2011 Free Internet Marketing Daily Productivity Plan

Do you have a daily productivity plan for your business that can  help you ensure everyday success? If your answer is no, you need to read the rest of this blog post. Remember that one of the top reasons why entrepreneurs fail is the lack of an action plan to help then map out each business day, and it doesn't matter if
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A recap of new Google Docs functionality for your business

As we near the end of the March, we want to highlight some of the many recent updates made to Google Docs. You’ve already heard about Discussions in Google Docs, which introduced a better way to provide document feedback. Here are some of the other features that have been released in Google Docs over the past couple months:

• Filter your data in spreadsheets: We made it easier to analyze and view your data with the addition of filtering in Google spreadsheets. Applying a filter to a set of data can help you quickly narrow down the data set to find the data you need. By selecting a data set, you can filter and sort amongst many rows at once.
  

• 12 new file formats in the Google Docs Viewer: The Google Docs Viewer is used by millions of people every day to quickly view PDFs, Microsoft Word documents and PowerPoint presentations online. Not only is viewing files in your browser far more secure than downloading and opening them locally, but it also saves time and doesn’t clutter up your hard-drive with unwanted files. We recently added support for:
  
  
  • Microsoft Excel (.XLS and .XLSX)
    
  • Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 / 2010 (.PPTX)
    
  • Apple Pages (.PAGES)
    
  • Adobe Illustrator (.AI)
    
  • Adobe Photoshop (.PSD)
    
  • Autodesk AutoCad (.DXF)
    
  • Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG)
    
  • PostScript (.EPS, .PS)
    
  • TrueType (.TTF)
    
  • XML Paper Specification (.XPS)

• Mobile editing in 45 languages: Last year, we launched mobile editing in English in Google documents. You can now edit your documents on the go in 45 languages on Android with Froyo (version 2.2) and on iOS devices (version 3.0+) including the iPad.

• Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in 34 languages: Last June, we introduced the ability to upload documents into Google Docs using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). We’ve now added support for 29 additional character sets, including those used in most European languages, Russian, Chinese Simplified and some other Asian languages. See the upload page for the full list.
  

• Multiple chart ranges and hidden sheets in Spreadsheets: We added the ability to chart multiple ranges and hide sheets in Google spreadsheets. In charts, you can now add extra ranges by clicking on “Select ranges...” and “add another range.” You can also manually add new ranges separated by commas. In addition, we introduced the ability to hide your sheets. You can now click on a sheet tab and select “hide sheet” to remove a sheet from view.

• Revisions, presence, and format painter in Drawings: We’re making it easier to work together in drawings. First, we’ve added presence highlights around shapes so you can keep track of which object each person is editing. Second, we added revision history which lets you see who made which change as well as go back to previous versions. Third, the new format painter lets you choose a source shape, press the format painter icon to copy its formatting, and then click on another shape to apply that formatting to the destination shape.
  

• Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office: Google Cloud Connect is now available in 39 languages. We’ve also added the ability to hide the toolbar.

• Hidden gridlines in Google spreadsheets: Under the View menu, you can Hide gridlines for each sheet, leaving only the borders that have been put there.

• Quick starring and improved sharing invitations: Now you can star documents while editing them. Once a doc is starred, you’ll be able to find the doc by clicking on the starred link in your document list. We’ve also updated document sharing so that when you share a doc with others, all new collaborators are now included on the email.

• Cloud printing on the go: now you can print from your smartphone with Google Cloud Print for mobile documents and Gmail for mobile. Just open a document in Google Docs or an email in Gmail in your mobile browser and choose “Print” from the dropdown menu in the top right corner. To get started, you’ll need to connect your printer to Google Cloud Print.

As with all updates in Google Docs, users get access to new features each time they open their browsers, and improvements roll out to customers with no need for administrators to manage patches or install software. Stay tuned for more updates to Google Docs.

Posted by Jeff Harris, Product Manager, Google Docs

10 Productivity Tips for Home-Based Businesses

Running a business from your home offers many benefits, but there are pitfalls as well. Distractions abound, and family and other responsibilities can intrude on business time.

But the productivity lessons you learned in the outside world still apply to a home-based business. A well-organized and well-managed business is a productive business. Here are some tips to help you make the most of your time and keep work and home life separate. 

1. Prioritize your tasks ahead of time. By scheduling your tasks in order of importance, you can devote more attention to your most pressing tasks. You can prioritize your day so that you do not spend five hours answering email, while the rest of your duties slide. 

2. Set goals for your day. As you plan your day, set the goals that you want to accomplish. Although you may not get through your entire to-do list, try to set and meet reasonable goals each day. 

3. Instruct your family. "Family interference" is one reason some home-based businesses are unproductive. Your family must realize that even though you are at home, you are still “at work.” Sit down with your family and make sure they understand you need this set amount of time each day to run your business. 

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Get in touch faster with new Gmail Contacts for Google Apps

Update: We're excited to announce that the new Gmail Contacts for Google Apps has launched for all Rapid Release users as of 4/7/11. Please continue to give us your feedback in the Comments below.

In our ever-connected world, working revolves around collaborating. It’s important to be able to quickly reach people in your network, speeding up the tasks you perform daily, like making a phone call or sending an email – whether you’re at your desk or on the go. To help with this, we’re rolling out an updated version of Contacts that makes it easier to use, organize and edit your work contacts in Gmail.

In addition to all of the improvements we made to Contacts for individual users, we’ve been hard at work on bringing additional, business-specific features to help you and your colleagues get in touch with contacts more easily. Now, you can:

• Add new contact information that will default to “Work” instead of “Home” field types
• View contact details from the domain directory together with the contact details that you’ve added yourself
• Add contacts from the domain directory to your “My Contacts” list in a single click
• Manage groups more easily by quickly adding email addresses to groups, and picking from a contact’s multiple email addresses to use on a group-by-group basis
• Revert changes to your Contacts for up to 30 days in case you need to restore deleted or merged contacts, or undo an import

If you’re the Google Apps administrator for your organization, you can enable the new Contacts interface in Gmail for your users from the Service Settings > Contacts area of the next generation administrative control panel. It may take up to an hour for users to see the difference once you make the change.

Make collaboration easier today by switching to the new Gmail Contacts (and once you do, be sure to contact us with your feedback).

Posted by Sean Purcell, Product Manager, Google Contacts

How much is faster collaboration worth to businesses?

Over the last few years, saving money on an email solution has been the most common driver for companies switching from legacy on-premises systems to Google Apps. But customers aren’t just using Google Apps for email. They’re also adopting innovative teamwork tools like web-based documents, spreadsheets, presentations and project sites, and we now know the value of improved productivity by “going Google” is actually even larger than the substantial cost savings.

To quantify the complete value of Google Apps including collaboration and productivity benefits, we enlisted the help of Forrester Consulting to measure the “Total Economic Impact” that a typical company can expect over three years, moving from legacy on-premises infrastructure to Google’s web-based solution. After dozens of in-depth customer and stakeholder interviews and hundreds of survey responses from IT administrators and end-users, we're excited to share the research results, and we invite you to download and share Forrester's report.

The key findings of Forrester’s analysis bring the benefits of Google Apps into sharp focus. The following results are what a typical large customer with 18,000 employees and several offices around the world can experience by making the switch.

• Over 300% ROI
  The return on investment of switching to Google Apps is 391%. (307% after adjusting for risk.) In plain English, for every dollar spent on Google Apps, the system pays back the initial investment and more than three more dollars in additional business value.
  
  
• Dramatically improved productivity
  The value of improved productivity from Google Apps is even greater than costs saved by making the switch. Features like fast email search, integrated IM, message threading, great spam filtering, collaborative sites and real-time, multi-person collaboration in documents, spreadsheets and presentations all contribute to the productivity improvements quantified by Forrester.
  
  
• Break-even under 7 months
  The break-even payback period of switching to Google Apps is very short – faster than seven months. After the investment quickly pays for itself, the productivity gains from Google Apps continue to grow year after year.
  
  
• NPV over $10,000,000
  The risk-adjusted Net Present Value (NPV) of switching to Google Apps is over $10,000,000 for the typical large business. Productivity gains contribute over $7,000,000 to this amount.

Of course, both Google and Forrester strongly advise readers to conduct their own impact analysis when evaluating Google Apps, but this research solidifies what the Google Apps team has been hearing loud and clear from customers about the business benefits they’ve experienced. If you’re already using Google Apps, we’d love to hear your story too, and maybe even feature your organization in the future.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Because Time is Money: Leveraging Google Apps Open Standards and Google Calendar

Editor's note: Continuing our “Going Google Everywhere” series, we’ve invited Stijn Van Vreckem, Founder and Managing Director of XAOP, a small Belgium-based software development company specializing in content integration, to talk about a quick and easy way his company has utilized APIs with Google Apps Premier Edition. XAOP builds software solutions, information integration products and related services for the life sciences industry.

Learn more about other organizations that have gone Google on our community map.

Filling in timesheets is a task that needs to be performed monthly or weekly in most service-oriented organizations. For years, I used to write everything down in my notebook to keep track of things.

Because the XAOP team has grown to seven people in the last year – who are usually working in small teams of two or three developers – it became more and more difficult to manage the billing for different projects. It was time to look for a better, more transparent solution to keep track of everyone's time.

After some internal discussions, we introduced a timesheet process based on Google Calendar. We created a calendar in our Google Apps Premier environment for each billable project we want to track. These calendars are shared with the team members working on the project.

Each team member registers his or her activities by simply putting them on the correct project calendar. As a result, everybody on the team can see who is working on which task in the project. At the end of the month, all invoices are created based on the activities of the project calendar.

Users track their time using project calendars in Google Apps.

Now, generating timesheet reports and invoices for clients is easy. Here’s how it works:

• A background Ruby application connects each Google Calendar with the Google Data API to collect the activities.

• The Ruby application then generates a monthly PDF report of the project calendars.

• These reports provide a detailed overview of the activities for each person in the project.

The main disadvantage is that we need a lot of calendars, so cleanup is sometimes necessary. We also wish we could see who created which event so we could more easily manage larger projects. For example, you can see who created an event via the tooltip when you rollover it with the mouse, but this becomes difficult to read easily when more than 3 users fill in the timeslot on the same calendar. Therefore we implemented a convention on some projects to start the title with a person's initials.

But there are many advantages. We now have a lightweight timesheet application that lets everyone fill in their calendars when they have the time. The Google Calendar user interface is very simple and accessible for everybody. Freelancers or other external people working on XAOP projects can be added to the calendar of the project without complexity. This is a web-based solution that can be used via a PC or a mobile phone.

Today, XAOP team members don’t need to keep track of the projects. They only need to keep their calendars up to date. Invoices are now generated automatically and we can provide transparent reporting on each hour of work.

XAOP recently invested in new mobile phones and our time management solution worked without any changes. Because these HTC devices (Hero and Magic) integrate seamlessly with Google Apps, we can fill in our timesheets from anywhere.

Posted by Serena Satyasai, the Google Apps team

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

Green, Financial Gains from TelePresence

Telepresence video communication systems enable groups of people to meet and collaborate in multiple locations worldwide -- while feeling as if they were all in the same room together. Executives can now equate the full positive impact from several tangible benefits of utilizing telepresence systems, according to the results of a new market study commissioned by the Carbon Disclosure Project.

U.S. and U.K. businesses that substitute some business travel with telepresence meeting services can cut CO2 emissions by nearly 5.5 million metric tons in total -- the greenhouse gas equivalent of removing more than one million passenger vehicles from the road for one year -- and achieve total economy-wide financial benefits of almost $19 billion, by 2020.

Other conclusions of the global market study determined a business with $1 billion or more in annual revenue that utilize four telepresence rooms could:

• Achieve a financial return on investment in as little as 15 months.
• Save nearly 900 business trips in the first year of using telepresence.
• Reduce emissions by 2,271 metric tons over five years -- the greenhouse gas equivalent of removing 434 passenger vehicles from the road for one year.
  

The study also revealed that telepresence solutions can help speed decision-making, improve employee productivity, and provide workers with a better work-life balance.

Modeling the Benefits of Telepresence Applications
The study was produced by Verdantix, who conducted in-depth interviews with executives of 15 Global 500 firms that are early-adopters of telepresence. They used the findings of those interviews to develop a detailed model to calculate the financial return on investment (ROI) and carbon reductions of telepresence.

The model looks at projected telepresence adoption among companies with $1 billion or more in annual revenue and forecasts how the financial and carbon reduction benefits achieved by early adopters of telepresence would translate into economy-wide financial and environmental benefits in the U.S. and U.K. by 2020.

Carbon emission reductions among U.S. companies with annual revenues over $1 billion were forecast at approximately 4.6 million metric tons by 2020 -- the equivalent of removing more than 875,000 passenger vehicles from the road for one year.

Among large U.K companies, carbon emission reductions by 2020 were forecast at approximately 940,000 metric tons -- the equivalent of removing more than 179,000 passenger vehicles from the road for one year.

Total economy wide financial benefits that could be generated by 2020 as a result of large companies using telepresence in place of some business travel were forecast at over $15 billion for the U.S. and almost $4 billion in the U.K.

"Companies that invest in carbon cutting technologies and re-engineer the way they do business will not only be better placed to succeed as we transition to a low-carbon economy but can experience considerable business benefits during this transition," said CDP chief executive officer Paul Dickinson. "Telepresence is a good example of a low-carbon solution that can bring financial savings and increase productivity while reducing emissions."

Study participant Zelda Bentham, senior environment manager of global insurance company Aviva, said, "We compared executives traveling from the nine months prior to telepresence with the nine months following implementation. From an air travel perspective, we observed a 25 percent carbon footprint reduction."

Goble & Associates advances customer-centric approach with Google Apps

Editor’s Note: We launched our Google Apps community map in March 2010, and have since received thousands of Gone Google stories from organizations around the world. We’ll be showcasing some of these stories in a new series of blog posts, Going Google Everywhere.

Today we welcome Mark Goble, COO of Goble & Associates, an integrated marketing agency servicing the healthcare industry. Has your company “Gone Google” and interested in sharing your story? Add your marker to the map!

Goble & Associates is a 27 year old global marketing agency with clients in the medical device, diagnostic, and pharmaceutical businesses. Our commitment to collaboration and communication has been the cornerstone of our success, with client relationships that average over eight years, which is rare in our business. As our agency has doubled in size over the past four years, our IT resources were increasingly consumed with managing our outdated systems, and we needed solutions that would enable us to continue to deliver the same levels of customer service that our clients had come to expect.

Our IT challenges were considerable. Our expansion to nearly 100 employees – including offices in Chicago and San Diego, plus mobile workers – had left us without a central calendaring system, and our in-house email support was costly and time consuming to maintain. When we added mobile access by rolling out iPhones to more than 20 employees, we realized our infrastructure was unable to support mobile solutions, and we knew it was time for a change.

Enter Google Apps. We migrated to Apps in early 2009, and have subsequently converted an additional organization we acquired. The results have exceeded our expectations. Six months after going Google, we saw an 80% reduction in IT issues related to email, while saving more than 23% in hardware costs. Additionally, we estimate our mobile efficiency has increased more than ten-fold.

While our initial pain points were focused on email and calendaring, we’ve experienced huge benefits from Docs and Sites. Docs has become the centerpiece of our daily communications regarding project status, and we’re actively using Google Sites to help manage our business, including a company-wide start page with integrated calendar and Twitter feed:

We’ve also found ways to utilize Sites to assist in our continued focus to be the best partner to our clients. We recently developed a Site to provide a potential client insight into our immersion and research process, which was instrumental in helping us prepare to win this business. Going Google has also reinvigorated our client-centric focus, as our IT team now has the resource to assist our development team in building new client solutions.

Using cloud-based solution like Google Apps has greatly enhanced our business operations; so much so that we’ve extended our cloud computing initiative to include Google Apps Marketplace providers such as TripIt. We eagerly await the adoption of new technologies like Google Wave that will continue to place Goble & Associates at the forefront of the technology and communications curve.

Posted by Colleen Horan, Google Enterprise team

Shortening sales cycles with SlideRocket and the Apps Marketplace

Editor’s Note: Rob Salvatore is CEO of Tongal, a cloud-based entertainment company. Tongal facilitates creativity in the cloud by crowdsourcing video content through Internet-based collaborations. The company marries its professional network of content creators to businesses that need video content. Tongal’s focus is on video advertising, music video, instructional video, and brand integrated short films. Customers include the New York Knicks and Kiva.org.

Our business is built on collaboration, and we wouldn’t be able to do this without the power of cloud computing. On average, each project at Tongal involves more than twenty separate contributors.

Thanks to Google Apps and SlideRocket – an integrated presentation app available on the Google Apps Marketplace – we’re no longer prisoners of desktop software and we're able to easily work across time zones and oceans.

Efficient & effective communications

For months we struggled with effective ways to share our high-definition video content. We’re dealing with very large files and it’s critical for us to exhibit and present our work online, not to mention the need to maintain the integrity and quality of the video. The combination of Google and SlideRocket made it possible for both us and our community to create, manage and share video files with a few simple clicks.

• When users submit video content to a Tongal collaboration, Google converts it ad hoc. So, we're free of heavy conversion software licensing agreements and only pay for what we use, when we use it.

• After the Tongal community and platform complete the video product, SlideRocket helps us show it off. We can easily embed the finished video product into our presentations without worrying about diminished video quality or file size.

SlideRocket has eliminated the need for us to burn videos and presentations to disks in order to send our content to customers and prospects. Plus, SlideRocket’s platform generates unique URLs for each presentation that we can immediately send to prospects via email without worrying about file size.

100% accurate, integrated information

Another benefit of working in the cloud is that we've linked our Google Docs and information from Google Analytics directly into our presentations, ensuring our slides are accurate and up-to-date every time the presentation is viewed. When we make a change to our Google Spreadsheet, that change is immediately reflected in our SlideRocket presentation. This saves us a lot of “busy work” updating our marketing presentations. As a start-up, every employee and each hour is important, and any application that saves us time and effort is invaluable.

Insight and analytics lead to shorter sales cycles

Not only did SlideRocket solve our technical issues, it also brought insight and intelligence about our customer’s behavior through the statistics and analytics that we would not be able to get with any other application. This has significantly shortened our sales cycle, and help us target our efforts.

For example, if one potential customer spends a lot of time on a slide about cost, we know that might be an issue for them. If another spends time on a slide that showcases a particular video, we know that their interest is truly piqued. If they spend no time at all – well, we can take a hint...

The viewership statistics and analytics that SlideRocket provides for each presentation have a direct effect on the success of our business. We’re gaining valuable insight into our customers’ experience with the content we’ve developed. Not to mention the fact that we can secure our presentations with password protection, especially if we’re dealing with sensitive content. SlideRocket is the only presentation solution out there that offers this kind of intelligence and control.

Posted by Chris Kelly, the Google Apps Partner team

Thriving in the New World of Enterprise IT

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is notable technology expert and futurist Geoffrey Moore. He is an author, consultant, and venture capital partner, with a background in English literature. He is the author of Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, The Gorilla Game (with co-authors Tom Kippola and Paul Johnson), and most recently Living on the Fault Line, which deals with a set of management or investor challenges posed by fast-changing, technology-enabled markets.

Geoffrey is a frequent contributor to business periodicals and a speaker at industry conferences. He is also a venture partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, providing strategy advice and consulting services across MDV's entire portfolio of early-stage investments.
Please join Geoffrey this week at a live webcast this Thursday, May 27, at 2:00 p.m. EDT, 12:00 noon CDT, or 11:00 a.m. PDT. Register today.

Tectonic shifts are occurring in today’s enterprise IT environment, powered by mega-forces such as globalization and commoditization—and also driven by consumer technologies like social networking, video, and mobile devices. In enterprise IT, static databases and servers no longer suffice, and it really makes no sense to build another data center.

So what’s next? How do you thrive in the brave new world of enterprise IT?

Many enterprises are holding their own by consolidating, virtualizing, and attempting to do more with less. But over the next few years, enterprise IT will have to adapt more dramatically, and do so quickly and nimbly. Whether dealing with huge volumes of transactions in a business-to-consumer environment or handling lower-volume, more complex operations in a business-to-business situation, enterprise IT professionals must understand that consumer technologies are now in the driver’s seat.

Fortunately, there are many insights and tools you can use to guide your infrastructure in the right direction. By making shifts in your IT strategies, you have the opportunity to increase profit margins while providing advanced services and systems that are truly user-centric, beneficial to the business and more secure than ever.

Join me in a lively discussion to share insights and actionable tips about how to turn your IT challenges into competitive advantages and thrive in an era of disruptive yet ultimately beneficial technology change.

Geoffrey Moore

Geoffrey Moore on the New Face of Enterprise IT
Thursday, May 27, 2010
11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT



Posted by Serena Satyasai, the Google Apps team

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

Managed Telepresence Gains New Converts

As the European aviation sector encountered major disruptions, online business meeting services attracted growing interest and new demand. Apparently, few traditional globetrotters plan for, or even anticipate, the effects of a natural disaster so many were searching for last-minute alternatives to international air travel.

Online visual collaboration platforms -- that enable just-in-time face-to-face meetings -- were a natural choice for the informed business travelers who, like most of us, only recently discovered that Iceland has an active volcano.

According to the latest market study by Frost & Sullivan, renewed awareness of videoconference solutions will create further opportunities for TelePresence service providers.

Telepresence Market Growth Predicted
Frost & Sullivan estimates the global Telepresence market value was $396.2 million for 2009, and forecasts this market to reach $825.9 million in 2015. Their research assessment included both ready-built Telepresence room solutions, and component parts that are used by third parties to construct customized Telepresence room solutions.

The effectiveness of the latest technologies and the impact of the global economic downturn are impelling businesses to re-assess Telepresence -- as a viable solution to facilitate reduced operation costs and create new sources of productivity increases.

"The volcano ash clouds from Iceland are just the latest in a long line of issues that have impacted business travel," says Frost & Sullivan principle analyst Dominic Dodd. "Telepresence in particular, has played a pivotal role over the last two to three years in helping build greater awareness and in re-focusing executive-level attention on visual collaboration."

Frost & Sullivan believes that Telepresence offers a unique proposition that can deliver effective and reliable visual communications. Its development and growth in popularity parallels advancements in other forms of collaboration as a service. Visual collaboration is also an essential part of a comprehensive Unified Communications (UC) strategy.

Immersive Experience will Accelerate Demand
The majority of Telepresence systems continue to rely on significant network bandwidth and quality of service management to perform up to their maximum potential. Globally, managed service offerings remain an essential ingredient for many users, as service providers continue to add new meeting room locations to their expanding networks.

Visual collaboration endpoints are expected to do well in the long term. Although, according to Frost & Sullivan, while the product format by which immersive Telepresence is delivered is likely to change, the overall demand for its unique features and benefits will continue to gain new user converts.

"While the latest research indicates that the market for today's ready-built systems will ultimately reach its upper-limit within the next five years, it also shows how growth demand for the immersive experience can accelerate as it is fed by other product sets such as high definition videoconferencing and custom Telepresence solutions," concludes Dodd.

Manufacturing in the Cloud with Google Apps and Smartsheet

Editor's Note: Tom Hippensteel is the Vice President for LiquidConcrete, a medium-sized Seattle-based manufacturer of high-performance concrete coatings and flooring systems for industrial and transportation markets. LiquidConcrete relies on Google Apps for email, calendar, and document collaboration, and on Smartsheet, an integrated app from the Google Apps Marketplace, for online project management, general work management, and team collaboration.

Smartsheet's integration with Google Apps enables businesses to transform the work they routinely track in spreadsheets into a complete solution for managing business operations. Smartsheet currently offers three versions in the Google Apps Marketplace: online project management, sales pipeline management, and crowdsourcing.

Below, Tom explains a bit about LiquidConcrete and the steps they took to get the entire business – from the front office to the warehouse – to operate in the cloud.

To learn more about LiquidConcrete's success with Google Apps and Smartsheet, please join us for a webinar on Tuesday, May 11 at 11:00 a.m. PDT.

We win business because we have great products, and because we run a lean operation that differentiates on quick turnaround of custom jobs with high levels of customer service. Everything about our operation is focused on efficiency, so we’re always looking for software solutions that fit that model. We’ve had successes and setbacks in getting our operations into the cloud in a way that works for all of our employees. We needed tools that "just work the way that we work."

We use Quickbooks for accounting and have had great success with Google Apps for email and calendar, but had trouble finding a tool that combined the ease of use, power and flexibility we needed to manage the rest of our operations. We tried various CRM, ERP and manufacturing solutions but they made us work in a certain way and were difficult to use – people just went back to how they were doing it before.

Then we found Smartsheet, a cloud-based project management tool. It was already integrated with Google Apps, and as we began deploying it more broadly, made Google Docs much more useful. Smartsheet and Google Apps are the only tools that have been readily adopted across our whole company, all the way out to the guys on the warehouse floor.

Here’s how we use them:

Project & task management We started tracking various projects and shared task lists in Smartsheet. User adoption was not a problem and the ability to launch Smartsheet from Gmail (the first app we open every morning) might sound simple, but it was a big win. Most of us check into Smartsheet dozens of times per day and we all have it added to the first screen on our iPhones.

Order-to-ship process We then realized that Smartsheet and Gmail could help with our order entry and shipping process. It was easy to set up and quickly adopted by reps on the phones with customers as well as people in the factory and at the warehouse. Here's our new streamlined process:

1. New orders are entered in a Smartsheet with the packing slip attached to the order and special instructions added as discussion notes

2. The people at the warehouse are automatically notified by Smartsheet (via Gmail on their iPhone) that a new order needs to be shipped

3. They access Smartsheet from their email, download the packing slip and prep the order

4. Once the order is shipped, they fill out the "tracking number" field for that order in Smartsheet and change the dropdown status from "waiting" to "shipped"

5. The right people receive a Smartsheet notification that a new order has been shipped with the tracking number available

Inventory tracking We also track raw and finished goods inventory in Smartsheet, giving salespeople instant access to the latest information online or via their iPhone.

Sales pipeline We have recently started using Smartsheet to manage the sales pipeline. It's been great to have all of our client projects and potential leads tracked in one place with their relevant documents attached to their record. We have instant status updates, forecast amounts and recent call notes at our fingertips and use reminders to make sure follow up happens.

Specification document management Since we are able to easily attach Google Docs to our Smartsheets, we decided to go forward with converting hundreds of specification documents into Google Docs. Google Docs gives us collaborative writing and review to get the specifications right, and Smartsheet organizes them conveniently right inside the project workflow. Accessing files directly from our sales, inventory and order processing sheets has been a big productivity win.

Smartsheet and Google Apps are changing the way our company communicates. Our CEO loves it because he gets an update on order status or a key customer in real time. Our reps love it because they can quickly pull up an order while on the phone with a customer and give an instant answer without waiting for someone at the warehouse to call them back. This saves us a tremendous amount of time.

The two keys for us are ease of use and the flexibility, and we've yet to come across a type of work that can't be managed in Smartsheet and Google Apps. We also love that it's a fraction of the cost of many of the other solutions we've looked at and we don't have to hire expensive consultants to customize it.

Bottom line is that we serve our customers better than bigger competitors because we're nimble and agile, and we feel the same way about Smartsheet and Google Apps.

Tom Hippensteel, VP, LiquidConcrete

Join Tom and the Smartsheet team for a webinar to learn more about this customer success story. This online discussion will include a question and answer session.

Improving operational efficiency with Google Apps and Smartsheet

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT

Register here

You can watch it at work here:

To learn more about Smartsheet's experience selling their app in the Google Apps Marketplace, please read their post on the Google Apps Developer Blog. To learn even more about Smartsheet, check out their Google Apps Marketplace listing.

Posted by Chris Kelly, Google Apps Marketplace team