Tag Archives: Google Hangouts

ProsperWorks runs its business in the cloud with Google Apps and Ringcentral

Posted by Bret Knobelauch, Senior Director at ProsperWorks

Editor's note: Today we hear from Bret Knobelauch, Senior Director at ProsperWorks, a SaaS provider of next generation CRM solutions and — along with RingCentral — a Google Apps partner in the Recommended for Google Apps for Work program. Read how this rapidly growing technology company uses Google Apps to radically simplify customer facing sales and communications. And register here to join our Hangout on Air, on March 29 at 9 a.m. and learn how ProsperWorks went all in on the cloud with Google and Ringcentral.

ProsperWorks is the world's first “zero input” CRM. Designed specifically for Google Apps, ProsperWorks helps companies sell faster by identifying, organizing and tracking sales opportunities right in Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Drive. Our company was founded in 2011 with the vision to empower small business sales and marketing with a fantastic user experience for CRM.

Going all-in with Google Apps and the cloud

When we started the company, we were already committed to leveraging the benefits of Google to run our business. After all, we build a SaaS CRM solution that is deeply integrated with Google Apps. So, in addition to choosing Gmail as our email platform, we went all in with Google technology for various aspects of our business. This included:
  • Google Hangouts to interact with prospects and customers who are Google Apps customers themselves
  • Google Drive for onboarding and sharing our sales assets with a rapidly expanding team of sales development reps and account executives
  • Google Sheets for exporting and reviewing sales reports using the ProsperWorks integration

We soon discovered the need for not just any, but the right cloud-based, enterprise-class phone solution. There are two key features that our cloud phone solution must have:

  • Ability to make and receive calls directly from within Gmail. My sales team spends 60-80% of their day at their desktop engaged in prospecting and sales calls. The ability to make and receive calls directly from a phone number within Gmail and ProsperWorks CRM keeps my team super productive. Plus users can see their communications history including call logs and voicemails, directly from within Gmail.


  • Sales call analytics and reporting. From my mobile phone, I can regularly check on the call productivity of the team. For example, I can check on inbound versus outbound calls following the launch of a campaign. I can see trends and intervene if there seems to be an issue that needs to be addressed.


    Why we chose RingCentral

    We switched from a vendor we worked with prior because RingCentral offered the enterprise business capabilities that we truly needed. I’m responsible for our sales development reps and account executives, and call activity is a key measure of productivity. RingCentral has robust call analytics and reporting that helped us gauge and increase productivity.

    I didn’t want to take any risks with security and reliability, so the fact that RingCentral had been vetted by Google meant a lot. I also appreciated that RingCentral was an overall leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications in the cloud, and most importantly, the user experience and integration with Google Apps was fantastic.

    ProsperWorks’ vision is about simplifying the CRM user experience. RingCentral shares this vision for business communications, and Google shares this vision for work productivity. Google Apps has proven to be a great unifying platform for partner solutions such as ProsperWorks and RingCentral. Empowered by Google Apps and RingCentral, we couldn’t be better equipped to serve and empower our own customers.

    Spanish gamechanger BQ builds a new way of working with Google Apps

    Posted by Adan Muñoz, co-founder and Director of Operations, BQ, Madrid, Spain

    Editor's note: Today we hear from Adan Muñoz, co-founder and Director of Operations at BQ, a producer of smartphones, tablets, e-readers, 3D printers and educational robots based in Madrid, Spain. Founded in 2010, BQ now has a global team of more than 1,300 people at offices in Germany, France, Sweden, Russia, Italy and the UK. See how Google Apps for Work has played a central role in BQ’s rapid growth and unique work culture right from the start.

    We don’t just want our customers to use our devices, we want them to understand what they’re using. That’s the core idea behind all of our products, whether it’s our “flatpack” 3D printer, our customisable smartphone or Zowi, our educational robot. Our goal is to get people thinking about technology, because the next great idea could come from anyone, anywhere.

    With the same emphasis on engagement, we try to run BQ as a team of equals, where everyone has a voice. We know we do our best work when colleagues in design, engineering, technical, marketing and sales are free to bounce ideas off each other. But with 1,300 people at 10 offices, open communication can bring challenges. That’s why we built our business around Google Apps for Work from day one. Its forward-looking, simple and powerful tools have allowed us to shape our ideal working environment and work team.

    Transparent and connected, not bureaucratic
    • Drive gives us an open central platform that everyone can access. If we receive product information from a third-party, for example, we save it in Docs for anyone in the organisation who’s interested to read and leave comments or queries. That gives us oversight and transparency so that we can avoid problems before they occur.
    • Instead of an email hierarchy of labels and folders, Gmail’s powerful search lets us find what we need in seconds on any device, and links directly to Docs on Drive and meetings on Hangouts. We don’t need to subdivide and separate projects and personnel, so teams develop more naturally.
    Supercharged project management
    • Every prototype we make is run through a series of tests by different groups before teams go back to the drawing board. With Drive, all of the information from every test is immediately available, and because we only have one version of the results on Sheets and Docs, we always know we’re working from the correct files.
    • Google Apps makes it easy to coordinate teamwork. At the beginning of every project, we create a plan of action on Sheets for colleagues to keep track of progress. Rather than trade emails, now when someone wants to organise a meeting they go directly to Calendar, check someone’s availability and create a meeting, adding a link for a video call on Hangouts when they can’t meet in-person but still want that person-to-person time.
    One tight team
    • Hangouts allows employees hundred of miles apart to feel that they work in one office. We use Hangouts daily to ensure maximum staff contact while saving on travel costs, video conferencing hardware, telecom bills and even time spent looking up phone numbers.
    • We keep minutes of meetings in Docs so that staff can add to the same document simultaneously and leave comments on the public document after the event.
    • Intuitive interfaces and simple administrative setup mean that when we bring on someone new, we can swiftly integrate them with our team. We even give them a Form asking where they will sit and what materials they need, so that we’re ready for their arrival ahead of time.


    Our work at BQ is part of a long-term project. When we teach children how to program and design their own Zowi the robot, we’re not just teaching them basic robotics, we also want to prepare them for a future in which technology will play an ever greater role. Google is the perfect partner for that mission, with its understanding of the fast-evolving tech landscape and the constant updates to its Apps. Ultimately, our goals are aligned: we both want to give people the tools to empower themselves.

    Connect with more people using Google Hangouts video calls

    Google Hangouts video calls make it easy to connect and interact to get things done. With today’s update, to make it easier to connect with more people, we’re raising the participant limit for Hangouts video calls from 15 to 25 for Google Apps customers.

    To help ensure a high quality experience on a variety of computers, only the 10 most active video call participants will have their video feeds visible at the bottom of the screen at any given time.

    No action is required to make use of this new participant limit. Check out the Help Center for more information on Hangouts video calls.

    Launch Details
    Release track:
    Launching to both Rapid release and Scheduled release

    Rollout pace:
    Gradual rollout (potentially longer than 3 days for feature visibility)

    Impact:
    All end users

    Action:
    Change management suggested/FYI

    More Information 
    Help Center


    Note: all launches are applicable to all Google Apps editions unless otherwise noted

    Launch release calendar
    Launch detail categories
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    GANT suits up for global growth with Google Apps for Work

    Posted by Kenneth Karlsson, IT Manager, GANT AB

    Editor's note: Today we hear from Kenneth Karlsson, IT Manager for GANT AB, a multinational clothing company based in Sweden. From its Swedish headquarters and three overseas subsidiaries, GANT coordinates 50 suppliers with 40 franchise partners worldwide to bring its brand of wearable fashion to more than 700 stores around the globe. Read why GANT chose Google Apps for Work to bring this global network together.

    When I started work here in the 1980s, GANT was far from being the major multinational brand it is today. And though we’ve always been expanding, we’ve grown at a much faster pace since 2009 – the year we upgraded our communications and transitioned to Google Apps for Work. Since then, GANT and its partners more than doubled our number of stores, opening an additional 392 new stores spread across the world.


    We initially switched to Google Apps to replace an email solution that was expensive, overloaded and incompatible with the range of operating systems we used. And with our subsidiaries in Sweden, the US, the UK and France effectively running as separate organisations and without essential collaborative abilities, including shared calendar access, we also had to find a way to come together if we wanted to compete globally. I was convinced that a web-based email platform would be the cost-effective, forward-thinking solution we needed. In 2009, the only major company to offer that was Google, and they’ve stayed ahead of that curve ever since.

    It took our small IT team just three months to roll Google Apps for Work out across four countries. First, we ran a pilot programme in Sweden with 20 users, assisted by Avalon Solutions, the IT consultancy that enabled our switch to Google Apps. Then we deployed 400 accounts over two months by holding training sessions with small groups. People who already used web-based private email required minimal training, and because it’s a web-based system, we simply sent out log-in information instead of installing a client on every computer. Now we’re running 1,000 Google accounts and have decommissioned our expensive email server. That means we’re saving on hardware maintenance and cut out the hassle of handling spam or chasing people to free up space by deleting their emails. Factor in cheaper licenses and zero software installation costs over the past six years, and we’re saving a huge amount of money.

    Google Apps for Work is uniquely suitable for doing business on a global scale. It’s not just about relying on web-based mobility to access all of our files and emails anywhere, anytime. Because Google Apps works through a browser, we no longer have compatibility problems with our 40 independent franchise partners, each of which has its own IT setup. Assigning single-sign-on accounts to those partners gives them controlled access to our intranet and Drive. Using Drive lets us centralise administration from our Stockholm office and provides a shared hub to consolidate accounting and retail information across all of our subsidiaries. We use Docs and Sheets globally to manage orders and deliveries with our 50 suppliers in China, Portugal and Spain, while local colleagues can work alongside each other on a single document to craft swift and thorough reports. And Google’s size and reputation gives us peace of mind about its security and stability that we would not get from smaller cloud systems.

    By using Google Apps for Work, we enjoy constant and automatic system improvements. New functions regularly appear on Drive, so we’re always ahead of the game as the marketplace evolves. For example, in 2009, Hangouts and tablets didn’t exist. Now outside every meeting room we have an Android tablet linked to Calendar so we can see who’s booked them, while inside the rooms we have Chromebox for meetings to enable Hangout video conferencing. With another IT solution, after six years we’d already be looking for a replacement. With Google Apps for Work, we’re still ahead of the game.

    Deli XL explores fresh markets for fresh food with Google Apps for Work

    Posted by Rene van Gelderen, CIO at Deli XL

    Editor's note: Today we hear from Rene van Gelderen, CIO at Deli XL, a wholesale food supplier and distributor based in Ede, The Netherlands. Deli XL’s 2,000 employees work round the clock, seven days a week to deliver fresh groceries to the country’s restaurants, hospitals, retirement homes and company canteens. Read how Deli XL is using Google Apps for Work to lead change in their business and connect their nationwide team.


    At Deli XL, what you order today, we deliver tomorrow, whether it’s fresh fish, purple mustard or any of the other 70,000 items we have available for ordering. With 700,000 order lines each week from 20,000 customers nationwide, we need to work together efficiently to keep this 24-hour promise.


    And when we decided to focus even more on hotels and restaurants and shift to the ecommerce model to adapt to client demands and changing business needs, we needed the tools that could help us do that even better.

    Google Apps helped us overhaul our business model with minimal disruption. Our old email system was functional, but too slow to satisfy the demands of ecommerce. Gmail is fast, remotely accessible, and, along with Calendar, makes it simple to work together across our 15 sites. Google+ was also invaluable during this time. We knew rolling out complex new structures in our financial- and warehouse-management systems was going to cause significant stress. So as we deployed new systems, we posted constant updates on Google+ so everyone could keep track and discover the new tools together.

    Now we use Google+ to solve problems in all areas of Deli XL, business and IT problems alike. For example, one Saturday morning, an account manager reported an issue with our ecommerce system. Previously, she would have called the weekend service desk and waited until Monday morning for a response. By posting the issue on Google+, I could immediately see that it was serious and brought our offshore developers in India into the discussion. Using Google Translate to interpret our Dutch, they had a solution ready for Monday morning, saving 1,000 customers from experiencing major disruption.

    Google+ is far more effective than spending time on the phone: basic IT problems can be solved in seconds by non-IT staff; account managers share advice on how to fill unclear customer orders, and employees air difficult questions that might otherwise never be asked. After one major problem, during which we posted frequent updates on Google+, I carried out a survey. In the past, similar situations would always elicit complaints about communication, but for this survey, 97% of respondents expressed strong satisfaction with how we communicated during the incident.

    Each of our 1,000 desk workers has a Google account, and now we’re connecting our 500 drivers and 500 order pickers, too. This opens up tremendous new possibilities for us. On every job, drivers keep track of the crates used to carry goods. Rather than do this by hand and deliver the slips to the Finance department, they’ll be able to keep track of the crates in Forms and eliminate the paper trail. Also, by having drivers check in and out of destinations on Forms, we’ll be able to tell customers where their delivery is and if it will be late, at a fraction of the cost of a GPS solution.


    Over ninety percent of our order lines now come from online business, and we’ve made the transition into the hotel, restaurant and cafe market without any loss in revenues. In addition to savings due to faster troubleshooting, stronger cross-team communications and delivery tracking, our CFO calculates that using Drive storage will save up to €100,000 a year, once we retire our old file servers. And behind the numbers, all the extra communication is making us more of a team: with a Hangout group on each company site, no one needs to miss out when we share birthday cake.

    Google Apps for Work helps deliver projected savings of £500,000 for The Cordant Group

    Posted by Craig Bell, IT Service Delivery Director at The Cordant Group

    Editor's note: Today we hear from Craig Bell, IT Service Delivery Director at The Cordant Group, a specialist recruitment and integrated services company employing up to 50,000 staff during peak times, and turning over £750 million a year. Here, Craig tells us how Google Apps for Work has not only helped them work smarter and more flexibly thanks to a business-wide rollout, but has also helped deliver a projected savings of £500,000 to the company’s bottom line in just a year.

    It may have grown since it was founded in 1957, but ours is still a family business, and one that values the input of every individual, whether they’re one of our 2,500 permanent employees, or one of our tens of thousands of seasonal workers. But with so many staff, we realised we needed an IT solution that would answer the needs of each person, rather than asking each of them to answer to our inflexible IT system. Our solution is Google Apps for Work, which has transformed the way we operate our business at every level.

    With 200 locations nationwide, as well as offices in Germany and Australia, we launched our rollout of Google Apps for Work so our staff can work as a team, wherever they are. Gmail gives access to our accounts whether in the office, at home or on the road — and the fact that it’s multi-device compatible means no more lugging laptops around just to check our inboxes. The flexibility and immediacy it provides ensures that important messages don’t fall through the cracks, and now we’re so speedy and effective with email communications that we send and receive up to 16 million emails each month.

    Hangouts also allows us to communicate (face-to-face in this case) at any time, no matter where any of us are based. With over a thousand Hangouts happening across the Group every month, Hangouts have become so crucial to the way we run our business and communicate with each other that we now often use it to conduct interviews for IT recruits. It’s a great way to asses how intuitively candidates use technology tools, in particular Google Apps. Using Hangouts for interviews also benefits our bottom line: we now spend an average of 25% less time on interviews for IT team members, simply because we don’t have to spend time on things like collecting interviewees from reception and making them cups of tea.

    As a recruitment company, we have a frequent turnover of staff. Having forward-looking and familiar tools helps us appeal to the very best new recruits. Web-based mail, instant messaging and online communities like Google+, are cloud-based tools that younger generations have grown up with — and are now ready to work with. This familiarity allows new starters to work efficiently from the moment they log on and saves us time and money on training. Plus Google Apps tools are also incredibly easy to scale up or down.

    Knowledge is also easy for us to scale now. We share documents hosted on Google Drive almost half a million times every month and add 125,000 new files each month. And everything we do is reusable rather than disposable. Our own internal teams can manage and roll out successful solutions to every one of our 200 locations without needing armies of external IT service providers to support us, a change that along with keeping specialist knowledge in-house and doing things more efficiently has played a significant part in reducing our operational expenditure by hundreds of thousands of pounds each year.

    With the virtual nature of Google for Work products, we can also keep costs and downtime at a minimum when relocating to new offices as we grow. Google’s ability to integrate data and systems to the cloud so seamlessly means shifting office spaces and acquiring new companies is now more economically viable. When considering the total cost of acquisition for a subsidiary business, we look at how easily a business can be “Googlised.” Using Chrome OS allows us to almost instantly integrate existing businesses with often outdated legacy apps into our Group. This has opened up a host of opportunities that we otherwise would not have taken because of prohibitive IT costs.

    In just one year, Google Apps for Work has completely changed the way we operate, which says a lot coming from a large and established business. As part of our company-wide “New World” IT rollout, we estimate that the new tools will enable us to save about £500,000, thanks to a combination of lower licensing costs, reducing capital expenditure by purchasing 2,000 compatible devices at more than half the previous cost of replacement, minimising use of external suppliers and relying more heavily on in-house skills and efficiencies. And there’s no doubt that we’ve also saved and earned a whole lot more thanks to working smarter with IT-led solutions.

    Georgia schools revamp old processes and innovate using Google for Education

    Posted by David Harrington and Brent Sarver, Google for Education team

    Editor's note: Georgia schools are seeing great success with Google for Education. We talked to educators and administrators in Georgia to reflect on how technology has helped them innovate and create more efficient processes. From creating more efficient ways for parents to pick their children up from school, to enabling more efficient coaching on the baseball field, technology has improved the student, teacher and parent experience across the state. To learn more about Google solutions for education, join us for a Hangout on Air focused on the next phase of content in the classroom on February 23rd at 2pm ET / 11am PT.

    Many schools are replacing former processes with more efficient ways to personalize learning and provide students with the skills to be successful. That level of innovation requires teachers and staff to think about how they can use technology in new ways. Schools in Georgia are using Google Apps for Education to drive innovation in small areas that ultimately inspire new ways of thinking across the district. We’d like to shed light on how schools have transformed their old processes using technology.

    Transforming lectures into project-based learning 


    Old: For many students, elementary and high school involves listening to a teacher lecture, reading a textbook and taking tests. This common approach to learning leaves out the interactive elements that often help students learn best.

    New: The Center for Design and Technology, a project-based STEM program at Lanier High School in Gwinnett County, gives students real-life experiences to apply the skills they’ve learned. Every student works on six team projects per year, and every team creates a website using Google Sites, with links to Google Docs, Sheet and Slides used for team planning and collaboration. “Google Apps helps students learn communication skills, collaborate with teammates and think creatively,” says Mike Reilly, technology teacher at Lanier High School.

    The program has helped teachers and students learn outside of the classroom and expand the skills they’re most interested in developing. For example, a team of four students worked with video editor Walter Biscardi to create a 3D model of a disease spread by flies, which appeared in the PBS movie “Dark Forest Black Fly.” They shared ideas in virtual brainstorming sessions via Google Hangouts and collaborated in real time using Google Docs.

    Bringing instant communication to an ineffective system 


    Old: Picking up students from school is often a slow, disorganized process since schools often have thousands of students to manage and communication isn’t always the smoothest between all staff involved.

    New: At Forsyth County Schools (case study), teachers and staff are using Google Apps beyond the classroom to help make the after-school pick-up queue more efficient. In the past, parking lot attendants who escort students to their cars and cafeteria attendants who supervise students didn’t have clear lines of communication. The principal turned to Google Sheets as the solution to increase communication.

    All students are assigned a number in a shared spreadsheet. When a parent picks up her child, she displays the student’s number on the windshield, and the parking attendant uses a tablet to flag on the screen in the cafeteria that it’s time for the student to go to the pick-up area. Introducing new technology improved real-time communication and inspired teachers districtwide to talk about innovative ways to use Google Apps to improve processes.

    Creating a more streamlined, collaborative process both in the classroom and out on the field 


    Old: Monitoring and recording sports team performance can be a time-consuming and tedious process when it’s done the old-fashioned way with a notebook and pencil.

    New: With Google for Education tools, coaches at Jeff Davis County Schools (case study) can record and keep track of the high school baseball team’s pitch speeds and number of pitches to make sure a pitcher isn’t throwing too many pitches. A member of the tech staff reads the pitch speed from a radar gun and enters the number into a Google Sheet using a Chromebook. Another Chromebook is connected to a TV in the dugout, so the coaches can monitor the speed and number of pitches thrown. With the sharing feature, the tech staff and coaches are able to view the same information that’s being edited in real time.

    Coaches now have more information to make more informed decisions about their players. “If a pitcher has thrown too many pitches or hit pitch speed begins to decrease, the coach can determine if the pitcher needs to be taken out of the game and a relief is sent in,” says Keith Osburn, technology and special programs director at Jeff Davis County Schools.
    Coach at Jeff Davis keeping track of pitch speeds on a Chromebook




    Schools are continuing to reinvent old processes to provide students with a 21st century education. Check out more inspirational stories from schools.

    We’ve heard great stories from many of you about how you’re using technology to do amazing things in your schools, so we're going across the U.S. to see for ourselves! Check out the map below to see where we’ll head next. We’d love to hear what’s happening in your state, so please share your story on Twitter or Google+ and tag us (@GoogleEdu) or include the #GoogleEdu hashtag.

    Georgia schools revamp old processes and innovate using Google for Education

    Posted by David Harrington and Brent Sarver, Google for Education team

    (Cross-posted on the Google for Education Blog.)

    Editor's note: Georgia schools are seeing great success with Google for Education. We talked to educators and administrators in Georgia to reflect on how technology has helped them innovate and create more efficient processes. From creating more efficient ways for parents to pick their children up from school, to enabling more efficient coaching on the baseball field, technology has improved the student, teacher and parent experience across the state. To learn more about Google solutions for education, join us for a Hangout on Air focused on the next phase of content in the classroom on February 23rd at 2pm ET / 11am PT.

    Many schools are replacing former processes with more efficient ways to personalize learning and provide students with the skills to be successful. That level of innovation requires teachers and staff to think about how they can use technology in new ways. Schools in Georgia are using Google Apps for Education to drive innovation in small areas that ultimately inspire new ways of thinking across the district. We’d like to shed light on how schools have transformed their old processes using technology.


    Transforming lectures into project-based learning 


    Old: For many students, elementary and high school involves listening to a teacher lecture, reading a textbook and taking tests. This common approach to learning leaves out the interactive elements that often help students learn best.

    New: The Center for Design and Technology, a project-based STEM program at Lanier High School in Gwinnett County, gives students real-life experiences to apply the skills they’ve learned. Every student works on six team projects per year, and every team creates a website using Google Sites, with links to Google Docs, Sheet and Slides used for team planning and collaboration. “Google Apps helps students learn communication skills, collaborate with teammates and think creatively,” says Mike Reilly, technology teacher at Lanier High School.

    The program has helped teachers and students learn outside of the classroom and expand the skills they’re most interested in developing. For example, a team of four students worked with video editor Walter Biscardi to create a 3D model of a disease spread by flies, which appeared in the PBS movie “Dark Forest Black Fly.” They shared ideas in virtual brainstorming sessions via Google Hangouts and collaborated in real time using Google Docs.


    Bringing instant communication to an ineffective system 


    Old: Picking up students from school is often a slow, disorganized process since schools often have thousands of students to manage and communication isn’t always the smoothest between all staff involved.

    New: At Forsyth County Schools (case study), teachers and staff are using Google Apps beyond the classroom to help make the after-school pick-up queue more efficient. In the past, parking lot attendants who escort students to their cars and cafeteria attendants who supervise students didn’t have clear lines of communication. The principal turned to Google Sheets as the solution to increase communication.

    All students are assigned a number in a shared spreadsheet. When a parent picks up her child, she displays the student’s number on the windshield, and the parking attendant uses a tablet to flag on the screen in the cafeteria that it’s time for the student to go to the pick-up area. Introducing new technology improved real-time communication and inspired teachers districtwide to talk about innovative ways to use Google Apps to improve processes.

    Creating a more streamlined, collaborative process both in the classroom and out on the field 


    Old: Monitoring and recording sports team performance can be a time-consuming and tedious process when it’s done the old-fashioned way with a notebook and pencil.

    New: With Google for Education tools, coaches at Jeff Davis County Schools (case study) can record and keep track of the high school baseball team’s pitch speeds and number of pitches to make sure a pitcher isn’t throwing too many pitches. A member of the tech staff reads the pitch speed from a radar gun and enters the number into a Google Sheet using a Chromebook. Another Chromebook is connected to a TV in the dugout, so the coaches can monitor the speed and number of pitches thrown. With the sharing feature, the tech staff and coaches are able to view the same information that’s being edited in real time.

    Coaches now have more information to make more informed decisions about their players. “If a pitcher has thrown too many pitches or hit pitch speed begins to decrease, the coach can determine if the pitcher needs to be taken out of the game and a relief is sent in,” says Keith Osburn, technology and special programs director at Jeff Davis County Schools.
    Coach at Jeff Davis keeping track of pitch speeds on a Chromebook








    Schools are continuing to reinvent old processes to provide students with a 21st century education. Check out more inspirational stories from schools.

    We’ve heard great stories from many of you about how you’re using technology to do amazing things in your schools, so we're going across the U.S. to see for ourselves! Check out the map below to see where we’ll head next. We’d love to hear what’s happening in your state, so please share your story on Twitter or Google+ and tag us (@GoogleEdu) or include the #GoogleEdu hashtag.

    Phase2 brings its “everywhere” teams closer together, saving time and money with Chromebox for meetings

    Posted by Frank Febbraro, CTO, Phase2 Technology

    Editor's note: Today’s guest post is by Frank Febbraro, CTO of Phase2 Technology, which helps clients such as Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer and Harvard Business School manage the way content is created, shared and experienced online. See how Phase2 Technology saves $3,000 a day and more than 100 hours a week by using Chromebox for meetings.


    From the day we launched, we designed Phase2 Technology as a company that welcomed people who didn’t work on-site. In fact, we like to say we have five locations: New York, Washington, D.C., Portland, San Francisco and “everywhere” — a solid 25 percent of our employees work remotely. Because of this, we build our teams without worrying about where people are. A project lead in Portland might team up with people in Austin or Oklahoma City.

    The most talented people don’t necessarily live near our offices, but that shouldn’t stand in the way of giving clients our best work. We rely on technology like Chromebox for meetings to bring down the barriers that get in the way of distributed teams working together.
    Before we discovered Chromeboxes, the audiovisual situation for our meetings seemed like an insurmountable barrier.

    Every video conference began as a comedy of errors: if we scheduled a half-hour meeting, we had to build in 10 minutes to struggle with the AV setup. We tried cobbling together configurations of cameras and mics, but nothing created the one-click system we needed. There were too many settings for employees to manage and too much tinkering around to get the meetings going. Plus, every room had a different system and settings. With five or so people in every meeting losing ten minutes on AV setup struggles, and those people meeting with others several times a day, we wasted dozens of hours every week. Over the course of a year, this translated into tens of thousands of dollars of lost time spent not delivering value to our clients.

    All this changed when we brought Chromebox for meetings to eight conference rooms among our four offices. There’s no learning curve: people walk into a room and click one button on the Chromebox remote to start the meeting. We already use Google Hangouts and Google Calendar, so Chromebox fits in with the tools we know. We now work more fluidly, since we can start ad hoc meetings without worrying about cameras, mics and settings.

    Chromebox for meetings saves time for our teams as they meet and also benefits our IT team. The management console lets us choose how the Chromeboxes operate, and those settings apply to every room and every meeting. Compared to conferencing systems that cost several thousand dollars per room, Chromebox for meetings costs much less and is much easier to set up and use. Achieving this ease at scale is critical for us — each employee might do as many as 10 Hangouts a day; multiply that by 140 people, and we’re spending about 450 hours on Hangouts daily.

    Efficiency and time management are especially critical for a business like ours, which makes money by billing hourly and delivering excellent, efficient client service. We’ve reduced our IT costs for maintaining meeting rooms to just about zero. We used to spend about four hours a month per room on maintaining our old AV setups. We now spend about one hour per month total on all rooms — from 32 hours a month on maintenance down to just one hour.

    We can do more with so much less now. Better meetings help us get rid of distractions so we can get right down to business, no matter where in the world our teams are.

    California schools inspire students and teachers to keep their “heads in the cloud”

    Posted by Posted by Alexandrea Alphonso, Eileen Huang, Angela Larkin and Mark Renne, Google for Education

    Editor's note: California schools are seeing great success with Google for Education. We talked to educators and administrators to reflect on how technology has changed what it means to teach and learn in California. From encouraging strategic thinking to improving writing skills, technology has enhanced the learning experience for students across the state.

    For California students, backpacks are getting lighter as schools turn to Chromebooks, Google Apps for Education and cloud-based education apps in place of textbooks, pencils and paper. This new approach to learning is helping students improve their writing and critical thinking skills, while helping teachers and staff increase productivity. Inspired by how schools are innovating with cloud technology across the region, we’re highlighting a few of the successes in California schools:

    1. Using the cloud to improve writing quality and creativity 


    While writing is predominantly a solitary activity, timely feedback is crucial for helping students to improve their skills. Between 2010 and 2014, the administration at Del Mar Union School District in San Diego introduced Chromebooks and Google Apps for Education to all third through sixth grade classes at all eight schools throughout the district. With these new tools, Del Mar’s staff has seen students’ writing quality dramatically improve. With access to the cloud, students can easily share their assignments with other students and teachers to receive feedback immediately. By storing documents in Google Drive, students can also rest assured that their most recent work is saved and secure.

    This new model of classroom collaboration inspires students to experiment and take more risks, knowing that they’ll receive feedback from teachers before getting a final grade. “Students’ vocabulary has increased. Now they’re using ‘million dollar words’ instead of ‘five dollar words’,” says fourth-grade teacher Stephanie Sullins. “They’re not afraid of making a mistake.”

    Chromebooks and Google Apps have also been vital in meeting rigorous Common Core State Standards for writing. “The number of students reaching the top score on the state writing tests dramatically increased after the introduction of Chromebooks,” Sullins says.

    2. Using the cloud to create an interactive educational environment


    Los Angeles’ KIPP Academy of Opportunity and KIPP LA Prep discovered that the ability to work together, aided by cloud-based tools, pushes students to think more critically. As part of Google’s pilot program that began in spring 2011, the school district introduced 400 Chromebooks — a number that has now grown to 5,000 Chromebooks with hundreds more added each year. KIPP LA decreased their costs by deploying Chromebooks because they no longer needed to purchase expensive software licenses, servers, security solutions and maintenance plans for each device.

    The educational impact for students has been notable. There has been a big shift from direct instruction and memorization of notes to an interactive classroom. Now, students work with one another on projects and share information through Google Hangouts and Google Drive.

    “Students create and collaborate, rather than memorize and regurgitate,” said James Sanders, a former social science teacher at KIPP LA Schools. “It’s a better, more authentic model for learning.” As one of Sander’s students explains: “We walk into a social studies class, grab a computer, and check out Mr. Sanders’s blog, then we follow the tasks he sets.”

    3. Using the cloud to inspire teachers and students to think outside the box 


    The Dublin Unified School District’s teachers and staff needed a better solution for communication and for helping students stay organized. They piloted Google Apps for Education and Google Classroom, and received rave reviews from parents, teachers and students. Now, teachers, students and staff enjoy having one unified platform for email, calendar and document sharing — accessible anytime, from any device.

    Technology has become deeply entrenched in Dublin schools. Dublin High School includes among its student body, Hania Guiagoussou, the youngest recipient to-date of Oracle’s Duke’s Choice Award for java programming. At Dublin High School, Guiagoussou was one of the many students who participated in the school’s computer programming class. Now, her first project, WaterSaver, is an award-winning, Java-based system that intelligently controls water sources. Guiagoussou’s story is one of many where technology has inspired a student to reach farther than she ever expected. 

    Collaboration and sharing in the cloud has made it infinitely easier for schools to exchange information. Using Google Classroom, a student can share writing assignments with a teacher and receive instant feedback. With a few taps, a teacher can share lesson plans or curriculum ideas with her colleague using the Drive mobile app. Administrators know who’s attending the next staff meeting by glancing at a Calendar invite. California schools are doing incredible things by taking a leap toward the cloud.

    Check out more inspirational stories from schools.

    We’ve heard great stories from many of you about how you’re using technology to do amazing things in your schools, so we're going across the U.S. to see for ourselves! Check out the map below to see where we’ve been. We’d love to hear what’s happening in your state, so please share your story on Twitter or Google+ and tag us (@GoogleForEdu) or include the #GoogleEdu hashtag.