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Posted by Milton Burgese, Head of Education, Google Brazil

Brazil is one of the fastest-growing countries in the world, and the state of São Paulo is the economic powerhouse underneath it all. The future of this continued growth rests in the hands of its youth. The state of São Paulo has more than four million students, 5,000 schools and a community of almost 300,000 teachers and staff.

To equip future generations with the skills to succeed in tomorrow’s workforce, we are partnering with the Department of Education of the State of São Paulo to provide and deploy Google Apps for Education across the state, for free.

“We are so excited to be bringing Google Apps for Education to more than four million students of São Paulo,” said Geraldo Alckmin, Governor of São Paulo. “Finally, classes will go beyond the four walls of the school.” We are working to deploy Google Apps for Education to all 4 million students within the year.

Milton Burgese, Head of Education, Google Brazil, speaks about the partnership

The municipality of São Caetano do Sul, a thought leader across the country and known for both quality of education and life, announced this week that they are excited to be going Google at an event hosted in São Caetano. We will be deploying Google Apps for Education in 67 schools there, reaching 19,000 students and 1,500 teachers.

“I'm sure that the learning process of our children and youths will be improved by the support of new technological tools that are being brought to our schools by Google” said Paulo Nunes Pinheiro, Mayor of São Caetano do Sul.

We’ve also partnered with the Escola de Formação de Profesores (EFAP), a professional development facility, to train all of São Paulo's 300,000 teachers on the use of Google Apps for Education. Helping them master the new technology will help them communicate, collaborate and partner even better with their schools and students. As Herman Jacobus Cornelius Voorwald, the São Paulo State Secretary of Education, told us, “If we want to change our country, we must use education… We need to dedicate time to helping teachers learn by showing them different ways to embrace technology.”

We believe in the power of the web to help people discover, connect, and learn. And we’re thrilled to see Sao Paolo and São Caetano do Sul join Malaysia, the City of Boston and a growing number of other forward-thinking districts around the world who are embracing the web and technology to drive a new, better future for our students.

Posted by Lee Wang, COO, WeddingWire

Editor's note: In honor of Valentine’s Day, and in the spirit of Cupid’s arrow, today we hear from a business that’s in the business of weddings. Our guest blogger is Lee Wang, COO of WeddingWire, a wedding technology marketplace that connects couples planning nuptials with wedding professionals. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.


Our goal at WeddingWire is to make wedding planning fun and simple. We connect engaged couples to event merchants, provide them with consumer reviews, online planning tools, and help them stay organized as they plan their big day. We also help event merchants manage their workflow and their business more efficiently through our SaaS business management tools. Using our suite of productivity tools, event merchants can generate new prospects, book appointments, manage their social media, create engaging content, and send digital contracts. They can even collect payment, all without leaving WeddingWire.

We recognize the importance of making work simple, exciting, and enjoyable for our employees at WeddingWire to help power our success. Google Apps plays a big part in that. We’ve used Google Apps to help run our entire IT infrastructure since 2006, when it was a beta product. We were also in beta, with four co-founders working out of our CEO’s pink living room. Today, our organization has grown from four to more than 320 employees.

As we scale our organization, we are often in need of new ways to help keep our team connected and productive. We have WeddingWire team members working around the world, from Los Angeles to Raleigh to international locations such as Brasov, Romania. We rely on Google Hangouts to ensure that everyone from Los Angeles to Brasov can participate in company-wide meetings. Google Apps makes it easy to switch from a physical meeting to a virtual video meeting since Google Calendar and Google Hangouts are so seamlessly integrated. Whether for daily use or for difficult weather-related situations, our essential business functions can always carry on.

Lee Wang and the executive team

We believe that constant thought sharing and collaboration makes us a smarter company. Google Apps helps us realize that philosophy online. In the office, we have an open seating plan and lots of common areas, so employees are can have more and better conversations. The ability to instantly collaborate with Google Docs in real-time to solicit feedback or edits on an idea, project or article, makes us work better and smarter as a team. When we recently rebranded our flagship website (WeddingWire.com), we created a master Google Doc where key stakeholders across the entire organization could add their updates and comments. Everyone from website developers and marketers to sales reps and executives could jump in and know the latest status and sentiment at any time.

Google Apps gives our employees a way to work together better from office, at home, or across the world. It gives us the opportunity to be spontaneous and team-oriented, and frees us up to make work more fun, for us and for our customers. When your job is helping people in love plan the biggest – and most exciting – day of their lives and empowering the businesses of those who serve them, you want to do it right.

Posted by Tia Lendo, Google for Education Team

Today is Digital Learning Day - a time to celebrate the incredible ways schools use digital tools to help students learn. As a former 4th grade teacher, I'm constantly blown away by the ways today’s teachers have embraced technology. What is happening in today’s classrooms (collaborative writing, virtual field trips) seemed light years away just 10 years ago.

In honor of Digital Learning Day, we'd like to highlight a few benefits that teachers using Google for Education often mention: more powerful sharing, greater student ownership, new insights into the learning process, and connections beyond the school walls.

More powerful sharing
Google Certified Teachers like education trainer Jack West tell us about the transformative power of sharing with Google Docs. Jack says, “The essence of what we do as 21st Century teachers has been distilled by the visionary educators at Point England, New Zealand. We want our students to (1) learn, (2) create and (3) share. Until digital tools like Google Docs came around, it was difficult to help students share their work beyond the other students in their class.”

Students at Passaic High School work together on a timeline of the French Revolution

Greater student ownership
At East Leyden High School in Chicago, teacher Katie Diebold has found her students are more motivated when using digital tools. In her “Exploring Tech” class, she taught a unit on transportation. In the past she had her students do research and then make posters. But this year she had them use dynamic apps like Stupeflix, a video editing tool in the Chrome Web Store, to deliver their projects. Katie explained, “With Chromebooks we can provide students with more choices in how they do their assignments and learn in flexible ways. Students have a range of different tools they are able to use when completing projects to demonstrate what they have learned.”

At Passaic City Public Schools in New Jersey, the district is also using Google Apps and Chromebooks as a centerpiece of their 1:1 model. Even in the early days of their 1:1 program last year the district was seeing impact. Joshua Koen, District Coordinator of Technology, said that “the most obvious benefit of using Chromebooks at Passaic is that students can take an active part in developing their own lesson plans. Rather than a teacher dictating facts to their class, the students can build their own learning experience, working together to solve problems.”

New insights into student learning
Digital tools give teachers views into the student learning process that were never available before. A few months ago I visited a high school English classroom in which the teacher was “dropping in” on the papers students were writing with Google Docs. We opened up one student’s document and we saw that she had pasted the feedback from her last assignment as well as the scoring rubric into the top of her current paper. The teacher was impressed and immediately added a comment into the document praising her approach.

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Dr. Dan Maas, Chief Information Officer for Littleton Public Schools, a school district just south of Denver, Colorado, with 15,000 K-12 students across 13 elementary schools, 4 middle schools, 3 high schools, several alternative programs, a preschool, and 2 charter schools. Check out their case study to learn more.

What motivated Littleton Public Schools to move to Google Apps?
Students today are growing up in a different educational world. Online tools have fundamentally changed how today’s kids learn, interact and work with each other. Moving to Google Apps was a natural step in creating a modern learning environment for our students, because the tools are intuitive and familiar to them. Before using Google Apps, the district was hosting email servers for teachers and staff, but had no collaboration tools and homework was done largely by emailing attachments or making paper submissions, a cumbersome process. Our top priority was to address these challenges.

LPS buildings average 50 years in age, but with Google, the learning is in the cloud.

How is the district using Google Apps now, nearly two years after deployment?
Today, every Littleton staff member, teacher and student in 4th grade and above has a Google Apps account — some schools have even started introducing their kindergartners to the Google tools. Adoption has been incredible across the board: during the 2011-2012 school year, Littleton students created more than 200,000 new Google Docs, and by the spring of 2013 they were averaging over 20,000 each month.

Are there any teachers or departments in particular that have embraced Google Apps in innovative ways?
I'm inspired by literally hundreds of classrooms in our district and how they're using technology to help their students learn. Katie Christie’s 5th grade class at Runyon Elementary School, for example, is using Apps in a particularly impressive way as part of the "Inspired Writing" initiative. The curriculum revolves around a Google Site that houses learning objectives, resources and videos, assignments, student and teacher work. Mrs. Christie posts assignments daily on a Google Calendar, which is embedded into the class’s Google Site and can even be added to a student or parent’s personal Google account. Google Docs lets students do different kinds of creative homework, including using Google Drawings to creating flowcharts for a book report and relying on Presentations to collectively create and speak to a deck about astronomy. It’s validating for us to know that Google holds her work in equally high regard — Mrs. Christie was recognized as a Google Certified teacher last spring.

Even second graders are using Apps for writing projects like pen pals among multiple schools, where kids don't write together several times a year, but several times every day.

Are you seeing any cost savings from using Google Apps?
We’re saving more than $42,000 each year with Apps, since we no longer have to maintain email servers, storage or licensing software. That’s not even including all the time we’re saving our IT team, since they no longer have to waste hours clearing out full email inboxes and resolving downtime issues.

What are you personally most proud of when you look back at how Littleton has changed since moving to Google Apps?
I love seeing how the technology empowers our students. Google Apps are great equalizers – regardless of their home situation, every student has the opportunity to learn with Apps. These tools, paired with the skills students gain in school, are universal and will serve them for the rest of their lives. It’s so inspiring to me and all our teachers to see the students light up and become masters of their own direction.

LPS students create 20,000 Google Docs every month as a normal part of their learning.

One cannot underestimate the power of collaboration. Any given feature set of a software or cloud application will evolve over time, so the specific skills are not as important. But the habits of mind that one develops by working with collaborative documents are truly different than what a 20th century education encouraged. Collaboration means inclusion; inclusion means more brain power applied to a problem; more brain power means better solutions; and better solutions produced by an inclusive process means better overall understanding. What more could any educator hope for?

Posted by Danny Attias, Chief Information Officer for The Grass Roots Group

Editor's note: Today's guest blogger is Danny Attias, Chief Information Officer for The Grass Roots Group, a U.K.-based global performance improvement company. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Grass Roots helps brands increase sales, improve customer service, build loyalty and grow productivity. We have over 2,100 clients globally, including major brands including Asda, BMW, Canon, Ford, McDonalds and Vodafone. Our 1,000 employees work in 26 offices across 15 countries, and need to share best practices and knowledge with each other regularly. Communication is at the heart of Grass Roots’ success. It helps us gain a deep understanding of our clients’ needs and become their trusted advisors.

Our five on-premise legacy Microsoft Exchange email systems were a constant challenge to maintain and a real barrier to collaboration and communication in our organisation. We had trouble finding contact details and reaching out to others in the business. Also, our aging data storage hardware infrastructure experienced regular outages that disrupted internal and external communications. We realised we could make the case for an overhaul, so after a comprehensive review of the market we decided to move to Google Apps for Business with the help of our Google Apps deployment partner Appscare. They became an extension of our own team and helped us understand how to get the most from all the features.

We decided to make the move to Google Apps rather than any competitive offering because Google provided the complete and comprehensive range of communication tools that met all of our company’s needs. We have email available online from laptop and mobile with vast mailbox space, online access to shared documents and calendars in the cloud, instant messaging, online video conferencing and a BYOD offering with integrated solutions that working brilliantly on both iOS and Android. By moving to a mobile, cloud, consumer platform with all the enterprise controls Google provides, we eliminated the costs and disruption of on-site maintenance, and the hefty licence fees of our on-premise email systems.

For many of our employees, Google Apps is revolutionising their team and project work. Teams are more organised because everything – including timelines, budgets and progress reports are stored transparently with the latest updates available for all to see online. Also, our employees no longer need to log on with a VPN to get to the resources they need to do their jobs. They can just log on securely using two-factor authentication with their mobile device into their Google Apps account.

A great example of the transformation we’re seeing with Google Apps is at Cyclescheme, our subsidiary that specialises in supplying bikes for employees of enterprises. Real-time collaboration with Google Docs became the epicentre for information sharing when the company redesigned its website. The rich, real-time collaboration capabilities of Google Apps reduced the time taken to design, approve and take the site to production weeks ahead of schedule. At the core of this process was the Cyclescheme team project plan which shared a central Google Spreadsheet with everyone involved with the project, including external suppliers. Everyone added updates on plans and progress, making the whole process more transparent and streamlined.

We are inspired by how our new tools are producing changes to the way our people organise and collaborate, and we are impressed with how Google Apps is proving to be a catalyst for organisational change. Based on the journey so far, we’re confident that Google Apps will support Grass Roots as we become an even more united, efficient and collaborative business.

Posted by Posted by Prasad Vootla, Senior Director of Engineering Operations at Snapdeal.com

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Prasad Vootla, Senior Director of Engineering Operations at Snapdeal.com. Read the full case study here, then see what other organisations that have gone Google have to say.


Snapdeal.com is India’s leading online retail marketplace. From home furnishings and fashion, to electronics and sporting equipment, we make sure there is something to delight every one of our 20 million subscribers.

As an online business, having efficient email and collaboration tools is critical for the success of our business operations. Most transactions require cross-team involvement, but before moving to Google it was challenging to coordinate this; some team members were on different email domains as a result of our legacy system and our teams sought a simple, single channel for communication. We also used to send lots of large attachments which took up our email storage.

Our search for a new mail solution began when employees told us they were spending most of their time clearing emails because of storage limitations. With the help of Premier Google Enterprise Partner MediaAgility, we implemented Google Apps for Business. Gmail stood out as the most reliable and easy to use option because we not only get 30GBs of space to cater for high email volumes, but it also offered the stability, high performance and cost-effectiveness we were looking for.

The collaboration features built into Gmail have proved to be a real bonus too. Google Hangouts — which give us a way to instant message one another and have multi-person video conferences — have expanded the tools we have to interact and collaborate. We now have group discussions within teams and across departments when people are in different places.

Teams also now use group emails to coordinate across departments, and instead of emailing files back and forward, we simultaneously edit and collaborate in Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets. These tools have actually reduced number of meetings we need to have, and because Google Calendar gives us visibility into team members’ schedules, the process to setup meetings and avoid clashing schedules has become faster.

The benefits of moving to Google aren’t just being felt by employees. Our IT team now has improved our overall security and efficiency of the IT infrastructure. Our email system performance can now be easily monitored through the analytics features in Google Apps, and we have much greater flexibility and control to monitor all the accounts.

We are happy with our decision to go Google. Its positive impacts are felt throughout the organisation. The teams can now focus on their work, like responding quickly to customer requests and around-the-clock product shipping services. This means we now deliver a fun and convenient shopping experience, keeping our customers happy and coming back for more.

Posted by Michael de la Cruz, International Head of Education

January is a time for fresh starts and resolutions, and for the last 30 years it has also been the time for BETT, the world’s largest education technology conference. This year’s event will be attended by 35,000 headteachers, educators and learning professionals from across the world. BETT brings everyone together at ExCeL London to discuss and debate the future of education and how technology can help raise standards and tear down barriers in the classroom.

Google has been participating at BETT for the last four years and we are back again, representing the growing and healthy adoption of Google Apps for Education and Chromebooks in classrooms all over the world. More than 30 million students, teachers and staff use Google Apps for Education and 5,000 schools use Chromebooks globally. Whole universities such as Keio University in Japan, cities such as Chicago, States such as São Paulo in Brazil, and even countries such as Malaysia have gone Google in the classroom and lecture hall.

Closer to the home of BETT, we recently deployed 810 Chromebooks in the Isle of Portland Aldridge Community Academy (IPACA), a non-selective, co-educational state school for students aged 3-16, located across four campuses in Dorset.

“By using Chromebooks and Google Apps, we’ve been able to transform the learning experience for all of our students,” says Alison Appleyard, the school’s Principal. “This open access to online resources is key to students becoming successful independent learners, empowering them to use resources as they see best and giving them the skills they’ll need to be successful in the future.”

IPACA students collaborate on a project together using Chromebooks

IPACA students learning on the web using a Chromebook

For anyone keen to hear how Google is working with schools, we invite you to visit our BETT Google zone at E240. The zone will showcase the full range of Chrome devices, including the recently announced Dell Chromebook 11, Toshiba Chromebook and the LG Chromebase, all for visitors to experience firsthand. Every 30 minutes there will be lightning talks at our on-site teaching theatre (schedule here) where educators from the field will share their experiences of using Google tools for teaching and learning.

For those not at BETT, school leaders can learn more about Chromebooks for Education by visiting our website.

Posted by Ed Lecky-Thompson, Head of Digital at Charles Stanley Direct


Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Ed Lecky-Thompson, Head of Digital at Charles Stanley Direct, a leading online investment site and part of the Charles Stanley Group, which has £18bn of investments under management. To learn more, join our Hangout with Charles Stanley Direct on January 23rd. Register here: http://goo.gl/A23N59

As a direct-to-client investment service, our website plays an absolutely critical role in attracting and retaining customers. While we’ve won a number of awards for the quality of our customer service and online trading platform, we realized our site's search functionality was in need of an upgrade.
Clients use our site to search for and view information on funds and stocks to help them weigh their investment decisions. However, Google Analytics showed that between 35-45% of client searches on the site resulted in no matches at all, while 15% of searches came back with thousands of potential results, meaning the right ones were often buried. Search was one of the last tasks clients performed before leaving the site altogether, showing the frustrations they experience in being unable to find what they were looking for.

To tackle these problems in-house would have proved costly and time-consuming, so we looked at a number of hosted providers. When our Google partner Extended Content Solutions Limited demoed the Google Search Appliance (GSA) using our own data, we saw instantly how it would benefit us.
Features like Intelligent Re-Direct enable customers searching, for example, for a subsidiary company to be re-directed immediately to the name of its parent company, which is what you’d actually trade shares in. The Spell Suggestions feature makes searching much faster. The GSA’s Query Expansion feature also provides clients with additional relevant results when they search for certain products or funds, meaning that they are presented with more investment options. Best of all, the GSA was so easy to integrate with our existing systems that we were up and running within a month.

Since deploying the GSA, feedback from our customers has been fantastic. Now, only 5% of searches result in zero matches or an unmanageable number of results, compared with 65% beforehand. We have a 99% click through rate, showing us that users are finding the fund or stock they’re looking for on their first search, whereas previously only 20% of searches actually generated a click-through to view that share or fund. Calls to our contact centre relating to finding information on stocks and funds on the site almost disappeared overnight. The next step for us is adding the ability for customers to search for our videos, which give up-to-date and insightful information on market trends. It’s exciting to think though that we’ve probably only scratched the surface of all the potential the GSA has to offer and how we can use it.

In the months since we’ve deployed the GSA we’ve improved customer retention and acquisition and increased the conversion rates of website traffic to client registrations. As the site goes from strength-to-strength it has paid for itself a number of times over. It is no exaggeration to say that the GSA has completely transformed the role the website plays within our business.

Posted by Gregory Urban, CTO, State of Maryland

Editor's note: Today our guest blogger is Gregory Urban from the State of Maryland. Greg is the Deputy CIO and CTO of the State of Maryland. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

According to the State New Economy Index, the State of Maryland ranks third out of the top five states that are at the forefront of the nation's movement toward a global, innovation-based new economy. So it’s no surprise Maryland is a leader in adopting innovative technologies to improve citizen services. But with 54,000 state employees scattered across 60 independent agencies, most with their own IT department, the Maryland state government faces challenges in creating a unified technology infrastructure.

To streamline IT infrastructure and improve collaboration between agencies, the Department of Information Technology is rolling out Google Apps for Government for all 54,000 employees. Previously, each agency ran its own email servers — from Microsoft Exchange and Novell, to in-house platforms. We knew to move these disparate email systems into the cloud would decrease complexity and improve intra-agency collaboration, but any cloud-based solution we selected had to meet high security standards.

With Google Apps for Government, all state government data and emails remain in a secure cloud that is compliant with FISMA standards. With over 50 different CIOs working in different agencies, Google Apps allows Maryland to manage security from one central point. Instead of each agency buying and running its own security systems, now Google lets us secure data on a global, enterprise-wide scale. From a central IT point of view, Google Apps lets us execute mobile device management and data leak prevention across all agencies, as well as track every email and document. Previously, each individual IT department had to install appliances to manage these issues on their own.

On a practical level, Google Apps has helped agencies improve productivity and collaboration. The State Police quickly adopted Gmail for all 2,000 employees, 1,400 of which are sworn officers. They have also been a frontrunner in using Drive to streamline daily workflow, across laptops, tablets and mobile devices. They use Docs, Forms and Spreadsheets to regularly report incidents, arrests and investigations. A sergeant's weekly reporting job that used to take 6-7 hours now takes less than an hour, freeing up officers to focus on more mission critical tasks.

What’s more, much of the innovation has come from the ground-up. Because Google Apps provides rich functionalities and is easy-to-use, troopers without any IT background have been able to create internal apps to make their jobs easier. One employee built a system in Spreadsheets to manage the schedule of the troopers across all shifts 24x7x365, making it easy to track hours worked, leave hours, and that schedules adhere to agency policy. Previously, this was done using printouts and pencils, creating lots of complications across 1,400 troopers in 22 barracks throughout the state.

Google Apps has also created a new sense of cohesiveness among the entire workforce. Employees used to have email addresses unique to their agencies, creating an identity that emphasizes their agency relationship. But with Gmail, we provide every employee with a maryland.gov email. State employees now have a stronger sense they are a part of One Maryland, a team representing the state government serving Maryland’s 5.9 million residents. We’re impressed at how effectively Google Apps has brought disparate agencies closer together, making us into a stronger team.

Posted by Phil Young, Head of Online, Transport for London

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Phil Young, Head of Online for Transport for London, one of the world’s biggest and most integrated metropolitan public transport systems. See what other organizations that have Gone Google have to say.

Each weekday, more than six million journeys are made on buses in London and over three million on ‘the Tube,’ as our 150-year-old underground system is affectionately called. Transport for London (TfL) oversees those transit systems -- as well as the trams, taxis, riverboats, the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme and the main roads throughout London. We are responsible for keeping London moving and growing and making life in the city better.

As part of a ground-up redevelopment of our increasingly popular website we are putting interactive mapping at the centre of our travel information to make it easier for travellers to see their options and get around faster than ever before. To do this, we’re introducing Google Maps for Business and Google Places API as part of our site to give customers one consistent, easy to use way of navigating around.

Our web services grew organically over time, resulting in over 70 different websites for the numerous services we offer. In 2007, we made a big step forward, visually integrating these sites with a common look and feel. Our website now receives over 250 million visits annually and the International Association of Public Transport named us the best public transport authority website in the world. But, there's still so much more we knew we could do to help our customers get from point A to point B and better integrate all of our work into one single site, with a load of new functionality.
We released the beta of the new TfL site in June and expect to go live with the final version early in 2014. One of the great things about the new site is that it uses responsive design to give a great experience on any device - mobile, tablet or desktop. We chose Google Maps for Business because it offers the best combination of usability, accuracy and user experience. It was the best tool to help integrate new functionality such as:

• Moving from five different map platforms to one comprehensive map
• Revamping our ‘Journey Planner’ with integrated Google Maps, which makes it really easy to use
• Integrating an ‘Interactive Roads’ tool that highlights areas affected by incidents or events on the map
• Adding a ‘Nearby’ feature, which shows real-time information on all the transport services that are around your current location. This includes arrival times of the next bus or train and even how many Barclays Cycle Hire bikes are available at any given docking station at that time.

We’ve built all of this around a single API which we’ll soon be sharing with developers as part of our open data portal. This will make it so much easier for new and improved smartphone apps to be created.

In 2014, we’ll move the site out of beta and begin to develop more personalised features, based on a single user login, to make planning journeys, checking on status or buying and managing tickets so much easier.

Posted by Bill Oates, CIO, City of Boston

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Bill Oates, Chief Information Officer of the City of Boston. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

In November, the City of Boston was named the #1 Digital City in America by the Center for Digital Government. While this recognition is based on a variety of measures, a key element is the city’s efforts to engage and connect with constituents using mobile technology and social media. As a tech-savvy city, we’re always looking for the best IT tools to help our government run smarter, innovate more effectively and provide better services for our citizens. Our most recent innovation was the successful migration of 76,000 email accounts from a collection of our premise based systems, mostly Microsoft Exchange, to Google Apps. Not only are all city departments, including the Boston Police Department, now on Google Apps, but every teacher and more than 50,000 public school students each has an individual Google Apps account.

Our new unified, cloud-based communication system is pretty big change from our old set-up. Our agencies worked together to manage their mail environments, with resources focused on mail administration and working across the group structures. Our largest department, the public school district, operated on a very separate environment that was in need of a major technical upgrade.

As the city evaluated an upgrade to communication and collaboration infrastructure, we clearly saw cloud services as the most cost effective, supportable platform to address our future needs. In 2013, following an extensive review of the market, the city initiated a rigorous RFP process that attracted an wide array of bids, including multiple Microsoft and Google cloud offerings. A selection committee composed of members from our City IT organization, Boston Police, and Boston Public Schools evaluated 10 proposals based on both cost and technical capabilities. The committee unanimously chose Google Apps based on its ability to meet the needs of a fast moving city while providing a secure cloud environment.

Going Google on such a large scale has many benefits. We gained reliability and security compared to our prior configuration of Microsoft Exchange servers, which required extensive upkeep, upgrades and patches. The Boston Police department, for example, now has a reliable, scalable system that supports its 24/7 operation with Gmail’s 99.9% uptime guarantee. More than 3,000 police employees, including 2,100 sworn officers, use Google Apps to communicate with one another as well as to streamline reporting processes.

All in all, we’ve securely moved more than twenty million email messages to the cloud. Every city employee — from police, to education, public works, transportation and beyond — has a Google account and a boston.gov email address accessible from any device, anywhere. We are confident Google’s secure, FISMA-compliant cloud environment ensures that city data is safe and private.

The Google Apps platform now sits at the center of our drive to infuse innovation in every aspect of city government and enhance collaboration. After 20 years in office, Mayor Thomas Menino is departing – making way for incoming Mayor Marty Walsh, and we’re proud to hand the new administration the country’s most advanced, fully-functioning, cloud-based communications system to keep our city at the forefront of technology innovation.

Posted by Holly Drury, Field Sales Manager, Premier Foods

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Holly Drury, Field Sales Manager for Premier Foods, one of the UK’s largest food producers. Premier Foods include iconic brands such as Ambrosia, Batchelors, Mr. Kipling, OXO, Hovis and more. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Premier Elves is our annual holiday season initiative to help maximise retail sales. In partnership with the major retailers across the UK, Premier Foods is sending out hundreds of elves across various functions from Head Office and multiple sites. Their job is to increase awareness and placement of Premier Foods products in retail stores during the busy Christmas period, drive year-end performance during the holiday shopping season, and share feedback and recommendations with internal teams at this key time of year. All in all, the elves will visit more than 1,000 stores nationwide.

This is the third year Premier Foods has run this successful initiative, but like every successful repeat initiative we always look to make improvements. This year we decided to improve the collaboration and efficiency of Premier Elves and reduce costs and complexity by using Google+.

With the help of Claire Hunt from our internal Google team and our Google partner Appsbroker, the Elves are using the dedicated Premier Foods internal and partner Google+ channels to capture photos of in-store promotional displays, share success stories with other Premier Elves, and collaborate on best practices. With Google+ we are increasing the elves’ efficiency, whilst also improving the customer experience and driving increases in sales.

Being able to capture pictures and context right at the point of sale and share insight across the business and is helping make this year’s holiday season the most successful and fun ever. Thank you to Google+ for making it all work so seamlessly and more importantly, thank you to all the Premier Elves for helping make the holiday season such a success for us here in the UK.

Posted by Hiwa Afandi, Head of the Department of Information Technology, Kurdistan Regional Government

Editor's note: Today, we hear from Hiwa Afandi, Head of the Department of Information Technology for the Kurdistan Regional Government, the official ruling body of Iraqi Kurdistan in Northern Iraq. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Why did the Kurdistan Regional Government decide to move to Google Apps?
We want to improve our operational efficiency and modernize our technology. We also want to help our 300,000 employees across the Kurdistan Regional Government’s ministries and departments to collaborate and communicate more easily. Like many emerging markets in the Middle East, lack of proper infrastructure and Internet service providers in our region make it very difficult to achieve true “interconnectedness.” That’s why we see Google Apps for Business, and cloud computing in general, as the kind of innovative technology that can help us to achieve our objectives.

What factors did you consider before making the move to Google?
Pricing was definitely a consideration. We are working on several large IT projects that are resource-intensive, including a state-of-the-art data center and government cloud. We like that Google is very price-competitive. But many other benefits – such as ease of use and management, speed, and reliability – were important factors in our decision, as well. We also have full trust in Google’s data security and privacy safeguards.

How many people in the Kurdistan Regional Government are using Google Apps?
About 3,000 employees are currently using Google Apps, including my IT team of 180. Several of the early adopters will be taking the lead in a “train the trainee” program in 2014. One person in each ministry or department will become the Google administrator for that unit and will train other users on how to use Google Apps.

Is there a Google partner assisting with your move to Google Apps?
Our Google partner is BRAMS, based in Dubai. They are helping us to transition both quickly and smoothly to Google Apps from our legacy systems, such as Microsoft Exchange.

How do you see employees using Google Apps after the rollout?
Steve Jobs once said that people don’t know what they want until you show it to them. In a developing country like ours, people sometimes need time to accept and adjust to innovation. I think that once our employees see how easily they can communicate and collaborate with each other – and all from a single platform – they will want to use Google Apps more and more. They will be able to work more efficiently.

What about your IT team? Will the move to Google Apps help make them more productive?
The move to Google Apps has already made our team more productive. I introduced Google Apps to my team as soon as I joined the IT department. It didn’t take long for them to embrace tools like Google Calendar, Google Chat and Google Docs for everyday work. On a broader scale, by moving the entire Kurdistan Regional Government to Google Apps for Business, my IT team doesn’t have to worry about the technicalities of hosting and configuring a complex data center for email and collaboration solutions. That prevents a huge headache. I only have about five people devoted to Google tasks for the entire government. The rest of my team is free to focus on other responsibilities.

I want to emphasize how important that is, especially as the Kurdistan Regional Government pursues a number of other important IT initiatives. In the Middle East, skilled IT resources are difficult to find and retain, and are often expensive to hire. So, we must use our IT resources wisely. Again, that’s why Google Apps and other cloud solutions are so beneficial to us. We don’t have to worry about heavy data storage or processing infrastructure. There is no need to install hardware, implement software or perform complex integrations. We can just focus on our business and on innovation. That is a huge enabling factor for our government.