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 Mike Hudson, Creative Director of Handsome Coffee Roasters

Editors note: To celebrate National Coffee Day, today’s guest blogger is Mike Hudson, Creative Director of Handsome Coffee Roasters, an artisan coffee company headquartered in Los Angeles, CA. See what another coffee company that has gone Google has to say.

I have a passion for coffee – a passion so strong that, while working at a digital marketing agency, I spent my weekends working part-time as a barista at a legendary coffee shop in Los Angeles. It was there that a few co-workers and I sat down and hatched a plucky business plan: to roast our own coffee. In 2011, with little more than our gumption, a Twitter handle, a webpage, and 1956 Ford Falcon van that carried a mobile coffee cart we aptly named the Handsome Traveler, Handsome Coffee Roasters was born.

We took the Handsome Traveler to big events and festivals in Los Angeles, and began to cultivate a large and dedicated following along the way. And we grew with them: in just one year, our company went from the original founders to 18 full-time employees. We recently opened our flagship retail coffee bar in the Arts District of downtown Los Angeles, and have plans to expand to New York City next year.

Put simply, we couldn't have grown this quickly without Google Apps for Business. We’re small but global – we have a coffee bar in Los Angeles and a travel schedule that takes us to Nicaragua, Norway and everywhere in between, and Google Apps is a tool that caters to our on-the-move team. With Google Apps, we know we can share travel and employee schedules with Google Calendar, communicate across time zones with Google Chat, and access our permits, notes and updated sales figures from Google Drive. We can do everything on the go, from any device, whenever we need to. We even hold rigorous strategy sessions on Google+ Hangouts with various participants playing along on their mobiles.

Starting a business couldn’t be any easier with Google Apps. We can manage a Herculean amount of data, documents and communications without getting bogged down and wasting hours fiddling with antiquated technology. Thanks to Google's tools, we get to focus on what we really love: roasting and serving amazing coffee.

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 Jim Reed, geologist and R&D director, RockWare Inc.

Editors note: RockWare is a geological software company based in Golden, Colorado. Founded in 1983, RockWare develops a suite of earth science and mapping applications used across several industries and fields, including civil, environmental and geotechnical engineering.

As the early morning sun rises, we head into the Rocky Mountains’ Front Range to take some field measurements. The scenery is breathtaking: rusty-hued sandstone formations tilting at dramatic angles from the ground below. Studying the Earth’s natural history and uncovering the mysteries that lie beneath its surface is just another day as a RockWare geologist.

Using a GPS device and a few specialty tools, we move around the site and record the tilt of the rock formations. These data points don’t make much sense to the untrained eye. However, by plotting our data on a map, we can gain an intuitive three-dimensional understanding of the rocks and their orientation.

When we return to the office, we quickly import the data we recorded in the field into Google Earth Pro. The software produces interactive 3D visuals, which we can easily share with customers. At RockWare, we make extensive use of the Movie Maker feature, which allows us to animate complex events over time. For example, if a toxic spill is leaking into the water table, we can model the spread and speed of contamination. These animations help our clients understand the impact of these geological events and act accordingly.

We’ve seen a positive impact on sales and marketing, too. Google Earth Pro, in conjunction with RockWare’s software, gives us the tools to tell a client’s story through video, rather than just creating static maps and reports. With more dynamic ways to showcase our work, we’ve been able to advertise in a way we’ve never been able to do before. As a result, we’ve seen growth in our customer base via referrals and word-of-mouth.

Many of our customers already use Google Earth Pro in the office, which streamlines my job as a consultant. Instead of spending extensive time on product training, we can dive right into the project. Google has essentially created an environment where it's easy for RockWare and our clients to collaborate on geological projects, which simplifies the decision-making process.

Google Earth Pro brings our projects to life. It has not only contributed to RockWare’s business growth, it’s also reinforced my love for geology. Going out in the field, taking measurements, and actually being able see what I’m mapping makes my job that much more incredible.

Posted by Ella Kim, Google Enterprise team

From growing the fruit and sending it off to the crushpad to bottling that first blend, winemakers are working from sunrise to sunset. When you see how much work goes into creating the perfect bottle, it’s apparent that a strong passion for wine is the driving force behind each company’s success. Here’s how three Californians with a love for wine turned to Google Apps for Business to help them start their own wine labels.

When longtime friends Noah Dorrance, Baron Ziegler and Steve Graf started Banshee Wines, all three still had day jobs. While they wanted to fulfill their dreams of opening a winery, they worked and lived in different areas of Northern California, and it was tough to get started. Without a physical office to work from, they turned to Google Apps for Business to create a virtual one. Today, they’re able to keep track of sales information, manage employees who are spread out across the country, and be accessible at any time on their mobile devices. Google Apps continues to provide them with a platform that helps them stay connected and work together.

Like the founders of Banshee Wines, Stacia Williams had another career for years, but was never able to ignore her passion for wine. In 2010, she started Cairdean Winery with her husband, Edwin Williams. They both knew starting a winery would be far from the typical desk job, and they needed the technology to keep them connected while they were constantly on the go. The mobility of Google Apps for Business was particularly beneficial for the duo who purchased a vineyard in one location but are building a new facility in another. They can send email, see calendars, and share documents whether they are checking on their grapes in the field or working on their new winery and tasting room in St. Helena, California. No matter where they are during the day, Google Apps helps keep their business running smoothly.

Husband and wife team Jeff Munsey and Felicia Alvarez established Pithy Little Wine Company in 2009. Their vision is as simple as their name: create good wine with no frills. The pair needed technology that matched their philosophy, and Google Apps provided just that. By choosing Google Apps for Business, the founders have a platform that allows them to stay organized, work together, and communicate with their customers – all in a cost-effective way. From using Gmail to communicate with customers, to using Google Forms to give managers better visibility in the workplace, Google Apps helps manage project workflow seamlessly. With Google Apps, they’ve been able to turn their dream of owning a winery into a reality.

What these three companies have in common are founders who share an intense passion for what they do. With a lot of hard work, they’ve brought their wineries to life, and we’re happy Google Apps made things a little bit easier.

Posted by Marcus Benedetti, President and CEO, Clover Stornetta Farms

Editors note: Clover Stornetta Farms is a family-owned and operated dairy processor that distributes a wide range of dairy products consumed by millions of families throughout the western United States under the Clover Stornetta and Clover Organic Farms brands.

Since the 1970’s, we’ve worked hard to do right by our customers and the environment, reducing our water consumption by 10 million gallons a year, converting our sales fleet to Hybrid vehicles, and always sourcing our milk from local farmers committed to the sustainability of their land, welfare of their cows and producing the highest quality milk pool in the country. These are the things we care about. So, when our IT infrastructure began to limit our ability to work together as we grew, we knew we had to find a new solution that allowed us to focus on making great dairy products, not running a complex IT system.

Google Apps provides us with a platform that can help the Clover business grow without a heavy investment from our IT team. The move to Google Apps went very smoothly and our IT team now spends 25% less time supporting email than they did with our old infrastructure.

We’ve always been very team-oriented, and Google Apps has made it easier for us to work even more closely and collaboratively. Since Google Apps is delivered via the cloud, our employees love that they can access their email, calendar and files from any computer or mobile device. Instead of waiting until we can meet face-to-face, we save time by working together in Google Docs and video chatting in Gmail. Google Apps has been a huge time saver.

The dairy industry is very traditional, but that doesn’t mean our IT has to be. We love that Google is constantly innovating and we can benefit from the new features and products available to us. With Google Apps, we know that we can continue to work together and communicate as if we’re a small company, even as we grow.

Posted by Scott Lawson, director of IT architecture, QAD

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Scott Lawson, director of IT architecture for QAD, a 1,300-employee company that delivers supply chain collaboration software to 5,500 manufacturers in 93 countries. QAD turned to the Google Search Appliance (GSA) to enable employees and customers to search across multiple databases and content repositories such as Lotus Notes.

At QAD, we span 30 different locations around the world, from the corporate office in California to operations in South Africa and Thailand. We pride ourselves on the quality of support we deliver to thousands of manufacturers in 27 languages. We offer more than 50 product modules that are installed in building blocks to support different rules, industry regulations, and manufacturing styles of various countries.

QAD must provide complex, detailed product information to customers, customer service representatives as well as other employees within the organization. We offer a secure extranet where customers can find information such as white papers, data sheets, support ticket status, and technical updates. As an additional resource, our public-facing Internet site provides everything from case studies to product demonstration videos and access to an online support center.

Historically, internal and external users found it challenging to find the right product and service information. Data is stored in many different repositories: Lotus Notes, an enterprise content management and collaboration system, knowledge bases, file shares, QAD’s own customer service and support system, and internal websites. Our content sources had grown organically and were somewhat disorganized, and we had millions of documents that needed to be indexed.

We were using an Autonomy search system for our intranet and public facing site, but it was not meeting user expectations for usability and search relevancy. Autonomy was also time-consuming and expensive to maintain.

In 2010, our employees began working with Google Apps, and wanted Google’s signature ease-of-use and power for search as well. We decided to evaluate the Google Search Appliance (GSA) and consider abandoning the Autonomy solution. The GSA can connect legacy enterprise systems and provide advanced security and multiple language support—all-important priorities for our business.

We worked with Google partner Perficient to develop a search roadmap, proof of concept, and ultimately a streamlined implementation. The GSA was simple to deploy and has been easy to maintain because the appliance features a one-stop administrative interface for configuration and index controls.

For QAD, costs related to search are down, search relevancy is up, and IT is doing less maintenance work. Customer service representatives and customers can locate details about products and services with ease.

Users are able to search through a massive, rich content library housed in many different repositories, all from a single search box. With the GSA, we are linking communities of employees and customers together with content into a cohesive experience. It has made us even more of a unified global company.

Posted by Jaime Casap, Google Education Senior Evangelist

Since we launched Chromebooks this summer, it’s been exciting to hear how students are using Chromebooks to collaborate and create in the classroom. In the spirit of letting our customers speak for themselves, we wanted to share stories from three of the newest schools using Chromebooks in their classrooms, libraries and to provide Internet access to students at home using built-in 3G.

Renaissance Charter School, Nevada - Management
The Renaissance Academy Charter School in Nevada virtually serves students from low-income families across 13 counties in the state. The Academy’s mission is to free students from perceived limitations on their performance, and to narrow the achievement gap through technology. Roy Harden, administrator, jumped at the opportunity to deploy Chromebooks to their 490 students and staff. “We promised our students and parents a protected environment for their computing needs, which the Chromebook - with forced proxy settings and content control - allows us to uphold. With 3G connectivity, the Chromebook also gives access to our students who typically do not have an Internet connection at home. We couldn’t ask for a better solution,” he said. The new features in the web-based administrator’s management panel will also help Harden better manage different age groups of students, teachers and staff, and these features will greatly improve his visibility into devices distributed across the state.

Prairie View Elementary School, Wisconsin - Engagement
The Oregon School District in Wisconsin has led the state in adoption of modern technologies in the classroom. As technology director and a former teacher himself, Jon Tanner understands how important it is to provide web access for all students while keeping costs low. This is why he decided to bring Chromebooks to 22 third graders at Prairie View Elementary School. Shannon Luehmann, the teacher whose class is using the Chromebooks, notes, "It was like Christmas morning in my class when I shared the news with the kids and let them open the Chromebooks. Some student reactions were, 'So, you're telling me this is mine to use all year?', and 'We are going to do some pretty cool things with these computers this year!'"

“Thinking long term, I would love to give every child the opportunity to take home a Chromebook and be connected,” Tanner said, “but we never had a product we felt we could do that with before.” Teachers and administrators have already noticed a big improvement in student engagement. Even with some of the biggest behavior challenges, students have used Chromebooks to “engage in the classroom, be more productive, and even be more positive.”

Students using Chromebooks in Shannon Luehmann’s third grade classroom at Prairie View Elementary School in Wisconsin

Montgomery School, Pennsylvania - Collaboration
Jared Hamilton, technology coordinator at Montgomery School, decided to start piloting 40 Chromebooks for middle schoolers at Montgomery School, an independent, co-educational day school in Pennsylvania. As he sees it, “Chromebooks are perfect for this age group because they spend most of their time on the web anyway.” The students gravitated toward Chromebooks from the start because they found that they could get more done in less time, and turning in assignments to their teachers was easier. “Once they start using the Chromebook, they don’t want to go back,” Hamilton said. Having Chromebooks in the classrooms has also improved collaboration and engagement; in particular the faculty noticed a difference in the school-wide “Make a Difference Project,” for which students work together to present ideas to their community about how to make the world better. As Jared explains, “big projects like that become so much easier with real-time revisions and collaboration.”

What can Chromebooks in the classroom do for your school? Learn more about Chromebooks for Education on our website.

You can also join us for the Chromebook Classroom webinar series, Wednesdays at 9AM PT/12PM ET. Register here.

Posted by Roth LaFleur, Product Manager for Amirsys

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Roth LaFleur, Product Manager for Amirsys, a company specializing in delivering useful, timely medical information to physicians and other healthcare providers.

We have 40,000 users in 50 countries—top physicians, surgeons, and residents for STATdx—our imaging point-of-care, diagnostic clinical decision support portal. As you can imagine, time is a important to them and affects both the cost and quality of patient care. For busy radiologists, time spent performing diagnoses is tracked and billed on a per-minute basis and can be a critical factor in delivering care. This makes fast, relevant search a key element of STATdx. Working with Search Technologies, we integrated the Google Search Appliance (GSA) into the STATdx diagnostic support portal.

We were expending a high degree of effort to support the search capability in our STATdx portal. Even with a full-time employee dedicated to the effort, the relevance of search results continued to be unsatisfactory. The existing system lacked the ability to “learn” based on user interactions. Features such as spell correction, a “did you mean” function to recommend different terms, and translation of search terms needed to be accomplished through programming and constant tuning.

After a comparison of several service providers, we engaged Search Technologies Corporation to help us implement the Google Search Appliance. Search Technologies partnered with our team to identify the unique search needs and find an optimal approach to provide fast, relevant search for the STATdx decision support portal quickly and cost-effectively.

The Amirsys development team integrated the Search Appliance into STATdx, where now search is a central feature, accessible in every part of the user interface. Capabilities from Google such as automatic query completion greatly enhance decision-making due to improved usability, relevance, and speed. Before implementing the GSA, average response time for searches was five to seven seconds, with some very general searches taking up to 15 seconds. After integration of the GSA into STATdx, query time has been reduced to milliseconds, saving valuable time for Amirsys clients and the healthcare professionals and patients who rely on their diagnoses.

For us, integration of the Search Appliance into STATdx has enabled us to provide better, faster services and reduced costs by eliminating the need for someone dedicated full-time to the task of special programming and tuning. And for the radiologists who use the STATdx system, we are helping them by increasing speed, accuracy, and diagnostic confidence in complex cases—and most importantly elevating the quality of care.

Posted by David Watson, Executive Project Sponsor for Calgary.ca for The City of Calgary.



Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is David Watson, executive project sponsor for calgary.ca for The City of Calgary. He sponsored a sweeping program to bring greater efficiencies to operations and provide enhanced and broader services to citizens. At its heart is a new search-centric website launched today, and powered by the Google Search Appliance.



Many municipalities today are under increasing pressure to reduce overhead while providing a wide array of services to citizens. In The City of Calgary, we looked to the Internet to enable us to provide enhanced citizen services as efficiently as possible. Our research showed several interesting facts:

- Over 93% of Calgarians use the Internet.

- Only 18% of traffic came directly to our home page - 55% of people came from search engines, primarily Google.

- Citizens want to interact with us online, instead of spending time on the phone or in-person - 60% noted better convenience, such as not having to drive to a city facility. Others noted speed and 24/7 availability.

- More than 40% of Calgary citizens said they wanted more services online.



Our public-facing web presence, which has 16,000 pages of content, across 28 business units, with a wide variety of applications, functionality, documents and information for our citizens, handled 9 million visits in 2010. The major drawback was that the information was difficult to find.



Forty-seven percent of Calgary citizens surveyed reported that the incumbent search engine on Calgary.ca did not work well. It required knowledge of city acronyms and terminology, something many citizens, understandably, don’t possess. Our content and our site was cluttered, out-of-date, and difficult to weed through. We struggled with maintenance as individual business units continued to add to our already packed site.



In response, we formed the Web Leadership and Renewal Program in 2007. Among the chief goals was to provide citizens with easy-to-use search and better access to city programs and services. This led us to create an entirely new, search-centric site which was first concepted and tested in November 2009, and finally launched today.



The Google Search Appliance (GSA) is the cornerstone of this new site and our efforts to improve access to services and programs and increase government efficiency. It is linked to a content management system, ESRI for interactive mapping, and to websites such as calgarymayor.ca to provide a holistic, integrated search experience.



Now, citizens can search for everything from YouTube videos on saving water to animal services and permit information, and they can easily serve themselves by finding answers to everyday questions. Calgary.ca is just as easy and effective as searching on Google.com. The search-based concept lets Calgarians type in common keywords or phrases to find what they need, without specific knowledge of city acronyms or terminology.



We can conserve phone and in-person resources for more complex requests and apply valuable government resources more strategically. Citizens benefit from the convenience of finding most of what they need online. They can avoid unnecessary driving and parking fees and have 24/7 access.



Certain search features of the GSA were very important to us. Topping the list were best bets, synonyms, and spelling correction. Related searches and content rating were also vital, as well as the ability to easily promote the relevance of a search result based on its popularity. The Google Search Appliance provided all of these capabilities, plus it had a reputation for being very easy to install and maintain.



Citizens are rapidly adopting search now. Early metrics show that only 4% of visits to the old calgary.ca used the internal search engine. In comparison, 65% of visitors to the new calgary.ca used the the GSA, and the search results page is the second most visited page after the home page.



Ultimately, our job is to provide city services as efficiently as possible. We strive to do more with less. By making the right content easy to retrieve, citizens get the convenience they seek—and we can reduce unnecessary overhead and increase the value and variety of our services and programs.

Posted by Ivan Chou, Web Applications Engineer for the American Red Cross

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Ivan Chou, Web Applications Engineer for the American Red Cross. When the American Red Cross was struggling with sub-optimal search functionality, it turned to the Google Search Appliance (GSA) to improve information “findability,” both for internal and external users.

Since its founding in 1881 by visionary relief coordinator Clara Barton, the American Red Cross has been the nation's premier non-profit emergency response organization. Today, in addition to domestic disaster relief, the American Red Cross offers compassionate services, from help for the needy to educational programs.

As one of the world’s largest non-profits, we rely on our public-facing websites and our intranet to keep millions of people and tens of thousands of employees and volunteers informed about our activities. On any “normal” day, we get up to 200,000 hits on our main website – but that number swells to millions during any disaster. The main external website, www.redcross.org, receives significant traffic from people seeking everything from CPR class schedules and Blood Drive locations to information about disasters, such as the 2011 U.S. tornadoes.

With such a heavy reliance on the web for delivering information, the American Red Cross needed a faster search system that would deliver better results. We had been using a solution that came bundled with our content management system (CMS), which we implemented in 2009. That search system used a meaning-based context model, which means results were driven by questions, phrases or sentences rather than keywords – but this approach often failed to deliver relevant results. People had to know in advance, for example, if they needed to search about community services, educational programs, international relief, and so on – it was a lengthy, and not very successful process.

Slow performance and lack of relevant results prompted us to investigate search alternatives – an initiative that coincided with a redesign for www.redcross.org and creation of www.measlesinitative.org, a new site supporting a multi-agency push to help halt the spread of measles worldwide.

Working with one of Google’s solution partners, Fig Leaf Software, we began evaluating our options and calculating the costs and benefits of deploying a new search solution. We were at a tipping point – we would have to pay more in licenses for our CMS to support our sites, but we saw in evaluating different options with Fig Leaf that we could save IT costs and achieve better results by setting up two Google Search Appliance (GSA) systems rather than staying with siloed CMS-based search systems. After substantial evaluations, our outsourced data center deployed two GSAs: one for production and the other as a backup – we wanted a redundant solution so that people could reliably find information in the event of emergencies.

The Google Search Appliance systems were implemented over a single weekend, and they now power search across our employee intranet as well as on the public redcross.org and measlesinitiative.org sites.

Right away, the search results from the GSA were excellent. We did almost no tweaking on our end, and our internal and external users comment on how pleased they are that the right search results come straight to the top, whether the query is about CPR class schedules or disaster relief. Visitors to the intranet as well as to the two public websites now have ready access to information through a powerful, intuitive and familiar search experience.

When we moved to the Google Search Appliance, search just started working, and working very well. We predicted that we could save IT costs and achieve better results by setting up the Google Search Appliance, and that’s exactly how it turned out.

Posted by Anya Kuligina, Product Marketing Manager, Google Enterprise Apps

More than three million businesses have made the switch to Google Apps and are now able to enjoy tremendous collaboration boosts, not to mention saving a penny or two! In this webinar, we invite you to learn how one customer is using Google Apps to communicate and collaborate more effectively and efficiently.


Roland Corporation US is a leading manufacturer and distributor of electronic musical instruments. As with almost all business, Roland’s internal operations strategy is not by any means simple. The Marketing department alone, for a single campaign, has to produce product videos, artist demos, photographer bookings -- all while coordinating with various media agencies to make it all come together in a cohesive campaign. With all of these moving pieces, Roland needed a better ways for people to work together as a team. After exploring various options, Roland tuned to Google Apps for chart-topping functionality!

Join us for a live webinar on Thursday, June 16 at 12pm EDT with Dave Williams, Information and Technology Director at Roland. Dave will share why Google Apps was the ideal choice for his organization, as well as his experience and perspectives on what it takes to make the switch to Google Apps.

When: Thursday, June 16 at 12pm EDT

Who: Dave Williams, Information and Technology Director, Roland Corporation and Adriana Boden, Enterprise Senior Manager, Google

Register Now: Thursday, June 16, 12:00PM EDT/9:00AM PDT.

Editor’s note: Woodcraft Supply is one of the nation’s oldest and largest suppliers of quality woodworking tools and supplies, offering more than 20,000 products through its retail stores, catalog, and website. We’ve invited today’s guest blogger, Nancy Miller, VP of Internet Sales and Development for Woodcraft Supply, to talk about how Google has helped her increase search revenue and transform Woodcraft’s online store. To learn more about her experience, read the Woodcraft.com case study.


At Woodcraft, we strive to provide the best experience for our customers, which means helping them find the right tool for the project. To this end, our retail stores are staffed with knowledgeable woodworkers. Online, we need a powerful search engine.

Prior to our switch to Google Commerce Search, Woodcraft had been using another popular third-party search solution - but we just weren’t seeing the same level of satisfaction on our website as we were in our stores. Visitors to our site often couldn’t find the products they were looking for, and our support team fielded a lot of complaints. Our customers were frustrated and our conversions suffered so we decided to make a change.

After thorough research, we picked Google to host our e-commerce search; their service provided better results, improved rankings, and an intuitive administrator interface. Google Commerce Search is simpler to maintain and much more effective than our old solution - even before customization. In fact, during our testing period we moved half of our traffic to Google Commerce Search and left the remainder on our existing solution – and with Google our conversions from search were 27.7 percent higher and our search revenues were up 34 percent!

Beyond providing a multifaceted search experience with better results, and increasing our online sales, Google Commerce Search has made our customers and employees much happier with our website. The complaints have virtually disappeared, giving us more time to focus on our passion: woodworking.



Above: Nancy Miller, Kyle Crabtree, Chris Brown, Matt Hall, Steve Markle, September Fleming, and Daniel Pennock with their latest woodworking project.

Posted by Nancy Miller, Woodcraft Supply

Editor’s Note: Guest blogger, Brent Frei, is the founder of Smartsheet.com, an online project management from the Google Apps Marketplace. His post explores the technology trends in the real estate industry, highlighting several firms who have moved their businesses to Google Apps and deployed Smartsheet.

Google Apps and the Real Estate Industry

A growing number of real estate firms manage their businesses with Smartsheet - for project management, buy & sell coordination, deal management and so on. We spent some time talking with our real estate customers to better understand how and why they use Smartsheet. Several themes emerged consistently, regardless of whether the customers were individual users or international enterprise teams. Most notably, the majority are Google Apps users, and Smartsheet's integration with Apps is key to their overall success.

Here are several of the companies we surveyed across a range of real estate services.

• NetGeneration is a combination real estate brokerage and financial planning service company.
• Agent Evolution is a web design and social media agency helping agents to engage via digital media.
• Encore Development Properties and Encore Realty are firms that buy, develop, and sell properties.

These firms have several things in common:

1. They deal with a wide range of stakeholders: Real estate companies are diverse collaborations between sellers, buyers, agents, title, insurance, mortgage, brokers, contractors, inspectors, escrow agents, and many others. Finding tools that work well for the company and will be readily adopted by external collaborators is often nearly impossible.
2. They use spreadsheets and email as their primary tools - Email and spreadsheets are the only commonly adopted tools amongst all the stakeholders. Emails get reliable responses, and spreadsheets are familiar and effective - both are available from anywhere in Google Apps.
3. They want more specialized tools to be pre-integrated with Google Apps - The specialty tools that work best alongside Gmail have had the highest adoption rates. Project management is one of the highest priority specialty applications.

Google Apps and Smartsheet are a perfect combination
Smartsheet’s spreadsheet-like layout and tight integration with Gmail and Google Docs have made it a successful project management tool where other tools have failed in the real estate vertical. Users who are logged into Gmail are automatically logged into Smartsheet, and existing spreadsheets can be imported “as is” into Smartsheet where those sheets gain the ability to attach files and Google Docs as well as threaded discussions to any row. Updates to discrete parts of a sheet can be managed through email by stakeholders who have not had the entire sheet shared with them.

All the project management automation is embedded in the tools that the stakeholders will use - without training. You can read the full case studies on Smartsheet’s blog, but here are a few choice excerpts:

“We have 10 full time employees, each collaborating with dozens of stakeholders,” reported NetGeneration co-founder Brian Davis. He found himself with an unmanageable portfolio of specialty solutions, few of which were integrated. “We tried multiple project and task management solutions but none were adopted as part of the daily work flow. Emails and traditional spreadsheets became the default....”

“Moving over to Google Apps was pivotal moment for us,” says Chad Johnson, president and COO of Agent Evolution. “We wanted to do everything under one umbrella. With Google Apps we had our business suite set and Google Apps Marketplace gave us partner solutions that were already integrated, like Smartsheet for online project management.”

“Google Apps and Smartsheet are easy to use right out of the gate,” says John Stilwell, President and Founder of Encore Development Properties and Realty. “Our members can jump in and use the tools right away. By using Google Apps and Gmail it enables us to have everything in one place. It makes a complex and sophisticated process streamlined and efficient and gives us a great selling tool for prospective investors and clients. It shows them that we are professional and have the capabilities to track our business.”

Conclusion
The real estate business has a plethora of stakeholders and moving parts. That doesn’t mean the software tools need to be equally complex. Google Apps and Smartsheet are a combination that works simply and effectively the way people do for a wide range of operational needs in real estate.

To learn more about how customers use Smartsheet with Google Apps and other Marketplace apps, come to a live Google webinar featuring Dlink CIO, Michael Walsh.
 
Optimizing Business Processes with the Google Apps Marketplace
Tuesday, December 14th, 2010
11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT
Register here

Posted by Harrison Shih, Google Apps Marketplace Team

It’s Google Commerce Search’s first birthday and we are celebrating it with Jack Kiefer, CEO of BabyAge.com, one of the top 500 online retailers in North America. Since implementing Google Commerce Search, BabyAge.com has seen searches rise 58% and search page views grow 64%, contributing to a 34% increase in sales conversions. You can read about Jack’s experience in this case study or watch this video to hear more:



Google Commerce Search (GCS) is Google’s core search technology tailored for retailers. It’s an e-commerce search solution that’s hosted in the cloud, meaning you don’t need to install any hardware or software. It also uses the exact same product feed that many retailers already submit to Google Products – so most of the work associated with the typical e-commerce search implementation is already complete. Finally, GCS provides extensive administrative controls to customize search results and navigation so that they are just right for your website.

Since our debut last November we’ve expanded geographically – we now offer GCS in the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Germany and Japan – and have added many new features like query auto-completions and a merchandising dashboard. Needless to say we’ve grown quite a bit in a year!

Just as we’ve progressed in our first year, the Google Commerce Search team strives to continue to improve online shopping and we need your help! Share your best and worst experiences from Cyber Monday, and we’ll publish select submissions in a few weeks. If you’re one of the first 50 respondents we’ll send you a Google sticker as a “thank you” gift.

Posted by Guillaume De Zwirek, Associate Product Marketing Manager, Google Enterprise Search

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Silicon Valley veteran Andy Bechtolsheim. While at Stanford University, Bechtolsheim devised a powerful computer (which he called a workstation) because he was tired of waiting for computer time on the central university system. Vinod Khosla and Scott McNealy approached him to market his invention and start Sun – derived from “Stanford University Network.” Sun Microsystems quickly became a success, with a market capitalization by 2003 of $11.5 billion. Today, Andy is Chairman of Arista Networks, a company that delivers networking solutions for large data centers and high-performance computing environments.

Andy will be speaking on a live webcast this Thursday, May 13, at 11:00 a.m. PDT, where he will also field questions from the audience.

If you are an entrepreneur or you are part of a growing start-up, then you're no doubt laser-focused on developing and marketing something game-changing. From experience, I know that you can’t afford to siphon off resources toward anything that’s not core to the business.

When we founded Arista Networks, we did not really want to buy our own servers for internal IT tasks such as hosting email. And we didn’t want to worry about data back-ups or remote access. We initially used a small, hosted email provider, but something went wrong every week. More than two years ago, we switched to Google Apps for all of our communication needs, and we have not had any problems since.

Our experience with Google Apps is very good. Email works great --- in particular the search function plus the integrated chat, and there is no SPAM. We get back-ups and world-wide remote access managed by Google. Document sharing is very useful. Basically everything just works as you would expect, and we don't have to worry about anything. We don't need a system administrator, even with a headcount of more than a hundred people.

My advice to every start-up is to use Google Apps. It saves you from having huge headaches, it is very inexpensive, and just a better system. We also use some other cloud services such as Salesforce.com for customer relationship management, Netsuite for our database and Amazon to host our website. Cloud computing works great for us. I would never buy another server to bring these functions in-house.

I would be happy to relay my experiences with Google Apps here at Arista and share three tips with you on:

• How to use cloud computing to focus on your core competency
• Ways to help employees increase productivity in a rapid growth environment
• How to recharge your business approach through constant innovations in Google Apps

Please join us for this LIVE event:

May 13, 2010
11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT

Posted by Serena Satyasai, the Google Apps team

Do you have an informative and fun Google Apps story to share? Please submit it here.

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Barry Driscoll, Senior Director of IT for Fairchild Semiconductor, the $1.2 billion chipmaker. Barry has more than 15 years of IT experience in the semiconductor industry. His responsibilities include enterprise IT support for telecommunications, messaging, database administration, and product design infrastructure as well as responsibility for business applications supporting finance, human resources, and business intelligence.

Barry will be available on a live webcast this Thursday, January 28, at 2:00 p.m. EST, 11:00 a.m. PST, 7:00 p.m. GMT to talk about his company's experience switching to Google Apps, and to answer your questions about this process.

At the end of 2008, we were at a crossroads for our email and collaboration tools. We had to make a long-term decision on what direction to take. At the time, we had over 6,000 Lotus Notes/Domino users around the world using an older platform (Lotus Notes/Domino version 6.5). We had some serious challenges: our users were frustrated with the outdated Notes/Domino functionality, the IT environment was complicated, and the ongoing maintenance costs were high. At the same time, we were working to implement an email archiving and e-discovery solution that was, frankly, not going well. To add to the mix, the world economy was in free-fall and our business was seeing those effects.

We wanted to improve our messaging tools while simplifying the IT environment, but needed a cost-effective approach. We originally thought we should upgrade our existing solutions to the latest releases, but knew that was going to be a time-consuming and expensive approach. So, we started seriously evaluating other options. During our review, we considered the hosted versions of the Lotus and Microsoft offerings, but ultimately focused our attention on evaluating Google Apps.

When Paul Lones, our SVP of IT, first suggested taking a look at using Google Apps as our enterprise email tool, we thought he was joking. But when we started looking at the capabilities, benefits, and costs of Google's enterprise offering, we were very impressed. We then began a more thorough technical and functional review. We determined that the core capabilities for email, calendar, contacts, and IM would probably meet our needs. Since email archiving and discovery were also critical for us, we looked at the Postini solutions. Again, we thought the delivered Postini features would work for Fairchild. Beyond the basics, we also saw the added value of Google's collaboration features available from Google Sites and Google Docs, and the anywhere/anytime access provided by Google's cloud-based services. Finally, we did an ROI analysis and estimated we’d save about $500,000 per year by migrating off of Lotus Notes/Domino. So, we made a case to our CEO and executive team to move forward with a pilot project using Google Apps.

For the pilot, we selected a core group of IT and business employees and asked for some volunteers. To our surprise the CEO and the entire executive team volunteered. As a result, we also included the executive assistants. Although having the execs in the pilot raised the stakes, it turned out to be one of the keys to the project's success. To help us get up to speed quickly and run the pilot smoothly, we partnered with Appirio Consulting. Appirio had previous experience converting large corporations from Lotus Notes/Domino to Google Apps. Appirio conducted one-on-one or small group training sessions for the pilot users and targeted training for the executive admins because of the complexity of their jobs when it comes to collaboration, email, and calendar management.

After a successful pilot, we made the decision to migrate the whole company to Google. The next group of employees migrated were 400 "early adopters" from across the company, including all owners of Notes/Domino applications and databases. The idea was to give these people a head start in moving any important non-email content from Lotus to Google Apps. For the early adopters, we used a combination of live and recorded web-based training. These early adopters also became "Google guides" for the rest of the user base during the full company migration.

Ultimately, we deployed Google Apps to over 6,000 users in 20 countries in less than five months. This deployment included migrating contacts, calendar entries, and up to 12 months of historical email, plus providing BlackBerry support. At the same time, we implemented the email security and email archiving capabilities available using Google's Postini platform.

Now we are providing our employees with a lot more functionality for a lot less money. Google Docs and Sites are really changing the way people work as teams, and the way information is shared. This new way of doing working is really powerful, especially for a company that does business in so many countries and timezones. We are now looking at Google Sites to replace our existing intranet. But the ability to access Gmail and the other Google Apps from anywhere – without having to use a VPN – has probably been the biggest hit.

We learned a lot of valuable lessons throughout the process of evaluating and migrating to Google Apps that we’d be happy to share with you. Please join me to discuss our experience in more detail and to learn how you might leverage Google Apps for your company.

Join us for this LIVE Event on:
Switching from Lotus Notes/Domino to Google Apps by Fairchild Semiconductor
Thursday, January 28, 2010
2:00 p.m. EST / 11:00 a.m. PST / 7:00 p.m. GMT

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps team

Find customer stories and research product information on our resource sites for current users of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino.

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Elliot Tally, Director of IT Collaboration and Automation for Sanmina-SCI, a leading Electronics Manufacturing Services (EMS) provider focused on delivering end-to-end manufacturing solutions for communications, medical, defense and aerospace, industrial, renewable energy, and other sectors. Elliot has more than ten years of experience in high-tech manufacturing and information systems spanning a breadth of industries. He is responsible for enterprise collaboration and messaging systems, process automation and integration, and for Sanmina-SCI's suite of IT applications.

Last year, Sanmina-SCI's IT team asked themselves, "Could Google Apps replace Microsoft Exchange for a global, multilingual workforce?" After careful due diligence, the team recently completed a phased migration for 15,000 email users, charting a new course for IT. Elliot and his team will be available on a live webcast next Thursday to talk about the migration and answer questions from participants.

Sanmina-SCI is a leader in outsourced Electronics Manufacturing Services (EMS). We have 37,000 diverse employees and our business is very competitive. We needed something that was less expensive to maintain and provided better collaboration tools than what our incumbent vendor, Microsoft, offered.

After putting Google through the test in more ways than you can imagine we decided that Google Apps was the way to go – especially after we saw collaboration tools like Google Sites. Then our job was to migrate 15,000 users in 18 countries...no small feat.

We started with several pilots to pinpoint any issues up front, and we conducted user surveys along the way to be sure we knew what users were facing. Many users got very excited. They knew they could get email from anywhere, and have access to collaborative tools like spreadsheets and instant messaging. We also gained valuable feedback on workflows and other issues we'd need to have a plan for during the migration.

From the start, we provided more than just a "here’s what we’re going to do, take it or leave it” approach. We were serious about ensuring that a certain set of activities happened in terms of communication and training, and showing people the features of Google Apps so they knew they were not missing anything. Then we would migrate a whole plant in less than a week. But the upfront training and familiarization process was paramount to our success. In all, the conversion went faster and easier than we anticipated.

One of the key factors was support from senior executives, who helped us drive and obtain support across the organization. We did get pushback from some employees but we spent time with them and showed them that, from a user experience standpoint, it might work differently, but they weren’t losing functionality.

In the end, we came close to our goal of a zero-touch conversion process as an IT team. It was a pretty highly automated, self-service conversion in moving everyone over. There were some gaps, but overall we are pleased with how quickly and efficiently the conversion went.

I’d be happy to share what we learned at Sanmina-SCI as a large enterprise that has made the move to Google Apps. We hope that you'll join us for this live event.

Migrating 15,000 users from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps, by Sanmina-SCI
Thursday, January 14, 2010
2:00 p.m. EST / 11:00 a.m. PST / 7:00 p.m. GMT

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps team

Find customer stories and research product information on our resource sites for current users of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino.

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Tony Aug, Vice President for Enterprise Apps for Sanmina-SCI, a leading Electronics Manufacturing Services (EMS) provider focused on delivering end-to-end manufacturing solutions for communications, medical, defense and aerospace, industrial, renewable energy, and other sectors.Tony has held a variety of leadership roles since joining Sanmina-SCI in 1996 and leads a global IT team supporting various aspects of the company's operations.

Last year, Sanmina-SCI's IT team asked, "Could Google Apps really replace Microsoft Exchange for a global, multilingual workforce?" After careful due diligence, the team recently completed a phased migration for 15,000 email users, charting a new course for IT.

Tony and Elliot Tally, Director, IT Collaboration and Automation will be available on a live webcast on Thursday, January 14, to share their story and answer your questions.

Sanmina-SCI is a leader in outsourced electronics manufacturing providing Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) with highly complex design and manufacturing solutions. It is a very competitive industry, so we're always looking to reduce overall IT spending while improving service levels. We have to do it with care. We're a large enterprise with 37,000 diverse employees and operations covering every continent except Africa and Antarctica.

When we looked at email and calendaring, we asked, “What are the viable alternatives to our current on-premise Microsoft Exchange 2003 system?” Whatever we chose had to be enterprise-ready. We took several months to answer all our enterprise-level questions, and came away knowing we should seriously consider Google Apps.

We knew that a services-based model would help make our employees more productive not only as individuals but also as teams – not only within the company but also with customers and suppliers. The benefits are greater than simple cost savings. They include better customer service, streamlined business processes, and increased flexibility. Productivity is not easy to measure, but it is more important than other factors in the long term.

There were a few requirements we needed from Google’s offerings, mostly around managing user accounts and ensuring security, and we provided feedback in an iterative process and saw Google work quickly to address our issues. Convinced that Google Apps was right for us, we conducted two pilots and recently migrated 15,000 users from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps. From a strategic standpoint, a main driver for moving to Google Apps was low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

I’d be happy to share what we learned at Sanmina-SCI as a large enterprise that has made the move to Google Apps. Please join me for “Migrating 15,000 users from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps by Sanmina-SCI. Join us for this live event.

Migrating 15,000 users from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps by Sanmina-SCI
Thursday, January 14, 2010
2:00 p.m. EST / 11:00 a.m. PST / 7:00 p.m. GMT

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps team

Find customer stories and research product information on our resource sites for current users of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino.