Tag Archives: Google Apps

What you love about Google Search — now for Drive

Posted by Josh Smith, Product Manager

(Cross-posted on the Google Drive Blog)

Innovation is critical for business success, so we're constantly trying to build tools that enable our customers to do more. Starting today, you can use Natural Language Processing (NLP) and other new and improved features in Drive search on web to find files easier and faster. You'll also see a couple of highly-requested Google Docs features that have been added based on your feedback (thank you!).

Search faster and with ease

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a fancy way of saying “search like you talk.” You can type things like “find my budget spreadsheet from last December” or “show me presentations from Anissa.” Drive will understand what you mean and give you the option to click for those specific search results. Drive NLP will get better with each query — so keep on searching. ;)

Get help with speling — er, spelling


When you're trying to find a doc fast, it's easy for typos to slip into your search. Drive now has a new autocorrect feature that suggests corrections to misspelled search terms — which can really help when your brain is moving faster than your fingers.



Enjoy other updates based on your feedback

We’ve also added a few small but mighty features in Google Docs to help you create your best work:
  • You can now easily split your document into multiple columns in Docs. Just choose “Columns” in the “Format” drop-down menu when you need more formatting options to get your point across.
  • We know that work happens in all types of file formats. So, when you open, convert and edit non-Google files in Docs, Sheets and Slides, we’ll now save a copy for you. Just view or download the non-Google source file in its original format directly from Revision History in Docs, Sheets and Slides on the web.
These features are available globally and will roll out gradually starting today. As always, tell us what you think about these new features on Google+ and Twitter. We’re listening.



Setting Expectations for Accessing User Data via OAuth

Posted by William Denniss, Product Manager, Identity and Authentication
Lavanya Mahendran, Policy Advisor, Google Cloud Platform and Google APIs

Developers have created an exciting ecosystem of mobile and web applications that offer a seemingly infinite array of features and services for consumers to utilize. Today you can download applications that offer to increase your productivity at work, as well as applications that manage your daily expenses or help you meditate, and many more.

We know that our users love using these applications, and we recognize that often Google users want to share their data with these applications to personalize or enhance the experience. Google provides a rich variety of API services that developers may access, and we provide developers the ability to request permission directly from our users when they want to access various categories of user data.

The privacy and security of our users’ data is very important to us, and we’ve always expected developers to treat Google user data with transparency and concern for user choice. Among other things, this means that we’ve long expected developers to get informed consent when they request access to user data, so that users understand what data they are sharing and how it will be used.

We’re always looking for ways to make our requirements more accessible to everyone, including our end-users. To that end, we recently published expanded policy guidelines for developers who wish to access Google user data using our API services. We hope this guidance will help developers and Google users interact in a manner that is informed and overall consistent with user expectations.

Read the full Google API Services User Data policy.

We hope that developers and Google users find this policy guidance helpful. We believe that transparency around the collection and use of Google user data is necessary to ensure informed user consent, but also that it genuinely fosters a helpful and productive dialogue between developers and users that ultimately benefits the entire ecosystem. Google account users can review and manage the apps and websites connected to their Google account from the My Accountpage. If you have any questions or comments, please let us know in the comment section below.

Your emails, optimized for every screen with responsive design

Posted by Pierce Vollucci, Associate Product Manager, Gmail and Steve Bazyl, Developer Programs Engineer, Google Apps

When you send emails, your recipients might read them on a computer, tablet, or phone—or more likely, all three. However your message might look different on all these devices. Later this month, you’ll be able to use CSS media queries with Gmail to ensure that your message is formatted the way you intended, whether it's viewed on a computer, a phone in portrait mode, or a tablet in landscape mode. You’ll be able to change styles based on width, rotation, and resolution, allowing for more responsive formatting to optimize your email for every device.

Example of an email before and after responsive design

In discussions with email designers, these supported CSS rules were identified as the most useful media queries to support responsive design. This is just one part of an overall effort to expand CSS support in Gmail and to give email designers more control over how their messages are rendered. For example, the CSS below applies the color red when the screen width exceeds 500px. 

@media screen and (min-width: 500px) {
  .colored {
    color:red;
  }
}

You can find the full list of supported CSS rules in the developer documentation. We hope this reference helps you create more feature-rich, responsive email for users. Happy formatting!

How Elsa State Bank made a road map to the future with Android for Work and Google Apps

Posted by Jaime Hinojosa, Information Technology Officer, Elsa State Bank

Editor's note: Today we hear from Jaime Hinojosa, Information Technology Officer at Elsa State Bank, which has served Texans since 1945. Learn how Elsa State Bank overhauled its IT department to provide its workforce with the tools to be more mobile and productive.

Elsa State Bank's 20,000 customers across South Texas depend on our expertise in commercial, consumer and agricultural finance. We’re always looking for ways to better serve our customers and grow our customer base. As an IT officer, I introduce, evolve and maintain the technology that helps our 100 employees acquire more customers. Security, durability and affordability are top of mind when I’m researching a new solution.

In 2010, we looked to modernize our IT solutions. Our employees wanted greater flexibility to pursue customer leads outside of the office. At the time, our employees were using laptops and smartphones that didn’t have the security, functionality or mobile management we needed. I started researching other solutions and discovered Google Apps for Work, Google Mobile Device Management (Google MDM) and Android devices. I believed these solutions would help us achieve our goal of giving our team greater mobility with tools that not only advanced productivity but that also offered the security, central management and cost efficiency we required — I was right.

Today we use Google MDM to manage 40 Samsung Galaxy smartphones and Samsung Note tablets. These Android devices help us save time and money. One example: We used to print and ship 300-page binders for board meetings, which was wasteful and inefficient, but now, board members use Android tablets during meetings to view and share annual reports and quarterly earnings presentations.

Our employees are already benefitting from greater mobility at work. Lenders now commonly travel to construction sites to meet with customers, receive progress updates and pursue more loan opportunities. Loan officers who work away from the office can receive reminders about upcoming client meetings on their Android smartphone, locate and reach their destination using Google Maps and retrieve relevant customer documents from the cloud with Google Drive.

The security of Google Apps was essential to our purchasing decision. Since commercial institutions can be targeted by cybercriminals, protecting our customer data is especially important. Our centrally-managed Android devices help us save time and money without compromising security, and IT administrators benefit from capabilities like mobile device management. Remote administration also helps us save time and money from a pure logistics standpoint — we don’t have to be on site to solve individual problems that arise.

Before we adopted Google Apps for Work and Google MDM, our employees were clamoring for tools that allowed them to work from anywhere and better serve our customers. The integration of Google Apps and Google MDM, supported by Android devices, has vastly improved what our employees can accomplish each day. These tools have helped keep Elsa State Bank competitive amid a rapidly evolving work environment.

Bringing Google Apps into HipChat

Google Calendar and Google Drive for Atlassian HipChat

Guest post by Rich Manalang, Partner Engineering Lead at Atlassian. Posted by Wesley Chun, Developer Advocate, Google Apps.

Atlassian has been building collaboration software for over 14 years. With products that include JIRA, Confluence, Bitbucket, and HipChat, our organization has learned a lot about how teams work effectively.

HipChat launched the Connect API in November 2015, and since then we’ve continued to build upon our ecosystem of integrations and collaborations. A few months ago, our team looked at potential integrations that would be a perfect marriage with HipChat — and today, we’re excited to share the Google Calendar and Google Drive integration for HipChat.

Millions of people use Google’s products everyday, so we instantly knew this was the right opportunity. Many of HipChat’s customers are developers, and they told us that managing time and better access to files were two of the most important things in their day-to-day. Now with Google integrations available inside of HipChat, there’s no need to launch another browser tab or app.

By building Google Calendar directly into HipChat, we’re improving the signal-to-noise ratio on a daily basis. Before this integration, we all dealt with context-switching between apps and browser tabs. Now, customers can use HipChat to view and share various calendars, schedules and important dates in the right sidebar. Our customers spend their entire working day inside our HipChat app — unlike email, you don’t just fire it up and quit periodically. So naturally, having your calendar up-front is compelling. And what’s more, you can slice and dice which ones you see on a per-room basis. Say you’re a program manager — if you go into the Engineering HipChat “room,” you can see the Engineering and related calendars. Then, when you switch into the Marketing room, you may see different calendars depending on whom you’re collaborating with.

Having dual calendars front and center within HipChat is critical for staying on top of my work. I’m personally very excited about the Google Calendar integration because it’s one of the most important apps I use day-in and day-out. As a single parent with two kids busy at school, I need to know everything that's going on. My calendar is stacked, and I want to see it all at a glance. That urgency is similar when considering the most important documents in someone's daily workflow.

When we started working on the Google Drive integration, we wanted to focus on what was most important — accessibility, shareability, and ease of use.

There are many benefits to bringing third party integrations right into HipChat. The Google Drive integration allows teams to collaborate and work together while saving time and eliminating context switching. Being able to access documents, presentations, and files is critical whether a user is at the office or remote. It integrates nicely into the right side bar, enabling users to access, share to the room, and collaborate around important documents, presentations, and spreadsheets. We worked with third party developer Topdox, who was a tremendous partner in bringing this new feature into HipChat. We’re getting great feedback around the speed and simplicity of sharing files without ever having to leave the HipChat application.

Why would Google Developers be interested?

When we built these integrations, we wanted to give our users a nice balance between out-of-the-box usefulness but also ultimate flexibility in which calendars and accounts a user can view. To do that, we wanted one UI that can display multiple calendars from multiple Google accounts — similar to what most Calendar mobile apps do today, including Google’s own mobile Calendar app.

These new integrations were built entirely on top of Google’s API. Google’s Calendar API is a full featured API that gave us everything we needed to create a calendar experience fit for HipChat’s users. On top of that, the API was designed with efficiency in mind with push notifications for changes to resources and incremental syncing to improve performance and bandwidth use.

Building on top of Google APIs has allowed us to think of new ways to bring even tighter integrations with our products along with the myriad of add-ons built by Atlassian’s ecosystem. One idea under consideration is to link JIRA Software and Google Calendar so that all your JIRA issues are overlayed onto a Google Calendar. Then this calendar can be shared with the relevant HipChat room bringing it all together and enabling teams to get more done. We’d love to hear your feedback on this idea.

We think there are many opportunities to improve how teams work together by integrating with Google and Atlassian. You can find out more about Atlassian Connect on our developer’s site and the Google APIs on theirs.

Google Apps Marketplace is opening up to consumer end-users

Posted by Chris Han, Product Manager, Apps Developer Platform

For over 6 years, the Google Apps Marketplace has been the #1 destination for administrators and business users within Google Apps domains to find, discoverand install third-party apps and integrations that extend what they can do with Google Apps.

We are happy to announce that over the next few weeks, we are opening up the Google Apps Marketplace to consumer end-users, and wanted to give you a heads up as well as some technical guidance should you wish to make any changes or tweaks to your app. Here is what you need to know if you are a technology partner or developer building for the Google Apps Marketplace:

First, this change only applies to apps which have opted in to “Enable Individual Install” on the Google Apps Marketplace SDK located in the Developer Console. Apps not enabled with individual install will not appear to consumers, nor will they be installable for them.

Second, as a general best practice, we recommend that you do not use a user’s email address as a unique identifier. Email addresses for both consumer and business accounts can be renamed or changed. Make sure to always use the Google Account ID. For more information on sign in and security, please read this.

If you have questions or have any feedback regarding this development, please let us know here. We look forward to exposing what you’ve built to our broader community.

Google Apps and devices as building blocks for change at ISG

Posted by Daniel Durgan, IT Business Partner at ISG

Editor's note: Today we hear from Daniel Durgan, IT Business Partner at ISG, an international construction services company delivering fit out, construction, engineering services and a range of specialist solutions. Daniel explains why there’s never been a better time to digitally transform the construction industry.

The construction industry is undergoing a digital revolution. Companies that have for decades relied heavily on printed contracts, drawings and documents are now moving to online tools to save time and money and keep productivity up in a marketplace that’s more expansive and more demanding. At ISG, we’re using Google’s cloud-based tools to ensure that we’re at the forefront of this industry shift.

With Google Apps, we’re taking full advantage of technology-enhanced collaboration, productivity and mobility. Over the course of a few hours, I can use Google Drive to review a presentation on my tablet, Gmail to check emails and Google Calendar to schedule meetings on my phone while away from the office. I can also jump into a meeting with colleagues from around the world from any of the 26 Chromeboxes that are set up in one of our conference rooms. Whether I’m on a site visit, in the office or on the move, Google Apps allows me to continue working and collaborating with my team.

Projects move fast with real-time collaboration

It’s essential for our business to control who has access to certain documents. Drawings must only be issued to authorised people, and each person must review the latest version as it’s being developed. Drive enables us to completely control what’s shared inside and outside of our company — the fact that our team alone has 1.5 million files in Drive speaks to our reliance on the tool for secure file storage.

Google Docs allows us to collaborate on shared documents at the same time, no matter where we are in the world. I can start shaping up a proposal in London and invite a colleague in Europe to work on it with me. There’s also more of a human element. When someone comments, you see their face next to it — it ties you emotionally to the process. We keep track of all our revisions in Sheets to monitor our progress. And we can always instant message each other with quick questions or suggestions, so we feel connected, all the time.

A lot of what we do is very visual. It’s hard to describe building plans and designs over the phone. With Hangouts, we can bring everyone together to discuss these plans and drawings as if we were all in the same room. We can move quickly from stakeholders to contractors to suppliers to make sure the right people are involved in the right conversations.

Staff expect more from an IT solution

A big part of my team’s role is to help build relationships and ensure employees communicate effectively and get the support they need. When we sent out a survey using Forms to ask all our staff what they’d like to see from IT, they told us they wanted to find out more about our Google tools. We’re using Synergise Google Apps Training to help our stakeholders go beyond the basics and use the suite to its full potential.

Quality: getting it right the first time

Quality is extremely important in our business, so we carry out frequent on-site check-ins to ensure teams are following the proper processes and delivering a high standard of construction correctly the first time. When we do these quality checks, we submit recommendations and observations using Forms on Android tablets. The information is imported into Sheets, and using Apps Script, we create dashboards, so employees across teams and functions can easily track the check-ins in real time.

We’re improving the way we work all the time, and that’s thanks to the support and enthusiasm of our employees. Many of our automated solutions have been suggested by them, and it’s great to see how passionate they are about Google Apps. There’s also an excitement among my team around what the future holds for us and our industry with new tools at our dispense and a new way of working for our customers.

How Compass Group Canada modernized its digital strategy with Chrome

Posted by Humza Teherany, CIO of Compass Group Canada and CEO of Compass Digital

Editor's note: Today we hear from Humza Teherany, CIO of Compass Group Canada and CEO of Compass Digital Labs, a subsidiary of Compass Group PLC, a global food and support services provider who serves millions of people around the world every day and employs more than 500,000 employees worldwide. Learn how Compass Group switched to digital signs powered by Chrome to boost its digital marketing efforts in restaurants and coffee shops across Canada. To learn more about how Chrome devices can be used to engage your customers, watch this recorded Hangout.

How do you design your digital strategy when you're part of a 20-year-old business with many brands, many partners and 32,000 employees in Canada? I faced this challenge when I joined Compass Group Canada leading technology and innovation four years ago. My top goal was to use technology to better consumer experiences and in turn grow our revenues. Compass Group relied on Google Apps already, so when we needed to revamp our digital signage, we turned to Google. Over the past two years, our technology field services teams, led by Jugveer Randhawa, installed more than 200 Chrome digital signage devices in our retail locations. We plan to add an additional 100 devices by the end of 2017.
Before we switched to Chrome, our store managers were bogged down by running all of our in-store marketing campaigns. The screens we used weren’t connected to the internet and had to be manually managed on-site, one by one. Store managers had to upload new images every time we wanted to promote a new menu item, daily special or social media contest. By modernizing our approach using Chrome digital signage, we’re saving hundreds of hours each week on this formerly time-intensive process. Today one marketer can manage dozens of campaigns in stores across Canada using Chrome Device Management and our signage software.

Adopting a digital-first approach means that Compass Group Canada can measure the return on its marketing investment, and Chrome is a key part of this. Each digital signage device costs about half as much as competing options, so we get more for our money. We use third-party software to analyze data from Chrome devices, so our marketing team sees how campaigns are performing right away. If we advertise a new pumpkin latte at a coffee shop, for instance, we can compare how many people saw our ad and how much our sales increased across stores.
Since switching to Chrome digital signage, Compass Group Canada has seen a 2-4% boost in sales from our marketing promotions, which is significant for a company that makes approximately $2 billion in annual revenue.

Chrome digital signage is part of a broader cultural shift at Compass Group. This year, we launched Compass Digital Labs, an offshoot dedicated to improving consumer retail experiences by building new technologies like mobile payment apps, on-site kiosks and wearable payment solutions.

Our digital-first strategy encourages us to try techniques like event-triggered marketing — promoting hot chocolate when temperatures dip below freezing, or offering a two-for-one beer special at stadiums when the home team's winning.

Consumer behavior is constantly changing, and we’re seeing how important it is to reach savvy customers on mobile, social and in stores. Our digital marketing strategy allows us to connect consumers with the right offers at the right time. Millions of people visit our retail locations every year, and with Chrome we can reach them all with the latest content.

Using Google and Asana to provide more understandable data: Q&A with Looker


Editor's note: Today we speak with Kyle Coleman, Director of Sales Development and Kelly Payne, Customer Programs Manager at Looker, a data analytics software company that makes deep data understandable and useable for business teams. Looker uses Google Apps and Asana to track and collaborate on all their work.
Can you tell us about Looker and why the company needed collaboration and productivity tools?
Kelly: Our team at Looker is building software that helps business teams find, explore and understand the data that matters to them. As a fast growing startup, we think a lot about scaling our team and processes effectively and efficiently. We need the right tools do this well.

Why Google Apps?
Kyle: We’re heavy users of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Sheets and Slides. We can easily share our work cross-functionally and always feel confident that the person we’re working with has the most up-to-date version.
Kelly: We’re constantly pulling up a Google Doc to have everyone work from the same place at the same time. There’s a huge benefit to having our work and discussions update in real time and to easily share what we’re working on with anyone in our organization.

How and why does your team use Asana?
Kyle: We use Asana for important cross-functional workflows like new hire on-boarding, sales development and for almost all of our marketing team’s work. From campaign management to launches, every piece of content we publish — whether video, customer case study or blog post — is tracked in Asana. There’s so many moving pieces involved in a complex and collaborative workflow; Asana lets us track every detail.
Kelly: With Asana, we can more easily keep track of who's doing what, and stay updated on the progress of projects. As we’ve grown, Asana has helped us identify how repeated tasks can become standardized processes. Developing process standards brings the clarity and accountability that help us work together well.

How are you using Asana and Google Apps together?
Kelly: We're always linking our docs, spreadsheets or slide decks into our Asana tasks, which is easy to do with the Asana and Google Drive integration. Asana is where we make our work actionable, so the task becomes the place where all the relevant information is stored. Connecting Google and Asana makes it easy to ensure that everyone’s working out of the right documents. We’ve added a good deal of efficiency to our workflow by not duplicating efforts across teams.
How has productivity improved on your team by integrating Asana and Google apps?
Kyle: Two things that matter deeply to us as a growing team are productivity and priorities. Having everything in the same central place saves us so much time as a team, and Google Apps and Asana have given everyone a sense of what they need to be working on and when.

You mentioned that you’re constantly working collaboratively at Looker. How does using Google and Asana side by side make working together easier?
Kelly: With these tools that we’re now using, it’s so much easier to be collaborative and build a sense of trust and empowerment within our team. Whether we’re making a comment in a Google Doc or “hearting” someone’s task in Asana, we’re having a lot more fun moving our work forward together.

We hope you’ve enjoyed reading about how Looker makes work fun and collaborative using Google Apps with Asana. You can learn more and enable Asana in your Google Apps account by visiting their application listing in the Google Apps Marketplace.

Taking learning beyond classroom walls with new features for Back to School

Posted by Dina Kachintseva, Classroom Software Engineer and Felix Wang, User Experience Designer

As any teacher would tell you, the classroom isn’t the only place where learning happens — it’s just the tip of the iceberg. From parents who help students with homework, to extracurriculars, field trips and more, there are so many ways students can learn beyond the walls of the classroom. This is why today we’re announcing new features to help teachers inspire learning for students, regardless of place or time.

Parents and guardians stay informed with Google Classroom email summaries


Parent participation has a major impact on student learning. Today, we’re launching a new feature in Google Classroom that will automatically share summaries of student work with parents. Once invited by a teacher, parents and guardians can receive automated daily or weekly email summaries of student work and class announcements, making it easier to stay up-to-date on what’s happening in the classroom.
“I enjoy helping my children prepare for assignments that they have coming up – and the earlier I know about them, the better,” says Michelle Barrette, a mother of five Medfield, Massachusetts students and pilot user of the new Classroom feature. “This way I can prevent them from missing deadlines and see if they need help brainstorming topics or solutions.”

Annotations help students color outside the lines — and the classroom


When teachers want to help students understand complex math or science concepts, visuals — like drawings on a whiteboard — can help. But how does this work when students and teachers aren’t in the classroom together? Today, we’re announcing the ability to annotate documents in the Google Classroom mobile app.

Using annotations, students can complete assignments, sketch out math problems or even create visuals of creative ideas directly on their devices. This gives students a portable classroom whiteboard on which they can easily draw and sketch. Now, thinking through complex homework challenges from home, school or on the bus is even easier. 

Teachers can use annotations to quickly grade assignments by writing directly on the student’s work, or highlighting the most important passages in a text or novel. Anne Farrahar, an English teacher in the Medfield Public Schools district, explains how her lessons benefitted from her high school students annotating a critique of Shakespeare’s "The Merchant of Venice." “They highlighted all the ideas they thought were convincing arguments in one color, and all the ideas they disagreed with in another color,” says Farrahar. “This gave me the chance to assess students' individual understanding and, based on their responses, gather ideas for future lessons.” 


More Expeditions thousands of miles away or inside the human body


Have you ever wondered what it would be like to visit the White House Kitchen Garden or what it would be like to travel inside the human body? Today we’re announcing new Expeditions that bring students far beyond the usual places they can travel. With these adventures, like a visit to Bhutan or an exploration of the human vascular systems, teachers are able to deeply immerse students in lessons, creating vivid and memorable learning experiences.
In addition, the Expeditions app is coming soon to iOS. More teachers, including those who use iPads, will be able to share Expeditions with their students by using full-screen mode on the devices in place of a VR viewer. With over 200 Expeditions available, we’re excited for them to experience these virtual field trips on more devices. 

More Google for Education features for busy teachers and curious minds


 In celebration of the new school year, we’re excited to share more new tools for teachers and students to break down traditional barriers within the classroom: 
  • A more organized Classroom. To make Classroom even easier to use, teachers can organize the class stream by adding topics to posts, and teachers and students can filter the stream for specific topics. Plus, users can now preview documents, PDFs, images and videos, all without leaving Classroom. 
  • Share your screens wirelessly at school. With the latest Chrome update, Cast for Education is now available to all teachers and students. This free Chrome app carries video and audio across complex school networks and has built-in controls for teachers — no new hardware required. Look out for updates including support for secondary domains coming soon. 
  • Google Forms get an upgrade with images. In Forms, teachers can now add images to questions or as multiple choice answers. This is perfect for subjects like math when students need to show their understanding of diagrams and graphs. 
  • Inbox by Gmail for the classroom. Inbox by Gmail is rolling out to Google for Education users. Coming soon, email notifications from Classroom will be intelligently grouped in Inbox, making it easy for teachers and students to find important updates and highlights. 
Whether students are at home or in the classroom, teachers can continue to inspire and support their curiosity with Expeditions, Classroom, Apps and Chromebooks. Stay tuned this week on Google+ and Twitter for more details on these exciting new tools.