Run Anywhere in the World With iFit Live Powered By Google Maps

Posted by Natasha Wyatt, Google Earth and Maps Enterprise Team

Editor’s note: From time to time we like to showcase how our customers are building fun and innovative products with Google Maps. Colleen Logan, VP of Marketing for Icon Health & Fitness, explains how a Google Maps API Premier powered treadmill helps exercisers reach personal fitness goals.

Most people use Google Maps for reasons of pure function: Where is that new restaurant? How do I get there? How long will it take? We thought Google Maps could be used for an entirely different purpose – as entertainment while working out on the NordicTrack home fitness equipment.

People buy fitness equipment for a range of reasons – train for a race, lose weight or simply stay in shape – but a universal challenge for most is staying motivated and finding the time to exercise. In order to reach their goals, more people are turning to technology for time-saving, motivating exercise. We thought the visuals provided by Google Maps, combined with our fitness products and iFit website might be so compelling, consumers would have more fun and stay on track. Even if the only time you can squeeze in exercise is in the evenings when kids are asleep in or in the early, snowy mornings of winter before a long day at work, the iFit exercise equipment can bring the experience of exercising on varied terrain into your home.



For example, if you wanted to experience a run through San Francisco’s hilly terrain, you can go to the iFit website and draw a running route on Google Maps. When you get on one of our treadmills, such as the NordicTrack Elite 9500 Pro, the treadmill pulls up Google Maps on the screen with the newly drawn running route. The treadmill mimics the incline of the real world route you are running, thanks to the elevation service of the Google Maps API. The runner experiences a real life running route by seeing the runner’s location move about Google Maps with Street View images flying by a she reaches new personal records.



To learn more about the Google Maps powered “smart fitness” treadmills visit the website of NordicTrack.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Our Gone Google Story: The Phoenix of New Orleans uses Google Apps to work together to rebuild neighborhoods after Hurricane Katrina

Editor’s note: Recently we announced the winners of our global Gone Google ad contest. Today’s featured winner is Jim Coningsby, Director of Operations at The Phoenix of New Orleans.

The Phoenix of New Orleans (PNOLA) is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the recovery of Lower Mid-City New Orleans and its surrounding neighborhoods after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Since 2006, we’ve rebuilt quality affordable housing and helped develop the community assets necessary for vital neighborhoods by leveraging construction expertise and using Google Apps to coordinate and collaborate on efforts.



PNOLA has a very small staff of 5-10 people per year, but we’ve been able to leverage hundreds of thousands of volunteer hours, grant funds and donated materials to rebuild over 70 homes. As a result we have saved homeowners over $4 million dollars in rebuilding costs. We were able to accomplish so much with such a small staff due to the efficiency enabled by Google Apps. We like to think of Google as being part of our team.

We estimate that Google Apps allows us to do the same work with a staff of 7 as we could with 8. While that may not seem like much, adding another staff member would be prohibitively costly to our organization so we rely on web-based tools, like Google Apps, to make up that difference.

Prior to using Google Apps, we had been using a webmail service through our website host, but our team found the interface confusing, so they often just opted to use their personal Gmail accounts. Having multiple email addresses made us appear less professional to our community partners and funders, and also made it difficult to collaborate without a standardized set of tools.

Migrating to Google Apps took less than an hour to set up. We immediately improved the professional appearance of our organization and began working smarter together through the collaboration tools. We now track all of our upcoming volunteers and project tasks through Google Calendar so everyone is able to stay up to date with what is happening. We are also able to stay on track with our projects which typically saves us up to two weeks on each house. This in turn saves our homeowners from paying extra rent, and saves us about $300 a week on project delivery costs.

In addition, our team works together to create marketing material using Google Docs and our entire team uses Google Voice as our office phones, which not only saves us hundreds of dollars a month, but greatly improves our ability to track our communication with volunteers, clients and donors. We have our entire training manual on our intranet built on Google Sites, which is constantly updated so that new team members can get up to speed quickly. We think we’re an example of a small non-profit that can do big things with the power of the cloud and Google Apps.

Posted by Jim Coningsby, Director of Operations, The Phoenix of New Orleans

Our Gone Google Story: Just Salad leverages Google Apps across global restaurant chain

Editor’s Note: Recently we announced the winners of our global Gone Google ad contest. Today’s featured winner is Matt Silverman, CIO of Just Salad from New York, NY.

Just Salad is a casual restaurant chain with six locations in Manhattan, and two locations in Hong Kong. Founded in 2006 by two recent college graduates Nick Kenner and Robert Crespi, Just Salad caters to health conscious customers looking for a fresh and fast meal.


We implemented Google Apps in 2008, and we have been extremely pleased with the results. While we originally made the switch for the robust email functionality that Gmail offers, the other applications in the Google Apps suite ended up being an invaluable toolset for all of our staff. In the restaurant business, the corporate staff are always on the run, visiting our different stores. Having all of our email, calendar, contacts, and documents available in Google Apps allows us to make our information accessible wherever our staff may be, which greatly improves our work efficiency.

The collaboration tools within Google Docs allow us to quickly and efficiently fill out our expense reports, brainstorm new ideas for our menu and operations, and maintain comprehensive training documents that can be printed by our staff in the stores at any time. We also use shared calendars to help with labor schedules, and to keep track of tasks on a store-by-store basis.

The scalable nature of Google Apps has also allowed us to seamlessly implement email in each store we open, with virtually no time spent on setting up email clients and office applications. Our network security has also improved, by moving the bulk of our virus checking to the cloud instead of managing it on premise, we are able to avoid most of the dangerous attachments that seem to plague Microsoft® Outlook email clients.

Out of all of the time saving features that Google Apps offers, the search function in Gmail is above and beyond the greatest feature. To give one quick example, we can enter transaction totals into Gmail to pull up various receipts for web purchases. This allows us to do our expense reports incredibly efficiently, without having to hunt through printed receipts to reconcile our purchases.

Finally, Google spreadsheets has allowed us to collaborate on in-depth nutrition analysis to help keep track of nutrition values for our 70+ salad ingredients. Keeping up on nutrition is hard work when you carry as many ingredients as we do, and allowing multiple staff members to work in tandem via Google Spreadsheets has proven to be incredibly useful. We look forward to continuing to work with Google Apps as we rapidly expand our restaurant concept throughout New York City, Hong Kong, and beyond.

Posted by Matt Silverman, CIO, Just Salad

Dominion Enterprises goes Google

Editor's Note: We're pleased to welcome guest blogger, Joe Fuller, CIO of Dominion Enterprises. Dominion Enterprises is a leading marketing services company serving many industries including real estate, apartments, specialty vehicles, employment, automotive and travel. Dominion is one of the largest providers of targeted classified advertising reaching over 34 million consumers monthly. 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.

If you had asked me six months ago, I wouldn’t have classified my company as a technology first-mover. Dominion has 4,000 employees with about 800 in our home office and 3,200 in field offices- the result of several companies being brought together over the years through acquisitions. As a result, we have more than 200 email domains and our email was hosted in 24 different locations. Prior to moving to Google Apps, we had been using a variety of different email systems. Some business units were using Microsoft ® Exchange and Outlook, and the rest were using various other applications. We had no shared calendars, no corporate address book and weren’t able to easily access our information from outside the office. The truth is, IT wasn’t serving our employees very well in the area of email and collaboration tools.

So our move to Google Apps was in large part an employee-driven initiative. One of our key IT managers at Boats.com thought it would be valuable for our company to adopt Google Apps so he started his own 5-person test drive. At about the same time, I attended Google’s Atmosphere event at its headquarters in California, and had a chance to talk to other CIOs that had either decided to “go Google” or were seriously contemplating a move. My biggest reservations involved security and privacy in the cloud. At the event, I learned how Google was addressing those concerns and listened to other CIO’s who had overcome similar concerns. I began to see the opportunities we were missing by not having email and our collaboration tools hosted in the cloud. When I got back to Virginia, we set to work doing our due diligence on competitive offerings and we expanded our Google Apps test drive to a full blown pilot.

We visited Redmond and though I am convinced they are committed to the cloud, their collaboration suite offering was not as seamlessly integrated as Google’s and their pricing model was complicated. Over the 6 months of the pilot, we found a groundswell of support for Google Apps. Our employees were familiar with Gmail, and they wanted to access email from their phones and their tablets. The Apps pilot grew to 150 users and we got to the point where we had to turn people away. Folks were extremely happy that they could schedule meetings with coworkers from any office (remember most of them were on separate email systems before, so this was revolutionary), host video chats and access their email from any device. Many pilot employees either had an iPhone® or Android smartphone. Once I migrated to an Android phone and discovered how easy email and calendar syncing was with Google Apps, I was sold.

By then the original Boats.com Google Apps champion had been joined by a small army of enthusiasts. I pitched the idea to the CEO, CFO and Legal Counsel and told them we wanted to move the entire company to Google Apps. For us this is really about the value and benefits we know we’re giving our employees.

We’re looking forward to discovering the new ways our employees will use Google Apps as we continue to roll it out across the company. So far, about 95% of employees say they prefer Google Apps mail to Outlook. I suspect a year from now we’re going to be wondering how in the world we ever lived without Google Apps - and even better, now I tell folks that at Dominion we’re a technology-forward company.

Posted by Joe Fuller, CIO, Dominion Enterprises

Macomb County Circuit Court and Clerk go Google to improve service and control costs

Editor’s Note: Today our guest bloggers are Mark Switalski, Macomb County Circuit Court Chief Judge and Carmella Sabaugh, Macomb County Clerk / Register of Deeds. The Macomb County Court and Clerk/Register of Deeds Office has gone Google to control costs, improve service, and keep innovating.

The Macomb County Circuit Court and Clerk / Register of Deeds border Detroit (“Motown”) to the northeast. Nestled on 31-miles of Lake St. Clair shoreline, and home to nearly 830,000 residents and growing, Macomb is Michigan’s third most populated county. Near Michigan’s two Big Ten universities, workforce training is also provided by Macomb County Community College, Michigan’s largest grantor of associate degrees with over 22,000 students. The county boasts three regional hospitals, expansive parkland, nearly 100 miles of hike/bike trails, and more than 1,900 retail establishments. Waterways hold 52,000 registered boats, and toll-free expressways provide quick access to two international airports and two international bridges to neighboring Canada. Brimming with engineers and skilled workers, the county accounts for 61 percent of Defense Department contracts awarded in Michigan.

Macomb County judges are among the most efficient at meeting State Court Administrative guidelines despite having the highest caseloads per circuit court judge across the state. Last year, we had to cut over $1.4 million from our budgets and downsize our workforce. We needed tools to meet the challenge of increasing caseloads and decreasing staff.

308 county court users recently joined 68 clerk staff on Google Apps for Government. Google Apps provides a way for judges and staff to access information anytime, anywhere and find things fast, while keeping costs down. Google lets us do more, despite budget cuts.

Google Apps for Government gives our employees great collaboration tools we never had before. County staff use Google Talk to communicate with clerks while they are in court or on the phone for quick answers. Jury staff use Google Docs to post juror Web updates without Web publishing software, even when working from home during bad weather. We can even send text messages from a computer to attorneys’ phones when their cases are being called. This is helpful when attorneys have cases in multiple courts and a judge wants to speed the docket along.

Our county has over 80,000 immigrants, speaking 40 languages, which is one reason staff appreciate the option to use Google Translate in Gmail. Viewing e-mail attachments in different formats is easy. Check out our short videos and information about our experience using Google Apps.

Besides the enhanced productivity, we know that when a disaster happens, our system will not go down and because our data is in the cloud, it is protected and accessible from anywhere. After a rare tornado hit last summer, briefly disrupting power and some network services, the clerk’s Google service remained accessible via cell phone and other networks until the county’s network and e-mail were restored.

The biggest draw for us to go Google is the cost control that comes with cloud computing. For a fixed per employee cost, the county gets Google Apps for Government and Google Message Discovery for archiving and e-discovery. There is no additional cost for servers, backup, antivirus or antispam protection, or disaster recovery. When new enhancements are available, there is no need for extra investment. Savings are also realized because Google Apps for Government has zero scheduled downtime! Maintenance is performed while the system is running. Our IT Department staff who have become proficient with Google Apps for Government are making themselves more valuable to the taxpayers.

We in Macomb County are pleased so far with the decision to improve service and control technology costs by switching to Google Apps for Government. Instead of spending time and resources to administer computer hardware and software, we can better focus on administering justice.



Posted by Mark Switalski, Macomb County Circuit Court Chief Judge, and Carmella Sabaugh, Macomb County Clerk / Register of Deeds, who are pointing to where Macomb County is located in Michigan.