Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Lee Tae Kyu, CEO of MS Autotech, which specializes in car-body parts for auto manufacturers such as Hyundai Motor Co., Kia Motors and Daimler-Benz. In 2011, the company had revenues of approximately 500 billion KRW, and anticipates revenues in 2012 of between 600 and 700 billion KRW. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.
My company, MS Autotech is based in Korea, but the auto-makers we supply with parts include not only Korean manufacturers such as Hyundai and Kia, but also non-Korean companies such as Daimler-Benz. We have 900 employees in Korea, 1,000 employees in India and we’re building a presence in Brazil. All of this means we’re a global company and we need a global communications and collaboration system that just works.
When we began our search for a global solution, we were looking for an easy-to-use, standardized communication and collaboration system that would allow us to upgrade seamlessly over time, and around the world. After examining Google’s offering from an IT perspective, it took us less than a week to choose the Google Apps solution. At the time, our users had very limited IT resources, and expanding our old email system was an extremely slow process. We really needed to make a new investment that would make a difference quickly.
Making the switch to Google Apps couldn’t have been easier. We worked with Netkiller, a Google Apps reseller, to help us get up to speed with Google Apps. We’ve found that Google Apps for Business is the optimal solution for our growing needs. We love that it’s cloud-based, so we don’t have to worry about upgrading software on individual PCs.
Now that we’ve moved to Google Apps, we’ve been spared the ongoing cost and resource demands of hardware management, and we no longer worry about things like hardware capacity or storage limits with 25GB of email storage for every employee. As a result, our IT strategy team has been able to change its focus to the fundamental work of planning and leading our technology services. After seeing this kind of innovation at work within our company, we know that we made the right choice with Google.
From our employees’ perspective, Google Apps is very responsive; we can easily check email and access docs from anywhere. We can even use smartphones to review and edit documents. We’re making the most of other Google Apps features as well, including Google Talk (in Gmail), which we use for videoconferencing. Likewise, we’re using Google Calendar for its collaborative features, like the ability to input your schedule and share it with others.
Perhaps the most valuable outcome is that we can now collaborate horizontally rather than in vertical silos, making it easier for different groups to work together toward shared goals. Now we can quickly work across international borders, which helps us do things like reach immediate decisions with our assistant manager in Brazil. It empowers us all to make decisions, together, in real time.
I’m happy to say that we’ve gone Google so that we can save time, make decisions faster, communicate and collaborate more effectively, and be more flexible as we grow. Going with Google Apps is helping us become the best in the industry.
There may be times when you don’t have an Internet connection on your Android device, but you still want access to a file you’ve saved in Google Docs. Now you can select any file in Google Docs to make it available offline. So regardless of whether you’re connected to the internet, you’re always connected to those files.
Even better, Google Docs automatically updates your offline files when you’re on Wi-Fi. You can also manually update files anytime you have a data connection by opening the file or tapping ‘Update’ from the Offline section of the app.
Make file available offline
Update online file
Make file available offline
Update offline file
For those of you with Android tablets, we’ve also improved the Google Docs reading experience. Now, when you open a Google document on your tablet while online, you’ll get a high-resolution version of the document. Swipe left and right to flip between pages, or use the slider at the bottom to page ahead quickly.
Posted by Patrick Ryan, Policy Counsel, Open Internet
Last year, we were excited about the effort initiated by the U.S. government to promote cloud adoption through the Cloud First initiative. Through this initiative, the federal government declared that taxpayers’ money should be used in a more productive way, and having the government run its own data centers (more than 2,000 of them) didn’t make sense. They’ve targeted the shutdown of more than 1,000 in what they call their “year of change in federal IT,” saving more than $2 billion in taxpayer money. Through leading by example, the federal government went Google with several large agencies including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(NOAA) and the Government Services Agency (GSA). They join other public entities like the states of Wyoming, and Utah, Washington DC, and the cities of Orlando and Pittsburgh. Also, quasi-public entities have embraced Google Apps, including more than 61 of the top 100 U.S. universities.
In 2012, we hope to see the same movement in Europe. On January 26th, the European Commission’s Vice President Neelie Kroes announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos the European Cloud Partnership, and they’re backing it with an investment of 10 million EUR to create “a strong common basis for cloud procurement by public authorities.” Commissioner Kroes also addressed many of the concerns about local clouds in a decisive way:
“There is one thing that does not make sense and I want to be clear about it: The Cloud Partnership, and indeed our overall Cloud Computing strategy, is not about building a European super-cloud, neither outright nor by forcing the integration of existing public cloud infrastructures. Cloud business models, and the set-up of cloud suppliers’ and publicly-run data centres, should be determined by efficiency considerations on the market.”
We believe that the European Cloud Partnership will be a positive thing for public authorities, not just in Europe, but around the world. According torecent studies, the Internet already accounts on average for 3.4% of GDP in a group of 13 emerging and developed economies, helps to spur economic growth and initiatives like this will help to promote its positive economic impact further.
Posted by Rajen Sheth, group product manager for Chromebooks
Cross-posted to the Chrome blog
Editor’s note: We’re posting from sunny Orlando, where we’re chatting with schools at the annual FETC ed-tech conference. We wanted to share highlights from our keynote this morning, which featured a panel moderated by Tom Vander Ark, author of Getting Smart: How Digital Learning is Changing the World. You can watch a replay of the keynote on YouTube. If you’re in town, come visit us at our booth #1101 – we’d love to say hi!
When we first conceived of Chromebooks, we were focused on providing a device that brought you to the web in the fastest, simplest and securest way possible. What we didn’t realize at the time was that this device would be so welcome and popular in classrooms! Many schools are eager to improve access to the web and technology for students and are planning to provide each student with their own device – a concept known as “1-to-1″ computing. We’ve heard from our customers that they choose Chromebooks for 1-to-1 because the simplicity of the web takes away the hassle for teachers, students and administrators.
During our keynote at FETC this morning, we had the opportunity to share some exciting news: hundreds of schools in 41 states across the U.S. are using one or more classroom sets of Chromebooks today. As a highlight, three new school districts in Iowa, Illinois and South Carolina are going 1-to-1 – that is, one Chromebook each for nearly 27,000 students.
Council Bluffs Community School District in Iowa is planning a Chromebook 1:1 Initiative for all 2,800 students in their two high schools and will use an additional 1500 Chomebooks in their two middle schools
Leyden Community High School District in Illinois will roll out devices to 3,500 students in their two high schools
Richland School District Two in South Carolina is going 1-to-1 with a total of 19,000 students
It’s great to see this positive momentum for Chromebooks in classrooms. It’s similar to where we were about five years ago when Google Apps was just getting off the ground. At that time, educational institutions were the most interested and it was inspiring to hear the different ways schools and districts had begun using Gmail, Calendar and Docs. At FETC we’ve been similarly excited to see how teachers have formed communities around professional development for Chromebooks, districts all across the US are piloting Chromebooks in their classrooms, and more and more reach out to us to learn about Chromebooks for Education every day. We believe Chromebooks and the web have the ability to facilitate learning in a powerful way, and we’re committed to helping schools recognize their goals to go 1-to-1.
But enough words from us. We’d like to close with thoughts from representatives of each of these school districts.
“From my perspective, Chromebooks couldn’t get any simpler; setting up this many laptops would have typically taken our team at least 3 months. And from the instructional side, we are teaching content not technology, and Chromebooks simply support teachers in what they do best while giving students the resources they need to be productive citizens. As just one example the quality of work that students turn in has improved literally overnight – from incomplete sentences to full paragraphs, in some cases – because they are much more engaged and participating readily in class.”
David Fringer, executive director, information systems at Council Bluffs Community school district, Iowa
“When we started on our digital evolution path we were looking for just the right tool – one that is invisible and gets out of the way to allow students and teachers to focus on instruction. With Chromebooks our students are publishing, producing and sharing with each other, and best of all, we don’t have to assign students a particular device number. Any student can use any device because all their work is saved online – for that matter they could access their work from home while logged in from the Chrome browser.”
Bryan Weinert, director of technology at Leyden school district, Illinois
Student at East Leyden high school selects a Chromebook from the charging cart. With Chromebooks, students can work on any device in any class period and access their work from anywhere – including from the Chrome browser installed on a home computer.
“Chromebooks make our 1-to-1 computing dream a reality. Teachers don’t need to add ‘help desk’ to their job description, and they save valuable class time knowing they can instruct students to close the Chromebooks to stay on task and they won’t have to wait when it’s time to open them again. Furthermore, we’ve seen that any behavior issues become an absolute non-issue because the technology is so compelling.”
Tom Cranmer, executive director of information technology, Richland School District Two, South Carolina
Fifth grade student teaches a younger student how to use a Chromebook in the Chrome Buddy project in Tim Swick’s classroom at Pontiac Elementary School in Richland School District Two.
For the last year, our data center team has been working on a project to bring our facilities to even higher standards for environmental management and workforce safety. Recently we got the good news that our work paid off.
All of our U.S. owned and operated data centers have received ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001 certification. We’re the first major Internet services company to gain external certification for those high standards at all of our U.S. data centers.
In a nutshell, both standards are built around a very simple concept: Say what you’re going to do, then do what you say—and then keep improving. The standards say what key elements are required, but not how to do it—that part’s up to us. So we set some challenging goals for ourselves, and we asked our auditors to confirm that we’ve followed through on them.
Here’s an example of the kind of improvements we’ve implemented: Like most data centers, ours have emergency backup generators on hand to keep things up and running in case of a power outage. To reduce the environmental impact of these generators, we’ve done two things: first, we minimized the amount of run time and need for maintenance of those generators. Second, we worked with the oil and generator manufacturers to extend the lifetime between oil changes. So far we’ve managed to reduce our oil consumption in those generators by 67 percent.
A second example: each of our servers in the data center has a battery on board to eliminate any interruptions to our power supply. To ensure the safety of the environment and our workers, we devised a system to make sure we handle, package, ship and recycle every single battery properly.
These are just two elements of what ultimately adds up to a comprehensive system of policies that our data center teams follow in their day-to-day operations. We do this because we want to be the gold standard in environmental and workforce safety, and because we care about the communities where we live and work. This is one more reason you can feel confident that when you’re using our products, you’re making an environmentally responsible choice.
Our data centers in the following U.S. locations have received this dual certification. We plan to pursue certification in our European data centers as well.
Happy New Year! As we return from our New Year’s celebrations, brush the dust off our workstations and gear up for our first release of 2012, we thought it would be fun to take a look back at improvements we have made and what developers have accomplished with App Engine in 2011.
Let’s start with the features and functionality we added last year:
Language Support: We released the initial version of Python 2.7 support and added Go as an experimental runtime.
Storage: We launched the High Replication Datastore and added support for the Files APIin Python and Java. We also announced the limited preview of Google Cloud SQL, a familiar relational database in a fully managed cloud environment.
Computation: We introduced Backends for building larger, long-lived and/or memory intensive infrastructure, Pull Queuesto allow developers to “pull” tasks from a queue as applications are ready to process them and two larger Frontend instance classes. We also released the GAE MapReduce framework as an experimental feature for Python.
Best of all, with your continued support we accomplished our goal of graduating from preview and became a full fledged Google product.
We’ve seen excellent growth and adoption over the past year, with businesses like Pulse, Evite and Best Buy choosing App Engine for their applications. Even St. James’s Palace chose App Engine to host the Royal Wedding site. We had so much fun collaborating with 17 of the world’s most renowned museums for the Google Art Project and with other Googlers building iGoogle gadgets and Doodles on App Engine. We’ve added more than 1 million registered applications and have more than 150,000 active developers on the App Engine platform generating more than 5 billion page hits per day.
Back in our first blog post in 2008, we asked you to “start your engines” and what a ride we’ve taken. Thank you for making 2011 our best year yet and here’s to making 2012 even better!
Posted by Scott McIntyre, Director of State and Local Government, Google Enterprise
Nestled in the mountains and valleys, the State of Utah got its name from the Native American “Ute” tribe, which means people of the mountains. Utah’s peaks, on average, are the tallest in the country. Utah also has a vibrant business climate. The state was recently ranked No.1 for business and career by Forbes. It’s committed to building a strong economy for the future. To achieve that goal, the state government relies on cutting edge technologies and services to bring value and innovation to its constituents.
The State of Utah recently selected Google Apps for Government as its new email and collaboration platform for all 22,000 state employees. This makes Utah the second state to move all state employees to the Google cloud. The contract is available to all branches of state government and local government entities.
Information technology consolidation has long been a top priority for Utah to improve accountability, reduce costs, and increase services to taxpayers. Its legacy email system was unable to keep up with the increasing demand from staff to access information anytime and anywhere. The Department of Technology Services (DTS) started looking for a cloud solution that could address those challenges in 2010. Through a comprehensive and competitive bidding process, DTS received six proposals. Google Apps premier reseller and implementation partner Tempus Nova was selected to bring Google Apps to state employees.
Once the migration is complete later this year, all Utah state employees will use Google Apps, which includes new features and capabilities such as video chats, real-time team editing in Google Docs and mobile support. Moving to the cloud will also reduce employees’ requests for IT support. In addition, Google Apps will provide Utah with increased security to comply with all FISMA requirements and a more efficient way to comply with government eDiscovery requirements.
We welcome the State’s decision to move to the cloud and look forward to working with Utah and Tempus Nova to ensure a smooth transition.
Last year, we started integrating Postini’s business-class email security and management capabilities into Gmail and today we’re excited to be rolling out the latest round of integrated features. Google Apps administrators can now take advantage of improved email compliance footers, approved/blocked sender lists and file attachment policies. These capabilities help our customers address compliance requirements and effectively manage email traffic. Previously, Google Apps customers used Google Message Security, powered by Postini, to provide these capabilities.
With this new release, we’ve improved these features and designed them specifically to meet the needs of our Apps customers. Admins will manage the features natively in the Google Apps control panel (localized in 28 languages), leverage our granular policy framework to customize settings for different types of users, and join multiple rules together to address very targeted use cases.
These new features are available globally for Google Apps for Business, Google Apps for Government and Google Apps for Education editions.
Dominie Liang, IT Director at New Media Group in Hong Kong, was able to use the new features to quickly address his company’s compliance requirements:
“Our legal team wanted us to add a compliance note to all of our outbound email. Thanks to Google’s new email feature set, we could easily add the rich text format disclaimer with Chinese characters to the email footer, and solved the issue within a minute.”
George Krieger, Technical Services Manager, Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, adds:
“The new message footers in Gmail have made it easy for us to standardize our email signatures and more effectively promote our race schedules. And I love the ability to delegate control of these to our Media department so they can change them when they want without having to call me. This is a major improvement for us.”
With the addition of these features to Gmail, there is no longer a need to use Google Message Security (GMS) with Google Apps so we will no longer offer GMS to Google Apps customers. We’ll work with those customers currently using GMS to migrate their settings to these new features. For more information on these features and how customers can migrate to them please refer to this Google Apps Help Center article and the Transition Guide.
Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Jay DeCoons, COO of YogaWorks. Renowned for its excellence in classroom instruction and teacher training, YogaWorks delivers yoga training and classes in 60 cities around the world. Learn more about other organizations that have gone Google on our community map.
At YogaWorks, we first and foremost consider ourselves to be educators of yoga. Since opening our first location in 1987, we’ve expanded our reach across the world, which means we’ve had to figure out how to effectively scale a growing organization while continuing to deliver the best training instruction possible. When we first took a look at Google Apps, we thought it would be a great cost savings tool but as we’ve discovered, Google Apps has also allowed us to easily and flexibly connect our business throughout the world.
Prior to Google Apps, we used a hosted Microsoft Exchange server. While on Exchange, we had to set a 2 gigabyte inbox quota and had difficulty achieving a simple, scalable email deployment for our staff’s mobile devices. We also had a lot of offline processes that were cluttering the operations of our studio managers and producing a lot of excess paperwork, which ran counter to our goal of running a sustainable and eco-friendly company. At the time, our IT costs were roughly $130 per user per year.
When we were evaluating Google Apps, we realized that the solution would allow us to further our green-friendly mission by reducing our overall environmental footprint and would enable us to create a truly mobile workforce with anytime, anywhere data access. We also saw the potential Google Apps held for collaboration among team members, with its unique communication and sharing capabilities.
We went Google with the help of Google Apps Authorized Reseller Dito, who assisted us in setting up Apps and training our team. With Google Apps, we’ve been able to reduce our total IT costs by over 60%. The ability to share documents and reach out to teammates quickly has boosted the morale and sense of community across our team. Mobility has also been a key gain for us, as Google Apps allows us to work seamlessly while on the go across our 24 studios and 60 cities where we hold teacher trainings. Through Google Docs, we have been able to save paper and eliminate tedious offline processes, making our day-to-day operation more environmentally-friendly and efficient.
Google Apps has helped us create a more efficient, more excited and more productive workforce, which in turn has helped us focus on what we care most about: bringing safe, compassionate and skillful teaching of yoga to all.
Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Jay DeCoons, COO of YogaWorks. Renowned for its excellence in classroom instruction and teacher training, YogaWorks delivers yoga training and classes in 60 cities around the world. Learn more about other organizations that have gone Google on our community map.
At YogaWorks, we first and foremost consider ourselves to be educators of yoga. Since opening our first location in 1987, we’ve expanded our reach across the world, which means we’ve had to figure out how to effectively scale a growing organization while continuing to deliver the best training instruction possible. When we first took a look at Google Apps, we thought it would be a great cost savings tool but as we’ve discovered, Google Apps has also allowed us to easily and flexibly connect our business throughout the world.
Prior to Google Apps, we used a hosted Microsoft Exchange server. While on Exchange, we had to set a 2 gigabyte inbox quota and had difficulty achieving a simple, scalable email deployment for our staff’s mobile devices. We also had a lot of offline processes that were cluttering the operations of our studio managers and producing a lot of excess paperwork, which ran counter to our goal of running a sustainable and eco-friendly company. At the time, our IT costs were roughly $130 per user per year.
When we were evaluating Google Apps, we realized that the solution would allow us to further our green-friendly mission by reducing our overall environmental footprint and would enable us to create a truly mobile workforce with anytime, anywhere data access. We also saw the potential Google Apps held for collaboration among team members, with its unique communication and sharing capabilities.
We went Google with the help of Google Apps Authorized Reseller Dito, who assisted us in setting up Apps and training our team. With Google Apps, we’ve been able to reduce our total IT costs by over 60%. The ability to share documents and reach out to teammates quickly has boosted the morale and sense of community across our team. Mobility has also been a key gain for us, as Google Apps allows us to work seamlessly while on the go across our 24 studios and 60 cities where we hold teacher trainings. Through Google Docs, we have been able to save paper and eliminate tedious offline processes, making our day-to-day operation more environmentally-friendly and efficient.
Google Apps has helped us create a more efficient, more excited and more productive workforce, which in turn has helped us focus on what we care most about: bringing safe, compassionate and skillful teaching of yoga to all.
