Posted by Daniel Durgan, IT Business Partner at ISG

Editor's note: Today we hear from Daniel Durgan, IT Business Partner at ISG, an international construction services company delivering fit out, construction, engineering services and a range of specialist solutions. Daniel explains why there’s never been a better time to digitally transform the construction industry.

The construction industry is undergoing a digital revolution. Companies that have for decades relied heavily on printed contracts, drawings and documents are now moving to online tools to save time and money and keep productivity up in a marketplace that’s more expansive and more demanding. At ISG, we’re using Google’s cloud-based tools to ensure that we’re at the forefront of this industry shift.

With Google Apps, we’re taking full advantage of technology-enhanced collaboration, productivity and mobility. Over the course of a few hours, I can use Google Drive to review a presentation on my tablet, Gmail to check emails and Google Calendar to schedule meetings on my phone while away from the office. I can also jump into a meeting with colleagues from around the world from any of the 26 Chromeboxes that are set up in one of our conference rooms. Whether I’m on a site visit, in the office or on the move, Google Apps allows me to continue working and collaborating with my team.

Projects move fast with real-time collaboration It’s essential for our business to control who has access to certain documents. Drawings must only be issued to authorised people, and each person must review the latest version as it’s being developed. Drive enables us to completely control what’s shared inside and outside of our company — the fact that our team alone has 1.5 million files in Drive speaks to our reliance on the tool for secure file storage.

Google Docs allows us to collaborate on shared documents at the same time, no matter where we are in the world. I can start shaping up a proposal in London and invite a colleague in Europe to work on it with me. There’s also more of a human element. When someone comments, you see their face next to it — it ties you emotionally to the process. We keep track of all our revisions in Sheets to monitor our progress. And we can always instant message each other with quick questions or suggestions, so we feel connected, all the time.

A lot of what we do is very visual. It’s hard to describe building plans and designs over the phone. With Hangouts, we can bring everyone together to discuss these plans and drawings as if we were all in the same room. We can move quickly from stakeholders to contractors to suppliers to make sure the right people are involved in the right conversations.

Staff expect more from an IT solution A big part of my team’s role is to help build relationships and ensure employees communicate effectively and get the support they need. When we sent out a survey using Forms to ask all our staff what they’d like to see from IT, they told us they wanted to find out more about our Google tools. We’re using Synergise Google Apps Training to help our stakeholders go beyond the basics and use the suite to its full potential.

Quality: getting it right the first time Quality is extremely important in our business, so we carry out frequent on-site check-ins to ensure teams are following the proper processes and delivering a high standard of construction correctly the first time. When we do these quality checks, we submit recommendations and observations using Forms on Android tablets. The information is imported into Sheets, and using Apps Script, we create dashboards, so employees across teams and functions can easily track the check-ins in real time.

We’re improving the way we work all the time, and that’s thanks to the support and enthusiasm of our employees. Many of our automated solutions have been suggested by them, and it’s great to see how passionate they are about Google Apps. There’s also an excitement among my team around what the future holds for us and our industry with new tools at our dispense and a new way of working for our customers.

Posted by Dan Tisone, VP of Global IT, BioDot

Editor's note: Today we hear from Dan Tisone, VP of Global IT at BioDot, a low volume dispensing manufacturer specializing in biotech applications. Learn how BioDot’s 60 employees use Android and Chrome devices to work closely together and build better products.


I’ve led IT at BioDot since my father, a former research and development engineer at Nokia Bell Labs, founded the company in 1994. Since then, I’ve seen workplace technology evolve from clunky desktops and servers to the fast, cloud-based devices we use today.

Our transition to Google started with Gmail in 2009. Through Gmail we discovered Google Apps like Drive, Hangouts and Docs. Google Apps are affordable and easy to use, so when we needed to purchase computers and smartphones for our employees the following year, we chose Google Chrome and Android products. Today, we have 42 Android smartphones, as well as a few dozen Chromebooks and Chromeboxes.

As an international business headquartered in Southern California with satellite offices in Asia and Europe, our sales team travels a great deal, and tends to use their smartphones more than laptops, whether they’re at the airport, in between meetings or in a taxi. They use Google Docs to review contracts and Google Slides to create new business presentations from their Android phones while traveling. They can even update Pipedrive, our CRM platform, through the mobile app.

I install work apps on each device using Google Mobile Device Management so employees can access required work apps and install any other pre-approved apps from the Play for Work Store. I can securely manage all devices with this central console, too. If an employee accidentally installs an app or downloads malware, I receive an alert and can fix the problem immediately.

Setting up Chromebooks is simple, too. It used to take me hours to deploy our old laptops. Each Chromebook takes minutes to set up — no time-consuming installations required. As BioDot’s sole IT staff member, it can be difficult to quickly deploy new devices while ensuring the security of every company device around the world. Chrome makes this easier.

Cloud-based Android devices also foster a collaborative work environment. For example, when the manufacturing team is assembling a new medical dispenser in the factory, they mark up the schematic diagram in red pen to show which parts don’t work. They used to snail-mail this marked up diagram to our engineers, who are hundreds or thousands of miles away in an office. Now, the manufacturing team snaps a picture of the schematic with their Android phone and uploads it to Google Drive, so engineers can see their revisions immediately. This saves our teams a few days’ delay, so they can iterate faster, and ultimately build better products in a shorter timeframe.

Google Apps also allows us to be more productive and efficient. Instead of taking a one-day trip to meet with a prospect for the first time, sales executives are starting to use Google Hangouts. This saves our company around $1,000 for each trip. When you think about the hundreds of trips salespeople take throughout the year, these savings go a long way — especially for a small company.

Switching to Google Apps, and subsequently Chrome and Android devices helps BioDot run faster and more smoothly. Employees, from tech-savvy millennials to employees who were new to smartphones, now rely on Android and Chrome devices to work together and complete tasks, whether they’re in the office, on the road or at one of our manufacturing facilities.

Posted by Chris Hewertson, CTO of glh

Editor's note: Today’s post is from Chris Hewertson, CTO of glh, the largest owner-operator hotel company in London with over 5,000 rooms throughout London as well as two locations in Malaysia. Chris was recently named “disruptive player in the crowded hotels market” in the CIO top 100 list. Here, he shares his secrets to success.


In 2013, we launched the world’s fastest hotel wi-fi and put our focus on digital. We had big ideas to transform our business, and we knew we couldn’t do it alone.

We’re always looking for new and innovative technology solutions that can help us deliver the best guest-centred experience in hospitality. Hosted services and real-time responses are becoming more and more of a basic customer expectation in other industries so we thought, why not hotels? We worked with implementation partner Cloudreach to adopt Google Apps as our fully integrated, enterprise-wide cloud collaboration and storage solution.

Let product enthusiasts within your teams help usher a smooth adoption With over 33 hotels, more than 1000 users and nearly 4 million files, how were we going to move everything and everyone onto Google Apps for Work? The answer was obvious – Jedis.

Well, not Jedis exactly, but pretty close. Our nominated Google Guides were a group of 65 champions across all our locations and departments – from night managers to head housekeepers – who helped kick-start our Google Apps for Work adoption. Their support and enthusiasm for the tools meant we could truly bring Google Apps for Work into every part of our business.

Not only did they help us cut down old and unused data as part of the migration process (we have now almost halved our original 3 million files), they encouraged everyone to use the tools for creative solutions. This is a great example of how a user led change approach can lead to high levels of engagement and adoption while minimising the need for a traditional data migration.

Find creative ways to use new tools to improve customer experience At glh, we take guest complaints seriously and try to accommodate each request as much as we can. At our biggest hotel, room moves and changes happen daily. Guests move rooms to be closer to their travelling party, away from their boss (yes, really) or even to avoid odd numbers.

Before Google, this would cause major disruption across a number of teams from Housekeeping to Concierge. Now, all teams can see and edit real-time room changes in Sheets, and housekeepers can even use it on their mobiles. As a result, we’ve significantly minimized delays, confusion and complaints.

From internal invites to office polls, Forms has been a welcome addition to the working lives of all of us at glh. Now we have a form that allows staff to check out a guest from anywhere in the hotel in seconds. No more printed paper that was popped into a box at reception.

Invest big savings from new technology tools into workplace improvements Trans-atlantic Hangout conversations have led to a 42% reduction in conference call charges. Hourly printouts of various logs and reports of over 1,000 pages are now shareable digital Docs that are securely stored on Drive. The logs are updated in real time and available on any device.

It’s just over a year since we introduced Google Apps for Work, and in that time we’ve made so many apps-based ideas a reality – like our Manager of the Month initiative, where everyone votes using a Form.

Our Google Guides, who were so central to our training and awareness a year ago, are still coming up with new suggestions all the time – it’s amazing how creative people can be.

Posted by Robert Cheetham, Founder and CEO, Azavea


Editor's note: Today we hear from Robert Cheetham, founder and CEO of Philadelphia-based geospatial web software and analysis firm Azavea. Read about how Azavea has relied on Google for Work tools for more than eight years and recently started using Chromebox for meetings and Chromebooks so employees can work together from anywhere.

When I founded Azavea in 2000, I dreamed of creating a great work environment focused on driving social impact by applying geospatial technology. We're a certified B Corporation, and our mission-driven work includes climate change, elections, public safety, transit, water infrastructure and natural resources. Inspired by my first job working for a local government agency in Japan, where cubicles don’t exist, I designed our workspace to have an open layout, long before it became popular in contemporary offices. Today, we rely on Google Apps, Chromebooks and Chromebox for meetings to support this collaborative environment and help us work closely together on our software and data analytics projects.

In the early years, when Azavea only had a handful of employees, we installed basic workplace software from a CD-ROM and had limited server space. When we outgrew our email system in 2008, we chose Gmail. Our employees quickly started using Google Calendar, Docs, Hangouts and Sheets because they integrate so closely with Gmail. These tools helped us work effectively together on projects, so it was a natural next step.

In 2012, our software developers started asking for supplementary computers to let them work from home, when traveling for client meetings or even in the office kitchen. We looked into tablets, but they were expensive and didn’t have fully functional keyboards. As longtime Google users, our Operations team investigated options from Google.

Chromebooks are fast, affordable, secure and remarkably powerful, so we started offering them as supplementary devices for people who wanted more mobility. Our colleagues can easily switch between their main workstations and portable Chromebooks, and the long-lasting battery makes them the perfect companion for frequent travelers, office roamers and remote employees. I typically travel for a week each month myself, so I use my Chromebook on long flights as well as meetings and conferences where there may not be convenient power. It typically lasts more than nine hours, while a laptop only lasts two or three.

The company now has more than fifty people, and when we moved to a new office a few months ago, we needed a videoconferencing solution for a dozen new meeting rooms, we once again turned to Google and picked Chromebox for meetings. Like the other Google products we use, Chromebox is affordable, easy to install and integrates with our existing workplace software, like Hangouts and Calendar. Anyone can quickly set up and join a meeting. As a small firm, this ease of use is critical for us — we don’t have a team of dedicated IT staff, so we don’t have capacity to constantly deal with technical difficulties or high-maintenance updates.

I wanted to start a company that felt like a community and made an impact. Over the past several years, Google has significantly enhanced our company’s operations because their products simply work and easily scale as the company has grown. Our teams are able to work effectively together, no matter where we are.

Posted by Koen Bosmans, Senior System Administrator/Service Desk Team Lead, Tessenderlo, Belgium

Editor's note: Today we hear from Koen Bosmans, Senior Systems Administrator at Melexis, a microelectronics supplier based in Tessenderlo, Belgium. One of the world’s top producers of sensors and microchips for the automotive industry, Melexis is expanding into new industries, with great success. Spread across 11 offices in nine countries, read how this truly global company uses Google Apps for Work to build its international team.

There’s a good chance you’ve used one of our products without realising it. The sophisticated microchips we make are in everything from children’s ear thermometers, to airbags, to smartphones, to drones. And as the demand for microelectronics has grown, so has our business: Melexis shares are worth 20 times more now than when I started working here in 1999, and today we employ 1,200 staff worldwide in Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Switzerland, China, Malaysia, the Ukraine and the US. As early as 2010, we could see that this rapid expansion might lead to “silo thinking” that prevents outstanding engineers in different countries from working together effectively in a global team. That’s why Melexis management asked me to research alternatives to the open-source software we were using.

I ranked five IT solutions on 25 criteria — including web accessibility, document sharing and OS compatibility — and Google Apps for Work came out on top. We bought 500 accounts and got ready to deploy them over 13 weeks. But after the first fortnight, I realised that Google Apps training was so straightforward I could ask a student working in my department to do it. He travelled the world for three months and trained the entire company.

Google Apps improves staff satisfaction with their work environment and rewards teamwork. In the first quarter after we switched to Gmail, the number of complaints about email dropped by 65%. No more spam or slow webmail, and Calendar has ended confusion over meeting room bookings. Expansion is much easier, too; instead of having to install servers and data lines in every new office, all we need is an internet connection. Plus, we can expand without asking engineers to relocate, since as part of a virtual team, they can talk to colleagues anywhere in the world over Hangouts while working together on a shared document in Sheets. And wherever we are, Drive saves time by letting colleagues work simultaneously on single documents — whether it’s our R&D teams collecting test data in Sheets, or the IT team preparing a presentation on Slides for our monthly meeting.

Through my experience using Google Apps within our IT team, I understand how something as simple as face-to-face contact through Hangouts can make a team so much stronger. My IT Service Desk team is made up of eight people split over six locations, and we meet every two days on Hangouts to discuss work. I noticed that seeing each other so often created a relaxed and friendly dynamic that made it easier to share advice and help each other.

At Melexis, we don’t just work hard, we play hard, too. Fun is part of our DNA, and three years ago, we invited everyone to take part in an international computer game LAN party. We’ve been doing it every year since, and it’s always a great opportunity to get to know each other across different locations.

Google Apps makes these international LAN parties possible. Staff use Forms to sign up for some of the four or five games we’ll be playing in competition, and we organise times and equipment through a community on Google+. Presentations on Slides explain what we’re doing, and we use Sheets to keep score.

The party starts at 6pm on a Friday. In each office, staff decorate a room, put on fancy dress, and set up a Hangout between all the offices, even our senior leaders get dressed up and take part! Projection screens, microphones and speakers let the offices communicate with each other while the organisers announce gaming fixtures. Our scoreboard is in Sheets, which automatically updates its graphs with all the new information from every match.

In the first year, we had 120 participants, and that number’s been going up every year since. We’ve even given out best-dressed awards for themes from Halloween to superheroes.

Now, when I travel between our offices in different countries, staff walk up to tell me how good the LAN parties are for the company and morale. But there’s no question that combining our talents and pulling together through technology, wherever we are, lies at the heart of our global success.

Posted by Andy Coppin, Operations Director at Bartle Bogle Hegarty

Editor's note: Today we hear from Andy Coppin, Operations Director at Bartle Bogle Hegarty, a global advertising agency based in London. Founded in 1982, BBH has twice won Agency of the Year at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival with groundbreaking campaigns for clients including Audi, British Airways, Tesco and Unilever. With offices in London, Los Angeles, New York, Shanghai, Singapore, Mumbai and Stockholm, read how the BBH team uses Google Apps for Work to enhance its global network.


A good idea can cross borders. That’s one reason why we have just one office in each global region, instead of one office in each country like most of our competitors. It keeps campaigns focused and recognises that our adventurous staff see travel as a perk, rather than a chore. So when we overhauled our IT system in 2010, we needed a system that enabled both close international collaboration and great mobility. Google Apps for Work opened up far-reaching creative possibilities that change the way we work.

Mobility we need with lower cost, more dependable tools
Google Apps is ideal for flexible and mobile working. Gmail and Calendar are web-based, so client-facing teams are never out of touch as they travel to meetings abroad. Previously, remotely connecting to our old servers could only be done with an unreliable VPN. It proved to be an expensive liability with a tendency to fail. Drive is not only cheaper, it’s also dependable. The instant messaging function on Hangouts is perfect for teams on the road. Chromebox for meetings has become so powerful and easy to use that it’s entirely superseded the separate video conferencing system we installed five years ago.

Managing IT and administrative controls internally, for faster troubleshooting
The simple administrative interface and modular design of Google Apps for Work means we can solve IT problems internally instead of spending on external support. My colleague Will Triantos, our Global Google Technical Lead, not only administers the entire platform for 1,000 staff in eight offices, he’s also constantly creating new ways of using Google Apps to improve work at BBH. Fast, friendly and comprehensive support from Cloud Technology Solutions (CTS) means all the advice we need is always on-hand. With their support, we migrated our entire Stockholm office to Google Apps in less than a week.

Fostering a culture of creative IT, sharing and efficiency
Using Sites, Drive and Google APIs, Will has created a much-improved new intranet. While our previous intranet was based on servers around the world that cost us £20,000 a year to license, the new intranet is entirely cloud-based, so we don’t pay to maintain our own hardware. Because it uses Sheets to present our global company directory, we can always be confident we have up-to-date contact details for all our offices. With its connections to Drive, we can upload documents like historical advertising pitches in a few seconds, instead of in ten to thirty minutes. And because any of our staff can upload, rather than just one administrator in London, each office can share news and holiday information specific to them. Teams anywhere can access their local Google+ communities or submit Forms to make catering requests from kitchen staff, and users access the intranet with their Google Account single sign on, too, so their Gmail, Calendar and Drive is embedded and only a click away.

Most IT FAQs are answered on our intranet, so Will is free to find other applications for Google Apps. To take a simple example, before new BBH staff arrive at the office, they fill in a Form on Sites that connects to a Sheet in HR, so we have all their details in advance. And at the building entrance they sign-in to a Form on a tablet that emails reception, so the right person can be there to meet them. Small things like that add up, make a great impression and prove that cutting admin in one area frees creative thinking elsewhere.

Posted by Steve Coulbourne, Technical Director, AOL

Editor's note: Today we hear from Steve Coulbourne, technical director at AOL, a global digital media and technology company focused on “Culture and Code.”


I’ve been part of the AOL team for more than 15 years. In that time I’ve seen the technology we use evolve immensely. When I first started, the company had standard desktops and a legacy IT system. Since then, we’ve shifted from clunky hardware and software to “lightweight enterprise” — prioritizing convenient, immediate access and ease of use.

Our CEO, Tim Armstrong, believes that if you keep doing things the same way, you’ll continue to get the same results. We take this philosophy seriously when it comes to our technology. Our global Chief Technology Officer, William Pence, provided clear vision for modern, cloud-based, and forward looking technologies, which propelled our investment and focus in this space. When we decided to start using Google Apps, we were most interested in unifying and improving how we work together across teams — especially between AOL’s different entities.

In recent years, we’ve completed many acquisitions (think Huffington Post, TechCrunch, and the integration of Verizon’s Digital Media Services to name a few). Having Google Apps during the period of potential confusion and chaos has helped us perform due diligence activities even quicker.

We started exploring Google Apps in 2010 and chose it over Office 365 because Microsoft required us to staff a whole team to manage SharePoint and its infrastructure. We also realized that adoption of Google Apps would be easier and more cost effective because of Google’s reputation for ease of use and the familiarity many of our employees already had with its tools.

Over the course of six months, we unified 13 domains into one with help from a third-party integrator to move from Microsoft Exchange to Google. From a set-up perspective, it took about two to three weeks to get everyone up and running with local peer (i.e., collaboration champions) and IT helpdesk support. Employees immediately started sharing their favorite Apps “hacks” with colleagues (for example, we use Google Forms for invite submissions, which alerts employees when events are filled and creates a culture of excitement and inclusion).

As a result, we were able to decommission 18 of our 22 globally distributed Messaging servers (more than 80 percent), eliminating 130 terabytes (TB) of drive space needs. We’re also migrating on-premise file shares into Google Apps, which will allow us to reallocate another 120 TB of file storage.

I led the initiative for company-wide adoption of Google Drive, Docs and Hangouts, and the entire company has been fully migrated since February 2015. With recent acquisitions, we've quickly integrated our collaboration tools to maintain focus on business value and production.

In terms of security (such as granting and denying access to data as needed), we’ve reduced costs. When you’re working in the cloud, there’s no need to bring on a third-party vendor to ensure data is secure. Moving away from premise-based solutions has provided us the flexibility to decrease our acquisition integration timeline from a messaging and collaboration perspective. We’re now able to offer the services of companies we acquire the same day that a deal is signed.

In certain instances, the collaboration capabilities of Google Apps enabled quicker time to market for our products. For example, the content and assets for each morning’s AOL homepage is queued up in real time on Drive. Also, our Business Communications team can edit articles at the same time — greatly reducing time to publication.

With multiple brands under the AOL umbrella, Apps also allows us to be more transparent and give everyone access to files and documents. With Apps, our employees are productive from anywhere — whether it’s on AOL’s campus or on the network — and connected as a unified team.

Posted by Doug Bohaboy, VP of Marketing, Mimeo


Editor's note: Today we hear from Doug Bohaboy of Mimeo, a content distribution and digital printing company based in New York City. Learn how Google Apps helped Mimeo deliver at breakneck speed while keeping its employees connected.


When I first started at Mimeo, a content distribution and digital printing company, in 2005, we had fewer than 100 employees. I could stand up and talk to anyone in our New York office. I knew everyone.

Today, we have over 800 employees in six locations, including four international offices in the UK, Germany, India and China. Our New York office had ballooned to multiple floors. That’s why we turned to Google Apps to keep our distributed workforce productive, efficient and competitive in an evolving market. Google Hangouts, Google Docs and Google Calendar keep us organized and coordinated across multiple time zones.

To compete with other online suppliers, we need to move fast and fulfill orders quickly. Customers can place an order for a complex printed document on our website at 10 p.m. EST and expect it to be fulfilled and delivered the next day. This means people at our New York headquarters need to communicate rapidly with our global manufacturing facilities. With Hangouts, our teams can video or text chat instantly from any device, whether it’s a desktop computer or mobile phone, at any time of day or night.

We made the switch to Google Apps from Microsoft Exchange in 2010 to give people tools to work more closely together — without wasting time on IT issues. Before 2010, our IT team had to deal with issues that didn’t add value to the company, like scheduled server maintenance and helping employees fix email problems. These minor issues added up to 1,000 hours each year. Now, our IT team spends 100-200 hours a year addressing minor issues — equating to huge financial and time savings.

Google Apps, and particularly Docs, increases our efficiency. Today we create about 90 percent of our documents using Docs. Employees often collaboratively edit documents together when they’re sitting across the room from each other. Docs also makes meetings more efficient by giving us the ability to take shared notes and assign owners. The whole team doesn’t need to be in every meeting — we can tag team members who need to share their input on one small section, and they can contribute on their own time.

With offices in the UK, Germany, China and India, we use Hangouts to collaborate more meaningfully with more face-to-face time. The ease of meeting person to person also helps us appreciate the cultural diversity of our team, which contributes to our open culture that embraces diverse ideas and paths to problem solving. Whether from Memphis or Berlin, any of us could easily hop on a video chat in Hangouts while also having access to intuitive tools, making training new employees from any location seamless.

As companies like ours grow increasingly global, Google Apps is helping to create more mobile, flexible work environments. Our biggest goal is to do more for our customers while keeping our employees in sync by making Mimeo a great place to work. We know that our customers depend on Mimeo for fast, reliable service that consistently exceeds their expectations. Google Apps helps our employees make the most of their time and creativity, ensuring we retain the competitive advantage that’s made us a globally recognized company.

Posted by Greg Bennett, Imaginea

Editor's note: Today we hear from Greg Bennett of Imaginea Energy, an oil and gas company based in Calgary, Alberta Canada. Learn how Google Apps helps Imaginea defy industry stereotypes as they work to produce energy sustainably, securely and profitably.


At Imaginea Energy, our vision is an Oil and Gas industry that is much better for the Planet, and for People, and for Profits. This vision is reflected in our culture, the mindsets of our people as well as in our organizational model. Together, our organizational model and culture promote curiosity, teamwork and 10X thinking — values that affect everything from our team-driven project pitches, to idea generation to the tools that are integral to creating solutions that match our aspirations, like Google Apps for Work.

We switched from our previous platform because our legacy storage, productivity and email tools didn’t reflect our open and transparent culture or our vision of the future. The closed IT environment made it difficult to collaborate together beyond very small teams: file-sharing was non-existent, which created insane revision situations and confusion about document version control. Google Drive changes all of that. We've migrated nearly 260,000 files to Drive, all of which can be accessed from anywhere, on any device, without deploying a rigid shared drive structure.

Google Docs, Sheets, Slides and Forms have absolutely transformed how we work together. With real-time editing, commenting and data collection, we can quickly share ideas and insights and rapidly move work forward together. At a recent meeting we had over 30 people generate 20 pages of new ideas in under two hours. Seamless collaboration and rapid ideation like this simply wasn’t possible before.

Google Apps for Work combined with our flexible working environment provide maximum autonomy, which our employees leverage to increase their productivity both in and out of the office. Visit our headquarters on a Friday and you might find up to 40% of our people foregoing their commute in favour of working from home (or a coffee shop, or a park). This flexibility really works for our company and our team.

With access to information online or offline, the ability to work remotely extends to the vast 30,000 km2 of rolling prairie that our operations cover. Operators can capture data even without internet access. Once they re-connect, all of their offline work is instantly synced, eliminating redundant data-entry and confusion.

Our ability to work from anywhere has been further enhanced by using Google Hangouts. Whether a field operator is at one of our 600+ active wells or a team member is running a training presentation from 7,000 kms away in Europe, Hangouts connects our people face-to-face. Our field staff have cut down on the 500 km round trip visits to headquarters — now they can spend more time on-site, and less time driving by communicating and holding meeting via Hangouts. Reducing driving time increases the safety of our team, and also reduces our environmental footprint and operating costs.

Not only has switching to Google Apps saved us significant time, it will also reduce our IT spend. By mid-2016, we’ll have saved over 50 percent on IT maintenance, money that can be redeployed to develop solutions to business problems and maximising our team’s capabilities.

Google Apps gives us the security we need without compromising information flow or flexibility. The Admin console lets us customize mobile device management and quickly respond to changing security events. On a recent trip to Paris, a company device was stolen on the subway. Within 12 minutes, access credentials were changed and our data was secured. This security extends behind the scenes to every part of Google Apps. We may never have world-leading security experts on our staff, but luckily we don’t have to: Google does. Having trust in our tools, combined with the trust we invest in our employees, means we can focus on creating value without obsessing over security.

At Imaginea, we defy industry stereotypes by focusing on Planet, People and Profit together. When you set out to reimagine an industry like oil and gas, achieving that vision is only possible with the right people and the right tools. With Google Apps, we’ve set course to truly transform our business and the energy industry.

Posted by Courtney Osgood, Head of Communications at Paint Nite

Editor's note: Today we hear from Courtney Osgood of Paint Nite, a Boston-based events company that offers consumers a creative social experience at local bars. Learn how Google Apps helps Paint Nite maintain its close-knit company culture and keep teams connected no matter where they work.


Paint Nite offers a different kind of nightlife experience. Guided by a local artist, our customers spend a few hours sipping cocktails and painting at a local bar.

Working together to create something great is in our DNA, which is why we’ve used Google Apps since the company was founded in 2012.

As we’ve grown, Google Apps has helped us maintain our tight-knit culture while successfully scaling our business. In the past year, we’ve added more than 950 cities and towns that are now hosting Paint Nite events, and more than doubled our employees at headquarters from 40 to 100+.

Work-life balance is a big priority at Paint Nite. Our founders recognize that everyone has commitments outside of work, whether it’s spending time with family, pursuing a hobby or volunteering. Paint Nite offers unlimited vacation time and allows employees to work from home any time. Tools like Google Apps help our employees take advantage of this policy. Teams use Google Hangouts to chat about projects throughout the day, whether they’re at the office, at home or working from a coffee shop. We use Hangouts for our weekly all-staff meeting so all employees can join from anywhere and feel like they’re in the same room.

Google Apps helps teams stay organized, which is important given how quickly the company is growing. Our employees love using Google Calendar, which makes it easy to schedule meetings with colleagues who are working remotely. Calendar also lets us book conference rooms in advance, which is a small but critical feature for a rapidly growing company with limited meeting space.

Google Apps also saves us time. Our data analytics team, for example, uses Google Forms to manage dozens of data requests each day. At Paint Nite, we rely on our data to make decisions or share information — a digital marketing manager needs to know how many cities we operate in for a new advertisement, or our communications team wants to share year-over-year growth figures with the local newspaper. Before they started using Forms, our analysts spent hours each week sorting through requests manually. It was an inefficient and frustrating process. Now, if anyone at Paint Nite needs company data, he or she can submit a request using Google Forms.

As we continue to scale from a local startup to a international brand, it’s crucial that our teams stay connected, whether people are working from our main office, at home or on the road. Google Apps helps us do this while maintaining the close-knit, flexible work environment we've grown to love.

Posted Mike Knapp, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Shoes of Prey

Editor's note: Today’s guest post is by Mike Knapp, Co-founder and Co-CEO of Shoes of Prey. Shoes of Prey creates handmade, bespoke women’s shoes designed by the customer.

Like a lot of tech companies these days, Shoes of Prey started as an exchange of ideas between a few friends — in my case, casual discussion with longtime friends from college, Michael and Jodie Fox. That day, a little magic happened for us when we landed on an idea that would spark interest for customers around the world — an online platform built to inspire creativity and truly honor individual expression. Shoes of Prey allows customers to design their own made-to-order shoes from anywhere via our online store, as long as they have Wi-Fi access.

The flexibility and freedom to be as creative with our personal expression as we choose is at the core of what we offer to customers, and we want the same from our workplace technology. We use cloud-based tools like Google Apps that allow employees to work how they want, from wherever they please.

Sharing information is particularly crucial now that we’re a global team with offices in the U.S., the Philippines, Australia, Japan and China. We save thousands of dollars we’d otherwise spend on travel by meeting face-to-face over Google Hangouts and working simultaneously in shared Google Docs.

Being able to write a document with people in three different offices at the same time is incredibly powerful. We compile our weekly global newsletter in a single shared Doc. Each team contributes its updates when ready, and there’s no need for multiple meetings and back-and-forth email attachments. Most teams share their weekly meeting notes in Docs as well.

We also use Google Sheets to manage financial budgeting across teams and have a singled shared master Sheet to track monthly expenses and cash flow. Each team updates its expenses in a designated Sheet and then the team lead or manager updates the master, which is access-controlled.

With Google Apps, we can maintain a highly collaborative culture and keep our data secure. Thanks to sophisticated sharing settings in Docs, we’re able to share customer and employee information only with intended recipients, grant specific permissions and adjust who has access even after sharing a link. We know that we have Google’s security experts watching out for us, which gives us peace of mind.

We’ve grown our company using Google Apps from day one, and I can’t imagine working any other way. Once you've worked this way, there’s no other way to work. And we’ve saved thousands of dollars by not having to hire people to manage servers or perform software updates, as these are automated with Google. Google Apps keeps our talented workforce from getting bogged down with outdated or mundane processes so that it can continue to create the best experience — and shoes — for our customers.

Posted by Bret Knobelauch, Senior Director at ProsperWorks

Editor's note: Today we hear from Bret Knobelauch, Senior Director at ProsperWorks, a SaaS provider of next generation CRM solutions and — along with RingCentral — a Google Apps partner in the Recommended for Google Apps for Work program. Read how this rapidly growing technology company uses Google Apps to radically simplify customer facing sales and communications. And register here to join our Hangout on Air, on March 29 at 9 a.m. and learn how ProsperWorks went all in on the cloud with Google and Ringcentral.


ProsperWorks is the world's first “zero input” CRM. Designed specifically for Google Apps, ProsperWorks helps companies sell faster by identifying, organizing and tracking sales opportunities right in Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Drive. Our company was founded in 2011 with the vision to empower small business sales and marketing with a fantastic user experience for CRM.

Going all-in with Google Apps and the cloud When we started the company, we were already committed to leveraging the benefits of Google to run our business. After all, we build a SaaS CRM solution that is deeply integrated with Google Apps. So, in addition to choosing Gmail as our email platform, we went all in with Google technology for various aspects of our business. This included:

• Google Hangouts to interact with prospects and customers who are Google Apps customers themselves
• Google Drive for onboarding and sharing our sales assets with a rapidly expanding team of sales development reps and account executives
• Google Sheets for exporting and reviewing sales reports using the ProsperWorks integration

We soon discovered the need for not just any, but the right cloud-based, enterprise-class phone solution. There are two key features that our cloud phone solution must have:

• Ability to make and receive calls directly from within Gmail. My sales team spends 60-80% of their day at their desktop engaged in prospecting and sales calls. The ability to make and receive calls directly from a phone number within Gmail and ProsperWorks CRM keeps my team super productive. Plus users can see their communications history including call logs and voicemails, directly from within Gmail.

• Sales call analytics and reporting. From my mobile phone, I can regularly check on the call productivity of the team. For example, I can check on inbound versus outbound calls following the launch of a campaign. I can see trends and intervene if there seems to be an issue that needs to be addressed.

Why we chose RingCentral We switched from a vendor we worked with prior because RingCentral offered the enterprise business capabilities that we truly needed. I’m responsible for our sales development reps and account executives, and call activity is a key measure of productivity. RingCentral has robust call analytics and reporting that helped us gauge and increase productivity.

I didn’t want to take any risks with security and reliability, so the fact that RingCentral had been vetted by Google meant a lot. I also appreciated that RingCentral was an overall leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications in the cloud, and most importantly, the user experience and integration with Google Apps was fantastic.

ProsperWorks’ vision is about simplifying the CRM user experience. RingCentral shares this vision for business communications, and Google shares this vision for work productivity. Google Apps has proven to be a great unifying platform for partner solutions such as ProsperWorks and RingCentral. Empowered by Google Apps and RingCentral, we couldn’t be better equipped to serve and empower our own customers.

Posted by Adan Muñoz, co-founder and Director of Operations, BQ, Madrid, Spain

Editor's note: Today we hear from Adan Muñoz, co-founder and Director of Operations at BQ, a producer of smartphones, tablets, e-readers, 3D printers and educational robots based in Madrid, Spain. Founded in 2010, BQ now has a global team of more than 1,300 people at offices in Germany, France, Sweden, Russia, Italy and the UK. See how Google Apps for Work has played a central role in BQ’s rapid growth and unique work culture right from the start.


We don’t just want our customers to use our devices, we want them to understand what they’re using. That’s the core idea behind all of our products, whether it’s our “flatpack” 3D printer, our customisable smartphone or Zowi, our educational robot. Our goal is to get people thinking about technology, because the next great idea could come from anyone, anywhere.

With the same emphasis on engagement, we try to run BQ as a team of equals, where everyone has a voice. We know we do our best work when colleagues in design, engineering, technical, marketing and sales are free to bounce ideas off each other. But with 1,300 people at 10 offices, open communication can bring challenges. That’s why we built our business around Google Apps for Work from day one. Its forward-looking, simple and powerful tools have allowed us to shape our ideal working environment and work team.

Transparent and connected, not bureaucratic

• Drive gives us an open central platform that everyone can access. If we receive product information from a third-party, for example, we save it in Docs for anyone in the organisation who’s interested to read and leave comments or queries. That gives us oversight and transparency so that we can avoid problems before they occur.

• Instead of an email hierarchy of labels and folders, Gmail’s powerful search lets us find what we need in seconds on any device, and links directly to Docs on Drive and meetings on Hangouts. We don’t need to subdivide and separate projects and personnel, so teams develop more naturally.

Supercharged project management

• Every prototype we make is run through a series of tests by different groups before teams go back to the drawing board. With Drive, all of the information from every test is immediately available, and because we only have one version of the results on Sheets and Docs, we always know we’re working from the correct files.

• Google Apps makes it easy to coordinate teamwork. At the beginning of every project, we create a plan of action on Sheets for colleagues to keep track of progress. Rather than trade emails, now when someone wants to organise a meeting they go directly to Calendar, check someone’s availability and create a meeting, adding a link for a video call on Hangouts when they can’t meet in-person but still want that person-to-person time.

One tight team

• Hangouts allows employees hundred of miles apart to feel that they work in one office. We use Hangouts daily to ensure maximum staff contact while saving on travel costs, video conferencing hardware, telecom bills and even time spent looking up phone numbers.

• We keep minutes of meetings in Docs so that staff can add to the same document simultaneously and leave comments on the public document after the event.

• Intuitive interfaces and simple administrative setup mean that when we bring on someone new, we can swiftly integrate them with our team. We even give them a Form asking where they will sit and what materials they need, so that we’re ready for their arrival ahead of time.

Our work at BQ is part of a long-term project. When we teach children how to program and design their own Zowi the robot, we’re not just teaching them basic robotics, we also want to prepare them for a future in which technology will play an ever greater role. Google is the perfect partner for that mission, with its understanding of the fast-evolving tech landscape and the constant updates to its Apps. Ultimately, our goals are aligned: we both want to give people the tools to empower themselves.

Posted by Kenneth Karlsson, IT Manager, GANT AB

Editor's note: Today we hear from Kenneth Karlsson, IT Manager for GANT AB, a multinational clothing company based in Sweden. From its Swedish headquarters and three overseas subsidiaries, GANT coordinates 50 suppliers with 40 franchise partners worldwide to bring its brand of wearable fashion to more than 700 stores around the globe. Read why GANT chose Google Apps for Work to bring this global network together.


When I started work here in the 1980s, GANT was far from being the major multinational brand it is today. And though we’ve always been expanding, we’ve grown at a much faster pace since 2009 – the year we upgraded our communications and transitioned to Google Apps for Work. Since then, GANT and its partners more than doubled our number of stores, opening an additional 392 new stores spread across the world.

We initially switched to Google Apps to replace an email solution that was expensive, overloaded and incompatible with the range of operating systems we used. And with our subsidiaries in Sweden, the US, the UK and France effectively running as separate organisations and without essential collaborative abilities, including shared calendar access, we also had to find a way to come together if we wanted to compete globally. I was convinced that a web-based email platform would be the cost-effective, forward-thinking solution we needed. In 2009, the only major company to offer that was Google, and they’ve stayed ahead of that curve ever since.

It took our small IT team just three months to roll Google Apps for Work out across four countries. First, we ran a pilot programme in Sweden with 20 users, assisted by Avalon Solutions, the IT consultancy that enabled our switch to Google Apps. Then we deployed 400 accounts over two months by holding training sessions with small groups. People who already used web-based private email required minimal training, and because it’s a web-based system, we simply sent out log-in information instead of installing a client on every computer. Now we’re running 1,000 Google accounts and have decommissioned our expensive email server. That means we’re saving on hardware maintenance and cut out the hassle of handling spam or chasing people to free up space by deleting their emails. Factor in cheaper licenses and zero software installation costs over the past six years, and we’re saving a huge amount of money.

Google Apps for Work is uniquely suitable for doing business on a global scale. It’s not just about relying on web-based mobility to access all of our files and emails anywhere, anytime. Because Google Apps works through a browser, we no longer have compatibility problems with our 40 independent franchise partners, each of which has its own IT setup. Assigning single-sign-on accounts to those partners gives them controlled access to our intranet and Drive. Using Drive lets us centralise administration from our Stockholm office and provides a shared hub to consolidate accounting and retail information across all of our subsidiaries. We use Docs and Sheets globally to manage orders and deliveries with our 50 suppliers in China, Portugal and Spain, while local colleagues can work alongside each other on a single document to craft swift and thorough reports. And Google’s size and reputation gives us peace of mind about its security and stability that we would not get from smaller cloud systems.

By using Google Apps for Work, we enjoy constant and automatic system improvements. New functions regularly appear on Drive, so we’re always ahead of the game as the marketplace evolves. For example, in 2009, Hangouts and tablets didn’t exist. Now outside every meeting room we have an Android tablet linked to Calendar so we can see who’s booked them, while inside the rooms we have Chromebox for meetings to enable Hangout video conferencing. With another IT solution, after six years we’d already be looking for a replacement. With Google Apps for Work, we’re still ahead of the game.

Posted by Rene van Gelderen, CIO at Deli XL

Editor's note: Today we hear from Rene van Gelderen, CIO at Deli XL, a wholesale food supplier and distributor based in Ede, The Netherlands. Deli XL’s 2,000 employees work round the clock, seven days a week to deliver fresh groceries to the country’s restaurants, hospitals, retirement homes and company canteens. Read how Deli XL is using Google Apps for Work to lead change in their business and connect their nationwide team.

At Deli XL, what you order today, we deliver tomorrow, whether it’s fresh fish, purple mustard or any of the other 70,000 items we have available for ordering. With 700,000 order lines each week from 20,000 customers nationwide, we need to work together efficiently to keep this 24-hour promise.

And when we decided to focus even more on hotels and restaurants and shift to the ecommerce model to adapt to client demands and changing business needs, we needed the tools that could help us do that even better.

Google Apps helped us overhaul our business model with minimal disruption. Our old email system was functional, but too slow to satisfy the demands of ecommerce. Gmail is fast, remotely accessible, and, along with Calendar, makes it simple to work together across our 15 sites. Google+ was also invaluable during this time. We knew rolling out complex new structures in our financial- and warehouse-management systems was going to cause significant stress. So as we deployed new systems, we posted constant updates on Google+ so everyone could keep track and discover the new tools together.

Now we use Google+ to solve problems in all areas of Deli XL, business and IT problems alike. For example, one Saturday morning, an account manager reported an issue with our ecommerce system. Previously, she would have called the weekend service desk and waited until Monday morning for a response. By posting the issue on Google+, I could immediately see that it was serious and brought our offshore developers in India into the discussion. Using Google Translate to interpret our Dutch, they had a solution ready for Monday morning, saving 1,000 customers from experiencing major disruption.

Google+ is far more effective than spending time on the phone: basic IT problems can be solved in seconds by non-IT staff; account managers share advice on how to fill unclear customer orders, and employees air difficult questions that might otherwise never be asked. After one major problem, during which we posted frequent updates on Google+, I carried out a survey. In the past, similar situations would always elicit complaints about communication, but for this survey, 97% of respondents expressed strong satisfaction with how we communicated during the incident.

Each of our 1,000 desk workers has a Google account, and now we’re connecting our 500 drivers and 500 order pickers, too. This opens up tremendous new possibilities for us. On every job, drivers keep track of the crates used to carry goods. Rather than do this by hand and deliver the slips to the Finance department, they’ll be able to keep track of the crates in Forms and eliminate the paper trail. Also, by having drivers check in and out of destinations on Forms, we’ll be able to tell customers where their delivery is and if it will be late, at a fraction of the cost of a GPS solution.

Over ninety percent of our order lines now come from online business, and we’ve made the transition into the hotel, restaurant and cafe market without any loss in revenues. In addition to savings due to faster troubleshooting, stronger cross-team communications and delivery tracking, our CFO calculates that using Drive storage will save up to €100,000 a year, once we retire our old file servers. And behind the numbers, all the extra communication is making us more of a team: with a Hangout group on each company site, no one needs to miss out when we share birthday cake.

Posted by Craig Bell, IT Service Delivery Director at The Cordant Group

Editor's note: Today we hear from Craig Bell, IT Service Delivery Director at The Cordant Group, a specialist recruitment and integrated services company employing up to 50,000 staff during peak times, and turning over £750 million a year. Here, Craig tells us how Google Apps for Work has not only helped them work smarter and more flexibly thanks to a business-wide rollout, but has also helped deliver a projected savings of £500,000 to the company’s bottom line in just a year. *Post updated on March 7, 2016.

It may have grown since it was founded in 1957, but ours is still a family business, and one that values the input of every individual, whether they’re one of our 2,500 permanent employees, or one of our tens of thousands of seasonal workers. But with so many staff, we realised we needed an IT solution that would answer the needs of each person, rather than asking each of them to answer to our inflexible IT system. Our solution is Google Apps for Work, which has transformed the way we operate our business at every level.

With 200 locations nationwide, as well as offices in Germany and Australia, we launched our rollout of Google Apps for Work so our staff can work as a team, wherever they are. In early 2015, Cloud Technology Solutions (CTS) helped us deploy Drive for Work and Chrome. Over the course of one year, CTS delivered several thousand Chrome devices, from Chromebooks and Chromebases to Chromebox for meetings.

Now Gmail gives access to our accounts whether in the office, at home or on the road — and the fact that it’s multi-device compatible means no more lugging laptops around just to check our inboxes. The flexibility and immediacy it provides ensures that important messages don’t fall through the cracks, and now we’re so speedy and effective with email communications that we send and receive up to 16 million emails each month.

Hangouts also allows us to communicate (face-to-face in this case) at any time, no matter where any of us are based. With over a thousand Hangouts happening across the Group every month, Hangouts have become so crucial to the way we run our business and communicate with each other that we now often use it to conduct interviews for IT recruits. It’s a great way to asses how intuitively candidates use technology tools, in particular Google Apps. Using Hangouts for interviews also benefits our bottom line: we now spend an average of 25% less time on interviews for IT team members, simply because we don’t have to spend time on things like collecting interviewees from reception and making them cups of tea.

As a recruitment company, we have a frequent turnover of staff. Having forward-looking and familiar tools helps us appeal to the very best new recruits. Web-based mail, instant messaging and online communities like Google+, are cloud-based tools that younger generations have grown up with — and are now ready to work with. This familiarity allows new starters to work efficiently from the moment they log on and saves us time and money on training. Plus Google Apps tools are also incredibly easy to scale up or down.

Knowledge is also easy for us to scale now. We share documents hosted on Google Drive almost half a million times every month and add 125,000 new files each month. And everything we do is reusable rather than disposable. Our own internal teams can manage and roll out successful solutions to every one of our 200 locations without needing armies of external IT service providers to support us, a change that along with keeping specialist knowledge in-house and doing things more efficiently has played a significant part in reducing our operational expenditure by hundreds of thousands of pounds each year.

With the virtual nature of Google for Work products, we can also keep costs and downtime at a minimum when relocating to new offices as we grow. Google’s ability to integrate data and systems to the cloud so seamlessly means shifting office spaces and acquiring new companies is now more economically viable. When considering the total cost of acquisition for a subsidiary business, we look at how easily a business can be “Googlised.” Using Chrome OS allows us to almost instantly integrate existing businesses with often outdated legacy apps into our Group. This has opened up a host of opportunities that we otherwise would not have taken because of prohibitive IT costs.

In just one year, Google Apps for Work has completely changed the way we operate, which says a lot coming from a large and established business. As part of our company-wide “New World” IT rollout, we estimate that the new tools will enable us to save about £500,000, thanks to a combination of lower licensing costs, reducing capital expenditure by purchasing 2,000 compatible devices at more than half the previous cost of replacement, minimising use of external suppliers and relying more heavily on in-house skills and efficiencies. And there’s no doubt that we’ve also saved and earned a whole lot more thanks to working smarter with IT-led solutions.

Posted by David Harrington and Brent Sarver, Google for Education team

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

Editor's note: Georgia schools are seeing great success with Google for Education. We talked to educators and administrators in Georgia to reflect on how technology has helped them innovate and create more efficient processes. From creating more efficient ways for parents to pick their children up from school, to enabling more efficient coaching on the baseball field, technology has improved the student, teacher and parent experience across the state. To learn more about Google solutions for education, join us for a Hangout on Air focused on the next phase of content in the classroom on February 23rd at 2pm ET / 11am PT.

Many schools are replacing former processes with more efficient ways to personalize learning and provide students with the skills to be successful. That level of innovation requires teachers and staff to think about how they can use technology in new ways. Schools in Georgia are using Google Apps for Education to drive innovation in small areas that ultimately inspire new ways of thinking across the district. We’d like to shed light on how schools have transformed their old processes using technology.

Transforming lectures into project-based learning 

Old: For many students, elementary and high school involves listening to a teacher lecture, reading a textbook and taking tests. This common approach to learning leaves out the interactive elements that often help students learn best.

New: The Center for Design and Technology, a project-based STEM program at Lanier High School in Gwinnett County, gives students real-life experiences to apply the skills they’ve learned. Every student works on six team projects per year, and every team creates a website using Google Sites, with links to Google Docs, Sheet and Slides used for team planning and collaboration. “Google Apps helps students learn communication skills, collaborate with teammates and think creatively,” says Mike Reilly, technology teacher at Lanier High School.

The program has helped teachers and students learn outside of the classroom and expand the skills they’re most interested in developing. For example, a team of four students worked with video editor Walter Biscardi to create a 3D model of a disease spread by flies, which appeared in the PBS movie “Dark Forest Black Fly.” They shared ideas in virtual brainstorming sessions via Google Hangouts and collaborated in real time using Google Docs.

Bringing instant communication to an ineffective system 

Old: Picking up students from school is often a slow, disorganized process since schools often have thousands of students to manage and communication isn’t always the smoothest between all staff involved.

New: At Forsyth County Schools (case study), teachers and staff are using Google Apps beyond the classroom to help make the after-school pick-up queue more efficient. In the past, parking lot attendants who escort students to their cars and cafeteria attendants who supervise students didn’t have clear lines of communication. The principal turned to Google Sheets as the solution to increase communication.

All students are assigned a number in a shared spreadsheet. When a parent picks up her child, she displays the student’s number on the windshield, and the parking attendant uses a tablet to flag on the screen in the cafeteria that it’s time for the student to go to the pick-up area. Introducing new technology improved real-time communication and inspired teachers districtwide to talk about innovative ways to use Google Apps to improve processes.

Creating a more streamlined, collaborative process both in the classroom and out on the field 

Old: Monitoring and recording sports team performance can be a time-consuming and tedious process when it’s done the old-fashioned way with a notebook and pencil.

New: With Google for Education tools, coaches at Jeff Davis County Schools (case study) can record and keep track of the high school baseball team’s pitch speeds and number of pitches to make sure a pitcher isn’t throwing too many pitches. A member of the tech staff reads the pitch speed from a radar gun and enters the number into a Google Sheet using a Chromebook. Another Chromebook is connected to a TV in the dugout, so the coaches can monitor the speed and number of pitches thrown. With the sharing feature, the tech staff and coaches are able to view the same information that’s being edited in real time.

Coaches now have more information to make more informed decisions about their players. “If a pitcher has thrown too many pitches or hit pitch speed begins to decrease, the coach can determine if the pitcher needs to be taken out of the game and a relief is sent in,” says Keith Osburn, technology and special programs director at Jeff Davis County Schools.

Coach at Jeff Davis keeping track of pitch speeds on a Chromebook

Schools are continuing to reinvent old processes to provide students with a 21st century education. Check out more inspirational stories from schools.

We’ve heard great stories from many of you about how you’re using technology to do amazing things in your schools, so we're going across the U.S. to see for ourselves! Check out the map below to see where we’ll head next. We’d love to hear what’s happening in your state, so please share your story on Twitter or Google+ and tag us (@GoogleEdu) or include the #GoogleEdu hashtag.

Posted by Frank Febbraro, CTO, Phase2 Technology

Editor's note: Today’s guest post is by Frank Febbraro, CTO of Phase2 Technology, which helps clients such as Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer and Harvard Business School manage the way content is created, shared and experienced online. See how Phase2 Technology saves $3,000 a day and more than 100 hours a week by using Chromebox for meetings.

From the day we launched, we designed Phase2 Technology as a company that welcomed people who didn’t work on-site. In fact, we like to say we have five locations: New York, Washington, D.C., Portland, San Francisco and “everywhere” — a solid 25 percent of our employees work remotely. Because of this, we build our teams without worrying about where people are. A project lead in Portland might team up with people in Austin or Oklahoma City.

The most talented people don’t necessarily live near our offices, but that shouldn’t stand in the way of giving clients our best work. We rely on technology like Chromebox for meetings to bring down the barriers that get in the way of distributed teams working together.

Before we discovered Chromeboxes, the audiovisual situation for our meetings seemed like an insurmountable barrier.

Every video conference began as a comedy of errors: if we scheduled a half-hour meeting, we had to build in 10 minutes to struggle with the AV setup. We tried cobbling together configurations of cameras and mics, but nothing created the one-click system we needed. There were too many settings for employees to manage and too much tinkering around to get the meetings going. Plus, every room had a different system and settings. With five or so people in every meeting losing ten minutes on AV setup struggles, and those people meeting with others several times a day, we wasted dozens of hours every week. Over the course of a year, this translated into tens of thousands of dollars of lost time spent not delivering value to our clients.

All this changed when we brought Chromebox for meetings to eight conference rooms among our four offices. There’s no learning curve: people walk into a room and click one button on the Chromebox remote to start the meeting. We already use Google Hangouts and Google Calendar, so Chromebox fits in with the tools we know. We now work more fluidly, since we can start ad hoc meetings without worrying about cameras, mics and settings.

Chromebox for meetings saves time for our teams as they meet and also benefits our IT team. The management console lets us choose how the Chromeboxes operate, and those settings apply to every room and every meeting. Compared to conferencing systems that cost several thousand dollars per room, Chromebox for meetings costs much less and is much easier to set up and use. Achieving this ease at scale is critical for us — each employee might do as many as 10 Hangouts a day; multiply that by 140 people, and we’re spending about 450 hours on Hangouts daily.

Efficiency and time management are especially critical for a business like ours, which makes money by billing hourly and delivering excellent, efficient client service. We’ve reduced our IT costs for maintaining meeting rooms to just about zero. We used to spend about four hours a month per room on maintaining our old AV setups. We now spend about one hour per month total on all rooms — from 32 hours a month on maintenance down to just one hour.

We can do more with so much less now. Better meetings help us get rid of distractions so we can get right down to business, no matter where in the world our teams are.

Posted by Jean-Marc van Cutsem, CEO, louis delhaize Delfood, Montignies-sur-Sambre, Belgium


Editor's note: Today we hear from Jean-Marc van Cutsem, CEO at louis delhaize Delfood, a groceries supplier in Belgium with an annual turnover of €160 million. louis delhaize neighbourhood stores have been a fixture of Belgian life for generations, and all of the food they sell – from fresh fruit to baked goods – comes from the Delfood warehouses. Read how this 140-year-old family firm is using Google Apps for Work to create a faster, more efficient business.


It’s exactly 140 years since Louis Delhaize, the fourth son of a Belgian winemaker, followed his three brothers into the groceries sector. The pioneering companies they set up would go on to dominate Belgian chain-store retail, so that generations have grown up knowing they’ll receive friendly, fast service on everyday items at their local louis delhaize store.

For the Delfood team that supplies the food, honoring that trust means staying one step ahead of rising expectations. So when our 2007 email solution was due for an upgrade, we took the opportunity to build a more efficient business.

With help from Fourcast, we began introducing Google Apps for Work in January 2015. After our early adopters and IT department had migrated, Fourcast and HR gathered crucial feedback using Google Forms to ensure that staff were content with the process. By April, the whole company was online, and the new tools were already making a difference.

From warehouse to shop display, we’re delivering food faster with Google Apps for Work. If items from our 9,000 dry and 3,000 fresh food lines arrive damaged at our two warehouses, staff use Hangouts on a Chromebook to provide visual proof to headquarters and inform our suppliers. When food heads out to the stores, we calculate optimal routes for 40 trucks with Google Maps. Once it arrives at stores from our warehouses, our inventory managers and their teams photograph anything in less than perfect condition and upload the image to Google+ for immediate action at headquarters.

In store, floor managers display food according to promotions and advice posted by our experts on Google+. This close communication between our store teams on-site and our experts located across the country helps us arrange our products in the most sensible way for our customers – ensuring, for example, that when strawberries are in season, they’re the first thing customers see.

Google Apps is helping us improve the working lives of staff throughout the company:

• The marketing department moves along the promotion decision process much quicker through the real-time collaboration functionalities of Sheets.
• Rather than keep time sheets on paper, store staff enter hours directly into Sheets, so that compiling hours can be done in two minutes, instead of a the full day every week it used to take.
• All staff, wherever they are, can use Gmail. With its powerful search function, 30GB storage space per user, and seamless integration with Calendar, it’s everything we could ask for.
• Departments use Forms to request leave and sales teams use it to report issues in stores.
• Chromebooks at our warehouses and owned stores ensure that information travels fluidly around the company instead of only one-way from headquarters.
• We use our Google logins to access other Google for Work products, such as Chrome for Work to manage digital signage in stores, and Google Cloud Platform to build internal applications.
• Docs and Sheets with their collaborative features help staff at our separate sites feel like part of a larger team.
• Our teams receive continued support and advice so that they can find new ways to implement Google Apps with tutorials in-person and on Hangouts from Fourcast.

With Google Apps for Work, we know we always have the latest and best tools at our disposal. Automatic updates to the software mean we can count on Google to cover new needs in an ever-evolving business environment. Being open to innovation has helped us remain a market leader for more than a century, and we plan to honor that legacy well into the future.