Category Archives: Google for Work Blog

Work is going Google

NCAA teams up with Google Cloud

Sports have the power to bring friends and family together, unite communities and inspire future generations. That’s why we’re so excited to be partnering with the NCAA® to make Google Cloud its official public cloud provider.

As part of its journey to the cloud, the NCAA is migrating 80+ years of historical and play-by-play data, from 90 championships and 24 sports, to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). To start, the NCAA will tap into decades of historical basketball data using BigQuery, Cloud Spanner, Datalab, Cloud Machine Learning and Cloud Dataflow, to power the analysis of team and player performance. In partnership with Turner Sports, our team will build a data-driven bracketology competition using historic NCAA data that will be integrated with public datasets, and data captured from live broadcasts. Fans and NCAA members will be able to search, compare and analyze team and player performance, as well as receive near real-time simulations for tournament analysis and forecasting. This will all kick off ahead of March Madness in 2018.

The NCAA also plans to use this data to create analysis workflows to build descriptive, predictive and diagnostic outputs that will help objectively determine and analyze the selection and seeding process across men’s and women’s sports. As part of this collaboration, we’ve also become the official NCAA Cloud Partner, in partnership with Turner Sports and CBS Sports, starting with the 2017-18 NCAA Division I men’s and women’s basketball seasons.

The mission of the NCAA has long been about serving the needs of schools, their teams and students. We’re proud to support that mission by helping the NCAA use data and machine learning to better engage with its millions of fans, nearly half-million college athletes and more than 19,000 teams. Game on!

Source: Google Cloud


5 ways to improve your hiring process in 2018

Editor’s note: Senior Product Manager Berit Hoffmann leads Hire, a recruiting application Google launched earlier this year. In this post, she shares five ways businesses can improve their hiring process and secure great talent.

With 2018 quickly approaching, businesses are evaluating their hiring needs for the new year.

According to a recent survey of 2,200 hiring managers, 46 percent of U.S. companies need to hire more people but have issues filling open positions with the right candidates. If your company lacks great hiring processes and tools, it can be easy to make sub-optimal hiring decisions, which can have negative repercussions.

We built Hire to help businesses hire the right talent more efficiently, and integrated it with G Suite to help teams collaborate more effectively throughout the process. As your business looks to invest in talent next year, here are five ways to positively impact your hiring outcomes.

1. Define the hiring process for each role.

Take time to define each stage of the hiring process, and think about if and how the process may need to differ. This will help you better tailor your evaluation of each candidate to company expectations, as well as the qualifications of a particular role.

Mobility best practice in connected workspaces: tiered access at Google

Earlier this year, Google reviewed a subset of its own interview data to discover the optimal number of interviews needed in the hiring process to evaluate whether a candidate is right for Google. Statistical analysis showed that four interviews was enough to predict with 86 percent confidence whether someone should be hired. Of course, every company’s hiring process varies according to size, role or industry—some businesses require double that number of interviews, whereas others may only need one interview.

Using Hire to manage your recruiting activities allows you to configure as many hiring process “templates” as you’d like, as well as use different ones for different roles. For example, you might vary the number of interview rounds based on department. Whatever process you define, you can bring all candidate activity and interactions together within Hire. Plus, Hire integrates with G Suite apps, like Gmail and Calendar, to help you coordinate the process.

2. Make jobs discoverable on Google Search.

For many businesses, sourcing candidates is one of the most time-consuming parts of the hiring process, so Google launched Job Search to help employers better showcase job opportunities in search. Since launching, 60 percent more employers show jobs in search in the United States.

Making your open positions discoverable where people are searching is an important part of attracting the best talent. If you use Hire to post a job, the app automatically formats your public job posting so it is discoverable by job seekers in Google search.

3. Make sure you get timely feedback from interviewers.

The sooner an interviewer provides feedback, the faster your hiring team can reach a decision, which improves the candidate’s experience. To help speed up feedback submissions, some companies like Genius.com use a “silent process” approach. This means interviewers are not allowed to discuss a candidate until they submit written feedback first.

Hire supports this “silent process” approach by hiding other people’s feedback from interviewers until they submit their own. We’ve found that this can incentivize employees to submit feedback faster because they want to see what their colleagues said. 63 percent of Hire interviewers leave feedback within 24 hours of an interview and 75 percent do so within 48 hours.

4. Make sure their feedback is thoughtful, too.

Beyond speedy feedback delivery, it’s perhaps more important to receive quality evaluations. Make sure your interviewers know how to write clear feedback and try to avoid common mistakes such as:

  1. Writing vague statements or summarizing a candidate’s resume.
  2. Restating information from rubrics or questionnaires rather than giving specific  examples.
  3. Getting distracted by personality or evaluating attributes unrelated to the job.

One way you can encourage employees to stay focused when they interview a candidate. is to assign them a specific topic to cover in the interview. In Hire, topics are included in each interviewer’s Google Calendar invitation for easy reference without having to log into the app.

Maintaining a high standard for written feedback helps your team not only make hiring decisions today, but also helps you track candidates for future consideration. Even if you don’t hire someone for a particular role, the person might be a better fit for another position down the road. In Hire, you can find candidates easily with Google’s powerful search technology. Plus, Hire takes past interview feedback into account and ranks previous candidates higher if they’ve had positive feedback.

5. Stop letting internal processes slow you down.

If you don’t manage your hiring process effectively, it can be a huge time sink, especially as employers take longer and longer to hire talent. If your business lags on making a decision, it can mean losing a great candidate.

Implementing a solution like Hire can make it a lot easier for companies to move quickly through the hiring process. Native integrations with the G Suite apps you’re already using can help you cut down on copy-pasting or having to jump between multiple tabs. If you email a candidate in Gmail, it’s automatically synced in Hire so the rest of the hiring team can follow the conversation. And if you need to schedule a multi-slot interview, you can do so easily in Hire which lets you access interviewer availability or even book conference rooms. Since launching in July, we’ve seen the average time between posting a position and hiring a candidate decrease from 128 days to just 21 days (3 weeks!).

Hiring doesn’t have to be hard. Request a demo of Hire to see how you can speed up talent acquisition. Or learn more about how G Suite can help your teams transform the way they work.

Source: Google Cloud


How Scheels uses Chrome to help its sales associates better serve customers

Editor’s Note: Today’s post is from Becky Torkelson, Computer Support Specialist Leader for Scheels, an employee-owned 27-store chain of sporting goods stores in the Midwest and West. Scheels uses Chrome browser and G Suite to help its 6,000 employees better serve customers and work together efficiently.

Whether customers come to Scheels stores to buy running shoes, fishing rods or camping stoves, they talk to associates who know the products inside and out. We hire people who are experts in what they’re selling and who have a passion for sports and outdoor life. They use Chrome browser and G Suite to check email and search for products from Chromebooks right on the sales floor, so they can spend more time serving customers.

That’s a big improvement over the days when we had a few PCs, equipped with IBM Notes and Microsoft Office, in the back rooms of each store. Associates and service technicians used the PCs to check email, enter their work hours or look up product specs or inventory for customers—but that meant they had to be away from customers and off the sales floor.

Starting in 2015, we bought 100 Chromebooks and 50 Chromeboxes, some of which were used to replace PCs in store departments like service shops. Using Chromebooks, employees in these departments could avoid manual processes that slowed down customer service in the past. With G Suite, Chrome devices and Chrome browser working together, our employees have access to Gmail and inventory records when they work in our back rooms. They can quickly log on and access the applications they need. This means they have more time on the sales floor for face-to-face interaction with customers.

Our corporate buyers, who analyze inventory and keep all of our stores stocked with the products we need, use Google Drive to share and update documents for orders instead of trading emails back and forth. We’re also using Google Sites to store employee forms and policy guides for easy downloading—another way people save time.  

We use Chrome to customize home pages for employee groups, such as service technicians. As soon as they log in to Chrome, the technicians see the bookmarks they need—they don’t have to jump through hoops to find technical manuals or service requests. Our corporate buyers also see their own bookmarks at login. Since buyers travel from store to store, finding their bookmarks on any computer with Chrome is a big time-saver.

Our IT help desk team tells me that they hardly get trouble tickets related to Chrome. There was a very short learning curve when we changed to Chrome, an amazing thing when you consider we had to choose tools for a workforce of 6,000 people. The IT team likes Chrome’s built-in security—they know that malware and antivirus programs are running and updating in the background, so Chrome is doing security monitoring for us.

Since Scheels is employee-owned, associates have a stake in our company’s success. They’re excited to talk to customers who want to learn about the best gear for their favorite sports. Chrome and G Suite help those conversations stay focused on customer needs and delivering smart and fast service.

Source: Google Cloud


A look at Team Drives in action at the California Academy of Sciences

Located in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the California Academy of Sciences is an aquarium, planetarium, and natural history museum all wrapped into one. Attracting visitors from all over the world, the California Academy of Sciences aims to explore, explain, and sustain life on Earth. In addition to biodiversity research and conservation efforts, they offer a large variety of exhibits to educate visitors about wildlife, ecosystems, and the sustainability of our planet.

The California Academy of Sciences uses G Suite and other Google products to help employees collaborate, onboard new team members effectively, manage data for science-based animal care, and schedule upcoming physicals and treatments for live animals. Recently, they migrated all their digital data to Team Drives, a G Suite for Nonprofits tool that lets organizations store, search, and access shared content from anywhere. In Team Drives, files belong to the team instead of the individual, so users won’t need to search across siloed folders with varying permissions. Since implementing this change, the California Academy of Sciences has been able to reduce time spent searching for documents, limit duplication of efforts, and collaborate more closely with their team members and other organizations internationally. We spoke with Associate Director of the Steinhart Aquarium (and Google super user), Laurie Patel, who successfully migrated 15 years of digital data to Team Drives in just one evening, to learn more about how they're using the tool.

Penguins

Three endangered African Penguins on exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences. The penguin on the left is a juvenile hatched at the Academy as a part of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ (AZA) Species Survival Plan.

Better animal health management through unlimited storage

The initial reasoning behind the transition to Team Drives was unlimited storage. Because of the massive amounts of animal medical data that must be stored, the aquarium team needs space to upload all the PDFs, images, videos, and spreadsheets that they collect. All medical data gets logged, like each animal’s annual physicals, blood work, pictures, weight, and other diagnostics. With 38,000 live animals at the California Academy of Sciences, it’s easy to see how the virtual file cabinet of data in their systems could start to overflow. With Team Drives, Laurie’s team can upload all the images and data they collect so that it’s accessible in one place, all the time—without relying on an individual owner to have sole access. And with Team Drives’ permissions settings, they share and link these folders to the external Zoological Information Management System (ZIMS) database. That database connects with zoos and aquariums across the world so researchers can cross-reference each species’ baseline health reports. Being able to upload large files to this database has increased both the California Academy of Sciences’ and the ZIMS accumulated knowledge of medical data to ensure all animals are treated properly and receive the best possible care and enrichment.

Everything you need to know is right there in Team Drives. Laurie Patel
Associate Director of Steinhart Aquarium

Real-time updates to support strict protocols for animal safety

Caring for a diverse animal collection in varied habitats, like the four-story Osher Rainforest exhibit or the 212,000 gallon Philippine Coral Reef exhibit, requires California Academy of Sciences’ staff to adhere to strict protocols to ensure a consistently high standard of animal care. To ensure stable environments, all processes need to be executed in a specific way—and this critical information has to be readily accessible to staff and always up to date. From changing an animal’s diet to venomous animal handling protocols, employees routinely search and access these procedures and databases to make real-time decisions. For example, water is collected daily from separate tanks to check the water quality and test things like pH levels and magnesium concentration. Employees input this data into Google Sheets, and conditional formatting automatically attributes a color code based on each test result—an easy and instantaneous visual indication to inform what action is needed for the employees back at the tank.

We use data-driven responses for science based animal care. And utilizing Google’s collaboration tools for all this data is how we’re able to do this. Laurie Patel
Associate Director of the Steinhart Aquarium

Streamlined onboarding = more time for animals

By consolidating all training materials and important resources in one place, the Steinhart Aquarium team can onboard new members to the team quickly and efficiently. This helps the team prepare for legacy planning as well. When one teammate leaves, their successor can easily take ownership of all the files and resume where the former employee left off, ensuring that no work is lost in the transfer. And by linking to various Team Drives folders in their online hub powered by Google Sites, they’ve created a one-stop-shop to guide team members to the right information at the right time.

Sharks
The Reef Lagoon exhibit showcases the interrelationships of mangrove, lagoon and reef habitats found in the Philippines, an ecosystem researched by the biologists and scientists at the California Academy of Sciences.

Ultimately, Team Drives help California Academy of Sciences operate without fear of lost data or out-of-date sharing preferences. This extra time saved allows employees to spend more time caring for a charismatic group of live animals and engaging with the museum’s visitors, rather than their screens. Learn how Team Drives can help your organization and get started today.

Source: Google Cloud


A look at Team Drives in action at the California Academy of Sciences

Located in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the California Academy of Sciences is an aquarium, planetarium, and natural history museum all wrapped into one. Attracting visitors from all over the world, the California Academy of Sciences aims to explore, explain, and sustain life on Earth. In addition to biodiversity research and conservation efforts, they offer a large variety of exhibits to educate visitors about wildlife, ecosystems, and the sustainability of our planet.

The California Academy of Sciences uses G Suite and other Google products to help employees collaborate, onboard new team members effectively, manage data for science-based animal care, and schedule upcoming physicals and treatments for live animals. Recently, they migrated all their digital data to Team Drives, a G Suite for Nonprofits tool that lets organizations store, search, and access shared content from anywhere. In Team Drives, files belong to the team instead of the individual, so users won’t need to search across siloed folders with varying permissions. Since implementing this change, the California Academy of Sciences has been able to reduce time spent searching for documents, limit duplication of efforts, and collaborate more closely with their team members and other organizations internationally. We spoke with Associate Director of the Steinhart Aquarium (and Google super user), Laurie Patel, who successfully migrated 15 years of digital data to Team Drives in just one evening, to learn more about how they're using the tool.

Three endangered African Penguins on exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences. The penguin on the left is a juvenile hatched at the Academy as a part of the Association of Zoo and Aquarium Species Survival Plan.
Three endangered African Penguins on exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences. The penguin on the left is a juvenile hatched at the Academy as a part of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ (AZA) Species Survival Plan.

Better animal health management through unlimited storage

The initial reasoning behind the transition to Team Drives was unlimited storage. Because of the massive amounts of animal medical data that must be stored, the aquarium team needs space to upload all the PDFs, images, videos, and spreadsheets that they collect. All medical data gets logged, like each animal’s annual physicals, blood work, pictures, weight, and other diagnostics. With 38,000 live animals at the California Academy of Sciences, it’s easy to see how the virtual file cabinet of data in their systems could start to overflow. With Team Drives, Laurie’s team can upload all the images and data they collect so that it’s accessible in one place, all the time—without relying on an individual owner to have sole access. And with Team Drives’ permissions settings, they share and link these folders to the external Zoological Information Management System (ZIMS) database. That database connects with zoos and aquariums across the world so researchers can cross-reference each species’ baseline health reports. Being able to upload large files to this database has increased both the California Academy of Sciences’ and the ZIMS accumulated knowledge of medical data to ensure all animals are treated properly and receive the best possible care and enrichment.

Everything you need to know is right there in Team Drives. Laurie Patel
Associate Director of Steinhart Aquarium

Real-time updates to support strict protocols for animal safety

Caring for a diverse animal collection in varied habitats, like the four-story Osher Rainforest exhibit or the 212,000 gallon Philippine Coral Reef exhibit, requires California Academy of Sciences’ staff to adhere to strict protocols to ensure a consistently high standard of animal care. To ensure stable environments, all processes need to be executed in a specific way—and this critical information has to be readily accessible to staff and always up to date. From changing an animal’s diet to venomous animal handling protocols, employees routinely search and access these procedures and databases to make real-time decisions. For example, water is collected daily from separate tanks to check the water quality and test things like pH levels and magnesium concentration. Employees input this data into Google Sheets, and conditional formatting automatically attributes a color code based on each test result—an easy and instantaneous visual indication to inform what action is needed for the employees back at the tank.

We use data-driven responses for science based animal care. And utilizing Google’s collaboration tools for all this data is how we’re able to do this. Laurie Patel
Associate Director of the Steinhart Aquarium

Streamlined onboarding = more time for animals

By consolidating all training materials and important resources in one place, the Steinhart Aquarium team can onboard new members to the team quickly and efficiently. This helps the team prepare for legacy planning as well. When one teammate leaves, their successor can easily take ownership of all the files and resume where the former employee left off, ensuring that no work is lost in the transfer. And by linking to various Team Drives folders in their online hub powered by Google Sites, they’ve created a one-stop-shop to guide team members to the right information at the right time.

Sharks
The Reef Lagoon exhibit showcases the interrelationships of mangrove, lagoon and reef habitats found in the Philippines, an ecosystem researched by the biologists and scientists at the California Academy of Sciences.

Ultimately, Team Drives help California Academy of Sciences operate without fear of lost data or out-of-date sharing preferences. This extra time saved allows employees to spend more time caring for a charismatic group of live animals and engaging with the museum’s visitors, rather than their screens. Learn how Team Drives can help your organization and get started today.

Source: Google Cloud


A look at Team Drives in action at the California Academy of Sciences

Located in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the California Academy of Sciences is an aquarium, planetarium, and natural history museum all wrapped into one. Attracting visitors from all over the world, the California Academy of Sciences aims to explore, explain, and sustain life on Earth. In addition to biodiversity research and conservation efforts, they offer a large variety of exhibits to educate visitors about wildlife, ecosystems, and the sustainability of our planet.

The California Academy of Sciences uses G Suite and other Google products to help employees collaborate, onboard new team members effectively, manage data for science-based animal care, and schedule upcoming physicals and treatments for live animals. Recently, they migrated all their digital data to Team Drives, a G Suite for Nonprofits tool that lets organizations store, search, and access shared content from anywhere. In Team Drives, files belong to the team instead of the individual, so users won’t need to search across siloed folders with varying permissions. Since implementing this change, the California Academy of Sciences has been able to reduce time spent searching for documents, limit duplication of efforts, and collaborate more closely with their team members and other organizations internationally. We spoke with Associate Director of the Steinhart Aquarium (and Google super user), Laurie Patel, who successfully migrated 15 years of digital data to Team Drives in just one evening, to learn more about how they're using the tool.

Three endangered African Penguins on exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences. The penguin on the left is a juvenile hatched at the Academy as a part of the Association of Zoo and Aquarium Species Survival Plan.
Three endangered African Penguins on exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences. The penguin on the left is a juvenile hatched at the Academy as a part of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ (AZA) Species Survival Plan.

Better animal health management through unlimited storage

The initial reasoning behind the transition to Team Drives was unlimited storage. Because of the massive amounts of animal medical data that must be stored, the aquarium team needs space to upload all the PDFs, images, videos, and spreadsheets that they collect. All medical data gets logged, like each animal’s annual physicals, blood work, pictures, weight, and other diagnostics. With 38,000 live animals at the California Academy of Sciences, it’s easy to see how the virtual file cabinet of data in their systems could start to overflow. With Team Drives, Laurie’s team can upload all the images and data they collect so that it’s accessible in one place, all the time—without relying on an individual owner to have sole access. And with Team Drives’ permissions settings, they share and link these folders to the external Zoological Information Management System (ZIMS) database. That database connects with zoos and aquariums across the world so researchers can cross-reference each species’ baseline health reports. Being able to upload large files to this database has increased both the California Academy of Sciences’ and the ZIMS accumulated knowledge of medical data to ensure all animals are treated properly and receive the best possible care and enrichment.

Everything you need to know is right there in Team Drives. Laurie Patel
Associate Director of Steinhart Aquarium

Real-time updates to support strict protocols for animal safety

Caring for a diverse animal collection in varied habitats, like the four-story Osher Rainforest exhibit or the 212,000 gallon Philippine Coral Reef exhibit, requires California Academy of Sciences’ staff to adhere to strict protocols to ensure a consistently high standard of animal care. To ensure stable environments, all processes need to be executed in a specific way—and this critical information has to be readily accessible to staff and always up to date. From changing an animal’s diet to venomous animal handling protocols, employees routinely search and access these procedures and databases to make real-time decisions. For example, water is collected daily from separate tanks to check the water quality and test things like pH levels and magnesium concentration. Employees input this data into Google Sheets, and conditional formatting automatically attributes a color code based on each test result—an easy and instantaneous visual indication to inform what action is needed for the employees back at the tank.

We use data-driven responses for science based animal care. And utilizing Google’s collaboration tools for all this data is how we’re able to do this. Laurie Patel
Associate Director of the Steinhart Aquarium

Streamlined onboarding = more time for animals

By consolidating all training materials and important resources in one place, the Steinhart Aquarium team can onboard new members to the team quickly and efficiently. This helps the team prepare for legacy planning as well. When one teammate leaves, their successor can easily take ownership of all the files and resume where the former employee left off, ensuring that no work is lost in the transfer. And by linking to various Team Drives folders in their online hub powered by Google Sites, they’ve created a one-stop-shop to guide team members to the right information at the right time.

Sharks
The Reef Lagoon exhibit showcases the interrelationships of mangrove, lagoon and reef habitats found in the Philippines, an ecosystem researched by the biologists and scientists at the California Academy of Sciences.

Ultimately, Team Drives help California Academy of Sciences operate without fear of lost data or out-of-date sharing preferences. This extra time saved allows employees to spend more time caring for a charismatic group of live animals and engaging with the museum’s visitors, rather than their screens. Learn how Team Drives can help your organization and get started today.

Source: Google Cloud


3 ways employees will benefit from digital transformation in 2018

Editor’s note: Business is no longer as usual. New technologies in the workplace, like machine learning and augmented reality, create opportunities for companies to enhance employee productivity. Alan Lepofsky, analyst at Constellation Research, Inc. discusses three key areas where technology will impact work as we know it.

From Baby Boomers to Gen Z, today’s workplace contains a mixture of generations. Although each has grown up with very different technological and cultural experiences, all face similar challenges at work, like information overload and having to stay up-to-date with technology that’s constantly changing. But all is not lost! The future of work is an exciting one which will leverage new tools, technologies and techniques to help people get work done.

At Constellation Research, three of the top areas we’re tracking around employees in the digital workplace are: 1. using technology to augment how teams accomplish work, 2. using data to guide actions and prioritize projects and 3. using technology to encourage more creativity among teams. Here are some of the things we’re observing.

Augmenting our ability to get more done

No longer a thing of the future, AI is already all around us in a big way—powering the voice input on our phones or the content in our news streams.

While conversations about AI often turn to science fiction, the reality for knowledge workers is that AI is already enhancing how they work, and will continue to do so. We’re already seeing email clients that recommend replies, calendars that automate meeting scheduling, and video services that transcribe content.

The way we create, consume and interact with content is also changing. Legacy whiteboards in meeting rooms are being replaced by large, intelligent and interactive screens that allow people to collaborate whether they're in the same room or across the world. Augmented and virtual reality are moving beyond science fiction (and gaming) to mainstream use cases such as education, product design and retail. While today’s headsets may be cumbersome, soon augmented reality will be everywhere, turning any clear surface into a potential display.

In addition, new input methods including voice dictation and gesture recognition (hands and face) are allowing us to interact with our devices in new ways. I actually wrote a lot of this post by speaking out loud to my phone. 

Using data to derive insights and guide actions

How many miles have you flown this year? How many steps have you taken today? Our personal lives are filled with measurements of our accomplishments and actions. Everything is quantified. But can you say the same for work?

Imagine if you could understand which social media posts are most effective or which meetings lead to more customer wins. We don’t always have the information we need at work to help us be more effective employees. In order to provide employees with meaningful information, data needs to be collected and patterns need to be discovered. But the fragmentation of work across social networks, file sharing, web conferencing and business applications creates quite a challenge.

The solution requires charting the interactions between people, content and devices. These collections are called “graphs” in computer science, and they reveal things like who people work with and what content they interact with. This information can be used to discover patterns, leading to insights about the way people work. In turn, this data can help employees better determine what work should be prioritized and what can be postponed.

Everyone becomes a storyteller

Think about the types of content people use at work: email, chat, documents, spreadsheets, presentations. Compare that to your personal life which is probably dominated by photos and videos. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a similar level of fun and creativity at work? 

In the past, creating compelling graphics or videos was limited to professionals. Today, almost anyone with a camera phone can start creating highly visual content. Most camera applications provide lenses, filters, stickers and other digital tricks to enhance pictures. Some take gorgeous panoramic images and some even create 3600 content. Conversations in group messaging applications now include emojis and animated gifs. Photo-sharing sites can automatically create collages from our best images.

These advances in storytelling are starting to show up in the workplace as well, enabling marketers to create more effective presentations, financial workers to create visually informative spreadsheets and sales people to pitch products with more engaging content. The days of boring content at work are coming to an end.

Delivering in the digital workplace

We’ve witnessed incredible advancements in the tools we use at work over the past 20 years. However, these pale in comparison to what the next decade will be like. The future of work is going to empower employees regardless of skillset or seniority.

If you're ready to embrace the changes and become a digital employee, have your holographic assistant connect with mine so we can discuss this further! ...Or at least take advantage of some of the auto-scheduling features cropping up in your Calendar app.

Source: Google Cloud


Building tools with GCP to help developers be more efficient

Editor’s note: Today’s post comes from Tomoaki Kobayakawa and Yoshiyuki Mineo of Rocro Inc., a subsidiary of Sony Network Communications. They take us through how they used Google Cloud Platform to create three SaaS products to help developers both inside and outside of Sony.

SaaS services are becoming more critical for developers working large-scale software developments. At Sony we know this all too well. So back in spring 2015, we set off to create three CI SaaS products that could dramatically reduce the amount of time it took to review source code, generate and manage API documents, and perform load testing. After enthusiastic results internally, we decided this year to establish a new company, Rocro Inc, and release those three products—Inspecode, Docstand and Loadroid—to the public.

sony-1

Even though our chief objective was to create robust tools that would be embraced by our internal developers, our goal from the beginning was to release our services externally as well. So, to build tools that had the speed, flexibility and reliability to serve all our users—whether inside or outside Sony—we turned to Google Cloud Platform.

sony-2

Google App Engine was the main reason we chose GCP. When we started out, our team was very small, and we couldn’t afford to hire a dedicated infrastructure engineer. App Engine is a fully managed platform that provides the user with an infrastructure abstraction, so you don’t need an infrastructure engineer to begin with. With App Engine, we’re able to work more efficiently because each developer can deploy services whenever they want. Our team has now grown substantially in size, yet to this day we haven’t needed a dedicated infrastructure engineer.

sony-3

In addition to App Engine, we also use Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Storage, and Cloud Datastore for our storage and database systems. The Kubernetes Engine kubernetes management service is very helpful for us. Both Inspecode and Docstand use the “Job” feature of Kubernetes—every time you use the git push command, it runs a new job, automating the source code analysis and documentation process. Each job functions in an isolated environment, which means it’s safe and stable to operate with individual containers for each user. Plus, jobs can be easily removed, which reduces both unnecessary labor and costs. Kubernetes can also restrict the use of CPU per job, so even if a particular user were to run a job under a heavy load, it wouldn’t have a negative impact on other users. This is essential for operating multi-tenant services in a stable manner.

GCP updates frequently, so our team benefits from access to the latest technologies relatively early. We’re now experimenting with Cloud Functions, and we hope the trend towards using serverless technologies can help us reduce the cost of keeping instances up and running for less frequently used features.

Both Rocro and Google Cloud save engineers a lot of trouble, helping them focus on the more creative elements of their work. We’re looking forward to experimenting with what’s next from GCP.

Source: Google Cloud


Announcing Google Cloud Next 2018

Google Cloud Next '18 is coming! Mark your calendars for July 24-27, 2018 at Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Google Cloud Next is where customers, partners, developers, influencers and the greater global cloud community get inspired and learn. Together, we’re working to make the cloud useful and accessible to everyone.

Dive deep into Google Cloud technology through hundreds of breakout sessions, code labs, demos and hands-on training, covering everything from infrastructure to devices, and security to machine learning. You’ll get the chance to connect with the entire Google Cloud team, including our engineers, product leadership, developer advocates and more to unlock new opportunities for your business.

At Next '17, more than 250 Google speakers and 70+ customer speakers presented at 200 breakout sessions. We made 100 announcements at Next '17, and we’re gearing up for more big news next year. Next '18 will feature tracks that encompass all aspects of our Google Cloud portfolio: application development, containerization, collaboration & productivity, data & analytics, infrastructure & operations, hybrid cloud, machine learning & artificial intelligence, maps, security, mobility & devices and much more. Be on the lookout for information on how to register coming in March 2018.

Know someone we can all learn from, or want to contribute yourself? We’re actively soliciting proposals for speaking sessions that will educate and engage attendees. If you have an interesting idea or expertise that you would like to share at Next '18, please submit your proposal by January 26, 2018. The earlier the better.

We’re excited to create an inclusive space that brings people together, fosters collaboration and inspires innovation at Next '18. We can’t wait to see you in July!

Source: Google Cloud


Google Drive recognized as a leader by Forrester for File Sync and Share (EFSS) cloud solutions

Drive

We’re designing cloud-based solutions to help teams become more knowledgeable and more effective. Businesses like Whirlpool are turning to Google Drive because they need more secure, friction-free tools to help them house—and more importantly, share—collective company knowledge.

Our continued efforts to help businesses collaborate in the cloud have not gone unnoticed. Today, Drive has been recognized as a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise File Sync And Share Platforms–Cloud Solutions, Q4 2017 report, which ranks cloud-based file sharing and storage solutions for enterprise IT professionals. Earlier this year, Drive was also named a leader among content collaboration platforms by Gartner.

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What does this mean for your business?

There are inherent benefits to working in the cloud, and businesses are starting to take advantage of them. Cloud-first tools like Drive gives companies a single place to store, access and share information, which can improve efficiencies.

Of course, you need to be confident that these new cloud solutions will work well with your existing IT investments. Over the past year, we’ve enhanced Drive with additional enterprise features to make migrating from on-prem fileshares and content management systems easier:

  • Team Drives, so you can work on collectively-owned files and feel confident that your work will stay put no matter who comes or goes on your team. 
  • AppBridge, so your enterprise can migrate all of its data more securely to the cloud with ease. 
  • Drive File Stream, to help you access all data quickly without using up a ton of disk space.  
  • Data Loss Prevention and Google Vault for Drive, to help you control how your teams share information and to help you keep sensitive data safe.
  • Quick Access in Drive, to help surface your data faster with artificial intelligence-powered technology.

To learn more, access the 2017 Forrester Wave EFSS Cloud Solutions report here. Or get in touch with us to learn more about how your business can benefit from moving to Google Cloud.

Source: Google Cloud