Tag Archives: Google for Work

Shoes of Prey embraces a “design your own” experience for bespoke shoes and workplace technology

Posted Mike Knapp, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Shoes of Prey

Editor's note: Today’s guest post is by Mike Knapp, Co-founder and Co-CEO of Shoes of Prey. Shoes of Prey creates handmade, bespoke women’s shoes designed by the customer.
Like a lot of tech companies these days, Shoes of Prey started as an exchange of ideas between a few friends — in my case, casual discussion with longtime friends from college, Michael and Jodie Fox. That day, a little magic happened for us when we landed on an idea that would spark interest for customers around the world — an online platform built to inspire creativity and truly honor individual expression. Shoes of Prey allows customers to design their own made-to-order shoes from anywhere via our online store, as long as they have Wi-Fi access.

The flexibility and freedom to be as creative with our personal expression as we choose is at the core of what we offer to customers, and we want the same from our workplace technology. We use cloud-based tools like Google Apps that allow employees to work how they want, from wherever they please.

Sharing information is particularly crucial now that we’re a global team with offices in the U.S., the Philippines, Australia, Japan and China. We save thousands of dollars we’d otherwise spend on travel by meeting face-to-face over Google Hangouts and working simultaneously in shared Google Docs.

Being able to write a document with people in three different offices at the same time is incredibly powerful. We compile our weekly global newsletter in a single shared Doc. Each team contributes its updates when ready, and there’s no need for multiple meetings and back-and-forth email attachments. Most teams share their weekly meeting notes in Docs as well.

We also use Google Sheets to manage financial budgeting across teams and have a singled shared master Sheet to track monthly expenses and cash flow. Each team updates its expenses in a designated Sheet and then the team lead or manager updates the master, which is access-controlled.

With Google Apps, we can maintain a highly collaborative culture and keep our data secure. Thanks to sophisticated sharing settings in Docs, we’re able to share customer and employee information only with intended recipients, grant specific permissions and adjust who has access even after sharing a link. We know that we have Google’s security experts watching out for us, which gives us peace of mind.

We’ve grown our company using Google Apps from day one, and I can’t imagine working any other way. Once you've worked this way, there’s no other way to work. And we’ve saved thousands of dollars by not having to hire people to manage servers or perform software updates, as these are automated with Google. Google Apps keeps our talented workforce from getting bogged down with outdated or mundane processes so that it can continue to create the best experience — and shoes — for our customers.

Talk with your audience — not at them — with Slides Q&A

Posted by Michael Frederick, Google Slides Engineer

(Cross-posted on the Google Docs Blog.)

Public speaking can be intimidating—even for veteran speakers with phenomenal ideas and experiences to share. Take Shree Bose, for example.

At just 17 years old, Shree took home the top prize at the first ever Google Science Fair for her research on drug resistance in ovarian cancer. Now, a senior at Harvard, she’s met with President Obama twice, crowdfunded a Minecraft computer program to support STEM education, and has given talks across the globe. But she still gets nervous every time she’s asked to speak at events.

When Shree recently visited our New York office to present to 200 middle school students, we invited her to try a new feature in Google Slides: Slides Q&A. This update—rolling out globally today—helps speakers connect with their audience and collect real-time feedback. With a simple link displayed on a Slides presentation, audience members can submit questions from their phones, laptops, and tablets—and vote on those they want answered the most.

Hear what your audience has to say 

Slides Q&A is great for audience members, too. During Shree’s talk, students submitted more than 170 questions and voted 800 times. They enjoyed being able to submit questions online the moment they thought of them instead of having to remember them until the end of the presentation. Some students also chose to submit questions anonymously.

At the end of her talk, Shree left time for Q&A, but she couldn’t possibly answer all 170 questions. So, she sorted the questions based on audience votes—and responded to the top ones. The question with the most overall votes was submitted by a seventh grader named Leila. She says, “I was so surprised when I saw my question was the most liked. I probably wouldn’t want to stand up and ask the question because I’m kind of shy.”

Focus on your ideas, not set up 

Slides Q&A makes it easy to interact with your audience—without having to worry about mics or moderators. Slides also helps you get your big ideas and stories on screen—without having to worry about wires or set up stress. Starting today, we're improving this "Show up, don't setup" experience in two ways:
  • You can now present your slides to a Hangout from your iPhone or iPad. So with just your phone or tablet and the Slides app, you can present to any screen using Chromecast, AirPlay or Hangouts. 
  • And for those of you who like presenting from a computer, we're introducing a new laser pointer on the web. Just in time for May the 4th (be with you). 
Today’s Slides updates are rolling out globally on Android, iOS, and the web. So go on, share your stories and present with confidence.

And for a little inspiration, check out Shree’s full talk, #HowCanWe Make the World Better with Science? on the Talks@Google channel.

New security and privacy certifications give more transparency on how Google handles your data in the cloud

Posted by Eran Feigenbaum, Director of Security, Google Apps for Work and
Matthew O’Connor, Product Manager, Google Cloud Platform

Google was born in the cloud, and we’ve set a high bar for what it means to host, serve, and protect our users’ data all over the world. That’s why we’re proud to add two new certifications to Google Apps for Work and Google Cloud Platform: ISO 27017 for cloud security and ISO 27018 for privacy. We announced ISO 27018 adoption last year, and have now added ISO 27018 certification to our compliance commitments. Additionally, we renewed our ISO 27001 certification for the fourth year in a row and increased the product coverage from 34 to 60 different products.

ISO 27017 builds on the well-known standard of ISO 27001 by providing additional controls that address some of the security risks that are more specific to cloud services, ensuring that:

  • The security roles and responsibilities between Google and our customers are clearly-defined
  • Our customers’ data is protected from any unauthorized party and between different cloud customers
  • The security policies for Google’s virtual networks are as secure as on our physical networks
  • Our customers have adequate tools to monitor how their data is handled at Google


Meanwhile, ISO 27018 establishes controls that examine our privacy practices and contractual commitments around the use of customer data and provide transparency on the processing of that data. It confirms that:

  • Google does not use customer data for advertising
  • The data that our customers entrust with us remains the customer's
  • Google provides our customers with tools to delete and export customer data
  • Google scrutinizes third party requests to customer data and ensures customers are informed of such third-party requests
  • Google is transparent about where our customer’s data is stored

Certifications such as these provide independent third-party validations of our ongoing commitment to world-class security and privacy, while also helping our customers with their own compliance efforts. We’re committed to ensuring that our products continue to meet trusted and rigorous global standards like ISO 27018 and 27017.

Google Calendar for Android: Find a time for my meeting

Posted by Stella Schieffer, Product Manager

(Cross-posted on the Gmail Blog.)

Smartphones have made productivity portable. You no longer have to be at your desk to catch up on meeting notes, dial into a conference call, or send an email. But scheduling meetings on the go is still difficult, as you have to open your laptop to check everyone’s calendar and find a time that works.

Starting today, if you use Google Apps for Work or Edu, you can schedule meetings from anywhere with "Find a time" in Google Calendar for Android.

With a single tap, “Find a time” helps you find meeting times that work for everyone—even if they're in different time zones—based on their availability and the times they usually have meetings. If there are no times that work, Calendar will look at which conflicting meetings can most easily be rescheduled. Designed specifically for organizations where sharing your calendar with colleagues is the norm, here's how it works:
“Find a time” makes suggestions, but you're still in control. You can tap to see everyone's schedule at a glance—perfect for making sure the timing works for all. And if you manage someone else's calendar, you can use the feature to schedule meetings on their behalf as well.

Download Google Calendar for Android to get easy, on-the-go scheduling. And yes, we're also working on bringing “Find a time” to iPhone, as well as easier ways to schedule on the web.

How Expensify employees work from the beach with Google Apps

Posted by Matt McNamara, Director of Engineering at Expensify

Editor's note: Today’s post comes from Matt McNamara, director of engineering at Expensify, a company that provides “hassle-free expense reporting built for employees and loved by admins.” Read how their team uses Google Apps to work abroad for at least one month every year.

At Expensify, we’re all about making mundane tasks (like expense reporting), a pleasant, less time-consuming experience. Google’s no-sweat, work-in-real-time tools have helped us achieve these goals since starting our company in 2008. We considered alternatives like Microsoft and Zoho, but we found that no other solution could compete with the simple, intuitive interface and ease of use of Google Apps.

Google Apps is a natural extension of our company culture, which I like to think of as “Family Style.” Whether or not we’re in the office, we encourage people to work flexibly and with people on different teams. Building this type of open, supportive culture depends on ensuring everyone has an equal voice — and tools like Gmail play a huge role in making this happen. We encourage transparency and participation by adding every employee to all internal email lists from day one. It might sound like a lot, but anyone can opt out and choose only to follow what’s relevant to them.

Our annual month abroad also contributes to our overarching family culture. For one month every year, the entire team has the opportunity to work (and bring their families) abroad. We run as the same business, but from somewhere awesome — last year we spent a month in Thailand. Thanks to the flexibility of Google Apps, our only requirements for this trip are a beach, power and Internet access.

We rely on our employees to give us feedback about the tools we use, and Google Apps is probably the only product no one has ever asked to replace. We’ve tested bringing on some other enterprise and productivity platforms, but we always come back to Google Apps. Their integrations, like single sign-on with Intercom, make our lives easier. We can quickly onboard new employees, and don’t have to worry about former employees accessing sensitive content.

Because it’s so easy to use, we hire zero IT support, and I don’t foresee that changing anytime soon. Even non-technical employees can set up accounts without any problems. It just works — whether we’re at our headquarters or on the beach.

Mid-size businesses, you have more incentive than ever to go Google — we’ll help cover the costs

Posted by Neil Delaney, Director, Global Inside Sales / Mid-Market, Google Apps for Work

Back in October, we made it easy for companies locked into an Enterprise Agreement (EA) to switch to Google Apps by providing our productivity suite for free until their existing contracts expired. We even helped prospects with the deployment costs of going Google through the help of our Google for Work Partners. And if interested companies weren’t under contract, we offered to help pay for their migrations from other solutions to Google Apps.

Since then, nearly 200,000 additional users have gone Google. We’ve also received tremendous interest to make the program available to smaller companies. So today, we’re excited to announce we’re extending the global program until the end of 2016. Companies between 250 and 3,000 that currently have an EA with another vendor can qualify for zero-cost Google Apps licenses for the term of their existing EA. And now, companies with 100 users (previously 250) to as many as 3,000 can qualify for a Deployment Voucher. This greatly expands the number of companies that can take advantage of the Deployment Voucher.

In addition to saving money and improving business productivity, the security benefits of Google Apps are especially valuable to mid-market businesses. For mid-market customers that sign up for this promotion, Google will pay for a Security Workshop, to the value of $750USD, through our trained Partners, to help them maximize the security and data protections Google Apps offers.

One example of those data protections are Security Keys. To help get customers started with security keys, our security partner Yubico will provide a limited number of free Security Keys for mid-market customers. These keys help protect users from phishing, account hijacking and other attacks with 1-touch encrypted, 2-step verification. They’re state-of-the art in account protection. They’re also a great example of the security benefits of Google Apps. Additional Security Keys can be purchased at a 50% discount.

Finally, with this announcement, a number of our Recommended for Google Apps for Work partners are announcing additional cost-savings for Google Apps mid-sized companies. Customers can now get similar savings when they build structured document lifecycles and workflows with AODocs and Powertools, move business phone systems to the cloud with Dialpad, use a tightly integrated CRM from Prosperworks or manage projects online with Smartsheet.

Our EA program gives new customers the opportunity to influence the move to Apps — and gives decision makers the final incentive to make the switch.

“Even before we made the official switch to Google, many of our employees used Apps without involving IT. Our entire international team migrated on their own before the roll out, because our previous solution didn’t mesh with their workflow,” says Sam Davidson, systems engineer at The Motley Fool. “Our previous solution was sluggish, with pretty consistent outages. We wanted to move to Google Apps, but we were locked into a three-year contract with our previous provider. The [EA] program allowed us to make the switch much sooner.”

Mid-size companies don’t always have the same resources as larger enterprises, and constraints (like contract lock-in) shouldn’t hinder collaboration or efficiency at work.

Additionally, companies with basic EAs and no dependencies have the potential to cut costs by up to 70 percent through switching to Google Apps for Work.

“Peterborough City Council took advantage of the EA program when the previous provider wouldn’t let us move from on-premise to the cloud without breaking a contract. Our council felt comfortable making the switch after evaluating companies and other councils that had already gone Google,” says Richard Godfrey, Project Director at Arcus Global and formerly Assistant Director, Digital at Peterborough City Council, England. “We’ve come to expect the pace of innovation that Google offers, as well as the flexibility it enables for our team. Google Apps will give us the freedom to work anywhere; all our employees need is a Chromebook, mobile phone and an internet connection.”

Learn more or call 844-420-0601 to get started now!

Charity: water provides clean water and reinvents charity with the help of Google Maps

Posted by Alessandra Mosenifar, Senior Product Designer for charity: water

Editor's note: This is the fourth post in our “Mapping a Better World” series, highlighting organizations using location data to affect positive local and global change. Today’s guest blogger is Alessandra Mosenifar, Senior Product Designer for charity: water. Read how the organization uses Google Maps to share the results of their work providing clean water for millions of people.

Charity: water’s mission is to bring clean drinking water to everyone on the planet. We work towards this mission by funding global partners who understand what’s needed for their specific communities. Our partners around the world have years of experience working with their state and local governments to build sustainable, community-owned water projects. We ensure this information is transparent and accessible so that donors, stakeholders and interested users can see what has been funded and the realized impact.

With Google Maps APIs, we were able to create a new way for donors to view exactly where their dollars go. We also built an easily digestible map packed with details and visuals for the thousands of water projects we've completed. Each project is represented by an icon on the map. When a user clicks the icon the project details appear — including the project completion date, the number of people benefiting from clean water, the implementation partner and the project's precise GPS coordinates.


We use Javascript API to display projects on our completed projects page and on project detail pages. We also use the Geocoding API for reverse geocoding of GPS coordinates to determine the district and village names for each project.

We also recently partnered with Google on a program that allows us to continuously monitor water projects and provide reporting accessible via our website. Using sensors to measure water flow per hour (transmitted weekly), we know if a water point is broken, as well as learn patterns of usage on a daily or yearly basis. Anyone can take a look at project status and details, including the average number of liters of water provided each day.

To date, we’ve funded nearly 20,000 water projects in 24 countries, providing clean water to more than 6 million people. Thanks to Google Maps APIs, donors can see exactly where and how their money is spent. Beyond providing clean water for millions of people, we’re helping transform how charities work by providing the highest degree of transparency about donation impact.

 If you're a nonprofit and interested in staying up to date on grants offerings for Google products like Google Maps APIs, apply to join Google for Nonprofits today.

Stay on task with today’s updates in Google Keep

Posted by Mario Anima, Product Manager

(Cross-posted on the Google Docs Blog.)

How many times have you found yourself with a great idea, but no easy way to jot it down for later? Or maybe you’ve got lots of notes scattered around, without no central spot to find them. Having a single place to capture what’s on your mind and save your ideas and to-do lists is what Google Keep is all about, and today's updates give you a few new ways to collect and manage the information that's important to you.

Keep is ready when you are

The next time you’re on a website that you want to remember or reference later on, use the new Keep Chrome extension to add it—or any part of it—to a note in Keep. Just click the Keep badge to add a site’s link to a note, or select some text or an image and create a new note from the right-click menu.

Same goes for Android—you can now create a note while you’re browsing or tapping away in other apps—without having to open Keep. Just open the “Share via” window and choose Keep to create a new note.


Organize your thoughts with #Labels
One of your top asks has been for a way to organize and categorize notes, and now it’s as easy as using a #hashtag. This should help you keep track of to-do lists for a #trip or a collect your favorite #recipes, for example.


You’ll also notice that some of the menus have been moved around to group similar options together, as pictured below.
So whether you’re researching a project at work, putting together details for your Science Fair submission, or collecting inspiration for your upcoming home renovation, give these updates a try on the web, or with the Keep app on Android and for iPhone & iPad.


Android Security 2015 Annual Report

Posted by Adrian Ludwig, Lead Engineer, Android Security

(Cross-posted on the Google Security Blog.)

Editor's note: For more details on our Android security efforts and results and what this level of security offers for the workplace, please sign-up to join our Hangout on Air with Adrian today at 10am PST. The session will be recorded and available to view on-demand afterwards as well.

Today, for the second year in a row, we’re releasing our Android Security Annual report. This detailed summary includes: a look at how Google services protect the Android ecosystem, an overview of new security protections introduced in 2015, and our work with Android partners and the security research community at large. The full report is here, and an overview is below.

One important goal of releasing this report is to drive an informed conversation about Android security. We hope to accomplish this by providing more information about what we are doing, and what we see happening in the ecosystem. We strongly believe that rigorous, data-driven discussion about security will help guide our efforts to make the Android ecosystem safer.

Enhancing Google's services to protect Android users

In the last year, we’ve significantly improved our machine learning and event correlation to detect potentially harmful behavior.

  • We protected users from malware and other Potentially Harmful Apps (PHAs), checking over 6 billion installed applications per day.
  • We protected users from network-based and on-device threats by scanning 400 million devices per day.
  • And we protected hundreds of millions of Chrome users on Android from unsafe websites with Safe Browsing.


We continued to make it even more difficult to get PHAs into Google Play. Last year’s enhancements reduced the probability of installing a PHA from Google Play by over 40% compared to 2014. Within Google Play, install attempts of most categories of PHAs declined including:

  • Data Collection: decreased over 40% to 0.08% of installs
  • Spyware: decreased 60% to 0.02% of installs
  • Hostile Downloader: decreased 50% to 0.01% of installs

Overall, PHAs were installed on fewer than 0.15% of devices that only get apps from Google Play. About 0.5% of devices that install apps from both Play and other sources had a PHA installed during 2015, similar to the data in last year’s report.

It’s critical that we also protect users that install apps from sources other than Google Play. Our Verify Apps service protects these users and we improved the effectiveness of the PHA warnings provided by Verify Apps by over 50%. In 2015, we saw an increase in the number of PHA install attempts outside of Google Play, and we disrupted several coordinated efforts to install PHAs onto user devices from outside of Google Play.


New security features in the Android platform

Last year, we launched Android 6.0 Marshmallow, introducing a variety of new security protections and controls:

  • Full disk encryption is now a requirement for all new Marshmallow devices with adequate hardware capabilities and is also extended to allow encryption of data on SD cards.
  • Updated app permissions enable you to manage the data they share with specific apps with more granularity and precision.
  • New verified boot ensures your phone is healthy from the bootloader all the way up to the operating system.
  • Android security patch level enables you to check and make sure your device has the most recent security updates.
  • And much more, including support for fingerprint scanners, and SELinux enhancements.
  • Deeper engagement with the Android ecosystem

We’re working to foster Android security research and making investments to strengthen protections across the ecosystem now and in the long run.

In June, Android joined Google’s Vulnerability Rewards Program, which pays security researchers when they find and report bugs to us. We fixed over 100 vulnerabilities reported this way and paid researchers more than $200,000 for their findings.

In August, we launched our monthly public security update program to the Android Open Source Project, as well as a security update lifecycle for Nexus devices. We intend the update lifecycle for Nexus devices to be a model for all Android manufacturers going forward and have been actively working with ecosystem partners to facilitate similar programs. Since then, manufacturers have provided monthly security updates for hundreds of unique Android device models and hundreds of millions of users have installed monthly security updates to their devices. Despite this progress, many Android devices are still not receiving monthly updates—we are increasing our efforts to help partners update more devices in a timely manner.

Greater transparency, well-informed discussions about security, and ongoing innovation will help keep users safe. We'll continue our ongoing efforts to improve Android’s protections, and we look forward to engaging with the ecosystem and security community in 2016 and beyond.

UK County Council ranked first for flexible working with Google Apps for Work

Posted by Tonino Ciuffini, Head of Information Assets, Warwickshire County Council, Warwick, UK

Editor's note: Today we hear from Tonino Ciuffini, Head of Information Assets at Warwickshire County Council, the local authority for Warwickshire, UK. The council handles social care, highways, public health, the fire service, economic development, education and more for the region’s 540,000 citizens. Read how £260,000 a year is just the start of their savings with Google Apps for Work.


The best thing about the work we do is the sheer range of ways we help people. While one group works to bring broadband to small businesses, another will tackle a fire or care for children in need. So when the government cut our council budget by 20%, we knew we faced tough decisions. For IT in particular, a £2,000,000 cut to our budget meant we had to look at all options for new ways of operating, and helped drive the decision to replace our 20-year-old email system. But it wasn’t just about saving money in the short-term. We wanted to share our facilities more effectively, improve the flexibility of our IT for staff and make it easier to work with external partners. Google was a perfect fit.
 
Tomino Ciuffini, Head of Information, Assets, Warwickshire County Council
Deploying 5,500 Google Apps accounts was much easier than I had imagined. With the help of Cloud Technology Solutions, who provided migration tools, advice and support, we migrated 3,000 users in just 8 weeks. Now Google Apps saves us £260,000 a year that we would have spent on our old system: £100,000 on licenses, £100,000 on infrastructure and £60,000 on support staff. But the really significant savings go deeper than that, and come from efficiencies made right across the organisation.

Saving time by working together on Drive. Instead of multiple versions of a document flying around on email, or saving documents to unrestricted servers, staff can work together on a single document on Drive, comment, make changes, choose their own access settings and even share documents with external agencies. This has also led to increased collaboration between staff and teams.

 The mobility of web-based apps frees office space. We now have the flexibility to not only work from home or elsewhere, but to also work more closely with customers and partners. When working on-site with the police or health workers, council staff can essentially take the office with them.

 Saving on transport costs with Hangouts. Face-to-face meetings with the citizens we serve are still important, but cutting out the financial and time costs of travelling to internal meetings generates further savings.

Cutting bureaucracy with Docs and Sheets. Taking notes during meetings on Docs eliminates the need to type notes afterwards. Everyone can leave comments, which improves accuracy and transparency, and voting with Forms gives us immediate, presentable results in Sheets.

Google logins make working simple. We no longer waste time dealing with forgotten passwords or typing separate logins into different applications. And being able to use multiple logins on a single device saves money on hardware, too: teams going to trade shows can share a single Nexus 9 tablet and log in simultaneously instead of using one device each.

Automatic upgrades saves on IT maintenance and keep us ahead of developments. In the four years that we’ve used Google Apps, every upgrade has felt like a natural evolution, and we’ve never had to implement new training to accommodate changes.

Google Apps has improved our effectiveness, too. Our team of four roadworks inspectors use Apps on tablets to be on the road for 80% instead of 50% of their day, significantly improving compliance with timetables for roadworks. And our family social workers use Calendar to advance safety by ensuring teams know where they are.

We also use notes on Drive to improve security and save paper with digital notes. At the top of our organisation, most of our elected county councillors have other jobs and don't work in our offices. Now they use Google Apps on a device of their choice, instead of clunky remote access systems, and check in more often to keep track of progress.

Budget cuts made life complicated for everyone at the council, but satisfaction with our IT system has actually increased during this difficult period. In the year we introduced Google Apps, our staff satisfaction scores increased in all 55 categories of an independent benchmarking run by a UK society of public service IT organisations called SOCITM. And last year, we ranked number one out of 60 UK councils in the SOCITM benchmarking survey for flexible working practices. That flexibility generates real savings without compromising on quality, and it was all made possible by Google Apps for Work.