Posted by Ryan Tabone, Director of Product Management, Docs editors

90,000 hours. That’s the amount of time the average person spends working during their lifetime. To put that in perspective, if you spend 90,000 hours watching movies and did nothing else — no sleep, no breaks — you would be watching for 10 years non-stop.

Since you spend so much time at work, we want you to have the latest Google Apps updates when they're available to make working easier. That means your apps have the latest tools, security updates and speed improvements — as soon as they’re ready. And that applies across the Docs editors as well. So as a busy 2014 comes to a close, we want to highlight a few of the new ways get things done with Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings and Forms.

Work with any kind of file

You come across all types of files all day. The last thing you want to worry about is what software you need in order to view or edit these files. For this reason, we made it so you can open and edit Office files directly in Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, on your desktop, phone or tablet.

Make suggestions

Editing files in real-time with others is a great way to work together across the Docs editors, and many of you asked for the ability to suggest changes in other peoples’ documents, rather than making edits directly. Now you can do just that with Suggest Edits in Docs. Make suggestions that can be accepted or rejected with a single click. And when you convert a Word file to Docs or vice versa, your tracked changes will convert as well.

Work on any of your devices.
We created new mobile apps for Docs, Sheets and Slides across Android and iOS, where you can edit your documents, presentations and spreadsheets on the go. While working in the cloud means you have access to your documents on any of these devices, you can still access or create documents even if you don’t have a data or WiFi connection.

Edit your images directly
Sometimes the best way to convey a thought is visually and you need your images to look just right, which is why we made it easier to edit and adjust images. You can now crop your images, even masking the crop to specific shapes, and add borders in Docs, Slides and Drawings. Plus, you can connect objects and images in Slides and Drawings, recolor and change opacity of images in Slides, and even add effects.

Get things done faster
We want to help you take care of your common tasks. And you know what lots of people make in documents? Bullet lists. So now, just type an asterisk (*) and it will automatically become bullets in Docs and Slides. Nobody likes having to do the same thing twice (unless you’re Santa) so just copy and paste your charts between different spreadsheets in Sheets. For all the regression lovers out there, you can also add trendlines, and to further visualize trends, you can add miniature charts, or sparklines, into individual cells.

Get answers to your surveys
Forms is a great way to gather information, and across 2014, we added lots of new ways to ask questions and get answers. You can customize themes in Forms to add your own flare and create short URLs that are easier to share. There are also lots of new question options, like limiting one response per person and shuffling the answer order.

Add tons of functionality from 3rd parties
Add-ons for Docs, Sheets and Forms are tools created by developers that help you do those extra things you need help with, whether it’s printing mailing labels or adding MLA-approved citations, right from your document.

Let there be tables
You can add borders and backgrounds to your tables, and merge cells together to get your tables to look just how you want. And when you convert your legacy files to Docs, the table cells and borders will still be there so you can keep working.
And let everyone, including blind and low-vision users, get work done
Across Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings and Forms, it’s much easier to use a screen reader, with better text-to-voice verbalization and improvements to keyboard navigation. You can now use braille support to read and enter text in Docs, Slides and Drawings. And you can collaborate easier with others in Docs, Sheets, Slides or Drawings because screen readers announce when people enter or leave the document, and you’ll hear when others are editing alongside you.

We’ll continue to make a ton of updates behind the scenes to ensure everything keeps running faster and smoother next year. Four cheers (Docs! Sheets! Slides! Forms!) for a happy work life in 2015.

Posted by Alex Gawley, Product Management Director, Gmail and Google Calendar

Email and scheduling are two of the most commonly used tools at work. And Gmail and Google Calendar have been core to helping our Apps customers get things done. As phones have become one of our main devices at work, school and home—whether you’re checking your schedule on the move between meetings, reading your email in the taxi on your way to the airport, or responding to a customer request while at your daughter’s basketball game—we need mobile apps that help us get things done.

Today, we’re introducing the brand new Google Calendar app on Android—built to save you time and help you make the most of every day—and the new Gmail app on Android that has a more modern style, sleeker transitions and supports other email providers.

Assists in Calendar: suggestions that save you time
When creating a calendar event, we often have to piece together phone numbers, addresses and attendees from lots of different sources, then add them to our calendars manually. With Assists, Calendar can suggest titles, people and places as you type, as well as adapt to your preferences over time. For example, if you often have lunch with your mentor Kelly, Calendar can quickly suggest this when you type ‘l-u-n.’

Schedule View in Calendar: easy to scan and lovely to look at
Your calendar is more than just a list of dates and times—it’s your life! So Calendar’s new Schedule view includes photos and maps of the places you’re going, cityscapes of travel destinations, and illustrations of everyday events like dinner, drinks and yoga. These images will bring a little extra beauty to your day, and make it easy to see what’s going on at a glance—perfect for when you’re checking in from your phone or tablet.

The new Google Calendar will work on all Android 4.1+ devices. It’s available today on all devices running Android 5.0 Lollipop, and you’ll be able to download the update from Google Play in the coming weeks. (And yes, we’re also working on a version for iPhone!) Learn more on our website.

A more modern Gmail app for Android
Today, the Gmail app for Android is getting updated with a more modern style, sleeker transitions, and a few other handy improvements.

As part of the new design, there’s now a convenient reply button at the bottom of every message, making it quick and easy to continue a conversation when you’re on the go. And if you access the app on your Android tablet, you’ll notice it’s easier to switch between accounts and the different inbox categories.



Lastly, we know some of you have email addresses that aren’t Gmail (it’s okay to admit it). The updated Gmail app now supports all email providers, which means you can now set up a separate inbox for, say, your Yahoo Mail or Outlook.com addresses using POP/IMAP.

The updated Gmail app will support all Android 4.0+ devices, so look for it in Google Play over the next few days.

We hope the new Gmail and Calendar Apps on Android help save you time when working on the go.

Posted by Saurabh Gupta, Product Manager,

(Cross-posted on the Google Drive blog.)

Google Forms is a free and simple way to collect information--from quickly polling your friends about who'll be attending your trip to the haunted hayride, to getting thousands of responses to an awareness survey for work.

Over the last few months, Forms has been getting a bunch of updates to help you make good looking surveys, like new theme choices and the ability to create your own personalized themes.

To give you even more flexibility and options, we’re introducing add-ons for Forms—new tools, created by developer partners, that deliver even more features to your surveys (just like add-ons for Docs and Sheets).

Add-ons bring handy extras to your survey building experience, like setting a survey end date, sending custom emails based on responses, storing lists of choices that you frequently add to questions, and more.

You can access add-ons from the “Add-ons” menu in Forms, or by directly visiting the Forms add-on store.

Here are just a few of the growing list of add-ons that you can use today with Google Forms:

• formLimiter: Close your survey automatically, after a maximum number of responses is reached, or at a date and time of your choosing. 
• Ultradox Trigger: Create custom emails, reports, invoices, newsletters, etc., based on information that people enter into your form. 
• Form Values: Store and pull from lists that you use regularly in Forms, like a list of staff, students, rooms, resources or anything you want. 

We hope these new tools make your Forms creation process even easier and more helpful--and stay tuned for more--our developer partners will be launching even more add-ons in the coming weeks.

PS: If you’re a developer with ideas for creating your own add-on for Forms, here’s some documentation to get you started.

Posted by Chris Han, product manager, Google Apps Marketplace

Your local hardware store offers something for everyone, just like the Google Apps Marketplace, which features hundreds of third-party apps that complement the suite of tools in Google Apps for Work.

Starting today, employees can install these apps without involving their administrator. Previously, only administrators could install these apps within an organization. So if you work at an organization that uses Google Apps for Work, Google Apps for Education or Google Apps for Government, you now have greater access to apps that help you work faster, more efficiently and collaboratively.

To find and add third-party apps for Google Apps, click the app launcher icon, click More, and click More from Apps Marketplace.

Administrators can adjust the settings that filter and show which third-party apps are available to their organizations from the Admin console (learn more). By default, any user can now install apps from the Google Apps Marketplace—excluding K-12 EDU domains that are defaulted off.

The Google Apps Marketplace has a wide-variety of options, no matter your taste, including Smartsheet for online project management, Freshbooks for accounting, Zoho for customer support, GQueues for to-do lists and more. To find a solution that fits your needs, visit the Google Apps Marketplace. For additional information regarding end user installations, visit our Help Center.

Posted by Julie Pearl, Director of Cloud Developer Relations and Partner Engineering, Google

Today at the Google for Entrepreneurs Global Partner Summit, Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Technical Infrastructure & Google Fellow announced Google Cloud Platform for Startups. This new program will help eligible early-stage startups take advantage of the cloud and get resources to quickly launch and scale their idea by receiving $100,000 in Cloud Platform credit, 24/7 support, and access to our technical solutions team.

This offer is available to startups around the world through top incubators, accelerators and investors. We are currently working with over 50 global partners to provide this offer to startups who have less than $5 million dollars in funding and have less than $500,000 in annual revenue. In addition, we will continue to add more partners over time.

This offer supports our core Google Cloud Platform philosophy: we want developers to focus on code; not worry about managing infrastructure. Starting today, startups can take advantage of this offer and begin using the same infrastructure platform we use at Google. For example, Headspace is helping millions of people keep their minds healthier and happier using Google Cloud Platform for Startups.

Thousands of startups have built successful applications on Google Cloud Platform and those applications have grown to serve tens of millions of users. It has been amazing to watch Snapchat send over 700 million photos and videos a day and Khan Academy teach millions of students. We look forward to helping the next generation of startups launch great products.

 For more information on Google Cloud Platform for Startups, visit http://cloud.google.com/startups.

Posted by Rishi Dhand, Product Manager, Google Apps

Google Apps helps millions of businesses, schools and governments get work done with easy to use apps that are built for the cloud. Working in the cloud not only makes it easier to get things done, but also allows new insights into how your organization is using Google Apps. Starting today, we’re introducing a new Reports section to the Admin console to make it easier for admins to manage Google Apps and also gain insights that help their entire organization run more efficiently.

See a snapshot of all activity
The Highlights page, located in the new Reports section, gives you a quick overview of all the activity across your domain. You can see how many Hangouts, Docs, Sheets and Slides your organization created, who is close to reaching their Drive and Gmail storage quota and how many files have been shared outside the company. You can also export any report to Google Sheets to slice and dice your data for further analysis.

Drill down to user level Reports
The Apps Usage Activity page shows data on how individual users are working with Gmail, Drive, storage and other apps. Choose what information you want to see and move the columns around to customize your view.

Filters
Use filters to quickly find who owns a specific file, people with a high number of uploads and shares, and granular data such as all the people who have between 1000 and 2000 documents.

Security
The Security page is another customizable user report that provides security related information like 2-step verification enrollment, how many files are shared externally, the number of external apps that are installed and other important information like account status and Gmail IMAP usage. Like the Apps Usage Activity report, Admins can customize column names and apply sorting and filters on the columns.

Login Audit
Monitor any security concerns by reviewing the specific IP addresses and dates of all logins and any failed or suspicious logins on the Login Audit page. Admins can use this report to track suspicious activity and take corrective action like resetting passwords.

To use the new Reports page, go to your Admin console and click on the Reports icon or the View Reports link on the right side panel. Mobile data will be added soon, in the meantime you can revert to the old Reports if needed. We have many additions planned for the future so stay tuned.

Posted by Melissa Dominguez, Software Engineer, Gmail

(Cross-posted on the Gmail Blog.)

Whether you’re checking your email first thing in the morning or as you’re waiting in line at the grocery store, you want to get your messages as quickly as possible. With today’s update to the Gmail iOS App, it’s easier to do just that.

The app now fully supports background app refresh, which means your Gmail messages will be pre-fetched and synced so they’re right there when you open the app—no more annoying pauses while you wait for your inbox to refresh. This feature requires iOS 7, and you’ll also need to turn on background app refresh and notifications (badge or any other type) for the Gmail app.

The Gmail app also now supports sign-in across Google iOS apps, including Maps, Drive, YouTube and Chrome. Sign in to one, and you’ll be signed in to all (this also works for signing out). So you won’t have to type in that 27-character password or retrieve your 2-step verification code every time you navigate to another Google app. You may need to re-login after you update the app, but then you’ll be all set.

Head over to the App Store now to download the updated app so you can save a bit more time each day.

Posted by Simon Corbett, Founder & Managing Director, Jargon PR

Editor's note: This week we’re featuring news, stories and updates about our vibrant partner community as we host more than 700 partners for our second annual Global Partner Summit. Today, we hear from Simon Corbett, Founder & Managing Director of Jargon PR, based outside London. Keep an eye on this blog, our Google+ page and visit our program site for more information on the Google Apps Reseller Program.

I worked at a few large PR companies for a decade before starting my own shop. I saw an opportunity for a small, nimble company to help businesses in the tech industry, and launched Jargon PR in a converted country barn outside London in 2008. Since then, we’ve grown to 12 people, added an office in the U.S. and even netted a few awards along the way.

The PR industry is extremely competitive, and we’re always looking for ways to differentiate ourselves. A few years back, we realized there was an opportunity to do just that with Google Apps. Most of us were using Gmail at home and wanted to be able to create, share and collaborate on documents in real-time at work, too.

There was one big, hairy obstacle in the way: we used Microsoft Outlook, worked on multiple devices and operating systems, and I had no idea how to switch to Google. How would this work if I was using a MacBook Air and another team member was on a PC? We needed someone to walk us through the process, hold our hand and make sure our work didn’t skip a beat along the way.

That’s where Ancoris came in (and saved the day). I’d researched online to learn more about Google Apps Partners, and, after realizing Ancoris were just down the road from us, set up a meeting. The team had done dozens of these migrations, both large and small, and talked us through the process from start to finish, addressing each of my concerns. They took the ambiguity and fear out of the switch. A few meetings later, our Ancoris team came to our office to make sure everything went smoothly, and we were up and running in less than a day. It was quick — no drama, no stress.

Now, gone are the old fashioned days of bad, hit-your-head-on-the-desk technology. No more asking someone to email the latest version of a document, and having to wait for different time zones to wake up to share them. We do all our work on shared Google Docs, so everyone has access to the most up-to-date information and can collaborate in real-time, whether they’re in London or California in somewhere in between. I can open a draft press release from the Drive app on my mobile phone while I’m sitting with my clients at the British Library’s Business & IP Centre. And as the company grows, it takes 30 seconds to set up a new employee with an Apps account, no training required — they’re already using it at home, so using it at work is an organic experience.

Our partnership with Ancoris has continued far past the migration, too. They send us email newsletters with product updates and new features. They’re accessible on chat and via a tech hotline for quick, one-off questions. And because they’re local, they’re never too far away for an in-person visit. Moving to Google Apps, and doing it with the help of a great partner, has been a game changer for our business.

Posted by Yordan Kamburov, IT Director of Blizoo Media and Broadband EAD

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Yordan Kamburov, IT Director of Blizoo Media and Broadband EAD, the largest digital cable operator in Bulgaria. In this post he discusses why Blizoo brought its 1,500 employees in 35 locations onto Google Apps for Business. See what other organizations that have “gone Google” have to say.

Blizoo Media and Broadband EAD is Bulgaria’s largest cable company, providing high-quality digital television, Internet and telephone service across Bulgaria and Macedonia. The company is growing quickly as broadband Internet usage surges in Bulgaria.

Blizoo was born from the merger of CableTel and Eurocom Cable in late 2009, and since then, we’ve been working hard to bring together 1,500 employees across 35 locations into one cohesive team. We’re known for deploying the most advanced network infrastructure, but, ironically, when it came to our internal communications systems, things weren’t so cutting-edge. Shortly after the merger, we realized each company was using a totally different communications system for email and calendaring – and both of these solutions were hopelessly outdated.

CableTel and Eurocom’s IT teams came together to find a unified communications solution that would move our newly combined company into a new era of collaboration. We wanted one platform for email, calendars, file sharing, video calls and messaging – accessible by all employees – no matter where they were located or what device they were using. During the evaluation process, we considered Google Apps, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange and open-source solutions like Zimbra. Google Apps was the only solution that covered all the bases – offering full collaboration, totally in the cloud.

The transition to Google Apps was very smooth. In partnership with our integration partner Solitex, we quickly moved all 1,500 employees to Google - and not one single email was lost in the transition.

All of our departments have found innovative ways to use Google Apps. The HR department uses Drive as their central employee management hub. They created special Docs and Templates that managers can fill in when employees are hired, promoted or leave the company. The sales department has adopted Google Apps to run training programs and create reports. Managers store all types of presentations in Drive, from training guides to skill-building programs to weekly bulletins. Since implementing Google Apps, sales managers spend 30-45% less time inputting data and calculating commissions.

The IT department also appreciates how easy it is to manage Google Apps. There is virtually no maintenance required and we don’t have to operate our own servers. We’ve reduced time spent managing the communications system by at least 30%. Google’s built-in security means we worry far less about about data leaks. Before, employees emailed attachments back and forth, which was not only cumbersome, but created multiple security risks. Now, they just log securely into Drive to collaborate in real-time.

From IT and HR, to sales, management, marketing and beyond, Google Apps has made life easier for all Blizoo employees.aborate in real-time.

Posted by Aman Rathi, Product Manager, Google Apps

Last year we launched the Google Admin app for Android that enabled administrators to easily add users, reset passwords, see audit logs and contact support.

Today we’re launching the Google Admin app for iOS so admins can take care of common tasks on the go directly from their iPhones or iPads.

This app is designed for admins and requires API access to be enabled. Install the Google Admin app for iOS or Android. To learn more, visit the Help Center.

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Dr. Dan Maas, Chief Information Officer for Littleton Public Schools, a school district just south of Denver, Colorado, with 15,000 K-12 students across 13 elementary schools, 4 middle schools, 3 high schools, several alternative programs, a preschool, and 2 charter schools. Check out their case study to learn more.

What motivated Littleton Public Schools to move to Google Apps?
Students today are growing up in a different educational world. Online tools have fundamentally changed how today’s kids learn, interact and work with each other. Moving to Google Apps was a natural step in creating a modern learning environment for our students, because the tools are intuitive and familiar to them. Before using Google Apps, the district was hosting email servers for teachers and staff, but had no collaboration tools and homework was done largely by emailing attachments or making paper submissions, a cumbersome process. Our top priority was to address these challenges.

LPS buildings average 50 years in age, but with Google, the learning is in the cloud.

How is the district using Google Apps now, nearly two years after deployment?
Today, every Littleton staff member, teacher and student in 4th grade and above has a Google Apps account — some schools have even started introducing their kindergartners to the Google tools. Adoption has been incredible across the board: during the 2011-2012 school year, Littleton students created more than 200,000 new Google Docs, and by the spring of 2013 they were averaging over 20,000 each month.

Are there any teachers or departments in particular that have embraced Google Apps in innovative ways?
I'm inspired by literally hundreds of classrooms in our district and how they're using technology to help their students learn. Katie Christie’s 5th grade class at Runyon Elementary School, for example, is using Apps in a particularly impressive way as part of the "Inspired Writing" initiative. The curriculum revolves around a Google Site that houses learning objectives, resources and videos, assignments, student and teacher work. Mrs. Christie posts assignments daily on a Google Calendar, which is embedded into the class’s Google Site and can even be added to a student or parent’s personal Google account. Google Docs lets students do different kinds of creative homework, including using Google Drawings to creating flowcharts for a book report and relying on Presentations to collectively create and speak to a deck about astronomy. It’s validating for us to know that Google holds her work in equally high regard — Mrs. Christie was recognized as a Google Certified teacher last spring.

Even second graders are using Apps for writing projects like pen pals among multiple schools, where kids don't write together several times a year, but several times every day.

Are you seeing any cost savings from using Google Apps?
We’re saving more than $42,000 each year with Apps, since we no longer have to maintain email servers, storage or licensing software. That’s not even including all the time we’re saving our IT team, since they no longer have to waste hours clearing out full email inboxes and resolving downtime issues.

What are you personally most proud of when you look back at how Littleton has changed since moving to Google Apps?
I love seeing how the technology empowers our students. Google Apps are great equalizers – regardless of their home situation, every student has the opportunity to learn with Apps. These tools, paired with the skills students gain in school, are universal and will serve them for the rest of their lives. It’s so inspiring to me and all our teachers to see the students light up and become masters of their own direction.

LPS students create 20,000 Google Docs every month as a normal part of their learning.

One cannot underestimate the power of collaboration. Any given feature set of a software or cloud application will evolve over time, so the specific skills are not as important. But the habits of mind that one develops by working with collaborative documents are truly different than what a 20th century education encouraged. Collaboration means inclusion; inclusion means more brain power applied to a problem; more brain power means better solutions; and better solutions produced by an inclusive process means better overall understanding. What more could any educator hope for?

Posted by: Ronald Ho, Product Manager, Google Apps for Business

Whether your organization has two people or 200,000, it should be easy to communicate and get stuff done together. In May, Hangouts launched as a unified way for people to communicate by voice, video or text across devices. Following the introduction of the new look full-screen video chat last month, today we're rolling out some new Hangouts features specifically for Google Apps customers.

With the addition of support for the Global Address List, it'll now be easier to quickly find and chat with your colleagues. The conversations you've recently had will still sit at the top of your Hangouts list, but start typing the name of anybody in your organization and auto-complete will help you find who you’re looking for.

New settings also give admins the ability to customize which Hangouts features are available to which employees. Admins can now choose to limit Hangout chat messages to being internal-only, set chat history to off by default and decide whether users within the domain can contact each other without sending or accepting formal invitations first. Video and audio chat can also be turned off across the organization.

Finally, the Google Apps support team will now provide the same level of help for Hangouts as they do for Google Talk, including 24/7 phone support.

Learn how to enable the new Hangouts experience.

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

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog and Google Drive Blog)

You're probably used to downloading email attachments, but each of those files takes time to download, eats up space on your device, and can get buried deep inside your "Downloads" folder. With today's update to Gmail, you can skip that whole process. Instead, you can view attachments and save files directly to Google Drive without ever leaving Gmail, making it easy to access them later from whatever device you’re on—computer, phone or tablet.

The next time you open an email with attachments, you’ll see new previews of the files at the bottom of the email, from photos and videos to spreadsheets and PDFs.

When you click on one of those previews, a full-screen view of the image or document will appear. You can read, search for a particular phrase, and even browse through multiple attachments right in Gmail.

You can now also save your attachments directly to Drive simply by clicking the Drive button that appears when you hover over the preview. Of course, if you prefer to download the attachment to your computer, you can—just click the arrow button.

This new attachment experience is available on desktop and will be rolling out over the next week. If you’re one of the more than 120 million active Drive users, you know that saving your files to Drive lets you get to them from any computer, phone or tablet. And if you aren’t taking advantage of Drive just yet, give it a try with your next Gmail attachment.

Posted by Ben Budde, Google Apps for Business Sales Manager, former Marine

Like a lot of veterans, my decision to serve was inspired in part by my family. In my case, it was my grandmother.

I grew up in California, and after graduating high school, my grandmother took me on a trip to Kenya to see a different world (she was a very cool grandma). We landed in Nairobi on August 7th, 1998 — the same day the U.S. Embassy was bombed. We felt compelled to go to the site and try to help. Later, we learned that more than 200 people had died and thousands were injured from the attack. I felt terrible for those impacted, but I was also inspired by what I saw: in the midst of the destruction and shock, the Marines established control over the situation. They acted with assurance and purpose. That’s when I knew I needed to be a Marine.

I went to the University of Colorado, Boulder on a ROTC scholarship and joined the Marine Corps the day I graduated. I deployed twice to Iraq, where I served with some of the bravest men and women. Then, 9 years after the day I knew I wanted to be a Marine, I returned home. I did what many vets do when they return to civilian life — I wrote out my resume and went on a job search. There were a lot of great companies looking to hire veterans, but I was drawn straight to Google, because I saw they had an inspiring mission and the same strong sense of purpose that we had in the military. That direction appealed to a Marine like me. I started as a temp in fraud protection and now manage a sales team focused on driving adoption of Google Apps for Business.

According to the latest Census data, veterans run 3.7M businesses in the U.S. and are 45% more likely to start a business than the average American. The numbers speak for themselves, but personally, I think vets are such successful entrepreneurs because they value teamwork, demonstrate leadership and have a high tolerance for stress.

I also believe Google Apps is a critical tool for veterans (or anyone) starting or running a business, because it lets them focus on their ideas and their companies, rather than worrying about the technology behind it all. One of my favorite parts of the job is getting the chance to talk to veterans about launching their businesses with Google tools, like I did at a Google for Entrepreneurs workshop for veterans last summer.

This week, we’re highlighting a handful of veteran owned businesses that use Apps to communicate and collaborate with partners all over the world. These are just a small sampling of the interesting and innovative veteran owned businesses out there, with more starting each day.

Finally, for those that serve, for veterans and their families who have answered the call of duty and know it as a way of life, I am forever indebted to you and I salute you on this Veterans Day.

Editor's note: Colorado has enticed all sorts of pioneers since its Wild West beginnings. We’re excited to highlight a handful of these trailblazers - the intrepid entrepreneurs, aspiring micro-brewers and ambitious thought leaders - who have helped create the adventurous and innovative culture the Centennial State is known for. Today, we hear from Brad Feld, Managing Partner at Foundry Group, a venture capital firm based in Boulder, Colorado. Join us next Wednesday for a Hangout on Air with Brad and fellow Techstars co-founder David Cohen to learn more about technology in the startup world.

What prompted you to start Foundry Group?
My partners and I started Foundry Group in 2007. We had previously worked together at Mobius Venture Capital and learned an enormous amount, both good and bad, from that experience. We built Foundry Group on a very clear strategy which included a set of deeply held beliefs centered around the power of networks and what we call “business love.” We treat each other with the utmost respect and truly like each other, and that attitude spills over to how we treat entrepreneurs and other investors. The firm is based in Boulder, Colorado but we’re national investors: 33% of our investments are in Colorado, 33% are in California, and the rest are made to organizations across the U.S.

When and why did Foundry Group decide to use Google Apps?
We switched to Google Apps in 2010 after spending the three years prior with a traditional environment grounded in Microsoft Outlook, Office and Exchange, with dedicated in-office servers. We had a heterogeneous computing environment -- some Macs and some PCs -- and the Mac users were definitely second class citizens with the Microsoft apps, while everyone suffered from disruptive email or server issues at least once a month. Meanwhile, we were using Gmail at home, and as most of our computing activities shifted to being Web-based, it was a natural evolution for us to go Google. As more Macs infiltrated our small 12-person office and the vast majority of the companies we invested in were on Google Apps, we felt incredibly anachronistic using a non-Google Apps environment. Switching was the obvious and smart decision.

How does Foundry Group use Google Apps?
Google Apps allows us to have truly continuous communication. We are incredibly aggressive Gmail users and are comfortable with the endless flow of internal email given the way conversation views work. In 2010, this was transformative for us, since we travel a lot and the ability to jump on any device from anywhere was infinitely more satisfying than the “sync my Microsoft email, connect to a VPN to access to files and wait as things grind away” experience we had gotten used to.

Does Google Apps cultivate a certain company culture?
We have an open culture and Google Apps plays a big role in maintaining transparency. Rather than meeting daily, for example, we run our entire business over one lunch on Mondays, and we use a single page on Google Sites to keep track of all the topics we discuss.

What are the most surprising benefits you've seen with Google Apps?
The continuous improvement of the actual products has been a great magic trick. We regularly discover a new Google Apps feature that quickly gets incorporated into everything we do. We each use various add-ins -- both to Chrome and specific apps -- and have found the third-party extension around the Google Apps infrastructure to be incredible. Several of the companies we’ve invested in, including Yesware and Spanning, are direct participants in this ecosystem, and it’s pretty awesome to see how it evolves.

Posted by Jean Charles Bully, Chairman of ILCEA Education

Editor's note: Our guest blogger today is Jean Charles Bully, chairman of ILCEA Education, a leading provider of educational programs and services around the world. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

With today's technology, the world can seem pretty small. However, language barriers can still form a big obstacle for global communication. At ILCEA Education, our goal is to bring the world together by teaching people new languages. Founded in 2001, we serve 1.5 million students in 50 countries around the world. We help our students learn about new cultures and languages with diverse in-country work programs, student exchanges, internship opportunities, online training, and even coordinate vacations to help people learn new languages. We get to work with all types of students, but we find that it’s not so easy to coordinate our work globally.

To help our students learn, we partner with more than 500 international schools around the world to teach and coordinate our programs. This requires a standard platform for communication, so we’re switching to Google Apps with help from Cloudreach, a Google Apps reseller. Before Apps, our education affiliates sent out emails from various addresses, making tons of phone calls and in some cases even mailing printed letters or printed forms to communicate with us. By bringing everyone in our network onto Google Apps under a single ILCEA Education domain, we’re creating a unified internal communication strategy, ensuring that all of our partners can participate in every conversation. It gives our partners access to Google+ Hangouts, Gmail, and shared Google Docs to foster easy communication no matter where they are or what device they’re on.

Google Apps will upgrade our student’s educational experience. Learning a new language and living in a new place can be overwhelming, so we want to make sure all of our students have a smooth start. All of our students will have an ILCEA Education branded Google Apps account, providing easy access to the resources, communication and social tools they need. Students will be able to interact with course materials from anywhere with an internet connection in an intuitive way using Google Drive. Google Hangouts will also provide an important opportunity for students to practice their language skills from anywhere with an internet connection, transforming the learning experience with active participation.

Because teaching is at the heart of what we do, our learning resources will get a major digital makeover with Google Apps. Sharing lesson plans, curriculums, and other resources on Drive allows our educators have access to the materials they need, without having to worry about cumbersome downloads or printed manuals. Drive allows our teachers and partners to simultaneously edit materials with ease, so our lessons will always be current, including the latest information as well as any updates based on student feedback.

Learning requires consistency and practice. By providing easy-to-use collaboration tools and access to educational resources, ILCEA Education is helping our affiliates provide a better education to millions of students worldwide. With Google Apps, we can work toward breaking down obstacles in communicating and obstacles for learning.

Posted by Paul Clarke, Director of Technology of Ocado

Editor's note: Our guest blogger this week is Paul Clarke, Director of Technology at Ocado, the world’s largest online-only grocery retailer based in the UK. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Ocado isn’t your typical corner grocery store. For one thing, there’s no corner as we’re the world's largest online-only grocery retailer reaching over 70% of British households, and now with a fast growing non-food business alongside. Our customers shop online using our award winning webshop or mobile apps and then their orders are picked and packed in one of our huge automated warehouses, the largest of their kind in the world; hours later, our vans deliver to their kitchens in one hour delivery slots. On a normal week we ship over 150,000 orders - that's over 1.1 million items each day. Google Enterprise solutions are playing a major, and expanding, role in helping us run such a time critical 24/7 operation across multiple sites.

Google Apps allows us to do things our way, wherever and whenever we want. Our staff use Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Drive to stay on top of their day to day work, and Google+ is helping our teams stay in touch, share information and build local communities. Ultimately, all of these tools help to make sure our customers get the groceries they order, on time and in the best possible condition.

But we didn’t stop there. We looked at other ways we could use Google’s technology to help us run our business and started using Google App Engine for building internal applications. For example, we used App Engine to create a new version of our "Where's My Order” application, which our customers will soon be using to find out where their orders are within our production cycle. Once their order is on the road, the integration with Google Maps allows them to see exactly where their delivery van is. So we’re taking what used to be a chore, grocery shopping, and making it a simple experience that you can do from the convenience of your own home, or wherever you may be.



Our most recent project was on Google Compute Engine. Within our warehouses there are certain tasks that are repetitive and arduous for humans to do, like picking heavy six packs of bottled water into customer orders. So our robotics team is developing solutions that use robots to automate these sorts of tasks and thus release staff for other more important work. But these robots need sophisticated 3D vision systems to enable them to see what they are doing. These are very computationally intensive applications and by providing the instantly flexible and scalable computing power to crunch all those numbers, Compute Engine provided the perfect solution. And, we are already using the cloud to store and process some of the huge volumes of data that our business spits out every minute. But with an eye to future growth and international expansion, we have plans to use Compute Engine and Cloud Storage to move other parts of our production systems to the cloud.

So walk into an Ocado warehouse in the future and you might run into a robot if you’re not careful. Like I said, we’re not your typical corner grocery store.

Posted by Muzammil Esmail, Product Manager, Google Apps

To make it easier for Google Apps administrators to manage their users, services and devices, we recently announced a redesigned Admin console. Two weeks ago, we made the new Admin SDK available to developers who want to build customized tools for organizations that use Google Apps.

Today we're launching the Google Admin app for Android devices. The Admin app makes it easy for admins to use their Android phone or tablet to accomplish the most common tasks—such as quickly adding or suspending users, resetting passwords, managing group memberships, and directly calling or emailing specific users.

This app is designed for admins and requires API access to be enabled. Install the Google Admin app from Google Play. To learn more or contact support, visit the Help Center.

Posted by Peter Shorney, Global IT Operations Manager at Rentokil Initial

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Peter Shorney, Global IT Operations Manager at Rentokil Initial, an international services business based in the UK. The company works across 60 countries and offers services including pest control, hygiene services, workwear laundering and interior and exterior landscaping. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Whether it's getting rid of pests, cleaning up a crime scene or tending to office plants, Rentokil Initial is a service business whose primary aim is to offer customers the best possible standard. This can only be achieved if teams work closely together, sharing expertise and ideas and communicating constantly.

We used to have 180 email domains and 40 mail systems in place, so finding contact details and responding quickly to colleagues was a challenge. To tackle this, in 2009, we moved 35,000 business users, including our ‘on the road’ service technicians and salespeople onto a single communications platform, Google Apps.

Since switching to Google Apps, we’ve saved millions of pounds (£) on IT maintenance and several hundred thousand pounds by cutting the time spent on administrative tasks through using tools such as Google Docs, Sites and Forms. For senior management, Hangouts have also proved their worth, saving roughly 54 hours of the senior management’s time a week - that’s over 2,000 hours a year.

As well as maximizing productivity, online sharing through Google Apps has meant we can now use the group’s size and combined expertise to our advantage by spreading knowledge and ideas organically across countries and divisions.

Individual teams have fully embraced the opportunity for knowledge sharing, using the group intranet, powered by Google Sites, to post training videos and access technical images. But it’s not all about official documents and meetings: online sharing is helping us to become a more personal, sociable organization, which is important for staff retention and working culture. Colleagues use our intranet to share personal achievements, from sleeping on the streets for a homeless charity to boxing in international championships, giving a true flavor of the diversity within the company.

Employees at all levels are embracing Google Apps to connect with colleagues. For example our UK Managing Director uses Google+ to post updates and pictures of his ‘road trips’ across the UK and his encounters with colleagues, from the CFO to our longest standing pest control technicians, providing new insight into his role in the business. Our 35 graduate trainees also have their own Google Group to share work experiences in the company. The ability to connect directly with our executives and create communities amongst our new employees is radically changing and modernizing the culture of our company.

All in all, we’ve been amazed by the journey which Google Apps has taken us on, connecting our teams no matter where they are and no matter what they’re doing and making a difference in almost every corner of our business. Thanks to Google Apps we see ourselves as better connected, able to offer a better service to customers and more competitive on a global scale.