burch store, we go through months of planning with as many as 200 people, with tasks ranging from hiring staff, importing custom fixtures, designing windows, and when we can, having Tory on hand to do the opening honors. Nearly all of the documentation around a store opening, like blueprints and project plans, are developed by teams, not just one person. Google Drive helps these teams collaborate on documents and make decisions faster — now we can open three stores in a single weekend, something we couldn’t have done before we moved to Google.

Every Tory Burch store needs to embody the brand, so the process requires careful coordination. The more accessible store information is, the easier it is to decide on next steps. But with our old IT system, emailing spreadsheets back and forth wasn’t enabling the speedy decision-making we need for a rapidly growing retail business. Teams couldn’t get their hands on the right information to push store development forward.

Using Google Drive lets our store-opening teams and outside partners like architects and visual designers connect and collaborate seamlessly. For each Tory Burch store, team managers can create master folders without relying on IT, making it easy for them to store and share project timelines, floor plans, and merchandise lists. With Drive, we don't have to worry about version control, which was a struggle when we shared files over email — now, we know that what's stored and shared is the true, up-to-date document.

Choosing Drive also means we won’t have to worry about storage for documents, especially as we expand the business. Purchasing our own servers and storage disks doesn’t make good business sense for us — why not simply rely on a company like Google that can scale storage much better than we can do ourselves?

We’ve got the perfect combination of fashion’s most colorful and eclectic clothing and accessories, and Tory herself to embody the brand — so we’re confident that the world is ready for many more Tory Burch stores. Google Drive has become a catalyst for our exciting growth plans.

Posted by Greg Hohenbrink, Enterprise IT Manager, Scotts Miracle-Gro

Editor's note: A few weeks ago, we announced Google Drive for Work, a new premium offering for businesses that includes unlimited storage, advanced audit reporting and new security controls. To celebrate the announcement and show how Drive helps businesses around the world, we’re sharing a few stories from a handful of customers using Drive (and the rest of the Google Apps suite) in innovative ways. Today we hear from Greg Hohenbrink, Enterprise IT Manager at Scotts Miracle-Gro, which provides lawn and gardening products to customers around the world.

Scotts Miracle-Gro was founded in Marysville, Ohio, in 1868 as a premium seed company. By 1940, the company reached $1 million in sales and expanded to 60 associates. Today, we have more than 10,000 associates across North America, Europe and Asia, and we sell about $2.8 billion in lawn and gardening care products and services annually. We manage the entire supply chain, from raw materials to shipping, and we’re always looking to streamline the process to become faster and more efficient as the company expands.

In 2012, we took a good, hard look at the IT department and realized that associates spent too much time managing files, folders and emails. We were using a combination of Exchange 2007 and 2010, with teams using a mix of products for cloud-based storage that made our processes disjointed and cross-team collaboration difficult. Our associates needed a platform to be efficient with documents and information. We spent a year evaluating productivity suites with an internal focus group of 100 associates. The overwhelming majority wanted Google Apps and, with help from Onix, we made the move quickly and smoothly.

We’ve seen organic adoption and satisfaction with Google Apps across the company. Most people were already familiar with Gmail, Docs and Drive, so collaboration happened naturally with teams of associates working in the same document instead of saving different versions on the server.

We’re now able to centralize our storage needs with Drive. Most teams use Docs, Slides and Sheets, while relying on Word, Excel and Powerpoint as needed. Since Drive supports all file types, we can store and share everything in one place. We’re seeing growth in adoption of the Drive desktop sync client, which lets associates drag and drop files into a folder in their home drive and have it automatically sync with Drive on the web.

With Drive, we can access all of our files and documents on the go. Recently, I was at an event and my colleague needed me to edit something immediately. I was able to find and open the file through my smartphone and address his concerns on the spot. In the past, I would have had to find a computer, VPN in, and fumble with a log-in. Thanks to Google Apps, what used to take half a day now only takes 30 minutes.

Hangouts is spreading across the organization as well. Our engineering team uses it twice a week to hold video calls with a developer in Hawaii. They also appreciate being able to share code in the same screen. Using a Chromebox in his office, our CIO holds daily standups with the Business Transformation leadership team, which makes videoconferencing quick and easy.

We’re also building applications on top of Google App Engine, which has been surprisingly easy to pick up. Our first big application was a CRM app, which we developed and rolled out with our sales force in a relatively short timeframe. With App Engine, we’re able to support this application without having to think about any of the underlying infrastructure.

For more than a century, Scotts Miracle-Gro has used innovation to help consumers create beautiful, healthy lawns and gardens. With Google Apps, we continue to find innovative ways to empower our associates to support this mission.

Posted by Justine Bienkowski, IT Team Lead, BuzzFeed

Editor's note: A few weeks ago, we announced Google Drive for Work, a new premium offering for businesses that includes unlimited storage, advanced audit reporting and new security controls. To celebrate the announcement and show how Drive helps businesses around the world, we’re sharing a few stories from a handful of customers using Drive (and the rest of the Google Apps suite) in innovative ways. Today’s guest blogger is Justine Bienkowski, IT Team Lead at BuzzFeed, a social news and entertainment company.

BuzzFeed is a content-heavy company—from our popular list posts to in-depth news features to lifestyle surveys, GIFs and videos, we have something for everyone. As our founder, Jonah Peretti, likes to say, our publishing is a lot like a Paris cafe: you may be sitting around reading a philosophy book or something equally mentally stimulating, but if you see a cute dog under the table next to you, you’re still going to want to pet it and enjoy that interaction. People are a lot more complex and multidimensional than liking just one or the other: as with everything, a balance is important.

In order to be able to manage that steady stream of material and get that balance, we need a platform that keeps us organized and helps us collaborate (because sometimes it takes a team to collect the 40 greatest dog GIFs of all time). That’s where Google Apps comes into play.

Justine Bienkowski, IT Team Lead, Buzzfeed

Each day, our team shares, submits and receives over 400 ideas for posts, which come from our editors, our reporters, and our community, and come in all sorts of formats, from .docx, and .zip to .jpg to .mpeg. And no matter the file type or source, we use Drive to store the constant flow of material and ideas, so we can stay organized and the right people can access them from one central place. When an editor receives a proposal or piece they know is perfect for a certain group, they’ll drop it into a Drive folder and share it with the appropriate email alias.

My IT team relies on Drive to share all sorts of documents, spreadsheets and other files. I receive vendor price quotes throughout the week, typically as PDFs, which I store in a shared folder with my group so they can review and comment on them whenever they have the time. We use Drive for important work functions like setting up new hires — what equipment & software they need as well as what email aliases they need to be added to. We use Drive to keep track of inventory in the office as well, so if I need to reference a software key and compare it to an invoice, I have everything where I need it. The Drive mobile app allows me to access all my files when I’m away from my laptop, saving time and encouraging efficiency within the team; just the other night, I received an updated floor plan for our office, which I was able to pull up and approve without having to run home, find and boot up my laptop.

The Google Apps suite as a whole makes us work better and also nurtures the culture we pride ourselves on (you can probably tell from our listicles that we like to have fun—did you see what happened when a member of our edit team accidentally emailed the whole company recently?). BuzzFeed’s editorial team organized a Jorts Week celebration in honor of the revival of the mid-70s uber-short jean shorts, and employees voted for team activities and customized their jorts designs with Forms and tracked jorts sizes in Sheets. The editorial team similarly used Forms to collect submissions for our “What Secrets You Want to Tell Your Mother” feature for Mother’s Day.

From an IT perspective, another major strength of being on the Google platform is the marketplace of third-party tools that make systems management so much easier. We use FlashPanel by BetterCloud to streamline Google Apps management and add security to our Apps domain. We can prompt employees to reset passwords on a regular basis, see which third-party applications people have installed and view publicly shared Drive documents to make sure nothing is public that shouldn’t be.

With Google Drive, we have an easy, reliable way to store, manage and share all the different types of content and information we get from sources around the world. And with the full Apps suite, our editorial team can focus on publishing even more great content while my IT team can focus on giving our company the best tools for their jobs. Google helps us to turn that raw material into the amusing, provocative and quirky posts that make people laugh, cry and keep coming back for more.

Posted by Scott Crowley, SVP & Chief Information Officer, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Fox & Roach, REALTORS®

Editor's note: Last week, we announced Google Drive for Work, a new premium offering for businesses that includes unlimited storage, advanced audit reporting and new security controls. To celebrate the announcement and show how Drive helps businesses around the world, we’re sharing a few stories from a handful of customers using Drive (and the rest of the Google Apps suite) in innovative ways. Today’s guest blogger is Scott Crowley, SVP & Chief Information Officer at Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices (BHHS) Fox & Roach, REALTORS®, a part of HomeServices of America, the nation’s second-largest provider of total home services.

Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Fox & Roach, REALTORS®, is the largest REALTOR® in the tri-state area of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. We’re constantly looking for competitive advantages to recruit and retain experienced agents, while also appealing to the next generation entering the workforce. Because our more than 4,000 sales associates spend most of their time on the road, all the tools need to be available on mobile phones and tablets. They need to access important information at their fingertips, whether they’re in the car, a property site or at one of our 65 offices.

A little over a year ago, we realized that not only was our technology platform lacking the mobility our workforce needed, but our sales associates and employees were not solely using the technology we provided them. They were looking elsewhere for IT solutions, forwarding work email to personal third party accounts for additional storage and using third party cloud storage providers. We needed a solution that could provide the same quality of technology tools to our users without them going outside of IT -- and knew Google Apps was the answer. After running a pilot with our IT department last July, we migrated our more than 5,000 users to the new platform throughout with winter with the help of Cloud Sherpas, our Google Apps reseller.

The move to Google has enabled us to provide our users with an all-in-one communication and collaboration platform to increase productivity and efficiency by bringing our tools together in one place, with one login. Among the additional benefits that Google Apps provides, it’s easy to use, works seamlessly with mobile devices, and offers significantly more storage space.

Google Drive allows us to share documents instead of sending attachments back and forth, making it easier for teams to work together on projects more effectively and collaborate on live documents. Not only is Drive transforming how we collaborate and collect information from around our footprint, but it also provides a great cloud backup, especially as a personal disaster recovery solution in case hardware fails or mobile devices are lost or stolen. Google Drive works for any kind of file type, not just Google Sheets, Slides and Docs — which is important in a business where we still work heavily with PDF contracts and photos for listings. Today, everything is automatically stored in the cloud for access from any device, anywhere.

We’ve been using the shared Google calendar to revamp our closing process. Instead of calling remote offices to book rooms, our coordinators can now schedule the settlement, invite all parties involved and book the room all at the same time. If the settlement gets postponed or moved, all participants are notified immediately, saving critical time and making us more efficient.

With the flexibility of Google Apps, it’s much easier for us to integrate with other systems. Via Google Sync, we can push and pull contacts directly to and from our CRM, providing our sales associates constant access to all leads as they arrive, particularly on their mobile devices. Our transaction management system allows documents to be uploaded directly from Drive, which eliminates the need for local storage and makes working from a mobile device a true advantage.

We’re constantly growing our usage of Google Apps products. Our IT department uses Hangouts to help diagnose problems for remote staff, allowing them to resolve issues faster and provide better support. Later this year, we plan to use a combination of Google+ and Sites to replace our existing Sharepoint based intranet.

With Google, we get a technology partner, not just a vendor. We receive several updates a month, instead of waiting for bi-annual releases, each providing new innovative functionality to our company. No one asks
“what version of Google apps are you running” -- everything is up to date without IT intervention. Our sales associates and employees now have the ability to work and communicate in one platform, making the entire company more efficient, integrated, and successful.

Posted by William Davis, Director of Research and Innovation, Bangor Daily News

Editor's note: Today’s guest post comes from William Davis, Director of Research and Innovation at the Bangor Daily News, a 4th-generation family-owned online and daily print publication covering news from around the state of Maine.

The Bangor Daily News has witnessed and reported on quite a long list of moments in American history since it first went to press back in 1889. From world wars to local fires, peace protests to suffrage laws, we’ve covered it all — keeping the people of Maine up to date and in the loop. And we’ve kept it all in the family along the way: our current publisher, Richard J. Warren, is the great-grandson of our founder, and his sister is our chairman of the board.

The last decade has been especially tumultuous as our business has changed rapidly. With people reading news online instead of in print and the rise of the 24-hour news cycle, we’ve re-evaluated how we define ourselves as a newsroom. And our legacy systems were holding us back as we tried to compete with a new wave of digital-only publishers.

One of the biggest issues we faced were slow, expensive systems that kept reporters in the newsroom instead of finding and researching stories in the field. With a large newsroom flung all across the state, traditional desktop and local server-based programs just didn’t cut it. To file a story, reporters often sent their editor an email with a Microsoft Word attachment, and the story would have to be copied and pasted into our local system. To push the story to our website, someone copied and pasted it into WordPress, added images and hyperlinks, formatted it, and published it. If the reporter filed a newer version of the story, the process started back from the beginning and all changes were lost. The process was painful for everyone involved.

That all changed when we moved to Google Apps. Now we use the Drive API to complete the process in a single click. We connected Drive, WordPress, and Adobe InDesign to make a tedious and slow process easier and faster.

In our new system, reporters and editors write their stories in Docs, using collaborative real-time editing, comments and revision history to make process quick and painless. We then use the Drive API to capture the text of the story, strip out comments and editing notes, and push it directly to our website — no copying and pasting. The text also flows into InDesign fully formatted, making the production of our print newspaper easier, faster and cheaper as well.

We also use the Drive API for project budgeting, which is how our newsroom tracks and prioritizes articles using metadata like wordcount, category, story importance and estimated submission time. Editors use the budget to plan our online content strategy for the day and decide what will go in the next day’s paper. As a reporter submits a budget line to let his or her editors know to expect it, a Doc is created via the API, keeping everything tied together and easy to track.

Google Apps costs next to nothing and lets us work the way we want. Instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on complex systems, we can spend that money on reporters. And in an industry where seconds, pennies and flexibility matter, Google Apps has helped our business focus on what’s really critical — breaking news that matters to Maine.

Posted by John Paul Besong, SVP & CIO, Rockwell Collins

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is John Paul Besong, SVP & CIO at Rockwell Collins, a Fortune 500 manufacturer of communication, aviation electronic, and information management systems, services and solutions.

In 1933, Rockwell Collins — then less than a year old and known as Collins Radio — supplied the equipment to establish a communications link with the South Pole expedition of Rear Admiral Richard Byrd. It was an exhilarating start to what would, over the next 80 years, include a number of industry milestones, including providing communications for the Apollo, Gemini and Mercury programs, pioneering GPS navigation, and more recently, developing the industry's only aviation head-up synthetic vision system.

Today, we're one of the world’s leading aerospace and defence companies. Our team of about 20,000 employees builds systems to ensure pilots around the world arrive and land safely. Our aviation electronics are installed in the cockpits or cabins of nearly every commercial air transport aircraft in the world. And our communication systems transmit about 70 percent of U.S. and allied military airborne communications.

Because we operate in an industry that places a premium on safety and serve clients that prioritize security, our technology — and our IT environment — has to be safe, trustworthy and reliable. Recently, I realized these priorities, along with our risk averse culture, had left us with IT tools that kept our operations secure and consistent but left our employees and our IT team frustrated.

The problems were widespread. With our legacy mail system, less than 10 percent of our employees — those with company Blackberries — could check their email and calendar on the go. A majority of our engineers expressed dissatisfaction with our development tools. And we were having trouble attracting young new talent. After digging deeper, I sent out a company-wide survey, and the message came through loud and clear: our employees wanted a faster, more flexible platform that was safe and let them access their info and collaborate on the go and from multiple devices.

We looked at a number of options, and after an extended evaluation process, decided that Google Apps for Business was the best solution for both protecting sensitive company information and giving our employees the consumer-friendly collaboration tools they were asking for. With the help of Maven Wave, our Google Apps implementation partner, we made the move successfully and completed our official go-live just a few weeks ago.

Google Apps is moving us into the next era of user-centric computing by allowing our employees to use technology at work the same way they do at home. To start, we’ve replaced the legacy mail system with Google Apps for email, calendar, storage, documents and video chat, and all employees can access their Google Apps account on their own mobile devices — Android, iPhone, tablet, whatever they choose to use. We have also deployed a campus-wide employee wireless network so people don’t feel chained to their desks.

Our employees are now exploring and adopting all of the other collaborative features of Google Apps as well. Three weeks into our deployment, 12,500 employees are using Drive for secure file storage and document sharing, with more than 750,000 files uploaded to Drive. Nearly 20,000 Google Docs, Sheets and Slides have been created. And finally, approximately 10,000 files have already been shared on a read/write access basis, enabling employees to co-author and collaborate within a single document.

Rockwell Collins is a Fortune 500 company with employees located across the globe, and we need to leverage technology to collaborate better and to work more efficiently. Now that our employees can respond to each other almost instantly and work from virtually anywhere with Google Apps, I believe we’re paving the way for the next phase of Rockwell Collins’ journey.

Posted by Michael Cai, Product Manager

It’s now easier to connect with co-workers and discuss important business decisions face-to-face with some new updates to Google+ and Hangouts. In the past, some of you may have noticed an admin option to enable a preview of “Google+ premium features.” Today we’re rolling out these premium features to everybody. It won’t change the way you’ve previously interacted with Google+ or Hangouts, but it will let you access several great business-specific features you may have missed out on before now.

These changes will let organizations do two things: first, you’ll have a more tailored Google+ experience with enhanced control options, like making Google+ posts restricted to your domain by default or the ability to hide employee profiles in external searches.

Second, you can save time and money while meeting face-to-face with colleagues using 15-person HD video calls with Google Hangouts. So the next time you need to quickly chat with a colleague or hash out a decision, you can just jump into a Hangout with one click from Calendar or an email invitation.

All new Google Apps customers will see these updates from the moment they register, and current users will see these great updates in the next month. Read more about these changes in our Help Center.

Posted by Richard Huré, CIO, Fred & Farid Group

Editor's note: Our guest blogger is Richard Huré, CIO of digital creative group Fred & Farid Group. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Fred & Farid Group is the first French independent Digital Creative Group based in Paris and Shanghai. Founded in 2006 by Frederic Raillard and Farid Mokart, we create digital integrated ad campaigns for global brands such as Audi, Porsche, Diesel, Société Générale, Garnier, and Mondelez. We’ve grown extremely fast and now have more than 350 employees in our Paris and Shanghai offices and have won 129 digital distinctions since 2011.

Though Fred & Farid is known for its tech-savvy campaigns spanning web, mobile, social, video and music, until recently, we used old-school business applications like Lotus Notes and Microsoft Office. When I joined in 2011, I wanted to move our company to the cloud to improve efficiency and increase collaboration between our creative, technology, and business teams in France and China. I chose to roll out Chromebooks because Chrome OS is the perfect operating system for the cloud -- it’s easy to manage and maintain, makes collaboration a snap, and offers integrated security and control.

Macs are a popular choice among the creative team. But I soon realized not everyone needs a Mac, especially the 60 percent of our employees who work in office roles like marketing, sales, IT, and administration. We recently rolled out 10 Samsung Chromebooks in a small pilot and plan to have 200 employees on Chromebooks by the end of the year. Our decision to adopt Chromebooks wasn’t based solely on price -- though we expect to save a significant amount compared to deploying Macs -- but also a desire to have faster collaboration. When you have a Chromebook, you think less about downloading stuff to your hard drive and more about sharing information in the cloud. With Google Drive, we're able to store, sync and share all our important files easily, whether it's when we're on our Chromebooks or on our phones and tablets on the go.

We use Google Hangouts for all our voice communications -- we don’t even have phone lines in our offices anymore. In the Paris office alone, we conduct more than 50 Hangouts each day. Of course, we also use Drive for document sharing and Calendar for scheduling.

From an IT management perspective, Chromebooks are a dream. Using the management console, we can push apps onto employees’ devices, including some in-house collaboration apps we’ve created like the Fred & Farid Bridge, a social network where employees share photos, videos, music, and other creative ideas. In the future, when we have 200 Chromebooks, we’ll explore new ways to use the Management Console, including for security and analytics.

Chrome OS is like a blank canvas, and we can’t wait to come up with new ways to use it. I’m thinking about installing scannable tabs on meeting room doors, and when employees enter they can check in with their smartphones so the rooms show up as ‘booked’ in Google Calendar. Creativity thrives when people can freely communicate, collaborate, and share ideas. Chromebooks will help us unify employees across time zones into one collaborative team -- even as the company grows at an unstoppable pace.

Posted by Jeni Britton Bauer, Founder, President and Creative Director, Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams

Editor's note: Did you know 60% of young business owners saw an increase in customer engagement after getting a professional email address? Or that 81% of young business owners said that online file sharing is critical to their businesses? That’s just a snapshot of what we learned from the Young Business Success report and infographic we released to kick off National Small Business Week. To recognize and celebrate the young businesses taking the entrepreneurial leap, we’re revisiting a few customers to hear how they got their businesses off the ground and what they’ve learned along the way. Today, we hear from Jeni Britton Bauer, Founder, President and Creative Director or Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams, who first shared their Gone Google story in 2012.

What was the inspiration for starting Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream?
I was 22 when I knew I wanted to make ice cream. I had spent some time blending perfumes with essential oils, and one day, decided to mix some cayenne essential oil with a cup of chocolate ice cream. It was cold. It tasted like chocolate. After a few seconds it burst into flames in the back of my throat. I couldn’t stop thinking about it and knew I’d found my canvas. So I left Ohio State University, started Scream, and sold the delicious dessert concoctions out of the North Market in Columbus, Ohio.

Scream lasted two years, and while it failed to become a profitable business, it made the foundation for what became Jeni’s just a few years later. I learned a lot in those two years, especially the importance of having a balance between being new and being consistent — I loved making new, unique flavors like goat cheese with fresh cherries each day, while customers sometimes just wanted their go-to salted caramel day after day. So I created a dipping cabinet for our signature blends, and kept another for the experimental concoctions. It worked. And here we are today, with nearly 400 employees and our ice creams being sold in over 1,200 grocery stores.

How has using Google Apps helped you in building and growing your business?
Google Apps makes it possible for businesses like ours to exist at all. When I started Jeni’s, I didn’t have to hire an IT guy to tell me how many servers I would need, which meant we could put that money towards our ice cream flavors instead.

Equally important is how Google Apps helps our business feel like a family. Yes, being profitable is essential (I learned that with Scream), but it’s the people that make us successful, and Hangouts keep us connected as we grow and hire throughout the country. We hold company all-hands meetings, new flavor brainstorm sessions and weekly status check-ins over Hangouts, so our employees in California feel like they know their colleagues in New York, despite the distance and lack of in-person contact.

Also, here’s a fun fact: I wrote two books on Google Docs. We organize recipes and track our changes and tweaks along the way in Docs, so everyone can access a single document and add their updates and comments, and it just made sense for me to do the same for my books.

Any advice for other aspiring or budding entrepreneurs?
Starting with nothing is a hidden blessing, so don’t let a need for scrappiness get in the way of launching your business. Having your boots on the ground from the get-go means learning about every aspect of the business — not just the fun stuff (the ice cream mixing) but the hands-on stuff (serving the goods) and the stuff you thought you’d never imagined yourself doing (financial statements). You learn the ins and outs and the nitty gritty details of running a company, which is an essential skill for any small business owner. And never distance yourself too much from the customer; they’re the ones your livelihood relies on, so make sure you keep an ear on the ground.

Make sure you do something you love. I’ve gone through plenty of tough times, but I didn’t question what I was doing because I knew it was my passion. I took the plunge for something I knew I was meant to do.

Posted by Amit Singh, President of Google Enterprise

Millions of businesses trust Google to keep their data safe—a responsibility we take very seriously. We focus on protecting our customers’ data from all unauthorized access, whether from common phishing, sophisticated hacking, or state-sponsored intrusions. That’s why this spring we implemented new, mandatory HTTPS connections to secure user access to Gmail and protect email messages as they move to Gmail servers.

Our commitment to your security doesn’t stop there, which is why we’ve recently added even more business-friendly features for our Google Apps Business, Government and Education customers:

• Mail routing, delivery controls and SMTP relay service—Control the flow of information to and from your company with policy-based routing to ensure that company messages are filtered, even if they are sent from third-party or other non-Gmail sources.
• Attachment compliance—Protect your business by blocking or rerouting messages based on what is attached to emails, providing controls over what content is sent and received.
• TLS Encryption of message content—Prevent eavesdropping and message spoofing through secure encryption and delivery.

In addition to these increased security measures, as we recently announced, we’ve now turned off ads in Google Apps services. This means administrators no longer have the option or ability to turn on ads in these services. We’ve also permanently removed all ads scanning in Gmail for Google Apps, which means Google does not collect or use data in Google Apps services for advertising purposes.

Customers who have chosen to show AdSense ads on their Google Sites will still be able to display those existing ads on their websites. However, it will no longer be possible to edit or add new AdSense ads to new or existing sites.

All this is part of our commitment to providing the best security to ensure your data is protected, while strengthening the features our Google Apps customers care about the most.

Posted by Adam Wilson, Co-Founder and Chief Software Architect, Orbotix

Editor's note: Did you know 60% of young business owners saw an increase in customer engagement after getting a professional email address? Or that 81% of young business owners said that online file sharing is critical to their businesses? That’s just a snapshot of what we learned from the Young Business Success report and infographic we released to kick off National Small Business Week. To recognize and celebrate the young businesses taking the entrepreneurial leap, we’re revisiting a few customers to hear how they got their businesses off the ground and what they’ve learned along the way. Today, we hear from Adam Wilson, Co-Founder and Chief Software Architect at Orbotix, who first shared their Gone Google story in 2013.

What was the inspiration for your business? What made you decide you’d stop what you were doing and pursue it?

Our inspiration was simple: change the way people interact with robots. Before we started Orbotix, my co-founder Ian and I shared a frustration with the lack of cost effective computing brainpower in the robotics space, especially with phones. We decided to use smartphones to change the robotics world — with Sphero, a robotic ball that could be controlled with your smartphone. Our idea has broadened to the “connected play” space, but we still aim to change the interaction of the physical with the digital.

Our decision to go full forward happened quickly. We had built a fully functioning prototype that people were genuinely excited about and we were propelled into working on Orbotix officially full-time when we were accepted to Techstars, a seed incubator in Boulder, Colorado.

Was there a pivotal moment when you realized you’d made it? That you’d really turned that business a reality?

Ian and I were both humbled by our first prototype Sphero being shown on Gizmodo — the video got nearly 60,000 views in a single weekend. For us, it seemed we had discovered a form factor that struck a chord with the world. Securing our series A funding was another obvious milestone, but was really just the beginning of a long journey towards success.

How has using Google Apps helped you in building and growing your business?

Let's face it — setting up email, calendars, a shared "drive" space, simple forms, a QA site and hosting, among other things, would just slow us down from our real goals. Using Google Apps lets our company focus on what we do best, and have someone else focus on keeping our email secure and syncing our calendars across all our devices.

If you had to do it all over again, what would you do differently?

We would’ve launched our education program earlier on in the game. We started pretty late with SPRK — “Schools, Parents, Robots, Kids” — to inspire and teach kids to be tomorrow’s inventors and innovators by teaching them concepts in programming, robotics and math in a fun way, and wish we had thought of it earlier. The Sphero product is a really natural educator of technology, but it took a few years to realize we could build an educational curriculum for students around it.

Any advice for other aspiring or budding entrepreneurs?

After Ian and I secured our Series A funding, we asked our lead investors if there was anything we could do that they would get upset about. We got two pieces of advice that I’d pass along to other aspiring entrepreneurs:

1. Be extremely critical of your own products, dream big, and go HUGE.
2. Don't get in over your head, be intellectually honest with yourself, co-workers and the board.

Posted by Noah Dorrance, Co-Founder, Banshee Wines

Editor's note: Did you know 60% of young business owners saw an increase in customer engagement after getting a professional email address? Or that 81% of young business owners said that online file sharing is critical to their businesses? That’s just a snapshot of what we learned from the Young Business Success report and infographic we released to kick off National Small Business Week. To recognize and celebrate the young businesses taking the entrepreneurial leap, we’re revisiting a few customers to hear how they got their businesses off the ground and what they’ve learned along the way. Today, we hear from Noah Dorrance, co-founder of Banshee Wines, who first shared their Gone Google story back in 2012.

What inspired you to start Banshee Wines?

The inspiration for Banshee was a shared love of wine among friends paired with a great opportunity in the market. We started our business in the midst of the late 2000s economic crash, but for us the timing was perfect: things were relatively cheap and possibilities that weren’t there a few years before were suddenly open.

Since we’re all friends, we had an acute sense of trust in one another’s capabilities and a good sense of how all those things fit together. Without each other, none of us would have been able to build what we have built together.

What made you decide you’d actually stop what you were doing and turn your idea into a business?

We started Banshee as a side project while we kept our day jobs. In a sense, we were burning the candle at both ends, which is much easier to do when you’re finding success. The demand just kept growing until we had to drop everything and work on Banshee full-time.

Although it’s not feasible for every entrepreneur, I highly advise getting as far down the road as possible with your startup before leaving a steady paycheck. I’ve done it the other way, and this way was much more fun.

Was there a pivotal moment when you realized you’d made it? That you’d really turned that business a reality?

While there have been lots of small gratifying moments and milestones — like a friend texting photos of Banshee at a Michelin starred restaurant or getting our first order from Denmark — I think what pushes us to grow and build Banshee is feeling like we haven’t actually made it at all. Yes, we’ve created a successful livelihood for ourselves, but we wake up everyday with a little chip on our shoulder, a good dollop of ambition and a small dose of fear. I consider it well aligned with the message of one of my favorite Nike ad campaigns: “There is no finish line.”

How has using Google Apps helped you in building and growing your business?

When we first started, we didn’t have an office or any real infrastructure. We were just three driven guys with the right idea, skills and set of contacts. Google Apps gave our bootstrapped, fledgling business a core set of tools that allowed us to work together more efficiently and organize ourselves with ease. We were able to devote more time to making and selling wine because of Google Apps.

Any advice for other aspiring or budding entrepreneurs?

There may a few examples to disprove this, but I’d suggest figuring out first how and who to sell your product to. If you can do that, everything else is possible.

Second, make sure you’re willing to invest all of yourself in your idea. Think of it like getting married. Be ready to eat, breath, and drink it every day.

Posted by Silji Abraham, CIO, Sigma-Aldrich Corporation

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Silji Abraham, CIO at Sigma-Aldrich Corporation, a life science and high technology company with more than 9,000 employees and operations in over 40 countries. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Can you tell us about Sigma-Aldrich and your decision to move to Google Apps?
Sigma-Aldrich is a leading life science and high technology company whose products are used in scientific research and disease diagnosis, and as key components in pharmaceutical manufacturing. Our customers include more than 1.4 million scientists and technologists in life science companies, university and government institutions, hospitals and industry. We have a global team of more than 9,000 employees, who produce and distribute more than 230,000 products to over 40 countries and provide excellent service worldwide.

Like many other organizations, our employees around the world create significant amounts of unstructured data in various forms to support our business and our customers. We started exploring Google Apps as a global collaboration platform to bring this unstructured content in real-time to every employee anywhere, irrespective of the device.

How does Google Apps fit into your vision to change and improve the way employees work?
Just as Sigma-Aldrich accelerates customers’ success through innovative products, customized solutions and unsurpassed service, our Information Technology group does the same for our internal customers. Our entire employee population benefits from the innovative, collaborative nature of Google Apps. At our recent sales meeting, for example, we relied on the Google Apps platform to make the week completely paperless. Key documents and up-to-date information were available and accessible to the team from their phones, tablets and laptops, and we didn’t have to waste any money printing things out or time worrying about changes to the plans along the way.

How is Google Apps changing the way you manage your IT?
Consumerization has driven significant changes in how the best businesses satisfy the collaboration needs of their employees. Now that we’re on Google Apps, we have a single platform that solves these needs across the enterprise, without the need for third-party add-ons. It’s easier to manage and provides a true consumerized experience for all our users. From an IT management perspective, we’ve simplified our collaboration platform significantly.

What role does Google Apps play in the strategy and success of your recruiting plans?
College graduates today are quite familiar with the consumerization of IT, such as Gmail and the Google Apps collaboration platform. I think this familiarity helps new employees acclimate to our business environment in a shorter period of time, increasing their efficiency and productivity.

What are you most excited about as you adopt Google Apps across the company?
I’m particularly excited about three specific things when it comes to our switch to Google Apps. First, we’re able to make all of our unstructured data available for collaboration to all employees, in real-time, on any device, supported by a full content search. Second, hundreds of disparate, custom-built small applications are naturally finding their way into Google Apps because of the power of a homogenous platform. These applications provide additional ways for real-time collaboration and a better user experience. Third, using Hangouts has already made us more productive as an organization, and we’ve only just begun. Jumping in on a video conference is no longer a siloed process. It’s seamlessly integrated with the flow of emailing a colleague or sharing a Google Doc.

Finally, let me just say that with Google Apps, I believe we’re supporting the core mission of Sigma-Aldrich internally to our employees. That is, we’re enabling our technology to improve the quality of life of employees, so they can focus their energy on developing and delivering the highest quality products and services to our customers.

Posted by Bhupesh Arora, Senior Director of New Technologies, Avery Dennison

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Bhupesh Arora, Senior Director of New Technologies for Avery Dennison, a global leader in labeling and packaging materials and solutions. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Our founder, Stan Avery, invented the self-adhesive label and launched the modern labeling industry when he started Avery Dennison back in 1935. Seventy-eight years later, Avery Dennison products are all around us, in thousands of consumer and industrial applications. And we’re still innovating. Brand-enhancing labeling solutions, RFID-enabled inventory management systems and wearable medical sensors are just some of the products fueling our innovation pipeline.

It’s not surprising, then, that Avery Dennison was quick to adopt Google Apps for its global workforce. Enabling collaboration to unleash human creativity through fast, simple and robust digital means is a big step in innovation for us. We also expect significant payback in greater productivity and cost savings.

Adopting Google Apps has allowed us to retire costly, less interactive email, intranet and social media platforms and replace them with a single virtual work and collaboration space that’s accessible to our employees anywhere in the world. And Google’s data center and network infrastructure allow us to deliver these services securely and with low latency, regardless of location.

Some of our business leaders were concerned about the size and complexity of such a transformation, and with good reason. Managing this kind of change—asking 19,000 computer-based employees to adopt a whole new set of tools in their daily work habits—turned out to be one of the most important parts of the initiative.

With the help of Tempus Nova, a Google Apps Reseller and our change management partner, we planned carefully, started small, learned at every step, and built scale and momentum over a 9-month period. We cultivated individual employees to become knowledgeable and enthusiastic Google Guides. And we worked closely with individual business divisions as their employees began adopting Google Apps.

It was also a tremendous help to have all our senior leaders become early and visible users of the new tools. Our CIO, Rich Hoffman, was a particularly strong advocate. He championed the initiative from the beginning and immediately incorporated Google Apps into all his personal communications and document-sharing habits. He sent regular emails to the entire company promoting the tools, encouraging employees to explore them and amplifying the excitement that was quick to spread as we rolled out the Google platform around the globe. He knows the benefits of going to the cloud and appreciates how Google has been a full strategic partner throughout the process.

Today, nearly all our computer-enabled employees use Google Apps. It’s early in the experience, but we’re already seeing improvements in productivity and user satisfaction. Our employees were hungry for better communications and collaboration tools and the freedom to use them anywhere at any time. They love the speed and stability of their new Chrome browser, and they’re embracing Google Docs for its real-time editing and collaboration capabilities—and its ability to eliminate unnecessary meetings. And everyone is delighted with the easy, ubiquitous access to people and data made possible by a cloud-based platform. Our senior leadership sees a platform that is actively fostering a new era of innovation at Avery Dennison—one built on unfettered creativity and collaboration.

All in all, adopting Google Apps has been more than a change in technology for Avery Dennison—it’s a key part of a major transformation in the way we work.

Editor's note: From Ada Lovelace to the ladies of ENIAC, women have played an important part in driving technology forward. As Women’s History Month winds down, we’re highlighting a handful of women who are making strides, driving change and shaping the future of technology. Today, we hear from Carolyn Cheng, SVP of Strategic Services for Royal LePage, a Google Enterprise customer.

How did you first get involved in technology?
I’d say that technology found me. I began my professional life as a management consultant in strategy and operations at Deloitte Consulting, then joined the growth strategy group at Brookfield Real Estate Services to help drive new business opportunities. After a strong growth period for the company, each person from the team took on a strategic role in one of the operating companies - and I joined Royal LePage. I was brought on to develop new products and services for the network of agents (now more than 15,000), and since they’re distributed so widely across North America, many of those products and services had to be delivered over the web. And thus began my journey into the world of technology.

Have any mentors or communities been especially instrumental to your interest and success in tech?
The Royal LePage culture has played a huge role in driving and developing my career in tech. When I started at the company, the CIO and half of our senior executives were women, so having those positive examples was inspiring. Our culture is also very entrepreneurial, driven in particular by our President, who ensures that employees who show enthusiasm, curiosity and capability are given opportunities to pursue new ideas - even if they’re outside their defined job role. I wasn’t a technologist by trade, for example, but once I’d established my capabilities and strengths, I was given new opportunities that happened to intersect with technology. In general, I think the inquisitive, analytical problem solving skills that are the backbone of strategy are well aligned with developing and delivering services through technology.

What are some of the biggest changes you’ve seen in technology since working in the space?
For one, it’s now much easier and faster to implement technology projects. A decade ago, we often built our own custom solutions in-house, which meant building the software, installing the hardware and learning by trial and error along the way. These were greater stress-induced days, to say the least. Today, third-party solutions in real estate are far more mature and require much more straightforward configuration. And when we choose to build custom, differentiated solutions, we partner with experienced vendors, use an agile process supported with documentation and, most often, ensure those solutions are cloud-based. On the whole, projects deliver in almost half the time, at a lower cost and with a far higher quality product.

What advice do you have for women interested or working in tech today?
Technology is such an integral part of the fabric of how work gets done that I think it’s critical for all women to learn about it one way or another. There’s no role that doesn’t touch technology somehow: sales people need CRMs, marketers have to be conversant in SEO, SEM and social media, finance relies on tech-based tools to deliver business intelligence. The choice revolves more around where you want to sit on the spectrum of technology - on one end, purely as an end user, or on the other, as a more technical creator or implementer. But the more you know about technology, the more opportunities you open up for yourself.

So, if I had one piece of advice, it’s to learn about technology from a young age, then decide what interests you most and go after it. Technology has a much broader definition and is more accessible than ever before. And from what I’ve experienced myself, women in technology are often very grounded, extraordinarily passionate and want to achieve great things, so you’ll be in good company.

Editor's note: From Ada Lovelace to the ladies of ENIAC, women have played an important part in driving technology forward. As Women’s History Month winds down, we’re highlighting a handful of women who are making strides, driving change and shaping the future of technology. Today, we hear from Kelly Campbell, Director of Enterprise Marketing at Google.

How did you get into technology?
I entered the world of technology when I joined Google in 2005 after getting my MBA. I’d worked in Finance earlier in my career and did an internship as a brand manager at a large CPG company, but both had left me wanting more. In my second year of business school, a handful of companies from various industries came to campus to talk about potential job opportunities. I popped into my first tech session, with Amazon, and was blown away. There was so much energy and excitement around what they were doing and where the tech industry was going that just didn’t exist in the other sessions. Then Google visited, and I was hooked. I joined the company after graduation and haven’t looked back since. In this industry, you have to constantly challenge the status quo and think about the future first. I love the pace, energy, challenges and vast opportunity.

What are some of the biggest changes you’ve seen in technology since working in the space?
Since I joined Google, I’ve seen a dramatic change in the way people work and the way people learn.

When I started, most people used devices and apps in their home life that they loved, while they were stuck with slow, heavy enterprise software and devices at work. Working from home, on the road or from a remote office meant feeling disconnected and operating in isolation. Now, with the incredible growth in the mobile space and the development of smartphones and tablets, people can use whichever devices they want to work with and work from wherever they need to be. You don’t have to be in the same place to feel like you’re working side by side with someone. You’re seeing their face over a video conference or collaborating on a document at the same exact time, watching as the words they type appear right on the screen in front of you.

On the learning front, if you look at a classroom today and compare it with eight years ago, the landscape has changed exponentially. Students are relying more on technology to learn, and education content and devices are opening new opportunities for teaching all over the world.

What advice do you have for other women interested in technology?
I’m one of four girls in my family, and my father always taught me the importance of having thick skin. I definitely think this applies to anyone working in the technology space. Decisions are made quickly. Change happens often. It’s important to be open to all perspectives and to be ready to push hard for what you really believe in.

How did starting a family affect your ability to continue to move fast at work in the tech space?
It was incredibly hard to take that first step away from work, and then to come back five months later and acknowledge how much I’d missed. But becoming a mother has also helped me in ways that I didn’t anticipate. First, it helped me put things in perspective. It’s incredibly inspiring to look at my child and think about all of the possibilities that technology will enable for him. Second, I increased my productivity quite a bit when I had a child. It’s important to me to be fully present whether I’m with family or colleagues. To strike this balance, I need to draw clear lines between work time and family time.

Editor's note: From Ada Lovelace to the ladies of ENIAC, women have played an important part in driving technology forward. As Women’s History Month winds down, we’re highlighting a handful of women who are making strides, driving change and shaping the future of technology. Today, we hear from Tonya Peer, VP of IT Shared Services for Office Depot, a Google Enterprise customer.

How did you first get involved in technology?
I noticed early on that I really liked computers and I loved problem solving. I got into computers, thought I’d take a few classes, and did really well — I was at the top of my class. I went into the computer science field because I thought it was even more challenging than some of the other careers I was considering. It’s definitely an ongoing challenge, but that’s what I love about it. I’m always learning.

What are some of biggest changes you’ve seen in tech?
When I first started in tech, I was working on a huge IBM mainframe. Over time, I saw the move from mainframe to client server, client server to web, web to mobile. Technology has evolved to be much more user friendly and much more user-empowering. It’s amazing to see the shift to cloud-based technologies and the impact it has had on the industry.

Another big shift has come from the Internet — the ability to search for anything you need and the ability to get an answer to any question that you have. The fact that you can do that just with your computer, your tablet or your phone didn’t exist when I first started in tech. It’s such a sweeping change.

What advice do you for for other women interested in technology?
Make sure you go after a career that gets you excited when you wake up in the morning. Always remember to do the best you can to satisfy your customers, because ultimately, that’s the purpose of technology — to make end users happy. And don’t forget to speak your mind. Step out. Say what you think. Have an opinion. Be present.