Posted by Wim Roose, Head of IT at Vooruit

Editor's note: Today we hear from Wim Roose, Head of IT at Vooruit, Belgium’s most culturally significant arts centre, as he describes how Google Apps has given it the freedom to develop and grow while remaining true to its values. With 80 members of staff, hundreds of artists and countless partners to manage each year, communication and collaboration has become key to running the centre efficiently without losing the essential spirit of the organisation.


Vooruit is a unique place, not least because of its rich history and visionary objectives and aims. Can you tell us a little about its history and vision?

Vooruit was originally designed and built in 1914 as a festival and arts centre. It had a ballroom, a cinema and a theatre, as well as exhibition spaces and venues for debates and meetings. It quickly became the epicentre of the Ghent-based labor movement, and the building itself became a symbol of the socialist movement in the interwar period. Even the name Vooruit itself means “cooperative.” Although it was abandoned and fell into disrepair, it was regenerated in the early 1980s by a group of friends who wanted to re-establish its significance and honour its history, and that’s what we still do today.

We welcome around 300,000 visitors a year and host up to 600 events annually, meaning there’s something for everyone. We’re incredibly aware of the role we’re playing in Vooruit’s continuing history to provide arts services to the public, which is why we were determined to find a 21st Century IT solution that would allow us to work in the spirit of creativity, collaboration and cooperation that shaped the original Vooruit.

Tell us why you chose Google Apps to help deliver Vooruit’s objectives.

Google Apps was an intuitive choice. As an IT guy, I love the openness of the Google ecosystem. We wanted to find a way of working that suited the company’s ethos rather than working against it, something that would allow us to work freely and collaboratively instead of having to conform.

We also needed something that would support our organic growth and help us meet the efficiency needs of the modern world, and Google’s cloud-based apps do just that. Our building may be historic but the way we work needs to be as efficient and modern as any business operating today. In fact, our investment in a digital office was necessary as well as logical — if we’re to continue to work with the government and other organisations to deliver public arts and culture services, we need to be compatible with their way of working, but without compromising our own values. Google Apps make that possible.

Can you explain how you use Google Apps to increase efficiencies?

As opposed to working in the limiting and closed building automation system we largely relied on before, the Google ecosystem allows us to integrate everything into one interface, and for me that’s a giant step forward.

Gmail was the starting point for our digital revolution, and underpins how we work. We’ve migrated all 100 members of our staff from Outlook to Gmail, and we now send and receive up to 12,000 emails each month. Many of us now use Google Keep to create our “to do” lists, which means we can work collaboratively on projects with ease. The continuous updates to each project list allow us to work together with maximum efficiency, meaning no more duplication of effort or jobs left undone, as we all share access to the same real-time information. Gmail also allows us to track communications more effectively, and we can now communicate with each other — and artists and external partners — much more easily.

You’ve said that Vooruit is all about collaboration and cooperation — how does Google Apps help support this?

Google Drive has also been an integral part of our digital solution, and we now have around 25,000 files stored in the cloud, including Google Docs, Sheets and Slides. It’s been fundamental in terms of allowing access to information freely and easily. The planning of exhibitions and projects is a core part of what we do, but our existing planning software had limited document storage capacity. We now use Drive next to the planning software, which not only acts as a file server, but also a new way of communicating via the files themselves. We can upload all the relevant information for any one project in one place, which can be accessed wherever we are thanks to the cloud storage, meaning it’s much easier to work together.

The use of Google Docs has also revolutionised our way of working with others. We were at a point where some people were working in the cloud and some were saving documents locally, so all our assets were everywhere but nowhere at the same time. It was a mess — we couldn’t find anything when we needed it. Now we have single documents stored in one place, annotated with comments that allow us to communicate with project managers, contractors, suppliers and building guards. The fact that colleagues and partners can all access the same Google Docs and update information simultaneously has made us instantly more efficient and collaborative.

What about communicating outside the core Vooruit team? How has Google Apps helped Vooruit to integrate with the wider world?

We’re already ahead of the communications curve by using Hangouts instead of arranging meetings in person. Our aim is to reduce our environmental impact as an organisation, and not driving 100km to a meeting with an external partner can really contribute towards meeting our green targets. Daily meetings with artists and cultural organisations from across the world are also now possible without leaving our desks, broadening our reach and our potential, as well as saving us time and money.

What does the future hold for Vooruit in terms of IT?

Google Apps is key in helping us create a modern way of working that will grow with us, providing us with the flexibility to be creative as well as the efficiencies we need to succeed commercially. We’re constantly evolving while remaining true to our philosophy and we needed the fundamental change that would enable our organisation to be ready for the future and appeal to new recruits, artists and partners. Google’s cloud-based solutions have helped us prove that, as an arts organisation, we’re as willing and prepared to work digitally as any other industry, without having to compromise Vooruit’s original creative or collaborative values in the digital age.

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.

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 Jan Castelijns, Head of Systems Engineering and IT Operations, Travix, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Editor's note: Today we hear from Jan Castelijns, Head of Systems Engineering and IT Operations at Travix, a global online travel technology company that sells low fare flight tickets to 2.5 million passengers from 28 countries every year. Founded in 2011, Travix has rapidly built up a network of 500 staff in seven offices worldwide. Read why they chose Google Apps as the IT infrastructure behind their rapid expansion.


When Travix started out in 2011, it was through the merger of three companies. We gained strength from that diversity, but we also inherited three corporate IT systems. So the first thing the CEO asked me to do when I joined was to find one system we could use across the whole company. He recommended Microsoft Office 365, but implementing it was more demanding than anyone had expected. Months into the process, I went back to him with a realistic projection of the time and resources necessary to finish the rollout, and a recommendation that we put the project on hold. The hunt began for alternatives. That’s where Google Apps came in.

Google Apps is perfectly suited for an expanding global business. We have offices in Amsterdam, Oosterhout, Berlin, Bangalore, Singapore, California and London, and in all of these places, Office 365 required infrastructure modifications before implementation. By contrast, Google Apps was ready to go right out of the box.

Our corporate IT systems need to be quick, reliable and safe, with a minimum of costs and management overhead. Google Apps costs less to implement, less to maintain and allows greater contractual flexibility than Office 365. Because Google Apps is also entirely cloud based, we don’t need to install servers, as recommended in the hybrid server-cloud Office 365 solution. In fact, Google Apps allowed the decommissioning of 10 existing servers, each of which is priced at $3,000.

Rolling out Google Apps took just six weeks. g-company led training with one-on-one sessions for executives, small workshops for staff and even presentations over Hangouts for our Bangalore team. But key to our rapid deployment were the “ambassadors” – staff prepared to support their colleagues when Google Apps went live. After setting up our systems engineers on Google Apps, I sent out a Form for people to register as ambassadors and the response was overwhelming: 104 people signed up for 50 positions. This was a clear sign for us that our people were willing to embrace this change and make this transition work.

At Travix, we already worked with other Google products in particular fields, like Google Analytics and Google Adwords in marketing and Google BigQuery and kubernetes in engineering. Now we have Google Apps for everyone.

Staff here have become very enthusiastic about Google Apps, as they see how the tools fit into their working lives. Gmail, Calendar and Hangouts let staff stay on top of their work anytime, from anywhere. Rather than book meeting rooms through a separate app, now everything is on Calendar, saving time and hassle. Drive has been organically and rapidly adopted across the organisation, and Forms has been a huge success that we didn’t even plan for. Instead of starting a gigantic email thread or using a free survey tool found on the internet, we now use the simple Forms interface to get swift feedback, with answers fed directly into Sheets for analysis.

Hangouts in particular has changed the way we communicate, whether through the efficiency of instant messaging or by working more closely with colleagues abroad. Hangouts on Air allows staff in other offices to participate in our CEO’s presentations in Amsterdam, and because the stream is recorded, engineers in Bangalore and California can watch it too, despite the time difference. Collaboration between team members no longer requires a kind of “email ping pong” and stressful version control. We can just open Hangouts and Drive and go through a document together, whether an engineering design in Docs, a marketing product plan on Slides, or details of a tender on Sheets.

A growing global technology company demands an IT solution that works in any location, on any device. On top of that, it has to be cost-effective, easy to maintain and ready to use in short time. It’s my job to provide that for my colleagues. With Google Apps, that’s exactly what we’ve got.

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 Matt McNamara, Director of Engineering at Expensify

Editor's note: Today’s post comes from Matt McNamara, director of engineering at Expensify, a company that provides “hassle-free expense reporting built for employees and loved by admins.” Read how their team uses Google Apps to work abroad for at least one month every year.


At Expensify, we’re all about making mundane tasks (like expense reporting), a pleasant, less time-consuming experience. Google’s no-sweat, work-in-real-time tools have helped us achieve these goals since starting our company in 2008. We considered alternatives like Microsoft and Zoho, but we found that no other solution could compete with the simple, intuitive interface and ease of use of Google Apps.

Google Apps is a natural extension of our company culture, which I like to think of as “Family Style.” Whether or not we’re in the office, we encourage people to work flexibly and with people on different teams. Building this type of open, supportive culture depends on ensuring everyone has an equal voice — and tools like Gmail play a huge role in making this happen. We encourage transparency and participation by adding every employee to all internal email lists from day one. It might sound like a lot, but anyone can opt out and choose only to follow what’s relevant to them.

Our annual month abroad also contributes to our overarching family culture. For one month every year, the entire team has the opportunity to work (and bring their families) abroad. We run as the same business, but from somewhere awesome — last year we spent a month in Thailand. Thanks to the flexibility of Google Apps, our only requirements for this trip are a beach, power and Internet access.

We rely on our employees to give us feedback about the tools we use, and Google Apps is probably the only product no one has ever asked to replace. We’ve tested bringing on some other enterprise and productivity platforms, but we always come back to Google Apps. Their integrations, like single sign-on with Intercom, make our lives easier. We can quickly onboard new employees, and don’t have to worry about former employees accessing sensitive content.

Because it’s so easy to use, we hire zero IT support, and I don’t foresee that changing anytime soon. Even non-technical employees can set up accounts without any problems. It just works — whether we’re at our headquarters or on the beach.

Posted by Tonino Ciuffini, Head of Information Assets, Warwickshire County Council, Warwick, UK

Editor's note: Today we hear from Tonino Ciuffini, Head of Information Assets at Warwickshire County Council, the local authority for Warwickshire, UK. The council handles social care, highways, public health, the fire service, economic development, education and more for the region’s 540,000 citizens. Read how £260,000 a year is just the start of their savings with Google Apps for Work.

The best thing about the work we do is the sheer range of ways we help people. While one group works to bring broadband to small businesses, another will tackle a fire or care for children in need. So when the government cut our council budget by 20%, we knew we faced tough decisions. For IT in particular, a £2,000,000 cut to our budget meant we had to look at all options for new ways of operating, and helped drive the decision to replace our 20-year-old email system. But it wasn’t just about saving money in the short-term. We wanted to share our facilities more effectively, improve the flexibility of our IT for staff and make it easier to work with external partners. Google was a perfect fit.

 

Tonino Ciuffini, Head of Information, Assets, Warwickshire County Council

Deploying 5,500 Google Apps accounts was much easier than I had imagined. With the help of Cloud Technology Solutions, who provided migration tools, advice and support, we migrated 3,000 users in just 8 weeks. Now Google Apps saves us £260,000 a year that we would have spent on our old system: £100,000 on licenses, £100,000 on infrastructure and £60,000 on support staff. But the really significant savings go deeper than that, and come from efficiencies made right across the organisation.

Saving time by working together on Drive. Instead of multiple versions of a document flying around on email, or saving documents to unrestricted servers, staff can work together on a single document on Drive, comment, make changes, choose their own access settings and even share documents with external agencies. This has also led to increased collaboration between staff and teams.

The mobility of web-based apps frees office space. We now have the flexibility to not only work from home or elsewhere, but to also work more closely with customers and partners. When working on-site with the police or health workers, council staff can essentially take the office with them.

Saving on transport costs with Hangouts. Face-to-face meetings with the citizens we serve are still important, but cutting out the financial and time costs of travelling to internal meetings generates further savings.

Cutting bureaucracy with Docs and Sheets. Taking notes during meetings on Docs eliminates the need to type notes afterwards. Everyone can leave comments, which improves accuracy and transparency, and voting with Forms gives us immediate, presentable results in Sheets.

Google logins make working simple. We no longer waste time dealing with forgotten passwords or typing separate logins into different applications. And being able to use multiple logins on a single device saves money on hardware, too: teams going to trade shows can share a single Nexus 9 tablet and log in simultaneously instead of using one device each.

Automatic upgrades saves on IT maintenance and keep us ahead of developments. In the four years that we’ve used Google Apps, every upgrade has felt like a natural evolution, and we’ve never had to implement new training to accommodate changes.

Google Apps has improved our effectiveness, too. Our team of four roadworks inspectors use Apps on tablets to be on the road for 80% instead of 50% of their day, significantly improving compliance with timetables for roadworks. And our family social workers use Calendar to advance safety by ensuring teams know where they are.

We also use notes on Drive to improve security and save paper with digital notes. At the top of our organisation, most of our elected county councillors have other jobs and don't work in our offices. Now they use Google Apps on a device of their choice, instead of clunky remote access systems, and check in more often to keep track of progress.

Budget cuts made life complicated for everyone at the council, but satisfaction with our IT system has actually increased during this difficult period. In the year we introduced Google Apps, our staff satisfaction scores increased in all 55 categories of an independent benchmarking run by a UK society of public service IT organisations called SOCITM. And last year, we ranked number one out of 60 UK councils in the SOCITM benchmarking survey for flexible working practices. That flexibility generates real savings without compromising on quality, and it was all made possible by Google Apps for Work.

Posted by Erick Johnson, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted on the Official Gmail Blog.)

Starting this week, we’re bringing Reminders in Google Calendar to the web so you can keep track of your to-dos alongside your events.

Just like on Android and iPhone, you’ll get the following:

• Reminders stick around - If a reminder isn't completed, it will appear at the top of your calendar until you mark it done.
• Reminders work across Google - Reminders you create in Inbox, Keep and the Google app will also show in Google Calendar. 
• Reminders sync with mobile - Reminders created in mobile show up on the web and vice versa. So you can stay on track from just about anywhere. 
  
  
  

With Reminders alongside your events on the web, Android and iPhone, you now have a single way to manage your day.

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 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 Suzanne Frey, Director, Security and Privacy Engineering, Google Apps for Work

Today is Safer Internet Day, a moment for technology companies, organizations of all sizes and people around the world to focus on online safety, together. To mark the occasion, we’re adding two new security features to Gmail that will roll out to Google Apps domains in the coming weeks.

First, users who receive a message from, or who are about to send a message to, someone whose email service doesn’t support an encrypted connection (TLS), will see an open lock icon in the message. Users won’t see this icon when sending mail from one Google-hosted domain to any other, including gmail.com, since those emails are always sent over an encrypted connection. Gmail will always send and receive messages over TLS, unless the connecting service doesn’t support it.

Second, users receiving messages that aren’t properly authenticated with either Sender Policy Framework (SPF) or DKIM will see a question mark in place of their profile photo, corporate logo or avatar. Read more about both of these features on the Gmail blog.

To make the most of this day and every day forward, here are some additional features you can use as a Google Apps for Work admin to help protect user data.

1. Increase security at login, while keeping things easy for users                     Two-step verification is a well-known protection against the theft of login credentials, the most frequent threat on the Web today. As an admin, you can easily enforce use of 2-step verification to enhance security for all users in your Google Apps domain. Security keys make authentication even more secure and more convenient for users. They’re easy to deploy and easy to manage, and as a Google for Work customer, you even get a 50% discount.



2. Prevent sensitive information from leaving your network                               Activate Data Loss Prevention (DLP) to help prevent information from being revealed to those who shouldn’t have it. Gmail DLP automatically checks all outgoing emails and takes action based on predefined policies, which include quarantining the email for review, telling users to modify the information or blocking the email from being sent and notifying the sender. Check out our DLP whitepaper and learn how to get started. Stay tuned for more on DLP later this quarter.



3. Get the mail you want, not the spam you don’t                                                   Gmail has long been known for its smart spam filters, today spam is only 0.1% of messages in the average Gmail user’s inbox. To help you track and improve the quality of the mail sent and received at your domains, you can use the Postmaster Tools. You should also follow the best practices outlined in Google’s sender guidelines. For example, create a Sender Policy Framework, prevent spoofing by adding a digital signature to outgoing messages using DKIM and create a DMARC record to track and prevent unauthenticated messages sent from your domain.



4. Enforce mobile device policies in your organization                                       Mobile Management lets you control the devices that can connect to your users' Google Apps data, whether iOS or Android, and perform actions like remote wiping.

These are a few steps that can go a long way. If you activate any of these features today, you will contribute to an ever-brighter future for your brand, customers, employees, ideas and assets. The Internet is a big place, and it’s going to take global teamwork to make it the most secure.

We are grateful to be the trusted technology partner of businesses worldwide as we work together to make the Internet a safer place for everyone, everywhere.

Posted by Christoffer Lorang Dahl, Digital Director, SMFB, Oslo, Norway

Editor's note: Today we hear from Christoffer Lorang Dahl, Digital Director at SMFB, an advertising agency based in Oslo, Norway. In the 14 years since it was founded, SMFB has delivered award-winning campaigns for local and international clients including Geox, Ikea and Statoil. Read how SMFB created a whole new work environment around Google Apps for Work and made its clients, collaborators and 65 staff happier in the process.

It’s hard to be a 21st century creative agency when we’re bogged down with a 20th century-like IT platform. As SMFB’s Digital Director, I work with creatives and account managers to make digital ideas happen. With at least five projects on the go on any given day, my hands are full, but I always make time to help out with IT, too. One year ago, this informal role took up at least three hours of my work week, while the rest of the team collectively lost 10 working hours a day to spam and a calendar system so clunky it was almost unusable. It was time for a change, so we trialled two possible solutions and chose Google. Not only did we see huge potential in Drive, we guessed that staff would be familiar with Gmail and adapt quickly. We were right.

Google Apps solved the core problems we wanted to address. Gmail fixed our issues with spam, and Google Calendar is exactly the synchronised, reliable and easy-to-use calendar we were looking for. Because of its straightforward interface, everyone can use it to book meeting rooms and tell designers which teams to work with on which days. We used to run everything through a server in Sweden, and when it crashed, none of us could work. We’ve never experienced any downtime since switching to Google.

As well as fix the problems we knew we had, Google Apps for Work has rejuvenated our creative process. It’s hard to put someone in an office and tell them to “be creative.” That’s not how creativity works, but it’s exactly what we used to do. A typical day at SMFB used to begin with a briefing from the account director to the creatives. After that, the creatives would head to their offices to come up with ideas, which they would share by late afternoon so that they could get feedback by the next day. Now creatives start every morning with a Hangout, spend the day in a cafe, under the sun or wherever they like, and share their ideas on Docs. The account director and account manager — even the clients — can pitch in on the process, concepts and copy, which constantly evolve. And we never experience the confusion that results from multiple drafts and versions floating around. Film scripts do change, but if the wrong draft is sent to an animator or a director, the consequences can be dire.

Once we have a project concept, we compile a budget together in Sheets and contact external production companies. We handle at least five of these at a time, and they change from one day to the next, but because Drive documents can be shared with anyone, we can send these external companies briefs, handle agreements and manage the whole process on one platform. Anyone can immediately see how a project is progressing by looking it up on Drive — something that’s vital for running campaigns on social media, where every second counts.

I like to help my colleagues, and Google’s simple administration interface makes it easy. When a workmate accidentally deleted crucial files, I retrieved them from Drive, which lets you recover documents from up to 10 users for up to 25 days. And rather than just react, I suggest better ways of doing things — like creating a group email account for a new project, which I can have ready in two minutes. It’s a whole new way of working. So much so, in fact, that I recommended Google Apps for Work to our partner agency, Forsman & Bodenfors. Now they’re on it, too.

Posted by Riccardo Zanni, Chief Technology Officer, Bricocenter

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Riccardo Zanni, Chief Technology Officer of Bricocenter, a chain of 77 home improvement stores in Italy with headquarters in Milan. Bricocenter uses Google Apps for Work to help employees share useful information with colleagues and stay in touch with customers in the store and on the road. 

Think about those flashes of inspiration you have when you’re in the middle of a DIY project — like finding the perfect bathroom sink, or a lounge chair for the terrace. We want Bricocenter to be the first place people think of to make that inspiration a reality. Our sales teams work hard to connect to people in their communities and help with their DIY projects, and we’re building and strengthening these customer relationships even more with Google Apps for Work.

Before we started using Google Apps, our 1,400 employees were largely disconnected from customers and from each other. We previously used Microsoft Office 365, but the aging PCs in our stores ran the applications very slowly – and in some cases, didn’t allow employees to use email at all. Each store has as many as 10 people sharing three PCs. Slow software forced sales people to take more time to read and answer email, which meant less time spent on the sales floor helping customers. Also, we were limited in how many software licenses we purchased due to their high cost, so not every employee had an email address through our email service provider or access to productivity apps.

Because our previous solution couldn't be easily used on a web-based browser, we were told that the only solution was to upgrade or replace all of our store PCs in order for the software to work the way we needed. Even worse, we’d suffer several days of email downtime during the changeover. Needless to say, this plan didn’t make sense for our budget or work environment.

We think technology should follow the way we work – not vice versa. That’s why we chose Google Apps for Work, and partnered with Google Apps Reseller, Revevol, to help us through a seamless migration process to ensure our teams could work the way they wanted.

Google Apps for Work didn’t require hardware upgrades and it functioned well with our existing PCs because it can be accessed from any modern browser. Every employee received a Gmail address without the need to purchase extra licenses or create time-consuming group profiles, as we had to do with our former solution.

Our choice of Google Apps dovetailed perfectly with our pilot plan to outfit 500 sales people with smartphones, so they could stay connected to colleagues and customers outside of the stores. Now they can access email and company documents on their phones, and stay in touch with store managers, colleagues and customers.

Faster, wider access to email is only part of our Google Apps story. People are using Google Drive to store documents and presentations that would have been impossible to collaboratively create and share with our previous provider. Now that all employees have Gmail addresses, everyone can use Google Apps to create presentations and share them with all of their coworkers.

Anyone at Bricocenter, even people who don't know any HTML code, can spin up a site in just a few clicks with Google Sites. For example, our finance department created their own internal site to share helpful content – embedded easily in the site from Google Slides – about best practices for accounting.

Google Apps helps us to get more work done faster. I recently needed to ask store managers about the performance of the GSM mobile networks in their stores. Instead of waiting several days for email responses, I used Google Forms to create a survey for store managers, and sent them the survey links using Google Forms. I collected all the feedback I needed in just one day.

We often talk about the importance of getting closer to our customers as a core company value. Google Apps shrinks the distance between store employees and customers, between employees and managers, and between work and home life so more dream DIY projects can become a reality.

Posted by Erzsi Sousa, Product Marketing Manager

Editor's note: We’re jumping into our Delorean to explore how some of our favorite historical figures might have worked with Google Apps. Today, in honor of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we imagine how Marie Curie’s discovery of radioactivity, which won a Nobel Prize and revolutionized modern cancer treatment, might have played out in a Google Apps universe.

Consider what Marie Curie accomplished in the face of adversity and with few resources. Despite being refused a place at the French Academy of Sciences and almost denied her first Nobel Prize for being a woman, she continued her work undeterred, securing a second Nobel Prize in Chemistry and developing methods for treating cancer with radiation therapy. To celebrate her, we explore how she might have worked in a different time — by using some of the tools we use today.

The radioactivity in Curie’s lab was so strong that it harmed her health — archivists today still use protective gear to handle her papers. Instead of carrying these radioactive documents, Curie could have kept them in the cloud with Google Drive, allowing for easy access whenever and wherever she needed them, without risking her well-being. Drive’s organization features could also have helped her organize her files and notes in folders, easily distinguishable by color and category.

Her easy access to files would also be secure with Drive’s built-in security stack. And to prevent anyone from stealing her discoveries, Marie Curie could have conveniently protected all of her files using the Security Key for 2-step verification along with password protection. This would ensure that she was the only one who had complete access to all of her work (she may even have thrown on a screen protector to shield her work from spying eyes on the train). To share the right documents with only the right people, Marie could have used sharing controls to give different groups access to relevant research.

With the voice typing feature in Google Docs that supports 40 languages, she could have dictated her numerous notes in her native Polish without stopping her research. She could have then used Google Translate to convert her papers into other languages, so that the global science community could see what she was working on.

Curie could have used Gmail’s Priority Inbox to create labels and organize her messages related to research, teaching and fundraising. Each label filters emails into its own section in her inbox, making it easy to notice new emails when they arrive. She might have created a “Physicist Community” label for correspondences with Pierre and other influential scientists like Henri Becquerel and Albert Einstein. She might also have used a “Fundraising” label to organize messages from members of the press and government who funded her research, including U.S. presidents Warren G. Harding and Herbert Hoover.

Even Marie Curie could have been the victim of seemingly neverending reply-all email threads. With Gmail, she could have avoided these distractions by muting the message so responses are automatically archived. For example, Curie could have muted the message from her Sorbonne colleagues who abused “reply all” in RSVP emails or broke out into a physics debate, letting her focus on important emails only.

With Google Hangouts, Curie could have broadcast her physics classes to a global audience using Hangouts on Air. As the first woman professor at the Sorbonne in Paris, making her classes available online could have given more women access to lectures from a renowned physicist during a time when many universities wouldn’t admit female students. She might even have started her own grassroots movement, using live video chats to bring advanced science into the homes, coffee shops, underground classrooms, etc., of whoever chose to tune in.

Marie Curie accomplished award-winning work, even without access to the most advanced lab technology of the time. It’s humbling to consider that despite any limitations she encountered, Curie’s pioneering work in radioactivity remains so relevant today as we continue to make advances in not just physics and chemistry but also engineering, biology and medicine, including cancer research, on the basis of her discoveries.

Posted by Jason Stockwood, Chief Executive Officer, Simply Business, London and Northampton, UK

Editor's note: Today we hear from Jason Stockwood, CEO of Simply Business, the UK’s biggest business insurance provider and the top-ranked company on The Sunday Times’ list of 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2015. See how Google Apps strengthens the Simply Business team’s valued company culture and gives employees the freedom to explore new ways of working.

Jason Stockwood, Simply Business CEO

Working at five online companies in the last 15 years has taught me that a company’s culture resonates in all things that it does, and that an attractive internal culture will ultimately attract customers as much as it attracts talent. So when our systems administrator, Martin Golder, proposed that we switch Simply Business to Google Apps for Work, I needed to understand how the change would affect our company culture, and feel confident it would have a positive effect on both our people and our business.

Martin Golder, Simply Business Systems Administrator

I quickly gained that confidence as I tested Google Apps out for myself. Gmail and Calendar transformed my work in ways I hadn't expected. For example, over the past twenty years, I’d created a complicated, time-consuming filing system for my email, but I gave it up as I discovered Gmail’s incredibly powerful search function. And the ability to log into a web browser and have full use of my account without going through clunky webmail servers was massively impactful.

Then there was the financial bonus: it cost us £26,000 to implement Google Apps for Work, less than half the price of its competitors.

With our pilot complete and our decision made, we rolled out Google Apps for Work in March with help from Cloud Technology Solutions and a group of our own production champions, including both myself and the staff of our contact centre in Northampton. The buzz that evangelists created really pulled everyone on board, and when we finished our full deployment in May, we could rely entirely on the product champions to step in when questions came up from people across the team.

The time and cost savings of Google Apps goes far beyond the deployment. Our IT team no longer wastes four hours a week maintaining our old email servers, which translates to over £4,000 a year that goes back to the business. They also spend 70 percent less time on helpdesk requests. And the wider team saves nearly 20 minutes each meeting merely by replacing our old meeting room booking process — using phones around the office to check availability of a room — with Calendar.

Using simple but powerful work tools gives our staff the freedom to create new ways to be efficient for our customers. At our Northampton contact centre, two hundred of our staff speak directly to customers every day. In the past, they would take a query, put the customer on hold, ring around to find someone who could help, then go back to the call. Now they use Hangouts to ping each other while customers share their queries, comments and concerns, which is simpler and faster and doesn’t put anyone on hold. The System Administration team, split between London and Northampton, also uses Hangouts for daily discussions, while remote consultants use Hangouts for weekly tech tutorials by streaming video through a Chromebox-linked projector in London.

One month after the rollout, we used Google Forms to survey staff reactions to the new system, and received an overwhelmingly positive response. More than two hundred of our staff have already started to use Drive of their own accord, and next year we’ll make the transition official by moving all of our 1.25 terabytes of files and secure spreadsheets onto the cloud. My advice to anyone considering the switch to Google Apps for Work is just to try it out. You’ll see the benefits immediately. It’s a new, lighter, easier way of working.

Posted by Jamie Holyland, Director of communications, Epic CIC, UK

Editor's note: Today we hear from Jamie Holyland, director of communications at London youth support organisation Epic CIC. Epic saved £67,000 last year by switching to Google Apps for Work, with projections to save £140,000 annually. Read how Google Apps re-energised the 155 workers at Epic with forward-looking solutions.

When government budget cuts threatened our organisation's financial health, we didn't expect a technology change to keep us afloat. But that's exactly what happened. We provide a wide range of youth services in inner London, including an assistance program for teenage parents and programs to help young people find employment. In the wake of increasingly severe public funding cuts, Epic joined the private sector after 25 years with the local authority of Kensington and Chelsea. Ending even one of our projects was a step we didn’t want to take, and by transitioning to Google Apps for Work, we didn’t have to. The £140,000 a year that we save with Google gives us room in our budget to maintain all of our services. Now Epic is not only financially sustainable, it’s more efficient, more secure, and primed for a future of cloud computing.

Google Apps pulled our fragmented organisation together. Before we switched over last year, few of our 80 part-time staff had a work email account or online calendar; we relied entirely on phone calls, texts and face-to-face meetings to communicate. Now, almost everyone uses Gmail and calendar to stay organized and in touch. Whether staff are working with young people at one of our six youth centres or at any of our other eight offices, they can use one of 50 Chromeboxes to check their accounts. And for management rushing between meetings and our 20 case workers who operate off-site, we have 40 Android devices for them to stay connected from anywhere.

The impact on our efficiency has been huge. Google Apps for Work has reduced the number of emails we send by 50 percent in two months. The Chromebooks our 25 senior and middle managers use take seven seconds to start up, compared to the 20 minutes we spent starting up some of our old machines, so their time is spent fixing problems for our other 130 staff rather than waiting for technology to warm up.

Cloud computing is the future for our kind of community work, where teams are spread thin and wide. For example, instead of relying on a scattered paper trail to register attendance at our events, we now use Forms to track participation as they happen. Under our old system, the quarter of a million files we had stored on the local authority hard drives were full of confusing duplications. In one case, we found the same document saved in 47 variations by over 50 people, with no clue as to which was the final version. Now, the whole team can work together on a single shared Doc. And because there’s only ever one version, we don’t just save time, we stay aligned and build off of each other’s feedback seamlessly. We found Drive to be more secure, too, because its privacy and file access controls let us control information in more nuanced ways than we could before.

Maintaining our services without public funding was a daunting challenge, but Google Apps helped make it possible. Even better, the tools bring our team together and save us time, so we can spend more of our resources on the people who need them most.

Posted by Sri Harsha Somanchi, Product Manager

(Cross-posted on the Official Gmail Blog.)

The Gmail team is always working hard to make sure that every message you care about arrives in your inbox, and all the spam you don’t want remains out of sight. In fact, less than 0.1% of email in the average Gmail inbox is spam, and the amount of wanted mail landing in the spam folder is even lower, at under 0.05%.

Even still, Gmail spam detection isn’t perfect. So today we’re sharing some of the new ways we are supporting the senders of wanted mail, and using the latest Google smarts to filter out spam.

Getting the mail you do want with Gmail Postmaster Tools Gmail users get lots of important email from companies like banks and airlines—from monthly statements to ticket receipts—but sometimes these wanted messages are mistakenly classified as spam. When this happens, you might have to wade through your spam folder to find that one important email (yuck!). We can help senders to do better, so today we’re launching the Gmail Postmaster Tools.

The Gmail Postmaster Tools help qualified high-volume senders analyze their email, including data on delivery errors, spam reports, and reputation. This way they can diagnose any hiccups, study best practices, and help Gmail route their messages to the right place. For you, this means no more dumpster diving for that confirmation code ;-)

Google smarts for less spam Since the beginning, machine learning has helped make the Gmail spam filter more awesome. When you click the “Report spam” and “Not spam” buttons, you’re not only improving your Gmail experience right then and there, you’re also training Gmail’s filters to identify spam vs. wanted mail in the future. Now, we are bringing the same intelligence developed for Google Search and Google Now to make the spam filter smarter in a number of ways.

• For starters, the spam filter now uses an artificial neural network to detect and block the especially sneaky spam—the kind that could actually pass for wanted mail.
• We also recognize that not all inboxes are alike. So while your neighbor may love weekly email newsletters, you may loathe them. With advances in machine learning, the spam filter can now reflect these individual preferences.
• Finally, the spam filter is better than ever at rooting out email impersonation—that nasty source of most phishing scams. Thanks to new machine learning signals, Gmail can now figure out whether a message actually came from its sender, and keep bogus email at bay.

Ultimately, we aspire to a spam-free Gmail experience. So please keep those spam reports coming, and if you’re a company that sends email, then check out our new Postmaster Tools. Together we can get the wanted mail to the right place, and keep the spam where it belongs.