Posted by Nan Boden, Head of Global Technology Partners


Today, we announced a partnership with Box to power collaboration and productivity for businesses of all sizes. As part of this partnership, Box will integrate with Google Docs and Google Springboard to deliver a seamless experience for working and collaborating in the cloud.

The integration between Box and Google Docs will enable Box to act as a third-party repository for Docs, Sheets and Slides, allowing users to create and collaboratively edit Google Docs directly from Box.

We’re also working together to integrate Box with Google Springboard, which connects people and information with Google-powered search and intelligence. Through this integration, Springboard will help users find the right information at the right time, no matter where it’s hosted — in Gmail, Drive, Docs or in Box.

We want our customers to have flexibility in their choice of tools and to have the most productive and collaborative suite possible for their needs. In fact, several of our own customers, like Avago, Intuit, Internet2 and Whirlpool already use Box and Google together, and these integrations will contribute to a more productive and collaborative enterprise. We’re excited to partner closely with Box to expand our efforts in the enterprise and transform how businesses work in the cloud.

Posted by Mike Hincks, Director of IT Infrastructure at Vivint Solar

Editor's note: Today we hear from Mike Hincks, Director of IT Infrastructure at Vivint Solar, a leading provider of residential solar power in North America. The fast-moving enterprise is using Google Apps, along with Dialpad, to drive collaboration and support for a workforce that's 63% remote. Register here to join our YouTube Live event on September 15 at 10 a.m. to learn more about how Dialpad, a Recommended for Google Apps Technology Partner, can modernize your IT strategy to support the anywhere worker.


Vivint Solar’s mission is to flip the switch on how the world consumes power. With millions of homeowners adopting solar for economic and environmental benefits, our workforce has rapidly grown to nearly 4,000 employees spread across 51 offices.

Much of that growth has been within our mobile workforce. Today, about 63% of our employees work remotely. Our sales professionals and technicians are constantly on the road building relationships with customers, and they need the right technology to ensure that they’re able to get their jobs done as efficiently as possible.

We turned to Dialpad to eliminate the hurdles of traditional voice technology, which can include multiple steps to reach successful deployment and ongoing maintenance challenges.

Integrating communications and productivity in the cloud with easy access to Gmail, Calendar and Docs across every device
Dialpad’s pure-cloud communications solution directly ties voice, video and messaging with Google Apps. Our mobile workforce immediately saw increased productivity once we made the switch. To get started, employees downloaded the Dialpad app, which automatically synced their meetings, emails and shared documents from Gmail, Calendar and Drive. The fact that it works across laptops, tablets and mobile devices (not just a desk phone) frees our workforce to work where and when they want.

Dialpad’s native integration with Google Apps allowed us to connect two mission-critical tools, and now our mobile workers can get their jobs done faster and more efficiently. When employees log in with their Google credentials to view recent emails, shared documents and upcoming calendar events, they get insights and rich context right from the Dialpad app.

In addition, Dialpad syncs with Google’s global company directory, so employee contact information is always up-to-date. And if an employee needs to call a colleague or customer, they can click-to-call with Dialpad straight from Gmail.

A simple deployment of scalable, high-value technology, without the overhead
Our transition to a pure-cloud communications platform with Dialpad and Google has resulted in significant cost savings and impactful productivity gains. For example, our prior telephony system needed a team of five people to manage and administer it full-time. Now, one employee spends only 5% of their time managing our new system.

Traditional IT voice systems come with hundreds of thousands of dollars in yearly infrastructure and hosting costs, while modern competitors require significant professional services just to get the product up and running. Dialpad, by contrast, had no upfront capital expenditures or ongoing maintenance costs. When switching to Dialpad, we were able to get our communications network deployed in just a couple of days without the high upfront costs — and Google Apps integrated instantly.

As our business continues to grow, both tools will scale seamlessly and neither requires the purchase of new IT infrastructure.

An empowered workforce that collaborates freely

A pure cloud stack lets employees get work done from anywhere. At Vivint Solar, our customer success managers need to connect with technicians in the field, but are based in our office headquarters. Before Dialpad and Google, it was a significant challenge for these different groups to maintain close relationships or communicate at a suitable time. Now, managers can resolve issues or bridge conversations using group messaging or SMS.

By integrating our core communications and productivity tools in the cloud, Vivint Solar has enabled an agile and deeply connected workforce that can collaborate from anywhere. It has created a new kind of business dialogue. Whether employees are local or remote, Dialpad and Google Apps make it easy to bridge voice with productivity and build a connected, more efficient workforce.

Editor's note: Today we speak with Kyle Coleman, Director of Sales Development and Kelly Payne, Customer Programs Manager at Looker, a data analytics software company that makes deep data understandable and useable for business teams. Looker uses Google Apps and Asana to track and collaborate on all their work.

Can you tell us about Looker and why the company needed collaboration and productivity tools?
Kelly: Our team at Looker is building software that helps business teams find, explore and understand the data that matters to them. As a fast growing startup, we think a lot about scaling our team and processes effectively and efficiently. We need the right tools do this well.

Why Google Apps?
Kyle: We’re heavy users of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Sheets and Slides. We can easily share our work cross-functionally and always feel confident that the person we’re working with has the most up-to-date version.
Kelly: We’re constantly pulling up a Google Doc to have everyone work from the same place at the same time. There’s a huge benefit to having our work and discussions update in real time and to easily share what we’re working on with anyone in our organization.

How and why does your team use Asana?
Kyle: We use Asana for important cross-functional workflows like new hire on-boarding, sales development and for almost all of our marketing team’s work. From campaign management to launches, every piece of content we publish — whether video, customer case study or blog post — is tracked in Asana. There’s so many moving pieces involved in a complex and collaborative workflow; Asana lets us track every detail.
Kelly: With Asana, we can more easily keep track of who's doing what, and stay updated on the progress of projects. As we’ve grown, Asana has helped us identify how repeated tasks can become standardized processes. Developing process standards brings the clarity and accountability that help us work together well.

How are you using Asana and Google Apps together?
Kelly: We're always linking our docs, spreadsheets or slide decks into our Asana tasks, which is easy to do with the Asana and Google Drive integration. Asana is where we make our work actionable, so the task becomes the place where all the relevant information is stored. Connecting Google and Asana makes it easy to ensure that everyone’s working out of the right documents. We’ve added a good deal of efficiency to our workflow by not duplicating efforts across teams.

How has productivity improved on your team by integrating Asana and Google apps?
Kyle: Two things that matter deeply to us as a growing team are productivity and priorities. Having everything in the same central place saves us so much time as a team, and Google Apps and Asana have given everyone a sense of what they need to be working on and when.

You mentioned that you’re constantly working collaboratively at Looker. How does using Google and Asana side by side make working together easier?
Kelly: With these tools that we’re now using, it’s so much easier to be collaborative and build a sense of trust and empowerment within our team. Whether we’re making a comment in a Google Doc or “hearting” someone’s task in Asana, we’re having a lot more fun moving our work forward together.

We hope you’ve enjoyed reading about how Looker makes work fun and collaborative using Google Apps with Asana. You can learn more and enable Asana in your Google Apps account by visiting their application listing in the Google Apps Marketplace.

Editor's note: Today we speak with Melissa Pateritsas of Shaw Industries Group, which uses Google Apps along with Smartsheet. Read on to find out how these integrated solutions foster collaboration and add greater efficiency to the Shaw Industries supply chain. Register here to join our Hangout on Air on July 20 at 10 a.m. PT to learn more about how Smartsheet, a Google recommended app, can improve your business.

Can you tell us about Shaw Industries and why you chose Google Apps and Smartsheet?

Shaw Industries Group is committed to creating an efficient and sustainable supply chain for its flooring enterprise. Being the world’s largest carpet manufacturer and a leading floorcovering provider means sustainability isn’t just a moral or ethical imperative, it’s smart for business. More efficient supply chains produce better, lasting products with fewer costs.

With offices and sales representatives across the United States and world, Shaw’s sales reach nearly $5 billion every year. Our growing business needed an even more efficient (and sustainable) way to bring daily operations into the digital age. So we turned to two powerful collaboration tools: Google Apps and Smartsheet.

In Smartsheet, we could make good use of the collaborative work management (CWM) platform that marries the power of a project and process management solutions suite to the familiar interface of a spreadsheet. And we saw Google Apps as an opportunity to improve efficiency and collaboration across teams. With a strong working history, the two work in tandem very well and together were exactly what we needed to achieve our digital transformation.

You mentioned the importance of supply chains for Shaw Industries. How did considerations around the supply chain impact your decision to switch to Google Apps and Smartsheet?

Part of creating an efficient and sustainable supply chain is lowering overhead costs. The processes used to produce carpet and flooring at our various manufacturing facilities differed slightly from location to location. The many manufacturing divisions had common needs, but also their own unique challenges. Any solution would have to address these differences, while commonalities would cause overlap. It didn’t make sense to have different support teams for each process, especially if half of what the teams did was identical.

Sharing plans and projects was also challenging. The systems we had in place were costly and time-consuming. We needed a way to increase visibility and update project statuses, not only for our team, but also for external parties like clients and vendors.

What results are you seeing now that you’re using Apps and Smartsheet?

Turning to Google Apps’ collaborative tools was a positive first step. Google Drive allowed us to easily share documents and files both internally and externally. Documents could be instantly shared and jointly edited by employees around the world in real time. Plus, going paperless made our operations more ecologically friendly.

Smartsheet’s suite of project and process management solutions, which feature Google Apps integration, further enhanced what Google already had to offer. Smartsheet offers great flexibility. With them, we can easily create templates that we can edit and customize to meet diverse needs.

We also simplified project roll-ups — which were previously done by hand. Using cell linking, engineering managers could automate the process, saving time and effort, and automatic updates solved the problem of visibility that we struggled with. We could now easily share individual projects with stakeholders, both internal and external, ensuring that everyone was on the same page.

Also, today our separate business units are able to build custom and individualized solutions on a strong foundation that addresses both common and distinct needs. Managers and engineers can automate processes that had previously been done by hand, spending more time and energy on devising ways to make our products better and longer-lasting. These new solutions are built using familiar interfaces and services that employees already know how to use.

Can you tell us about the process of adopting Smartsheet?

Adopting Smartsheet was a simple transition because of its familiar spreadsheet-like GUI. We didn’t need additional software. Everything we needed could be done within the frameworks that Google and Smartsheet already offered.

So where does the company stand now in terms of its digital transformation?

We’re definitely in the midst of transformation. With Smartsheet and Google solutions, and their simplicity and the scalability that a worldwide enterprise like Shaw needs, we’ve reduced overhead and complexity and cut time spent on processes. We now have more time and focus on building for the future. We can also proudly say that we’ve met our goal to create easy-to-adopt digital practices and a more efficient, sustainable supply chain.

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 Ignacio Eceiza, Head of Global IT Projects at Euralis

Editor's note: Today we hear from Ignacio Eceiza, head of Global IT projects at Euralis, a food and agriculture company with an annual revenue of $1.7B. Read how this innovative company is using Google Apps for Work with AODocs to help manage their documents, create workflows and go paperless, creating a faster, more agile business. You can also register here to join our Hangout on Air, on March 15 at 9 a.m. to learn more about how AODocs, a Google Apps for Work partner, can improve your business. 

Euralis started out as a cooperative venture when a group of local wheat farmers in southwest France came together to sell their crops. Nearly 80 years later, we’ve grown to over 5,000 employees around the world who bring high-quality food to market, from seed selection and poultry rearing to the harvesting and selling of the agricultural products. In addition to our employees, we bring together over 12,000 farmers to accomplish our mission. Collaboration remains a core part of who we are.

We have 130 farming and production sites for wheat, cereal, poultry, wine and vegetables; 14 processing plants to prepare these items for distribution; and we market in more than 120 countries across 5 continents — our annual revenue is $1.7B. To accomplish all this, our team needs the tools to work together across diverse environments, in different languages and timezones, within an industry that’s subject to strict quality regulations.

Going Google Three years ago, when we wanted to improve our document management infrastructure, we moved to Google for Work with AODocs. We had compared Apps with AODocs against IBM Lotus Quickplace and Microsoft Sharepoint, and going Google was the obvious choice. The user interface of Google Drive with AODocs was easy to adopt and we could tailor workflows and views in AODocs without requiring much help from the IT department. We were also convinced by the ease of migration, the improvement we’d see in the quality compliance processes and the opportunity to reduce our environmental impact.

AODocs and Drive make it an easy move to Google In addition to giving us all the features we had on our legacy system, AODocs also provided ready-to-use tools that let us migrate our existing content easily into Google Drive. The migration project started in 2014, with multiple document libraries used for human resources, quality policies and ISO 9001 compliance. We trusted AODocs with these critical documents because they were the first enterprise content management solution fully integrated with Google Drive, and their product could be easily configured for a variety of needs, without customized development. We also had peace of mind because of the excellent support of the AODocs team whenever we had questions or needed help.

AODocs and Drive, a perfect fit for quality and regulatory compliance Of course, quality is paramount in the food business, and from farm to warehouse to table, each and every one of us on the team had a part to play in maintaining this quality for our customers. AODocs on Google Drive made it easier to put more attention and focus on quality. Our intranet portal, which uses Google Sites with embedded customized views from AODocs, ensures that we have quick access to all the latest quality-related documents and processes we rely on.

Going paperless with AODocs on Drive With the powerful workflow engine we gained by choosing AODocs on Google Drive, and AODocs’ ability to integrate with SAP, we’ve transformed a formerly complex network of invoicing and purchase processing with multiple custom-built applications on our legacy IBM infrastructure into a simplified, paperless system.

Our accountants can now send invoices to AODocs by email directly from the scanner. AODocs then manages the entire validation workflow and sends notification emails to the corresponding managers. Our managers are often traveling, and they love that they can validate the documents on their smartphone, by simply reviewing notification emails and clicking the validation links.

Furthermore, our managers can configure and update their AODocs applications the way they want, without involving IT as much. Teams are more agile, and now the company has more resources to focus on important goals, like feeding the world.