HealthWarehouse.com delivers healthy growth with Google Commerce Search

Posted by Marston Alfred, Director of E-commerce, HealthWarehouse

Editors note: HealthWarehouse.com is America’s largest and fastest growing, accredited online pharmacy, which boasts an inventory of over 4,000 unique prescription drugs. The company was recently featured in Consumer Reports as one of the top drugstores in the United States. We’ve invited today’s guest blogger, Marston Alfred, Director of E-commerce at HealthWarehouse.com, to share why HealthWarehouse implemented Google Commerce Search. To read more, download the case study.

HealthWarehouse isn’t your typical pharmacy. Instead of physical stores, we rely on a website where we sell and ship medications to tens of thousands of customers throughout the country. And while an online-only presence allows us to save on typical infrastructure and personnel costs, it also presents some unique challenges.

From the beginning, implementing quality e-commerce search was critical to our business. Medication names are complicated and difficult for pharmacists to spell – let alone the consumer (amlodipine benazepril as an example) – so it’s necessary that we have a search and navigation experience that can interpret customer intent as well as a pharmacist could. But as we quickly found, e-commerce search can be very complicated.

To tackle the search problem we evaluated several third-party e-commerce solutions, but these providers would have required us to manually register thousands of common medication misspellings and synonyms – which wasn’t feasible or scalable, and would have required constant fine-tuning. Providing relevant results for our audience was also an issue. In search, our customers demand the expertise and intuition of a pharmacist, and you can imagine how this would be difficult to provide without reams of historical data related to medicine and our business. Enter Google.

Google Commerce Search utilizes the same underlying spellchecker and thesaurus of Google.com (tried and tested on over one billion queries across every imaginable category each day) to automate the display of results on retail websites. Google Commerce Search uses these signals to provide a search and discovery solution that performs phenomenally out-of-the-box, and only gets better the more people use it.

We implemented Google Commerce Search, and results for complicated prescription names were instantly more accurate, providing a 40% decrease in call-center volume (literally overnight). Clearly, visitors are now finding and discovering products much better on their own. In line with this unexpected drop in customer support calls, actual searches increased 85%, unique visitors and page views doubled, and conversions rose 19%. Search became a much more valuable component of our website.

Switching to Google Commerce Search not only increased our revenues, but also allowed us to focus and scale our core business (which, believe it or not is affordable medication and not IT). More importantly, Google’s search and navigation solution has significantly improved product discovery, putting affordable medication into the hands of more people.

Live webcast: Virginia legislative agencies discuss benefits of Google Apps

Posted by Wendy Wu, Google Enterprise Team

The IT staffs of the Senate of Virginia and Division of Legislative Automated Systems (DLAS) were taxed with the responsibility of maintaining and upgrading servers and desktop clients for a legacy email system, as well as purchasing server and client licenses. As users’ mail databases grew larger, so did the storage space and the amount of data to backup daily. In addition, plans were being established for continuity of operations, which their current email system environment could not easily offer. All these factors led to their migration to Google Apps.

After conducting initial pilot projects using Google Apps, DLAS and the Senate officially migrated to Google Apps in 2009 and 2010, respectively. Last summer, convinced by compelling cost savings and reduced IT administrative work, 11 legislative agencies supported by DLAS made the switch, including the Division of Capitol Police, State Crime Commission, and Joint Commission on Health Care.

The switch to Google Apps has enabled DLAS and the Senate to reduce IT maintenance time and dramatically increase document and email storage space -- all while saving significantly on licensing costs. Best of all, employees are more productive with Google Apps. They enjoy larger email quotas, easier access to their email on the go, and the ability to collaborate on documents in real time via Google Docs.

Join us on Thursday 5/19 at 11:00am PT / 2:00pm ET for a live webcast. Presenters from DLAS and the Senate and Google partners DLT Solutions and MiCore Solutions will discuss the business drivers behind their decision to go Google and how they approached the implementation. You’ll also learn how the various legislative agencies are leveraging and integrating Google Apps into existing business processes.

Click here to register. We hope to see you there!

Live Webinar: Effective global teams with WWF & Google Apps

Posted by Matt Charman, Google Enterprise Product Marketing Manager

WWF is a charity foundation that works with a number of partners to drive conservation and sustainability projects around the world. At any one time, WWF has over 1,300 projects underway in more than 100 countries.

With projects spanning the globe, there had been a long standing need to provide a more interactive and collaborative environment to support these dispersed project teams.

WWF began rolling out Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Calendar in May 2009, aiming to deliver an efficient platform for creating project workspaces and file repositories, as well as provide a new framework for their intranet.

For this live webinar we are excited to be joined by Neil Morgan, Global Intranet Manager at WWF, who will provide insight into how WWF is using Google Apps to collaborate more effectively across global teams.

Neil comments, “18 months on, we have achieved significant adoption of the new collaborative platform, resulting in improved content management processes, greater efficiencies, and less reliance on email for collaboration purposes.”

This live webinar will be hosted by Angela Ashenden, who is a Principal Analyst at MWD Advisors and leads the Collaboration practice.

When: Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 14:00 BST (GMT+1)
Who: Angela Ashenden, Principal Analyst, MWD Advisors; Neil Morgan, Global Intranet Manager, WWF International; Kaisa Qvist, Product Specialist, Google Enterprise.

Register now

Going Google in Canada: This story almost began with a server.

Editor's note: Over 3 million businesses have adopted Google Apps. Today we’ll hear from Marawan El-Asfahani, Managing Principal of Oxygen, a creative design agency based in Toronto, Canada. To learn more about organizations that have gone Google, or to share your own story, visit our community map or test-drive life in the cloud with the Go Google cloud calculator.

At Oxygen Design Agency, we offer branding services, develop retail campaigns, build corporate communication and more, helping companies market effectively, discover their voices and reach their audiences quickly. Four years ago, we were using the Apple^® product for email, and it was constantly crashing on us. I figured the solution was clear: a server and Microsoft^® Office. But then this tech buddy of mine made a suggestion. He said we could either go with a pricey server and software suite, or we could give Google Apps for Business a try at $50/user/year. “Hmm...”, I thought. That’s when we crossed over.

It was so easy to set up Google Apps, and with it, our downtime worries went away. As a business owner with 16 people on staff, I always want to make sure my teams are set to go in their jobs. When a new employee used to walk into the studio, it would take a lot of time to set them up with email and other software. Now it takes five minutes.

Google Apps also helps us stay connected. Our designers work very closely with our clients and suppliers, which requires them to constantly be on the move. Now, whether we’re at client sites or photo shoots, Google Apps keeps us in touch; we can chat right from our email and access important work files from any web-enabled device.

When we first adopted Google Apps, we did see some push-back from a few employees. There were certain features these employees didn’t see, and this made them skeptical. But then Google consistently released new features that made the products better and met those needs, and now those people are the ones who are most enthusiastic about our company’s use of Google Apps.

At Oxygen, we’re now heavy users of Google Apps -- especially Sites, which we’ve found to be an intuitive system to work from. We’ve used it to build a company intranet where we store employee manuals, health insurance policies, stock photo sources, and even a restaurant corner to showcase some of the really cool boutique restaurants we have in our city. Our designers can write reviews on local places for everyone to see -- from their desk or even from their mobile devices.

With Google Apps, we’re a much more powerful company. I’m proud to say we’ve gone Google.

Posted by Marawan El-Asfahani, Managing Principal, Oxygen Design Agency

Google Apps is a recipe for success at EAT.

Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Cesar Ramanauskas, Systems Engineer at EAT., a restaurant chain in the U.K. Learn more about other organizations that have gone Google on our community map or test drive life in the cloud with the Go Google cloud calculator.

EAT. is a fast growing and dynamic restaurant chain with more than 1,700 employees and over 100 stores throughout the U.K. We pride ourselves on serving “good, fresh, uncomplicated food” in our stores every day. It is our job in the IT Team to adapt that philosophy and provide simple, fast and uncomplicated systems to our customers and employees. In addition to free customer Wi-Fi, Twitter feed (@eat_news) and iPhone app, we have pioneered technologies such as an integrated Chip & PIN contactless payment solution in the U.K.

In preparation for our goal of doubling in size, EAT. migrated to Google Apps for Business, after more than a decade of using Novell GroupWise®. We found the GroupWise upgrade process very costly and time-consuming, and because of long release intervals between versions our users had to wait years to access new features. We needed something better.



Our research for an alternative led us to Google Apps for Business. Its innovative approach to communication and collaboration, tied to its highly scalable and secure environment, was second to none. All the steps in this transition, from seamless deployment and migration to user training, were performed by the small in-house team of experts.

I, for one, believe that the cloud is not just another buzzword, but is definitely where the future of productivity lives. Outfitting our users with software that works in a web browser means there is less need to install and update local applications. Plus, it gives them extra flexibility to take their work away from their desks onto mobile phones, tablets and other gadgets.

Furthermore, with Google Apps’ on-demand capacity, we avoided the ever growing capital and time expense of owning, running and protecting the servers ourselves. We also steered well clear of the upfront cost of building the infrastructure required to accommodate our aggressive expansion plans, without either wasting or having insufficient resources.

Time and cost savings didn’t stop there. Although BlackBerry® devices are fully supported by Google Apps, we appreciated the flexibility of Android devices with native Gmail, calendar, and the latest corporate and management apps, such as Google Apps Device Policy and Authenticator for 2-Step verification. We kept the momentum and in just one day all users were migrated to new the HTC Desire Z™. Retiring BlackBerry Enterprise Servers in the process was a welcome saving on our infrastructure!

Ultimately, it all adds up. With Google Apps for Business, our costs, risks, and storage usage shrank considerably while our user satisfaction, productivity and revenue opportunities multiplied. We are now able to allocate more time and resources to activities that really matter - good service and quality food.

Posted by Cesar Ramanauskas, Systems Engineer, EAT.

I’m lost without you: Google celebrates Admin Professionals’ Week

Lost. Late. Out-of-luck. That’s where we’d be without our administrative assistants at Google. Using Google Apps and the flexibility of our 100% web tools, these gurus coordinate schedules, manage inboxes, and keep our organization humming.

In light of Administrative Professionals’ Week, we’re celebrating with some of our Google Apps customers and their dedicated executive assistants and administrative teams. At Google, we are fond of saying that we “eat our own dogfood,” so when a group of Google admins came forward to offer assistance to our customers’ admin teams to help them learn the ins and outs of Google Apps, the “Admin Assistant Guru” program was born.

The Admin Assistant Guru program officially launched earlier this year and includes a network of 70 volunteer admin assistants from Google who meet with and coach their peers in our customer organizations. The goals of the program are to help our customers’ admin teams increase productivity and foster collaboration in the admin community by sharing best practices.

Since launching the Admin Assistant Gurus program, we have seen great joint-success with more than 20 customers. For example:

SNL Financial, a large global company with more than 1,500 employees, spent time with our Google Admin Assistant Gurus team on their Google Apps go live day in April. Galen Warren, CTO at SNL Financial said, “Our executive assistants were very pleased with how much attention they got from Google and how much time and effort was put into ensuring that they were happy, and that all of their questions were answered. The Admin Assistant Gurus program made a big difference to the success of our launch of Google Apps across SNL Financial.”

Brady Corporation, an international manufacturer with more than 7,000 employees, understands that successful collaboration starts with their exec admin team. Prior to and during their Google Apps deployment, Brady employees and the Google Gurus gave personal attention to the admin team, who “loved having 'Googlers' help them work through issues quickly" said Matt Vandenbush, IT Director of Strategy and Architecture at Brady Corporation. After a year using Google Apps, Lynda Carpenter, Executive Assistant says, "e-mail and calendar are critical to doing my job well. Thanks to the resources Google provides, I know how to get the right answers to my management team quickly."

Making Google Apps easier to adopt and manage continues to be a priority for our team, and we look forward to supporting our customers through innovative support programs such as the Admin Assistant Gurus.

Happy Admin Week!

Posted by Jocelyn Ding, Director of Enterprise Operations

Cinram coordinates across continents, saves over 60% on messaging using Google Apps

Editor's Note: We're pleased to welcome guest blogger Andrew Murrey, Vice President of IT Infrastructure Cinram North America. Cinram specializes in optical disc manufacturing, packaging, distribution and demand planning solutions for the home entertainment, telecommunications, and retail industries. Learn more about other organizations that have gone Google on our community map or test drive life in the cloud with the Go Google Cloud Calculator.

For more than 40 years, Cinram has worked with some of the biggest names in home entertainment and retail to produce and distribute movies, music, and video games. We have grown organically and through acquisition to more than 10,000 employees and 20 facilities in North America and Europe; many locations still operate independently – including selecting their own technologies. Everything was very decentralized, and this made it difficult to collaborate and communicate. Even scheduling meetings was a challenge; we’d have to hunt to find contact information, and email back and forth multiple times just to find availability and rooms.

Decentralization meant we also had a combination of email and collaboration solutions, with 80% of our offices on Microsoft® Exchange 5.5 – 15 year old technology with no support or future updates planned – and the others using Exchange 2003 and 2007. With inbox quotas ranging from 50-500MB, many of our users were storing their mail in .PST files on their computers, making backups and restoration of critical data almost impossible, and creating a giant risk in the case of corrupt or stolen machines. Running a mail system from the mid-1990’s also meant that we had all kinds of limits on attachments, and a ton of other frustrating issues. Between server failures, incompatibilities and corrupted PSTs, we were running close to $220 per mail user per year just to keep the old system running.

Our goal was to have everyone at Cinram using the same technology for email and daily collaboration, so we explored three different options: (a) upgrading all of our internal systems to Exchange 2007, (b) migrating to hosted Exchange, (c) Google Apps. Staying on-premise and adding quite a bit of storage would require a heavy capital investment, and we would still be paying for backup agents, tapes, vaulting, patching, and still have all of the other headaches of managing a mail system. Hosted Exchange didn’t really fit our needs because we wanted to move away from paying for an Outlook client, and Gmail’s web interface was just as powerful.

However, when we looked at Google Apps, we calculated that we could be saving 60% on email alone by moving to Google Apps for Business – a clear winner when it came to price per user – but we also knew we’d save serious time on IT management, freeing my team up to do more strategic work. In addition, we would have superior disaster recovery options and best of all, our employees would be more productive. We chose to go Google.

In just four months, Google Apps is 100 percent deployed in North America and Europe – about 3,000 people so far. The positive changes we expected are now being revealed, and we’re even uncovering some unexpected benefits as well. For starters, my IT team is happier as we previously had 16 full-time people managing our messaging systems, spending about 8,000 hours per year backing up email, fixing file storage problems, or managing server issues. If one of our servers at our Toronto headquarters went down, the entire company lost email access – it seamed like we had a company-wide email delay or outage every couple of months. Google Apps provides us with disaster recovery capabilities that we could have never dreamed of. In addition, we now need only two folks to look after messaging and the other 14 are now more focused on business-critical projects. They’re so happy they wear Google t-shirts about once a week!

Our employees are also adjusting well, and are more productive. We’re working closely with our Google Partner, Onix, to provide an end-user support site using Google Video for Business for training videos and webinars. One of the biggest benefits we’ve seen is that, since all employees have one user interface with easy processes, they can collaborate more efficiently. Scheduling meetings for example is infinitely easier, we just click on Google Talk video chat, and we can easily view employee calendars to facilitate scheduling. That’s something we didn’t calculate – all the time we spent trying to do these small, day-to-day tasks across all of our employees.

We’re also really pleased and excited to see employees adopt tools like Google Docs – we’re at a growing rate of about 150 new, shared documents each day. The HR and compliance teams in particular have been using Google Docs to store their different policies and procedures. We can give them exactly what they need in Google Docs or Google Sites, whereas before we had three or four different Microsoft SharePoint sites, and we’d have to spend money on auditors to track everything down. Now that’s all moving to a central repository, and we’re already seeing significant cost savings and productivity gains there.

We have only begun scratching the surface of capabilities that Google Apps brings to us. We have an open door to bring Google Apps to all 10,000 Cinram employees in the future, from the current user employees in our distribution and manufacturing facilities, to the folks who have never had a Cinram account before, so everyone can see the benefits. With the flexibility of Google Apps, the sky is the limit. We’ve gone Google, and we’ll never go back.

Posted by Andrew Murrey, Vice President of IT Infrastructure - Cinram North America

From the Ocean State to the Show Me State: 2 More States Go Google

Nearly one year after Oregon blazed the trail as the first state to bring Google Apps to students and teachers, Rhode Island (the Ocean State) and Missouri (the Show Me State) will begin offering support for Google Apps to K-12 schools and districts across their respective states. Together, they will provide over a million students and over 100,000 teachers with the ability to move to the cloud with Google Apps.

The RISTE organization will help Rhode Island schools who decide to "go Google" with both technical deployment assistance and training opportunities. Paul Barrette, executive board member of RISTE and Director of Technology at the Burrillville School Department, has already moved his district to Google Apps and is excited to offer this service to the other 32 districts in Rhode Island. "Google Apps also integrates very well with a wide variety of handheld and portable devices," Barrette adds, "making it a perfect fit with the ways that teachers and students are now accessing technology."

In Missouri, the Missouri Research and Education Network (MOREnet) – a consortium of schools, public libraries and higher education institutions – will assist K-12 member schools in the adoption and configuration of Google Apps by providing training to administrators, faculty, and staff. MOREnet hopes to help members faced with budget constraints move to Google Apps to reduce IT costs while also improving technology integration in the classroom. As John Gillispie, MOREnet Executive Director explains: “It’s more than just a fiscal decision. Google Apps provides communication and collaboration tools that enhance learning across the curriculum not only in reading and writing, but also in areas like math and science.”

We're excited to welcome Rhode Island and Missouri to the growing Google Apps family, which also includes Colorado, Iowa, Maryland, New York and Oregon.

Posted by Jaime Casap, Google Apps Education Manager

Luxury Real Estate Company Improves Mobility, Security and Email Performance with Google Apps

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Colleen Barry, Director of Marketing for Gibson Sotheby’s International Realty, a luxury real estate company in Boston. Gibson Sotheby's International Realty joins other real estate businesses like Baird and Warner, Ray White, and Cadillac Fairview in switching to Google Apps. Learn more about other organizations that have gone Google on our community map or test drive life in the cloud with the Go Google Cloud Calculator.

We are the Boston-based franchise of an international luxury real estate company. To support sales and marketing, as well as 200 independent agents who are constantly on the go, we needed a more mobile, secure, and fast solution for communication and collaboration. We were providing email services centrally for 300 mailboxes using SmarterMail, but this solution’s capabilities were very limited. People only had 10MB of storage. The service was slow and somewhat unreliable. Everyone had to use an email client, and because many are independent contractors, they chose whatever they wanted to use. This ultimately led to complexity and a higher likelihood of data loss. With Google Apps for Business, the company now has a more secure, consistent toolset that is increasing sales productivity while reducing IT complexity.

Over the years, I have had so many agents call me on the verge of tears because their machine had crashed and they lost everything on their hard drive. If Microsoft ® Outlook is your record-keeping mechanism, you’re in trouble unless you back it up – and let’s be realistic – people rarely do that. They also lose their computers and phones. We wanted to move into the cloud so that we no longer had to worry about data loss or data back-ups.

Another motivation for change was the need for better mobile access. We were using POP mail so agents and others could see emails on their mobile phones, but the experience was limited and ultimately frustrating. Because the email wasn’t in the cloud, you couldn’t do much more than view it. In an industry like real estate, it’s essential that our agents can access their information instantly from wherever they are.

We were pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to deploy Google Apps. We worked with Google reseller, SADA Systems, to purchase Google Apps, but two office administrators and I completed the implementation on our own. Because Google is so great at making information available, we didn’t even need to hire anyone to migrate our data. We brought 300 email accounts to Google Apps, without needing a partner for the deployment.

The ability to share and collaborate on Google documents and spreadsheets has saved us from having to do a lot of repetitive and manual tasks. For example, we can now share “show sheets” – brochures about a property listing – in Google Docs directly with our clients. We previously created PDFs and emailed them around to agents and then the agents downloaded them and attached them in emails sent to clients.

We’re also using Google Forms for requests for services that we offer to our agents. Instead of receiving countless email requests, we can now just circulate a survey, which populates instantly into a Google spreadsheet. That spreadsheet also lets us track trends and forecast. All of the essential data is there and accessible to the entire team.

With all of the snow we’ve gotten this year, Google Talk has been a lifesaver. People can work from home yet still preserve the connected, social aspect of their work while getting questions answered and discussions taken care of in minutes. These examples may not seem like much, but they add up to big productivity gains and help our employees feel connected and part of a team, even when we’re not physically in the same office.

Our employees are happier, and our IT costs are decreasing. With Apps we are dealing with fewer IT problems and are operating at a much quicker pace. Google Apps quickly begins to pay for itself. Our employees know that we’re investing in them and giving them the tools to do their jobs better and work together. We are providing a more valuable service to our agents and, ultimately, to our clients. We believe moving to Google Apps will be one of our great achievements this year.

Posted by Colleen Barry, Director of Marketing, Gibson Sotheby’s International Realty

Our Gone Google Story: At Edina Public Schools Google Apps helps students learn without boundaries

Editor’s Note: Recently we announced the winners of our global Gone Google ad contest. Today’s featured winner is Molly Schroeder, Technology Integration Specialist at Edina Public Schools.


Google Apps has been an invaluable learning tool for students and teachers at Edina Public Schools. As a technology integration specialist for Edina Public Schools, I am Google Certified Teacher and a Google Apps for Education Certified Trainer, Over the past year and a half, my team launched Google Apps at Edina Public Schools. Google Apps has transformed our ability to help students and staff engage in learning.

Staff and students have been using Google Docs, Google Sites, Picasa, Blogger, and Google Maps to work efficiently and collaboratively. Teachers rely on Google Apps for their classroom web presence, staff development and collaborative projects. Students create state research projects, websites and online portfolios of their work. Google Apps enables them to collaborate, submit and publish their work online, allowing them to communicate with an audience broader than their classroom. Even parents benefit from Google Apps -- using Google Docs to sign up for conferences and volunteer opportunities.

At Edina Public Schools, we are excited not only about what our students learn but about how they are learning. Google Apps for Education allows our students to stay current in the evolving world of technology while engaging deeply with their academic pursuits. Students are now learning without boundaries, any time, anywhere.

Posted by: Molly Schroeder, Technology Integration Specialist, Edina Public Schools

Live Webinar: How local governments use Google Apps to improve productivity and reduce cost

Across the country, governments of all sizes are turning to Google Apps for Government. Like any other organization, governments need their employees to communicate and collaborate effectively and efficiently -- especially when employees are working from home or from remote locations.

American City and County Association has joined Google to present a live webinar “How Local Governments Use Google Apps to Improve Productivity and Reduce Cost.” The webinar will feature special guests from two local governments that recently switched to Google Apps for Government: Pierce County, Wisconsin and the City of Mesquite, Nevada.

Join us to learn:

• The reasons these local governments switched to Google Apps -- and the benefits they’ve realized since.
• How Google Apps has improved collaboration and productivity while meeting government requirements for security and document retention.
• Best practices for adopting and deploying Google Apps in your government.

Register now to attend the live webinar on 4/14 @ 11:00 am PST.

Posted by Wendy Wu, Google Enterprise Team

Our Gone Google Story: Boxx Group builds foundations for success with Google Apps

Editor’s Note: Recently we announced the winners of our global Gone Google ad contest. Today’s featured winner is Kristof Boden, ICT Manager at Boxx Group in Antwerp, Belgium.

Boxx Group is a young, dynamic company with great ambition. Boxx started in 2001 as a small residential construction company, now-10 years later-the activities have expanded to residential as well as utility construction, renovation and civil contracting. In 2009, Boxx Group started investing in construction grounds and the development of housing projects. Since March 2011 Boxx Real Estate has served as a reliable and professional partner in real estate conciliation for individuals and companies.

Due to a company acquisition in 2009, we decided to try and find a way to provide full collaboration capabilities to employees in all locations, in the most cost-efficient and scalable way. Both companies had been working on local Microsoft® Exchange 2003 servers up until then and were in need of an upgrade of their communication platform anyway. We briefly considered the idea of joining Windows domains across a site-to-site VPN tunnel but we quickly gave up on the idea.


We switched our full staff of 25 employees to Google Apps for Business in May 2010. Our first roll-out to 10 users was successful so we were able to decommission one of our Exchange servers. A few weeks later we migrated 13 more employees in less than 3 days and the remaining Exchange server was decommissioned.

Employees are now able to access their emails and calendars from anywhere: on their PC's at home or on their Android phones. They enjoy the flexibility of having access to data on-the-go and the ability to communicate with colleagues and customers anytime, anywhere (and at a reasonable cost!)

Posted by Kristof Boden, ICT Manager, Boxx Group

Our Gone Google Story: South Carolina REALTORS® saves members $50,000 a year with Google Apps

Editor’s Note: Recently we announced the winners of our global Gone Google ad contest. Today’s featured winner is Sharon Delia, Communications Director, South Carolina REALTORS®

South Carolina REALTORS® (SCR) is the largest non-profit trade association in the state of South Carolina. With 14,000 professional REALTOR® members, and a staff of only eleven employees, our association depends on fast, efficient and reliable means of communication. We needed a way to simplify our IT management while maintaining communication between our small staff on-the-go. And, considering the recovering real estate market, we wanted a streamlined way of doing business that our members could also use.

Switching to Google Apps has enabled us to do just that. With Google we streamline tasks, become more efficient and enhance productivity and organization. The benefits have been so great, we encourage our REALTOR® members to use it as well ... and they are!

When we sent an email to our members telling them about all the benefits of Google Apps - access from anywhere, great collaboration tools, and 25 GBs of email storage, just to name a few - we received multiple responses from excited new Google Apps users.

Kristin Walker, a REALTOR® at Dunes Properties in Charleston, SC was happy to find out SCR has gone Google and wrote to tell us about it. “It's great to hear SCR has gone Google!! My company completed our transition to Google Apps about a month ago. Many of our agents were already familiar with the Google platform and we have been training the others on the tools. We've got shared online calendars now and are using Google Docs for company-wide documents. It is definitely enhancing productivity!”

At SCR, our Google REALTOR® Education Calendar adorns the screaltors.org homepage. We are able to collaborate on projects through Google Docs, check email through Google Apps on our company cell phones and teach our members how to video chat with their clients. We’re even using the user-friendly Google Sites to create an online presence for our 2011 annual conference, The Unconference. But the best part is the $50,000 a year in savings for our members.

And of course, it’s comforting to know our email is reliable. So, while we watch the real estate industry bounce back, we are confident our emails will not. Thank you, Google!

Posted by Sharon Delia, Communications Director, South Carolina REALTORS®

Our Gone Google Story: ESSEC Business School uses Google Apps across 65,000 students, faculty and alumni

Editor’s Note: Recently we announced the winners of our global Gone Google ad contest. Today’s featured winner is Martine Bronner, Head of Marketing at ESSEC Business School in Cergy-Pontoise, France.

ESSEC Business School was founded in 1907 and is one of Europe’s top management schools with 4,300 students, 138 academic staff and 37,000 alumni. The school, known for its international orientation, also has a campus in Singapore and partnerships with some of the best universities all over the world, including the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, IIM Ahmedabad India, SDA Bocconi Milan and Peking University.


In August 2009, we deployed Google Apps for Education to our students, alumni, faculty and administrative staff – 65,000 users in total. Google Apps has significantly increased the creation and sharing of content between all our users, with about 2,000 collaborative sites created every year on the platform.

Google Apps has provided us with a great way to lower IT costs while launching new projects that would have otherwise needed huge investment. For example, by moving to Google Apps instead of upgrading our internal messaging system we saved more than €100,000 in migration costs and €20,000 per year on email licencing. We also moved all of our teaching collaboration tools from custom internal websites to Google Sites and Google Docs. This switch has allowed us to offer long-term access to course materials for all our students.



Communicating in the cloud has also allowed us to improve collaboration between our campuses in France and Singapore. For example, the text, voice and video chat integrated in Gmail has replaced expensive video conferencing solutions for our executive board and has enabled students to easily communicate with their peers across the globe.

We benefit from Google’s focus on innovation - new features are released regularly which help us to improve the user experience. We will continue to utilise and promote these features to students and staff as they enable us to focus on our real added-value: innovation in education.

Posted by Martine Bronner, Head of Marketing, ESSEC Business School

Our Gone Google Story: 3Tailer relies on Google Apps to take its business from a $1,000 investment to a million dollar company

Editor’s Note: Recently we announced the winners of our global Gone Google ad contest. Today’s featured winner is Jon West, Co-founder of 3Tailer, from Charlotte, North Carolina

My friend, Chad Ledford, and I started 3Tailer at Appalachian State University in 2005. 3Tailer, a niche online marketplace, has been focused on growing its business and we were recently selected by the Charlotte Business Journal as the 2nd fastest growing company in Charlotte, North Carolina.



Simply put, Google Apps runs our business. Google Apps has enabled our small company to minimize IT costs while maximizing our infrastructure capabilities. It’s incredibly easy to add new employees, define group mailing lists, and share documents. When building a company you have to maximize every minute of your time and every dollar you spend. Google Docs has to be the simplest way for organizations to setup email and start collaborating. Plus, I feel better knowing that our sensitive information is stored in the cloud and not on a random hard drive in our office.

In addition to the core products that come with Google Apps, we’ve also begun using the Google Apps Marketplace, relying on apps like Socialwok and ManyMoon. The Google Apps Marketplace has slowly started to open up a whole new level of productivity for our company. An added bonus for us is that everything integrates beautifully with our Android phones. There's no doubt in my mind that Google Apps has been essential in us being able to bootstrap our company from a $1,000 initial investment to millions in revenue today.

Posted by Jon West, Co-founder, 3Tailer

Our Gone Google Story: Monash University turns nine campuses into one with Google Apps

Editor’s Note: Recently we announced the winners of our global Gone Google ad contest. Today’s featured winner is Susan Zolezzi, Manager, Communications & Change at Monash University in Victoria, Australia.

Monash University is Australia’s largest university, with 60,000 current students across nine campuses and centres in Australia, Malaysia, South Africa and Italy, and over 250,000 alumni around the world.

Our switch to Google Apps for Education began with students in November 2009, and despite being an opt-in offer over summer break and the Christmas holiday, 40,000 students had migrated before their return for semester one! By July 2010 all students were on Google Apps and the old student mail service was retired. Between June 2010 and December 2010 we migrated over 20,000 staff from 3 systems, and to date we have seen excellent uptake and use of the new applications in addition to email. In comparison, our previous Monash email and calendar projects took years of project resources and budget and saw poor adoption.



We believe accessible and easy collaboration means better ideas. Better ideas shared by more people have the potential to be even more powerful. Going Google has provided the Monash community the ability to leverage technology for collaboration in new ways and to a much greater degree than ever before. We are seeing teacher-teacher, teacher-student and student-student collaboration in every area of the university, including in the classroom, research, study and administration.

We have professional staff developing Google Sites to attract and onboard new students; teachers using Google Spreadsheets to facilitate lab assignments; administration using Google forms to collect important evaluative feedback from staff; and students using Google Docs for shared note taking. Teachers are also using Google Docs and Sites to garner valuable insight into students’ learning experiences and outcomes by observing students working real time and providing feedback as well as using revision history to observe contributions to group assignments and thought processes.



Going Google has helped us turn nine campuses across four countries into one University by providing a platform of greater opportunities for active engagement between students, staff and researchers, producing ‘world and work ready’ graduates. Apart from the collaboration and educational benefits to the Monash community, Google Apps has been better, faster and cheaper than we could have hoped for, delivering cost and time efficiencies across the university.

Posted by Susan Zolezzi, Manager, Communications & Change, Monash University

Our Gone Google Story: Oakwood Junior School uses Google Apps to help students collaborate...and manage their biscuits!

Editor’s Note: Recently we announced the winners of our global Gone Google ad contest. Today’s featured winners are the pupils and staff of Oakwood Junior School in Southampton, U.K.

Oakwood Junior School is a junior school for boys and girls, situated in Lordswood, Southampton. The school has 240 pupils from the age of 7 to 11. We have over 300 Google Apps users and after just twelve months we rely heavily on Google Apps for the day-to-day running of the school.



We’re using Google Apps for Education for all of our pupils and members of staff. Within the school, pupils as young as 7 are able to vote for their House Captains with Google forms. They also use shared folders in Google Docs to share and store information to help them manage their micro-businesses selling biscuits. In addition, our teachers and administrative staff can arrange appointments and events with Google Calendar and staff bulletins are posted and stored using Google Sites. We’ve been able to survey our Year 6 pupils with Google forms which provided instant feedback to their teachers.



We also use Google Apps to communicate and collaborate outside the school - we share meeting agendas and minutes with our school Governors with Google Docs and this year, nearly 50% of parents booked parent-teacher meetings online using Google forms.

Our school’s strength in information technology has been externally recognised by OFSTED, the schools’ inspectorate. We have recommended Google Apps to local schools, and four other primaries in Southampton are now using Google Apps - and others are joining too!

Posted by Ian Taylor, Headteacher, Oakwood Junior School

Contoso has gone Google

Editor's note: Today we’ll hear from Albert V. Leems, CIO at Contoso, a manufacturing firm headquartered near Seattle.

As a subsidiary of a traditional software company, we went against the grain and switched all 1,200 Contoso employees across nine continents to the cloud. After previously considering Google Apps, we were finally convinced to make the move when Google Docs began supporting the Corsiva font. I still can’t find track changes in Docs, but now we can use Corsiva from anywhere, on any device. We decided against Microsoft^® Office 365 beta, because we’d heard for years that beta software was too risky.

Before the switch our work maintaining IT systems was never done. Now it's easy. And when people still need Clippy, they can write TPS reports without attachments through Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office. We’re still waiting for offline Docs, so in the meantime we’re using TiSP to access the Internet in our remote locations and corporate jets.

Since moving to Gmail, HR violations and after-hours sharing of Rebecca Black videos have gone down by 76 percent thanks to Mail Goggles, and Old Snakey has doubled our IT satisfaction scores. Our teams are especially excited to start communicating more efficiently using body language alone with Gmail Motion.

Google Apps helps give our business the agility and fast decision-making of a startup, and now our parent company is considering the switch as well. We’ll be sure to pay another visit here to share their story if they go all in.

Posted by Albert V. Leems, Chief Information Officer at Contoso

Our Gone Google Story: Boise State University saves on IT costs and invests in academics

Editor’s Note: Recently we announced the winners of our global Gone Google ad contest. Today’s featured winner is Brian Bolt, Lead Systems Engineer at Boise State University in Boise, Idaho.

Boise State University first looked at moving to Google Apps for Education in 2007. At the time, we were in the process of upgrading our email for employees and students from a system that had been in place since 1996. We realized that by choosing Google Apps for Education, Boise State could provide much more than a new email platform: an entire set of integrated, cutting edge communication and collaboration tools. And the huge cost savings would allow us to redirect scarce budget dollars and personnel away from email maintenance towards new technology initiatives that support our school.

We were proud to be the largest deployment of Google Apps for Education to students, faculty and staff when we moved to the cloud. Almost 20,000 student accounts and 3,000 faculty and staff accounts were migrated. Since then we’ve seen tremendous benefits. Every year, we save $147,000 in IT costs alone. This savings has allowed us to redeploy one and a half full-time employees to important technology projects that are core to our university. Our students and faculty alike have embraced Google Apps for Education. They are excited to use Docs and Google's other communication tools to easily share, research, and collaborate.

Boise State sees Google Apps as a great tool to help us in our commitment to academic excellence, public engagement, vibrant culture and exceptional research.



To lean more about Boise State's experience using Google Apps and the Apps Marketplace, join us for a webinar on April 7th at 11am PST

Posted by Brian Bolt, Lead Systems Engineer, Boise State University

Georgia Department of Corrections Improves Case Management with Google Maps

Editor’s Note: Providing a safe and secure environment for the citizens is the mission of U.S. law enforcement agencies. Today we invited Jeff Smith, Enterprise Systems Manager from the Georgia Department of Corrections, to share how it improved offender management by using Google Maps.

The Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) is the largest law enforcement agency in the state. Our team of over 13,000 Corrections professionals strives everyday to manage the offenders effectively while helping to provide a safe and secure environment for the citizens. With a growing number of probationers to supervise - now more than 150,000 - this challenge was becoming increasingly more difficult and we needed modern technology to help us.
With the massive number of probationers in the GDC system, it’s fundamental that we have accurate mapping tools in order for probation officers to manage their caseloads appropriately. Believe it or not, for decades we had been plotting the probationers on paper maps and manually drawing the routes we took to supervise them. More recently, our officers turned to publicly available mapping tools to make their job easier on their own. In spite of that, accuracy was still a problem, and we came to realize the urgent need to equip our officers with accurate, interactive maps.

We implemented a solution that integrates large amounts of offender management data that we collected into Google Maps API Premier in October 2010. Google Maps gives us the flexibility to send large amounts of data to draw a single map and customize the data icons. We can easily map the address of each offender and color-code it based on the offender’s supervision level. Probation officers are now able to access customized Google Maps both from their desk computers and on their netbooks when they are on the road. An officer can quickly see on a map all the offenders he supervises, their addresses, identification information, supervision levels, and the probation office supervising the offenders’ cases. Officers can optimize caseloads based on real geographic boundaries so each of them can focus just on a sector of the city and reduce the amount of time spent navigating through Atlanta. We can also run a search by officer, office, or by radius to identify the cases. If an offender reports a home address change, we can tell if he or she moves out of the region and needs to be reassigned to another officer or office. We no longer have to rely on the offenders’ self-reported data for the city or county their residence is in. Google Maps has helped advance our case management and collaboration significantly.

With the capability to visualize where the offenders live, Executive Management also realized Google Maps would be a valuable tool in deciding where to establish new offices. These new ways to look at managing offenders and officer caseloads were hard to imagine with our previous systems.

Google Maps has helped us improve collaboration and optimize resource allocation intelligently. We can now focus more on our core agenda, which is to protect our citizens and provide effective opportunities for offenders to achieve positive change.

Posted by Jeff Smith, Systems Manager, Georgia Department of Corrections, Office of Information Technology