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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.

Drive makes group projects easier because everyone can share files and work together. But in today’s busy world, it’s tough to track the changes to all your shared to-do lists, budgets and presentations, especially when content changes so often. So starting today, you’ll notice a new activity stream in Drive – a single, easy-to-view place to review every action taken on your files and folders.

When you open Drive, click the ⓘ button in the top right corner and the activity stream will appear, showing you who has taken action on files and folders in My Drive. You’ll see a rundown of what your team has been doing, such as editing and commenting on notes, adding a new spreadsheet, renaming a presentation, and more.
It’s also easy to only see what you’re interested in. Just select any file or folder and the stream will change instantly to show information relevant to that item.
And last month it became easier to take quick actions on your folders like rename, share, organize and more with a new drop-down menu at the top of each shared folder. Below this menu you'll see the entire folder hierarchy so you can jump to a different folder with a single click. And you can see profile pictures to help you understand exactly who has access to the shared folder.
Activity stream will rollout to everyone over the next week. Give it a try with your next group project and let us know what you think on our Google+ page.


Posted by Ian Gunn, Google Drive Interaction Designer 

Posted by Ian Gunn, Google Drive Interaction Designer

Drive makes group projects easier because everyone can share files and work together. But in today’s busy world, it’s tough to track the changes to all your shared to-do lists, budgets and presentations, especially when content changes so often. So starting today, you’ll notice a new activity stream in Drive – a single, easy-to-view place to review every action taken on your files and folders.

When you open Drive, click the ⓘ button in the top right corner and the activity stream will appear, showing you who has taken action on files and folders in My Drive. You’ll see a rundown of what your team has been doing, such as editing and commenting on team notes, adding a new spreadsheet, renaming a presentation, sharing with your boss and more.
It’s also easy to only see what you’re interested in. Select any file or folder and the stream will change instantly to show information relevant to just that item.
And last month it became easier to take quick actions on your folders like rename, share, organize and more with a new drop-down menu at the top of each shared folder. Below this menu you'll see the entire folder hierarchy so you can jump to a different folder with a single click. And you can see profile pictures to help you understand exactly who has access to the shared folder.
Activity stream is rolling out over the next week, so try it with your next group project to make working together a bit easier with Drive.

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.