Tag Archives: G Suite

A strategic partnership with Salesforce to bring the power of cloud to businesses globally

Our partners are incredibly important in helping our customers maximize the value of their cloud investments. Today, we’re announcing a first-of-its-kind strategic partnership with Salesforce that spans Google Cloud and Google Analytics to enable smarter, more collaborative experiences for our customers. As cloud-native companies, our partnership offers a unique opportunity to turn marketing, service and sales data into actionable insights and better business outcomes.

The new collaboration leverages the full value of Google Cloud. Salesforce has named G Suite as its preferred email and productivity provider. In addition, Salesforce plans to use Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for its core services as part of the company’s international infrastructure expansion.

Our teams are working very closely to develop new integrations that will connect Salesforce CRM with G Suite to offer the only cloud-native collaboration platform of its kind. These integrations will enable companies to surface powerful intelligence about your customers from Salesforce directly within Gmail, Sheets, Calendar, Drive, Docs and Hangouts Meet. Here’s some more on what you’ll be able to do:

Salesforce Lightning for Gmail: Surface relevant Salesforce CRM data in Gmail, as well as customer interactions from Gmail directly within Salesforce, to service your customers faster. Identify high priority emails and suggest next steps based on the email content to work with customers faster than before.
Salesforce Lightning for Google Sheets: Embed Sheets anywhere in Salesforce, and with a single click push content from Salesforce Records or Reports to a new Sheet. Data will automatically update bi-directionally to ensure everyone has the most recent information.
Quip Live Apps for Google Drive and Google Calendar: Quip Live Apps will integrate with Google Drive and Calendar, allowing you to access information in a more collaborative, open cloud environment, and embed any list of Drive files, including Google Docs, Slides and Sheets, or your Google Calendar inside Quip. This new combination of Quip and G Suite will create a modern alternative to legacy intranet content services.
Salesforce for Hangouts Meet: Access relevant customer and account details, service case histories and more from Salesforce CRM directly within the Hangouts Meet interface. This gives you powerful insights directly in the communications platform to conduct better sales conversations or efficiently resolve customer service issues.

To help take advantage of the combined Google and Salesforce experience, qualified Salesforce customers can receive G Suite for up to one year at no additional cost—restrictions apply, and more details can be found on our site.

We hope this partnership enables more companies to take advantage of the cloud and that the combined solutions will provide an unmatched experience for customers. In fact, our team at Google Cloud uses Salesforce as our preferred CRM provider to engage with our customers in meaningful ways.

As for availability, several integrations between G Suite and Salesforce are already in market, including Lightning for Gmail and integrations with Calendar and Google Drive. The deeper integrations we’ve announced are expected to start rolling out in 2018.

Source: The Official Google Blog

The meeting room, by G Suite

With G Suite, we’re focused on building tools that help you bring great ideas to life. We know meetings are the main entry point for teams to share and shape ideas into action. That’s why we recently introduced Hangouts Meet, an evolution of Google Hangouts designed specifically for the workplace, and Jamboard, a way to bring creative brainstorming directly into meetings. Combined with Calendar and Drive, these tools extend collaboration beyond four walls and transform how we work—so every team member has a voice, no matter location.

But the transformative power of video meetings is wasted if it’s not affordable and accessible to all organizations. So today, we’re introducing Hangouts Meet hardware—a new way to bring high-quality video meetings to businesses of any size. We’re also announcing new software updates designed to make your meetings even more productive.

Introducing Hangouts Meet hardware

Hangouts Meet hardware is a cost-effective way to bring high-quality video meetings to your business. The hardware kit consists of four components: a touchscreen controller, speakermic, 4K sensor camera and ASUS Chromebox.

The new controller provides a modern, intuitive touchscreen interface that allows people to easily join scheduled events from Calendar or view meeting details with a single tap. You can pin and mute team members, as well as control the camera, making managing meetings easy. You can also add participants with the dial-a-phone feature and present from a laptop via HDMI. If you’re a G Suite Enterprise edition customer, you can record the meeting to Drive.

Designed by Google, the Hangouts Meet speakermic actively eliminates echo and background noise to provide crisp, clear audio. Up to five speakermics can be daisy-chained together with a single wire, providing coverage for larger rooms without tabletop clutter.

The 4K sensor camera with 120° field of view easily captures everyone at the table, even in small spaces that some cameras find challenging. Each camera component is fine-tuned to make meetings more personal and distraction-free. Built with machine learning, the camera can intelligently detect participants and automatically crop and zoom to frame them.

Powered by Chrome OS, the ASUS Chromebox makes deploying and managing Hangouts Meet hardware easier than ever. The Chromebox can automatically push updates to other components in the hardware kit, making it easier for large organizations to ensure security and reliability. Remote device monitoring and management make it easy for IT administrators to stay in control, too.

New Hangouts Meet enhancements greatly improve user experience and simplify our meeting rooms. It also creates new ways for our team to collaborate. Bradley Rhodes
IT Analyst, Woolworths Limited, Australia

Says Bradley Rhodes, IT Analyst End User Computing at Woolworths Ltd Australia, “We are very excited about the new Hangouts Meet hardware, particularly the easy-to-use touchscreen. The enhancements greatly improve the user experience and simplify our meeting rooms. We have also seen it create new ways for our team to collaborate, like via the touch-to-record functionality which allows absent participants to catch up more effectively.”

More features, better meetings

We’re also announcing updates to Meet based on valuable feedback. If you’re a G Suite Enterprise edition customer, you can:

Record meetings and save them to Drive. Can’t make the meeting? No problem. Record your meeting directly to Drive. Even without a Hangouts Meet hardware kit, Meet on web can save your team’s ideas with a couple of clicks.
Host meetings with up to 50 participants. Meet supports up to 50 participants in a meeting, especially useful for bringing global teams together from both inside and outside of your organization.
Dial in from around the globe. The dial-in feature in Meet is now available in more than a dozen markets. If you board a flight in one country and land in another, Meet will automatically update your meeting’s dial-in listing to a local phone number.

These new features are rolling out gradually. The hardware kit is priced at $1999 and is available in select markets around the globe beginning today.

Whether you're collaborating in Jamboard, recording meetings and referencing discussions in Drive or scheduling your next team huddle in Calendar, Hangouts Meet hardware makes it even easier to bring the power of your favorite G Suite tools into team meetings. For more information, visit the G Suite website.

Source: Google Cloud

The meeting room, by G Suite

Introducing Hangouts Meet hardware

More features, better meetings

We’re also announcing updates to Meet based on valuable feedback. If you’re a G Suite Enterprise edition customer, you can:

Record meetings and save them to Drive. Can’t make the meeting? No problem. Record your meeting directly to Drive. Even without a Hangouts Meet hardware kit, Meet on web can save your team’s ideas with a couple of clicks.
Host meetings with up to 50 participants. Meet supports up to 50 participants in a meeting, especially useful for bringing global teams together from both inside and outside of your organization.
Dial in from around the globe. The dial-in feature in Meet is now available in more than a dozen markets. If you board a flight in one country and land in another, Meet will automatically update your meeting’s dial-in listing to a local phone number.

These new features are rolling out gradually. The hardware kit is priced at $1999 and is available in select markets around the globe beginning today.

Source: The Official Google Blog

The meeting room, by G Suite

Introducing Hangouts Meet hardware

More features, better meetings

We’re also announcing updates to Meet based on valuable feedback. If you’re a G Suite Enterprise edition customer, you can:

Record meetings and save them to Drive. Can’t make the meeting? No problem. Record your meeting directly to Drive. Even without a Hangouts Meet hardware kit, Meet on web can save your team’s ideas with a couple of clicks.
Host meetings with up to 50 participants. Meet supports up to 50 participants in a meeting, especially useful for bringing global teams together from both inside and outside of your organization.
Dial in from around the globe. The dial-in feature in Meet is now available in more than a dozen markets. If you board a flight in one country and land in another, Meet will automatically update your meeting’s dial-in listing to a local phone number.

These new features are rolling out gradually. The hardware kit is priced at $1999 and is available in select markets around the globe beginning today.

Source: Drive

The meeting room, by G Suite

Introducing Hangouts Meet hardware

More features, better meetings

We’re also announcing updates to Meet based on valuable feedback. If you’re a G Suite Enterprise edition customer, you can:

Record meetings and save them to Drive. Can’t make the meeting? No problem. Record your meeting directly to Drive. Even without a Hangouts Meet hardware kit, Meet on web can save your team’s ideas with a couple of clicks.
Host meetings with up to 50 participants. Meet supports up to 50 participants in a meeting, especially useful for bringing global teams together from both inside and outside of your organization.
Dial in from around the globe. The dial-in feature in Meet is now available in more than a dozen markets. If you board a flight in one country and land in another, Meet will automatically update your meeting’s dial-in listing to a local phone number.

These new features are rolling out gradually. The hardware kit is priced at $1999 and is available in select markets around the globe beginning today.

Source: Drive

How Google Hangouts helped us scale one of our Googleyest programs

Editor’s note: This is the second article in a five-part series on Google Hangouts. Read the first article here.

We have a program at Google called Talks at Google where we invite influential scientists, activists, inventors and more to speak with Google employees. From Noam Chomsky to Leymah Gbowee, my colleagues and I are lucky enough to have listened to some enlightening perspectives. (And you can, too!). I was among a group of volunteers who helped kick-start the program.

What makes the Talks at Google a great example of our company culture—of “Googleyness”—is how it began. It started with a few events per year and morphed into a speaker series with more than 50 talks per month, thanks to our volunteers and, especially, Google Hangouts.

Cobbling together technology to share stories

After seeing the success of Zeitgeist, a group of Googlers and I set out to create an internal speaker series for employees. We started in 2005 with events hosted just at our Mountain View headquarters, but quickly realized that wasn’t enough. It’s a big part of our company culture to make resources available to all employees. So we experimented with outsourced video conferencing (VC) technology to broadcast talks to other offices.

With growing demand, we quickly realized it’s one thing to secure interest and speakers, but it’s another to ensure the technical infrastructure needed to actually scale the program globally.

In 2008, this became apparent. We arranged for linguist Noam Chomsky to speak, one of our most anticipated talks to date. Because our Boston office was new at the time, we cobbled together outsourced VC equipment—a Googler delivered it to us from our New York office. We hosted Professor Chomsky in a cafe and unplugged the refrigerators to cut back on background noise.

Scaling Talks at Google with Hangouts

Talks at Google required a better technical solution. Thankfully, Google decided to build its own VC platform around the same time: Hangouts. Hangouts gave us the tools we needed to scale our program with minimal resources. It helped us meet employee demand, and, more importantly, afforded us the opportunity to include more diverse perspectives in our talk series.

In 2011, we tested an early iteration of Hangouts with Game of Thrones author, George R.R. Martin, and livestreamed Talks at Google for the first time to the outside world on YouTube. More than 25 Google offices tuned in to hear Martin talk about House Targaryen and the White Walkers, and the event went off without a hitch.

Now, we can do all of this within Hangouts Meet, which lets us live stream to global teams, and has advanced audio / video capabilities, so we no longer have to worry about unplugging refrigerators.

Transforming our company culture

Google is full of incredible individuals who do remarkable work, including engineers who reimagine how businesses do business. But technology in the workplace is most powerful if it can help us accomplish things we never thought were possible while remaining true to our company values.

Looking back, Hangouts helped us scale Talks at Google and unite our teams under one common interest: listening and learning from the best minds in the world. Work programs like these help us bridge geographies, expertise and cultures, and in turn, transform how we work together to help us create more meaningful products for our customers. And this is starting to catch on at other businesses, too. Companies like Woolworths and Braintree are using Hangouts Meet to transform how their teams collaborate.

It all started with an idea and a few passionate Googlers.

Source: Google Cloud

How Google Hangouts helped us scale one of our Googleyest programs

Editor’s note: This is the second article in a five-part series on Google Hangouts. Read the first article here.

Cobbling together technology to share stories

With growing demand, we quickly realized it’s one thing to secure interest and speakers, but it’s another to ensure the technical infrastructure needed to actually scale the program globally.

Scaling Talks at Google with Hangouts

Now, we can do all of this within Hangouts Meet, which lets us live stream to global teams, and has advanced audio / video capabilities, so we no longer have to worry about unplugging refrigerators.

Transforming our company culture

It all started with an idea and a few passionate Googlers.

Source: The Official Google Blog

How Questar is saving $2.1 million with Chrome Enterprise and G Suite

Editor’s note: Today’s post comes from Nick Winnie, Infrastructure Systems Administrator for Questar, which provides testing and assessment services in the United States. Questar is using Chrome Enterprise and G Suite to collaborate and save valuable time and money spent provisioning and maintaining laptop equipment for testing workshops.

For 40 years, Questar has helped train educators on how to develop tests for students in mathematics, language arts and science, and English language proficiency. By developing better tools for instruction, educators can help students better prepare for college and their careers.

Our CEO likes to say that we need to “think like a startup,” which is why we’re always looking for new ways to train educators for state assessments. Technology plays a big part in this.

Provisioning laptops for teaching workshops

About 45 times a year, we offer workshops to educators to help them learn how to develop tests for the subjects they teach. The process requires a lot of work from our IT team, which transports 50 or more machines per workshop to and from the site. The IT team also ensures that operating systems, security programs and software licenses are up to date, which includes wiping old desktop data added by previous workshop attendees and patching software when needed.

This process can take hours and is costly for the business. And with nearly 150 new employees expected to join the company this year, we also wanted to give our employees tools to help them collaborate and share information at any time with ease.

To shorten our laptop provisioning time, and to give our employees better tools for trainings, we tested 30 Chromebooks using G Suite.

Saving money and time with Chrome Enterprise and G Suite

Right away, our employees saved time preparing for workshops. With Chrome Enterprise, we can customize applications available to educators before they start working. Security is automatically updated, so we don’t have to worry about updating and patching antivirus software. We also can skip the time it takes to wipe machines and delete old files using Ephemeral mode and Chrome Kiosks for employees. All told, the time spent provisioning each device has gone from hours to minutes.

Security is automatically updated . . . All told, the time spent provisioning each device has gone from hours to minutes.

We’ve also seen significant cost savings by switching to Chromebooks and G Suite. We no longer pay for operating systems, business software, and security program licensing.

Instead, we use Chromebooks with the Chrome Enterprise license, and use Chrome’s management console to whitelist and blacklist websites, so we don’t need proxy servers to control online access. Altogether, we spend less than $300 per device using Chromebook and Chrome Enterprise.

Here’s a look at the total cost savings in comparison.

Our employees have also told us that G Suite has transformed how they work together. The team has streamlined processes because their favorite apps—like Google Sites, Sheets and Drive—are all in one place. Some employees are creating pivot tables in Sheets and using Drive to share it with their colleagues. This collaboration wasn’t possible with our previous technology–especially for people working remotely.

Creating a culture of collaboration to train tomorrow’s educators

Following our successful test of Chromebooks and G Suite, we’ve purchased more Chromebooks for workshop attendees and Questar employees to use. By deploying Chrome OS, using Chrome Enterprise and collaborating with G Suite, our processes have become more efficient and much faster. It’s been easy to get our teams seamlessly up to speed on these products and less expensive for IT provisioning. That adds up to a good investment in better technology—just what a “40-year-old startup” needs.

Source: Google Cloud

How Questar is saving $2.1 million with Chrome Enterprise and G Suite

Our CEO likes to say that we need to “think like a startup,” which is why we’re always looking for new ways to train educators for state assessments. Technology plays a big part in this.

Provisioning laptops for teaching workshops

To shorten our laptop provisioning time, and to give our employees better tools for trainings, we tested 30 Chromebooks using G Suite.

Saving money and time with Chrome Enterprise and G Suite

Security is automatically updated . . . All told, the time spent provisioning each device has gone from hours to minutes.

We’ve also seen significant cost savings by switching to Chromebooks and G Suite. We no longer pay for operating systems, business software, and security program licensing.

Here’s a look at the total cost savings in comparison.

Creating a culture of collaboration to train tomorrow’s educators

Source: The Official Google Blog

G Suite and Freshdesk at your (customer) service

Managing teams and customer requests across geographies and disciplines can be a challenge, but cloud-based applications like Freshdesk can make it much easier. What’s great about Freshdesk is that it’s a popular customer support and IT helpdesk solution—and, better yet, it integrates with G Suite.

Together, G Suite and Freshdesk help companies manage many customer interactions in one place which helps businesses collaborate and address customer concerns quicker. Win-win. Integrate your favorite Google and G Suite tools like Gmail, Hangouts, Google Drive, Analytics and more, directly into Freshdesk. Check it out.

How Citizens Advice uses G Suite and Freshdesk

Citizens Advice is a network of nearly 300 independent charities in England and Wales. The organization provides free consultation on issues like housing, immigration, and consumer rights, and employs 30,000 staff across 2,700 locations. More than three-quarters of the staff are trained volunteers who work remotely. With so many inquiries per year, it’s imperative that Citizens Advice has the tools to collaborate, analyze and improve customer experience, particularly when bringing together so many independent partners. Plus, the organization requires a solution that can integrate directly with existing IT infrastructure.

Citizens Advice chose G Suite and Freshdesk to help with this. Says Simon Sheridan, product manager at Citizens Advice, “G Suite and Freshdesk help our teams collaborate and create more value for our customers every day.” The organization uses both tools to:

Collaborate with distributed teams. G Suite apps like Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Calendar help Citizens Advice organize customer support processes, and to collaborate across distributed teams, including its large network of volunteers.
Create better support functions for customers. The company uses integrations with G Suite and Freshdesk to mitigate customer support issues quicker. For example, Citizens Advice uses Hangouts to resolve customer issues face-to-face.
Analyze and optimize the customer support process. With tools like Freshdesk and Freshservice by Freshworks, Citizens Advice is able to analyze and improve the customer support process. The company also monitors and reports on each stage of the customer journey using G Suite tools.

Learn more about how your business can use G Suite and Freshdesk to deliver better customer experiences. Sign up for this webinar on Thursday, November 9, 2017 at 2pm GMT if you’re in Europe, or at 11am PT / 2pm ET if you’re in North America.