Posted by Aimee Anderson, Vice President of Business Development at Daily Grommet

Editor's note: From the founding of Faneuil Hall in 1740 to the opening of Franklin Southie in 2008, Boston’s businesses have embodied an enterprising and entrepreneurial spirit. Today, we’re wicked excited to hear from Aimee Anderson, Vice President of Business Development at Daily Grommet, a Boston-based online marketplace for new, innovative consumer products. See what other companies that have gone Google have to say.

At Daily Grommet, we love finding the next new thing. Since we started in 2008, our site has launched more than 1,500 products from companies with innovative consumer product ideas, including luggage, solar-powered lights, funky watches, headphones and skin care products. We’re a fast-moving company that embraces the entrepreneurial spirit, both in our own culture and in the products we help go to market.

Building a business around a steady stream of product launches demands a strong technology platform that enables quick and constant collaboration for a team that works all sorts of hours from all over the country. Our office is in Boston, but we have remote workers in Colorado, California and Minnesota, and people often work from home or on the road. Whether it’s catching up on a project using Google Chat, firing off an email or collaborating in real-time with co-workers using Google Docs and Google Sheets, our employees are connected wherever they are. Our marketing team has even completely dumped wired phones and relies entirely on Google+ Hangouts. They may be dispersed geographically, but with video conferencing, they feel like they’re all in a room together.

While Google+ keeps us connected, Google Sheets drives our product launch cycle. We launch something new each day at noon, so getting each product ready to go live is an intense process that requires significant coordination and collaboration across multiple teams. Every ounce of information about all of our product lines is held in a shared spreadsheet, from purchase orders to contact information, manufacturing details to photos and videos. Each spreadsheet is shared with the discovery, marketing and development teams and gets updated as every product moves through the process to launch. Releasing a new product takes a lot of coordination and our teams need to know the information they're working with is up to date and can be accessed anywhere by anyone. With Sheets, that’s never a question.

Finding the next new thing requires a technology backbone that lets us be nimble, fast, and always connected. Google Apps does just that. Right now, we’re celebrating National Craft Month by highlighting more than 30 cool pieces of jewelry, food, crafts tools and other amazing things our partners create. Google Apps helps us make good on our commitment to the companies we work with by giving them a springboard to build their business. That’s a commitment we take seriously and are proud to uphold.

Posted by Mike Volpe, CMO of HubSpot

Editor's note: From the founding of Faneuil Hall in 1740 to the opening of Franklin Southie in 2008, Boston’s businesses have embodied an enterprising and entrepreneurial spirit. When we looked at several recent lists of the top startups in the Boston area - from Bostinno, Quora and the Boston Business Journal - we were pleased to discover that about 75% of these companies are running on Apps. 

Today, we’re wicked excited to hear from Mike Volpe, CMO of HubSpot, the industry leader in inbound marketing software and one of those top startups. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Back in 2006, two MIT alumni decided there had to be a better way to do marketing. Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan knew that loud, interruptive and unwanted advertising wasn’t the way to help businesses attract customers, not to mention that new technology like caller ID and spam filters was simultaneously rendering those legacy efforts less effective. So they started HubSpot, and with it, a new paradigm that would be better for both marketers and customers, replacing loud, interruptive advertising with marketing consumers actually love.

HubSpot has grown to 450 employees since launching in 2006, and along the way, we've settled on a core mantra when it comes to how we work: “use good judgment.” We don’t tell employees where they have to work or when they have to be here - we care most about results. It’s imperative, then, that we leverage enterprise tools that make work easy and accessible anytime and anywhere. That’s why we use Google Apps. It lets us work together whether we’re at our desks or halfway around the world. That, combined with the fact that it grows with us and is simple to use, makes it the perfect solution for our company.

Our employees use Google Apps every day on nearly every aspect of our business. With Docs, Sheets and Slides, we’re able to collaborate on our most important documents with our colleagues, no matter where we are. We can store all our files in one place with Drive, so each team knows they can find their templates and notes whether they’re sitting down with their laptops or traveling with their smartphones. And Google Forms makes tracking executive speaking requests simple and seamless. Any time an organization wants a HubSpot expert to talk at an event, we send them a form with a set of standard questions, and the information they submit about the opportunity is automatically populated into a spreadsheet that houses all other requests. It's perfectly efficient.

Google Calendar helps us stay transparent, which we consider essential to empowering our employees. Many of our executives book office hours on Google Calendar and share them with our company. Any employee at any level can sign up for an hour with them, where they can bring up anything from product development ideas to problems they’re having at work.

Working for a fast-moving company isn’t easy, but with Google Apps, we’re not burdened by the hassles that can otherwise grind busy days to a halt without a strong technology platform. We don’t have to deal with attachments, version history screwups, email outages or fussing around with our phones to get our email to sync. We open up Google Apps and it works. It’s the same experience we offer with our software – simple, effective and lovable.

Posted by Kristin Phelan, Marketing Director at Faneuil Hall Marketplace

Editor's note: Boston’s changed a bit since Paul Revere set out on his famous midnight horseback ride in 1775. Belichick and Brady hadn’t met yet, the curse of the Big Bambino had yet to be cast (then broken), and Ben and Matt hadn’t won an Oscar for “Good Will Hunting.” But one thing has stayed the same in Boston over time: the city has been driven and defined by self-starters and homegrown businesses.

We’re wicked excited to highlight a few Boston businesses using Google Apps over the next few weeks. Today, we’ll hear from Kristin Phelan, Marketing Director at Faneuil Hall Marketplace, a historic Boston landmark. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

It’s not every day that you get to work in the same spot where Samuel Adams brought Bostonians together on the eve of the Boston Tea Party or where George Washington toasted the United States of America on its first birthday. As the Marketing Director at Faneuil Hall Marketplace, I help carry the legacy of America’s first marketplace forward.

Faneuil Hall is entrenched in its rich past, but part of my job is to make sure it also stays modern. We’ve recently started adding programs that reflect a new, more innovative and independent spirit: on top of the bustling retail space we’re historically known for, we’ve also hosted local musicians, NBC’s The Today Show, an LED light and sound show, pilates bootcamps and the Urban RAID obstacle course race. And each new day brings another new idea.

Coordinating all these activities requires a lot of communication and organization. It also requires a reliable technology platform - something we didn’t have until we moved to Google Apps last year. I remember the night I knew we had to switch. I was working late on a project, when all of the sudden I got a notification that my mailbox was full. I’d been using Gmail for my personal email and knew it would be a better solution for our team not only for storage, but for the rest of the tools in the suite.

Getting Apps up and running was a snap. I’m no IT expert, but setting the team up with email and teaching them how to use Calendar, Drive and Docs was simple. In our first week, we set up a shared calendar to track our street performers, visiting artists, and events, so now everyone can see what's going on and when.

Apps doesn’t just help us stay organized – it also helps us work better together when we’re away from our desks. Just a few weeks ago, I was doing an on-site walk-through for an upcoming mural when a reporter called looking for pictures for an upcoming article. I jumped on my phone, opened the Drive app, and with just a few clicks, gave her access to the photo folder I had created for press inquiries.

I may not be an American Revolutionary, but I still get to help bring millions of people together at one of the country’s most revered landmarks. And thanks to Google Apps, we have the tools to keep our 271-year-old building in the 21st century.

Posted by Suan Yeo, Head of Google Education, Asia-Pacific

With a new academic year comes a new way of learning.

   

Increasingly primary, secondary, and university students and faculty are using Google Apps for Education, a free suite of productivity tools designed to help people work together better. This also include three top-tier universities in Australia who are going back to school this year with Google Apps. The universities of Griffith, Macquarie and Monash join the community of thousands of institutions worldwide using Google Apps for Education to enhance their students’ learning and to increase organizational efficiency. This community includes 72 of the top 100 schools in the USA and 20 million students and teachers worldwide.

Griffith University is a leading research university with a strong international focus spread over 5 campuses. They were looking for an easy-to-use communication and collaboration platform that offered more storage capacity and a better user interface, regardless of access device or location.

Monash University has a presence in Malaysia, South Africa, India, Italy and China, and benefits from being able to streamline communication among its dispersed students and staff.

“How could you not consider Google Apps in the world we are in today? It, to me, is the best productivity tool you could imagine, in the most intuitive fashion.” 
—Adam Shoemaker, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education), Monash University

Macquarie University was in fact the first university in Australia, and amongst the first in the world, to offer Gmail to their students, setting up 68,000 accounts back in 2007. Since then, they have switched on more and more of the suite’s features, and in 2012 even became the first Australian university to map its campus 3 dimensionally in Google Earth.

   

Several students from each of these universities have also been appointed as Google Student Ambassadors this year, and will join students from 25 other universities this week in our Sydney office. They will learn first-hand how Google Apps for Education can help to uncover a new way of learning, and help others on their campuses to use technology for good.

For more information about Google Apps for Education, and to sign up today, visit www.google.com/apps/edu. Or say hello in person June 3-5 at EduTECH in Brisbane, Australia.

Posted by Samuel Cheung, Regional Lead, Asia-Pacific, Google Apps Supporting Programs for EDU

Rolling green hills, a skyline of trees and no traffic in sight. Yes, this is Thailand. Today in partnership with the prestigious Mae Fah Luang University, we’re supporting an educational institution famous for its breathtaking natural environment in their vision to become a Green University by going Google.

Through the Google Apps for Education Support Program, 14,000 teachers, students and staff from Mae Fah Luang University will now use Google’s collection of free email and open collaboration tools, including Gmail, Google+, Docs, Calendar and Groups, and be the first educational institution in northern Thailand to go Google.

Being cloud enabled means students and teachers can take full advantage of the web and collaborate wherever they are. No matter if they are on a bus, at home, or enjoying one of the many beautiful gardens on the Mae Fah Luang University campus. Leading-edge technologies, like cloud computing and collaborative tools, have a vital role to play in helping equip future generations with the skills they need to thrive in the workforce of today and tomorrow.

Why is going Google greener?
In addition to supporting learning, the move to the cloud will also help Mae Fah Luang achieve their sustainability goals. Our energy efficiency efforts mean our cloud is greener, ensuring that colleges, universities and businesses that use our cloud based tools, such as Gmail and Google Apps, are greener too. Our analysis suggests that a typical organization can achieve substantial energy and carbon savings—ranging from 65 to 85 percent—by migrating to Google Apps and that an organization using Gmail can decrease its environmental impact by up to 98 percent.

Just 9 months ago, we were excited to announce the first university in Thailand to go Google in Khon Kaen province. Today 13 educational institutions and more than 300,000 students, teachers and academics in Thailand have gone Google, and that’s just the beginning.

Posted by Jared Tabler, Vice President of Operations at ICOM Productions

Editor's note: Our guest blogger is Jared Tabler, Vice President of Operations at ICOM Productions, a Calgary, Alberta-based eLearning company. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

ICOM Productions is a 100-person company focused on helping companies better engage and develop their employees by freshening up their training programs. We pride ourselves on being progressive, young and vibrant; we encourage our employees to question old habits, push the envelope and change the way we teach and learn every day.

When I joined as VP of Operations less than a year ago, I was shocked by how our progressive mentality clashed with our old, slow and unreliable technology. We were using a piecemeal technology solution built around Microsoft® Exchange that made everyday processes disjointed and inefficient. We wanted employees from each of our three offices to be able to collaborate on projects, but the process of emailing versions back and forth and editing them in silos wasn't quite the collaboration we were looking for. We knew we needed something better, but upgrading to the newest Exchange Server would have cost us a fortune and still leave us three years behind the latest technology.

It turned out that our forward-thinking employees were pushing the envelope with technology on the side, too: they'd started using their personal Google accounts at work. They were sharing files through Google Drive and creating project hubs with Google Sites. Over the next few months, we talked with our employees and Agosto, a Google Apps Reseller, and we came to a clear conclusion: moving ICOM to Google Apps was the best path forward. In the Fall of 2012, Agosto partnered with our technical team to put a migration plan in place, and 30 days later, all 100 employees were on Apps. It was the fastest IT implementation I’ve ever done.

Google+ Hangouts have completely revolutionized our recruiting process. Instead of relying on phone screenings, which don’t really convey a candidate’s personality, or flying people to Calgary, which is expensive, we use Hangouts, which cost nothing and bring each prospect’s character to life. We like to do group interviews via Hangouts to see how people think and interact - group collaboration is huge at ICOM, and you get a good sense of that over video conference. Our candidates love that we’re using new technology and we love that we’re still getting the same valuable insight about our candidates.

Google Apps has helped us be more efficient, more forward-thinking and more cost-effective. It’s also helped us strengthen the ICOM culture we pride ourselves on - being creative, asking thought-provoking questions and working as a team. All of this, of course, means that we’re getting better at what we do: helping other companies teach and train their employees more effectively. Just like what Apps has done for us.

Posted by David Gendel, Corporate IT Director at Allrecipes.com

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is David Gendel, Corporate IT Director at Allrecipes.com, the world’s largest digital food brand. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Allrecipes.com started in 1997, when Tim Hunt couldn’t find his favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe online. He vowed that other cooks like him shouldn’t have to deal with the same problem, and started CookieRecipe.com. From there, he created even more recipe sites that eventually came together into the site we know today: Allrecipes.com. Fifteen years after that cookie baking epiphany, we have more than one million user-generated recipes and 30 million visitors per month. That’s a lot of people looking for more than just chocolate chip treats.

I took over as IT director for Allrecipes.com a year ago, and fixing our aging email system sat at the very top of my first to-do list. We culled our top options—Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Office 365, and Google Apps for Business—and put them through the ringer. After testing, analysis, and focus groups, Google Apps came out on top. With the help of our partner, Cloud Sherpas, we moved all of Allrecipes.com employees over. Changing old habits is hard, especially when it comes to technology, but after just five months, it feels like Google Apps is second nature to us.

We want all of our employees to be able to work from wherever they are, with whatever device they have with them. With Google Apps, they can do just that - we use a mixture of mobile devices and operating systems, and our teams can switch seamlessly between them. I don’t always have my laptop with me, but with the Google Drive mobile app, I just jump into a doc on my smartphone or tablet to review or edit it, whether it’s during a meeting or on the way to the airport. Needing to fix a document on the fly doesn’t mean needing a computer anymore. We move quickly. Apps moves with us.

Hangouts also help us stay connected. Our social media manager recently moved to Australia, but with Hangouts, it’s almost as if she never left. We have video conferences with her throughout the week, and you wouldn’t know she’s halfway around the world. Our technical teams also use Hangouts for off-hours maintenance. They get excited about being able to see who they’re working with as if they were both in the office, interacting as if they were in person, and sharing their screens to help expedite problem solving. We love that video conferencing is so seamlessly integrated with the entire Apps suite, and we don’t have to use or pay for a separate program.

Food is more than just food – it brings people together and creates shared experiences. At Allrecipes.com, we’re proud to provide so many people with the foundation for those experiences. Google Apps brings our company closer so we can focus on helping home cooks make magic in their kitchens, one cookie or casserole at a time.

Posted by Jaime Garcia, IT Corporate Director of the All Inclusive Collection

(Cross-posted on the Google Latin America Blog)

Editor's note: We are excited to have guest blogger Jaime Garcia, IT Corporate Director of the All Inclusive Collection with over 5,000 employees at Hard Rock hotels in the Mayan Riviera, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta, and Punta Cana. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

At Hard Rock hotels, we don’t want to be a normal hotel; we want our guests to feel like rock stars from the moment they walk in the door. But, with 1,200 employees that use our IT platform across four locations, it can be challenging to create a consistent guest experience. We need tools that help us make decisions in the moment -- the party doesn’t stop at the Hard Rock!

As the IT Corporate Director of the All Inclusive Collection (which runs all of the Hard Rock Hotels in Mexico and the Dominican Republic), I’m responsible for providing tools to our employees that will let them to work together effectively and focus on our customers. On our old system, Microsoft® Exchange, we had a large datacenter for the hotels to maintain. Our communication tools weren’t flexible enough to make decisions on the go and we couldn’t guarantee that we were running the same promotions at the same time. We worried about the effect on our guests’ experience. I decided that we needed to move to Google Apps and get off of our on-premise infrastructure. Google Apps was fast, safe, and agile and met all of the security standards I was looking for, so I knew that all of our customers’ information would be protected, too!

Since moving to Google Apps, we've improved internal communication and are now spending half as much time on things as we were previously. While our hotels are in Mexico and the Dominican Republic, our sales teams are located all over the globe—North America, Europe, Asia, and here in Latin America—and they’re moving all the time. With Google Talk and Google+ Hangouts, we rarely use the phone anymore, it’s easier to jump on a Hangout from any device and from any of our locations. When our sales team in Miami make an important reservation for a wedding or a big group, they chat via Google Talk with the hotel in Cancun, providing immediate assurance and confirmation that everything will run smoothly.

Having so many guests across our hotels, problems can arise at anytime day or night, so we can’t have downtime. Rather than worrying about keeping our servers and email running, we spend our time managing tools through a browser. We've saved thousands of dollars in IT infrastructure and telecommunication costs, and my IT headaches are gone. I used to have a team of guys helping me manage servers and keep our email up and running. Now, only two of us manage all of the tools.

Google Sites and Google Calendar have been fundamental in organizing our promotions and standardizing our guest experience by allowing us to share across hotel locations. We just had a promotion across all our branches for Christmas and the holidays. We made a site with all of the dates, rates, and details of the deal and we could easily monitor how it was rolled out across each hotel. This process used to take weeks, and fixing discrepancies between the locations was messy. Now, it’s simple, consistent, and happens in real time.

On Google Apps, we really feel like a team, working together despite being countries apart. We are able to provide the same level of rockstar service in all of our hotels and create great experiences for our guests. All while improving our customer experience – rock on!

Posted by Jeff Ton, SVP of Corporate Connectivity & Chief Information Officer for Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana

Editor's Note: Our guest blogger this week is Jeff Ton, SVP of Corporate Connectivity & Chief Information Officer for Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana, based in Indianapolis. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Goodwill Industries’ mission is to give people an opportunity in life that they may not otherwise have, like a job or better education. As one of the larger Goodwill organizations, we at Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana aim to run as efficiently as possible to best serve our 3,000 employees spread across 29 countries and the greater Indiana community.

When I joined the company in 2010, we were running Microsoft® Exchange 2003 and we badly needed an upgrade. As a CIO, the last thing I want is to tell the executive staff we have to spend two months and thousands of dollars to upgrade our email system. We chose Google Apps because we wanted a cloud solution that gave us leaner infrastructure, better business capabilities, and security. We saved tens of thousands of dollars, and avoided future costs from server maintenance, upgrade costs and lost time dealing with email problems.

Since moving to Google Apps, we’ve changed how we communicate and collaborate with our 1,200 business users. Google Forms and Sheets in Google Drive have been powerful tools for us. Our Corporate Connectivity Committee – a cross-functional group spanning four different business areas – used a Google Form to collect research during a six-month tour of our 70 locations into a Google Sheet. They were able to analyze results and find the best ways to distribute information to employees and make them feel more included the company. This would’ve been a messy process before, compiling 70 different questionnaires. I also use Google Sites for my personal dashboard to collect, maintain, and organize data. I spent about four months trying to piece this together on our old platform, but it never worked. On Google Sites we had it working in about 20 minutes. It updates in real time so my monthly report is a 5-minute task instead of a month-long project.

Google+ Hangouts have also transformed the way our teams connect. Our Benefits Committee used Hangouts instead of traveling to attend in-person meetings about a new payroll system and benefits structure. Additionally, our recruiting team uses Hangouts for interviews – again, saving driving time without sacrificing the face-to-face relationships with candidates. I personally use Hangouts for my weekly meetings with my staff when I am working from home. Using video makes the meetings much more cohesive, and we can work simultaneously in shared Docs so we’re all on the same page.

As a CIO, the best part about moving to Google Apps is seeing the adoption happen organically – the first time a Google Doc was shared with me, it came from outside of IT. Google Apps has helped us immensely, allowing us to take our focus off of internal processes and problems and put it instead on those who really need it.

Posted by Bill Schechtman, IT Director at Quixote Studios

Editor's note: Our guest blogger is Bill Schechtman, IT Director at Quixote Studios, a Los Angeles-based company that rents stages, vehicles and production supplies for photo shoots and movie and TV productions. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

At Quixote Studios, we work with the bleeding edge of American pop culture. We’ve hosted pop legends like Madonna, brought Jay-Z’s “On To The Next One” to life, and stood in for countless precinct offices, crime scenes and killers’ hideouts on the CBS show “Criminal Minds.” We have more than 200 employees at six locations giving studios what they need to make movies, helping photographers and fashion houses make their clothes look stunning, and playing a part in bringing the television shows you love to the small screen every week.

We work in a forward-leaning industry, but until we moved to Google Apps for Business, we worked with painfully outdated technology. Our server was unreliable and our employees couldn’t access email from their smartphones. Fixing these and a host of other problems was my first priority when I joined Quixote Studios as IT Director two years ago. We considered Microsoft Exchange, but the storage, licensing and support costs were more than we bargained for. We also looked at Office 365, but it didn’t offer the full suite of tools we needed or the simple pricing structure Google Apps has. So, with the help of our reseller, Dito, we switched to Apps.

We started with the fundamentals: moving everyone to Gmail and setting up device syncing so people could access email from their phones and tablets. Before we knew it, we started seeing employees picking up more advanced product features on their own: shared calendars became a company standard and Docs became the norm for team meeting notes.

But Google Drive has been the real revelation. Every important document in our company is stored in Drive, from onboarding and exit forms to organizational charts, permits and checklists. It's a far cry from our old system, a complicated file server that was stuffed full of different versions of Microsoft Word and Excel files, all with their own cryptic names for versions or dates.

Drive has also dramatically improved the way we collaborate. Creating our company all-hands presentations, for example, is a team effort that involves up to ten stakeholders working together on a single document at the same time. It's powerful to see that many employees collaborating so seamlessly and efficiently. It's even more exciting to think about how much time we save by eliminating the need to send attachments back and forth or check that we're working on the most up-to-date version.

Google Apps has helped turn technology into an incredible resource for our employees – smooth, hassle-free email and an easy collaboration hub. Now we can put all of our energy into helping our clients do great things. As someone in charge of IT, it’s comforting to know those systems will grow right alongside Quixote Studios as we continue to help make Hollywood’s big ideas come to life. And Scene!

Posted by Martijn Nykerk, Senior Consultant Group IT

Editor's note: Our guest blogger this week is Martijn Nykerk, Senior Consultant Group IT at Randstad, the Netherlands-based global provider of HR services and the second largest staffing organization in the world. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

HR is fundamentally about people. That may seem obvious, but in our firm that takes unusual dimensions. Randstad is one of the biggest staffing companies in the world and has some 29,000 employees working from more than 4,500 branches in 40 countries around the world. We help companies and candidates connect in industries such as engineering, finance and accounting, healthcare, human resources, managed services, pharma and technology. To give you an idea, we place on average well over 500,000 people per day. We’ve grown to become quite large since we began as a small company started in a student dorm room in 1960 and our business has changed quite a bit in that time. But at its core, we’re still the same. We’re all about people.

With so many employees in locations across the world, we had several different email and collaboration systems in place and were looking to standardize. A majority of employees around the world were using Microsoft Outlook for email and Lotus Notes for collaboration, but we ran into several problems. For one, both Outlook and Lotus Notes weren't seamlessly integrated with other systems, requiring our employees to find workarounds and solve formatting issues on their own. This wasted valuable time on the part of both the employee and IT department. In addition, both Outlook and Lotus Notes are primarily hosted solutions, which makes it difficult to collaborate across our many locations.

Our decision making process involved several companies, but ultimately we decided on Google for a few different reasons. We have a workforce of younger, web-savvy employees and we heard the feedback that they are quite familiar with Google tools like Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive and Google+ Hangouts in their personal lives, and on a variety of devices, and that they'd like to use them at work too. Also, because the Google tools are all integrated, we wouldn't run into the problem of having employees across offices and countries having to work with several different pieces of technology that don’t work well together. Lastly, the availability of resellers such as G-company was a big plus. We wanted to provide our employees with as much training as they needed and G-company were able to provide that. Our rollout will eventually include all 29,000 Randstad employees, 5,000 of whom are located in the Netherlands. Our employees in France, Japan and India, approximately 8,000, are already on Google.

We’re right in the middle of our rollout, but early feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. We can simply do things that weren't possible before. For example, it has become much easier to search and access mail, calendar and documents when on the road, or for an employee in France to schedule a video chat with an employee in The Netherlands in a Hangout. It’s a conference call, but it’s so much more - it’s a conference call that’s based around people, not technology. For an HR company, that’s exactly what we’re looking for in a technology partner.

Posted by Joel Hughes, Senior Vice President of eMedia strategy and IT at Scranton Gillette

Editor's note: Our guest blogger this week is Joel Hughes, Senior Vice President of eMedia strategy and IT at Scranton Gillette, a media and publishing company based in Arlington Heights, Illinois. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Scranton Gillette has been around for more than a century - we’ve lived to see the first Model T, a man walk on the moon and the birth of the Internet. We’re a media and publishing company, so you can imagine our industry has changed quite a bit since we were founded 108 years ago (typewriters, anyone?). It's not easy to keep afloat in the business world, let alone in a market that’s undergone so many massive and fundamental changes. But we've been fortunate enough not only to survive, but to thrive, and we owe much of that to our technology.

We first opened our doors in 1905 as a publisher dedicated entirely to the transportation construction industry. We’re still a publisher, and we still cover the transportation construction industry, but now we're a full-service media agency that covers a variety of verticals and helps with everything from website development to event planning. Just as we've outgrown our publisher roots, we've also outgrown the slow-moving stereotype that many associate with the publishing industry. To us, speed and technology are essential to growing our business. Technology can make or break an organization, so if our solution fails or slows us down, we won't hesitate to find something newer and better.

That’s exactly what happened over the Fourth of July weekend in 2011. Our Exchange server died during the holiday break and left us without email or access to our shared company files. We'd been considering a switch to Google Apps for a few months, so this shutdown solidified our decision. We couldn't be tied to a physical server anymore, let alone an unreliable one. We needed a more trustworthy system that would let us be more quick-moving and nimble, and we knew that meant moving to Google Apps.

By the time our employees returned to the office after their Independence Day barbeques, we’d already started our migration to Apps with the help of our reseller, CloudBakers. We haven’t looked back since.

Apps has completely changed the way we communicate. We’re headquartered in Illinois with a satellite office in Arizona, and we want our remote workers to feel just as part of the team as everyone else. Hangouts do exactly this: they facilitate a closer connection and collaboration that conference calls just can’t match. Google Chat is equally integral to our day-to-day. It’s perfect when you’re not in the right place to hop on the phone and need a quicker response than an email typically gets. We didn’t have a dedicated chat client before we moved to Apps, and I can’t imagine going back to that way of working.

Google Drive has been the biggest eye-opener for us. Documents are our lifeblood, so it's essential for us to have a robust system around organizing and sharing them. Before, we just saved everything to our hard drives and sent files back and forth as attachments. That got messy and confusing fast. Drive gives our documents a better, safer, more accessible home. Our employees store their spreadsheets, presentations, mocks and proofs in one place and share them to the right people with just a few clicks. Our marketing team, for example, has a folder on Drive dedicated to campaign materials, knowing that everyone collaborating on those campaigns—internal and external—can access all the images, ad copy, videos and proofs they need without having to search through their mailbox. It’s comforting to know that every document we need can be found in Drive.

A company can’t survive for over 100 years without the ability to see trends before they happen and adapt based on those trends. That’s not always easy to do, so you need a technology solution that can adapt as quickly as possible. With Google Apps, we're confident we have the right tools to last us another century.

Posted by Anne Billak, Federal Civilian Account Manager

The National Archives and Record Administration preserves a broad range of this country’s most important historical documents, ranging from the Emancipation Proclamation to maps of the Louisiana Purchase to Thomas Edison’s patent applications. Together with Google reseller Unisys, the Archives will move its 4,500 employees and contractors to Google Apps for Government in 2013.

Known as the nation’s record keeper, the Archives protects and provides public access to more than 10 billion pages of textual records, in addition to maps, photographs, videos and more than 133 terabytes of electronic records. The National Archives Building in Washington, DC gives visitors the opportunity to come face-to-face with significant documents in United States history, such as the Declaration of Independence. The Archives also manages Presidential libraries across the country for every president dating back to Herbert Hoover.

Memorandum of a fee paid by Thomas Edison for a patent on "Electric Lamps."
(image courtesy of the National Archives)

The Archives joins a growing list of federal agencies including the General Services Administration, NOAA and Idaho National Laboratory who have chosen Google and Unisys to provide their employees with cloud-based email and collaboration tools.

Google Apps will improve the ability of Archives employees in 44 locations nationwide to collaborate with one another, as well as with their customers and partners outside the agency. Archives employees across the nation will also get anytime, anywhere access to their data. What’s more, the FISMA-certified Google tools will keep the Archives’ data safe while also providing a reliable system with built-in failover and disaster recovery.

Posted by Jim Nielsen, Manager of Enterprise Technology Architecture and Planning for Shaw Industries

Editors note: Our guest blogger this week is Jim Nielsen, Manager of Enterprise Technology Architecture and Planning for Shaw Industries, a 25,000 employee company headquartered in northwest Georgia. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Shaw Industries was founded in 1946 as a small area rug company, and over the last 66 years we've grown to become the world's largest carpet manufacturer, with 25,000 employees across 200 locations worldwide. During my 15 years at Shaw, I've watched the organization grow, but our collaboration capabilities began to lag behind the needs of our global manufacturing company. We found challenges in scalability and stability in our previous email solution. Support resources were also an issue, as we required a team of three full-time employees just to keep our email up-and-running.

In 2012, we made the move to Google Apps for Business, after proving in pilot programs that it would provide the integrated tools to help our dispersed global teams work together more effectively, would meet the requirements of uptime and ease of provisioning our IT team wanted, and accommodate the security requirements we were looking for.

Prior to moving the entire company to Google Apps, we used Microsoft® Office, which did not meet the collaboration needs of a global manufacturer. We’d end up with 15 different versions of a document attached to who knows how many different emails. As an example, the marketing team wanted a way to easily share files and work together on copy for our website and ads with our agencies. With Google Drive and Google Docs, multiple team members could work on content, and you could actually see it evolve in a very short period of time from a concept to a script for a TV commercial, all in the same shared document.

True collaboration and access from anywhere was something our employees were demanding with more frequency. We knew we needed to extract ourselves from our current email environment. When I did a cost and benefit analysis, it was clear we needed to move to the cloud. We discovered that Microsoft Office 365 would cost about 13 times more for us than Google Apps. In March, with the help of our Google Apps Reseller, Cloud Sherpas, we implemented Google Apps for more than 10,000 of our associates who use email.

It turns out that collaboration doesn’t just benefit the marketing department. We have an elaborate budget process inside IT that we were able to move to Google Sheets. Now our master spreadsheet can be instantly updated in real time, shaving about two months, or 50 percent of time spent, off the budgeting process. We’ve also started to use Hangouts for a lot of our meetings. In fact, we’ve started holding our staff meetings via hangout, even though the team is only 20 minutes apart. Hangouts have allowed us to be more focused, trimming the hour long meeting to 30 minutes.

One responsibility in my job is to find ways to help our teams be more productive. That can be challenging in a manufacturing company where the majority of users aren’t necessarily tech savvy, but with Google Apps that doesn’t matter because the products are intuitive. They are now able to do things themselves, and we have wanted to allow them to be self-sufficient for a long time. After just a few months of using Google Apps, I’m inspired by the way our teams are working together and finding faster, easier ways to work.

Posted by Jeremy Ward, Senior Vice President for IT, Kempinski Hotels

Editors note: Today we welcome guest blogger Jeremy Ward, Senior President for IT at Kempinski Hotels. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

At Kempinksi Hotels, we believe we are personally responsible for creating rich and meaningful experiences for each of our guests. As Europe’s oldest luxury hotel group, it’s important to us that we provide perfection for our guests, whether that’s planning their wedding or just making sure they’re comfortable in a city they’re visiting for the first time.

As we began planning our five year strategy in 2010, we recognized the need to free operational resources from IT and find ways to work together across 70 hotels in 30 countries to continue providing best-in-class guest experiences. We found that moving to the cloud would allow us to reduce the overall cost of ownership and IT administration at each individual hotel so they could focus on driving efficiencies out of applications instead of just maintaining them. Quickly moving all of our properties to the cloud became a key part of our broader business strategy.

After considering cloud email platforms from Microsoft and Lotus, we found Google Apps to be the most mature solution and would allow us to collaborate easily across hotels and offices around the world. With the help of Google Apps Reseller, Cloud Technology Solutions (CTS), we transferred existing messages, appointments and contacts from GroupWise to Google Apps using their CloudMigrator multi-platform migration suite.

Now that we’ve fully migrated our 5,000 employees, we feel like we have an email platform that allows us to easily scale our business across each location, adding and removing users in a matter of minutes. We’re excited about being on a platform that continues to innovate and release features like instant translation in Gmail, Google+ Hangouts in Gmail, and document storage and collaboration using Google Drive. Moving to Google Apps was key to reducing the overall cost of ownership and cost of administration to the hotels, but we believe that the true benefits will come from the creative ways our employees use these tools to work together and provide an even better experience for our guests in the coming years.

Posted by Reginaldo Barbosa, Manager of Acquisitions, Telecom and Technology, Leroy Merlin Brazil

Editors note: Today we welcome guest blogger Reginaldo Barbosa, Manager of Acquisitions, Telecom and Technology for Leroy Merlin in Brazil. You may remember our guest blog post by Luis Herrero, CIO of Leroy Merlin, Spain in February. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

We expanded Leroy Merlin - the French home improvement and gardening store - to Brazil in 1998 and have grown to more than 26 stores and over 6,000 employees throughout the country. For the past three years, we’ve actually been the leading construction materials retailer in Brazil. To be successful in the retail industry, it’s important that our employees are able to work together across our corporate and store locations to provide the best experience for our customers.

As our business grew in Brazil, we found ourselves faced with a number of IT challenges. One of our biggest obstacles was communicating between our locations in Brazil and our headquarters in France. We found that our calendar system was so unreliable that our own directors would use their personal Google Calendars to share events with one another. With a growing retail business - regularly opening new stores and traveling between different locations - we knew we needed an IT platform with more flexibility, mobility, and reliability if we wanted to keep our employees and customers happy.

That’s why we moved our 2,100 IT users to Google Apps for Business last year. With Google Apps, our team is now able to work together easily and much more efficiently, while providing a much better experience for our customers. When a customer wants to know if an item is in stock, our sales rep can immediately chat with our logistics team using Google Talk and verify the inventory in real time. We can also now share calendars across our stores and with headquarters in France, which allow us to better manage our promotions and events, and helps us to always know what’s happening across the Atlantic.

Google Apps for Business not only helped us streamline our business, but the costs savings have been substantial. We’ve been able to cancel our antispam and antivirus contacts saving us $25,000 per year and Google+ Hangouts have saved us from having to make a $100,000 investment in videoconferencing technology. On top of that, we ended up saving $200,000 in infrastructure and maintenance costs that we would’ve spent setting up users on our old IT system last year.

It’s clear that Google Apps for Business was the right choice for us: in a recent company survey, our employees gave Google Apps a 95 percent satisfaction rating. It’s so rewarding for me to know that these tools are helping us provide a better experience for our customers and our employees.

Posted by Joe AbiDaoud, CIO of Hudbay Minerals

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Joe AbiDaoud, CIO of Hudbay Minerals, a publicly traded Canadian mining company headquartered in Toronto. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Since 1927, Hudbay Minerals has focused on discovering and producing base and precious metals. From exploration projects in North and South America and our current operations in Canada, our 2,000 employees depend on technology to work together and make sure our efforts are coordinated across regions. To do this, we really needed a platform that allowed us to easily collaborate, work remotely using our mobile devices, and communicate across teams in different regions and different languages.

We had been using Microsoft® Office for years, with several Microsoft® Exchange servers across the company, but it became increasingly difficult for our IT team to stay up and running with the uptick in support calls due to a dated system. After exploring various options at different price points, we knew we wanted to move to a cloud-based solution to work more efficiently and provide a scalable and reliable solution.

We invited Google reseller, Sheepdog, to conduct a two-day Google Apps for Business workshop for a small group of employees from various levels and departments within the company. During the workshop, employees evaluated Google Apps against our “success criteria,” which included ease of use, efficiency, functionality, speed and cost. We quickly realized that Google Apps was a good fit for our geographically dispersed company and in July we started moving more than 1,000 employees to Google Apps.

Our IT support calls for email plummeted overnight, demonstrating just how easy it is to use Google Apps. For a global company, being able to instantly translate messages in Gmail and use Google+ Hangouts to meet “in person” made the language and geographical barriers easier to overcome. We’ve also estimated that by going Google we will reduce our costs over the long term when compared to the cost of upgrading and maintaining our old infrastructure. As a public company, we’re thrilled with the savings and new ways of working that we discovered by moving to the cloud.

Posted by Steve Jensen, VP of Information Technology at Insphere Insurance Solutions, Inc.

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Steve Jensen, Vice President of Information Technology at Insphere Insurance Solutions, Inc., one of the fastest growing insurance distribution companies in the U.S. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Insphere Insurance Solutions, Inc. is a distribution company that specializes in meeting the insurance needs of small businesses and middle-income individuals and families. Our field sales force consists of approximately 3,000 independent agents nationwide who offer life, health, long-term care and retirement insurance.

In 2009, we decided we needed to move all of our agents, in more than 80 locations, off of various email systems, including Microsoft® Exchange, onto one platform. This would keep operational costs down and allow our agents and support teams to communicate more effectively. Since our agents rarely come into an office, access from any device was critical.

Today, nearly four years after our initial implementation, Google Apps has dramatically increased productivity and transformed our business. Now, our agents are using Google Docs to collaborate with each other on projects and can meet virtually anywhere using Google+ Hangouts to share ideas and best practices from their experience. With no more servers or software licenses, we reduced our projected costs from other solutions by almost 70 percent. That kind of savings delivers true value to our bottom line.

As a company, we have been able to leverage Google APIs to help us be efficient. When an agent joins or leaves the team, our provisioning system manages all account items with our Google integration.

In addition to the add/change user administration, we utilize Google Groups to constantly maintain distribution lists for email and control file security related to GoogleDrive/Docs. This automated maintenance promotes increased use of Docs collaborative capabilities. An office manager never has to worry about sharing docs or managing a distribution list again.

After this successful integration, we integrated our CRM platform with the Google calendar. All of our agent appointments are pushed to Google Calendar and then to their mobile phone automatically. Any update on the phone is then reversed and posted back to Google and CRM. We were able to leverage the Google platform and its APIs to deliver for the business without incremental licensing costs.

When it comes to recruiting and sustaining our growth, Google Apps has been instrumental in helping us hire new agents quickly while ensuring that they are equipped with the information they need to be successful. With all their documents, calendars and email accessible on the go, our agents are always connected to each other and clients, no matter where they are. This platform has really helped our teams stay connected and collaborate in ways they hadn’t imagined.

IT is no longer a barrier and no one has to wait to meet with someone from the IT department to get going with Google Apps. In fact, I personally haven’t had to pick up the phone once to call an email administrator. It has been truly amazing to see the natural adoption of the product by our field agents.

Posted by Ronen Lapidot, Senior Vice President of Information Technology, Perry Ellis International

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Ronen Lapidot, Senior Vice President of Information Technology at Perry Ellis International, a designer, distributor and licensor of apparel and accessories for men and women. Perry Ellis International joins other retail organizations in going Google. See what they have to say.

Far from a typical fashion house, our apparel spans a variety of categories including men’s and women’s clothing, accessories, children’s apparel, even evening gowns for the red carpet. In total, we manage a portfolio of some of the best known brands in fashion, including Perry Ellis®, Original Penguin®, Jantzen®, Laundry by Shelli Segal®, Nike® Swim, Callaway® and more. With 2,600 associates spanning across 65 store locations and 30 offices worldwide, we rely on technology to stay connected.

The increasingly fast-paced global economy of the past several years has made it even more important to be able to work together efficiently, act quickly and share information across the company to help us all understand the state of the business and act as one global team. We were using a popular, premise based email solution, but with so many offices around the world, we knew the only way to keep our brand fresh and our business agile was to move to the cloud.

With the help of Cloud Sherpas, we moved the entire company to Google Apps. Now our global teams are able to connect through Gmail’s video chat feature to meet “face to face” about upcoming projects, designs and merchandise. With so many offices in different time zones, it’s great to be able to give our associates the option to work where they’re comfortable, even if it’s just going home to have dinner with their families before a jumping on a video chat with colleagues in China or Indonesia. This has been especially helpful for offices with eight or ten hour time differences between them and has made us feel more like one cohesive team instead of siloed offices.

Being able to work together easily across offices not only brings the team closer together, it also saves significant time and costs. We recently opened two international offices in Indonesia and Bangladesh. Usually I travel to each location for weeks at a time to interview and hire employees and oversee the regional office openings. With Google Apps, we were able to interview job candidates via video chat and work with regional managers on important policies and resources that needed to be in place for these new offices and associates. I was elated to discover that what normally takes significant travel time and costs could be done right from my desk. I sat there amazed as I watched documents fill in with information from my colleagues across the world. I think that’s when I realized we were all going to be able to do things very differently, now that we were in the cloud.

Posted by John Edelman, CEO of Design Within Reach

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is John Edelman, CEO of Design Within Reach, a national retail operation that sells modern design for homes and offices. Design within Reach joins other retail organizations in going Google. See what they have to say.

At Design Within Reach, we make authentic modern design accessible. Rob Forbes founded the company in 1999 when he tried to furnish his apartment with the clean, simple classics he’d come to appreciate while living in London, but found that many of his favorite designers weren’t accessible in the United States. Design Within Reach quickly took off and today has 44 retail locations across the U.S. and Canada.

In 2009, my partner and COO, John McPhee, and I decided to move the corporate office from California to Connecticut, it gave us the opportunity to reevaluate our internal operations. Our previous technology platform required us to maintain multiple servers, and moving them across the country and setting them up again would have been costly. Plus, an on-premise solution was never going to provide the ease of collaboration across our store locations and headquarters that is essential to our success. With the help of Google Apps reseller Cloud Sherpas, we decided the move was the perfect opportunity to implement Google Apps.

Before Google Apps, it wasn’t easy to share important materials like store promotion schedules, store layouts, or PR updates quickly and efficiently. Instead, we relied heavily on email for communication. In retail, things change all the time and emailing about employee schedules, promotional timelines or new merchandise availability meant that the information was quickly out of date and risked employees having inaccurate information. Google Apps changed all that. Now, our marketing team is able to track in-store promotions via shared calendars. Employees can track inventory through Google Docs, so when we have a floor sale and someone wants 4 red chairs and we only have one, we can easily hop onto Google Docs and find the chairs at another location. The customer is happy – and we’re happy because we’ve made a sale and cleared the floor.

Easily collaborating across headquarters and all our store locations helps us provide a much more consistent and inviting experience for our customers, and that’s really important to us. We want our customers to linger, bring their dog or kids, and explore and learn about design. We want our customers to be a part of something bigger than just shopping, and that’s the same way we feel about our employees. Google Apps and the ease of communication and sharing that it brings has helped us do just that.