Posted by Jack Fermon, Technical Program Manager, Google for Education

(Cross-posted on the Google for Education Blog)

Educators across Latin America are changing what it means to “go to school” by introducing new learning models that prepare their students for real-world problems. Inspired by their ambitious goals and innovative approaches, we’re highlighting a few ways that schools in the region have made strides with the support of technology, including Google Apps for Education.

Building the groundwork for equal access
The Municipality of Vicente Lopez (MVL) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, created a program to give all students the same access to technology, regardless of socioeconomic background. All students and teachers use Google Drive to share worksheets and presentations, provide immediate feedback on shared documents, and work in teams while in class or at home. Teachers now learn from students, who have become experts in technology and taken ownership of their education.

Going digital without an IT staff
Colegio Banting in Mexico City has equipped its students with the best tools for success, even without resources to spend on staffing for IT. By introducing Google Apps for Education, they’ve interested students in educational technology, helped boost test scores, and improved communication between teachers, administrators, students and their families. Google Classroom makes it easier to assign homework, helping teachers and parents keep track of student work and progress.
Connecting face-to-face across many miles
Argentina’s San Andres University (UDESA) adopted Google Apps to encourage flexible learning through virtual classrooms while replacing their unstable email solution with Gmail. While Gmail was the initial reason for the switch, UDESA uses the full range of tools in the Apps suite to bring learning outside the classroom. Students use Hangouts to present their thesis projects remotely, and teachers invite outside experts, no matter where they’re located, to present about different topics.

Involving parents and teachers
In 2007, The American School Foundation (ASF) became the first school in Mexico to use Google Apps for Education, moving its 3,000 students to Apps while introducing weekly “technology office hours” for parents and teachers. As an early believer in the power of cloud-based technology, ASF wanted to equip its students with tools that would prepare them for the future. Beyond simplifying day-to-day processes and administrative workflows, ASF has created a supportive environment for all members of its community.

As schools across Latin America continue to develop and integrate technology into their curricula, they’re exploring ways to build learning spaces for curious minds both in the classroom and beyond. We look forward to seeing what the future holds for schools in the region.

Posted by Eran Feigenbaum, Director of Security, Google for Work

We know you want to be assured that your digital information is safe and available when you need it. The series of incidents that riddled 2014 showed why it is important to stay ahead of those ill-intentioned people targeting online information. We have taken clear steps to make our products more difficult to attack, and to make it easier for you to protect your data. Innovative security technology is necessary today, and making it easy to use is equally important.

At Google, we take security very seriously and it's built into everything we do, from protecting our datacenters and your devices, to our partnership with the security community to stop bad actors on the web.

This year we raised the bar even higher. We created new security teams, our engineers discovered and helped fix vulnerabilities like Heartbleed and Poodle, and we took a series of concrete steps that will increase the security of our customers’ information:

• We offered encryption as a default for Gmail since 2010, but this year we made sure every single email you send or receive is also encrypted while moving internally between our data centers.
• We released End-to-End, a Chrome extension that encrypts information between your browser and the intended recipient and yesterday, we made it available to the community.
• We ensured that all files uploaded to Google Drive are encrypted at rest on Google servers — in addition to in transit, as they are shared on the web.
• We launched a physical security key that provides second-factor authentication through your computer’s USB port, and we are working on admin tools to let you deploy this at scale in your organization.
• We gave business users controls to share responsibility with IT, providing a wizard to secure your account and a new dashboard to monitor device activity.
• We made it easier to secure devices in the workplace with the new security features in Android 5.0 Lollipop.
• We rebuilt our device management solution to support iOS 7, 8 and the new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.

In addition to these announcements, we offer strong contractual commitments to protect our customers’ information. We do not show advertisements or scan customer information for advertising in Google Apps for Work, Education, Government or Non-Profit, and we do not use data for any other purpose than to manage and deliver our services. These commitments are regularly verified by independent auditors, and this summer we published their detailed findings in our SOC3 security audit report. We also help our customers comply with their regulatory obligations, and we renewed and extended our ISO 27001 certification and certified our Cloud Platform to the PCI standard. We were excited to participate in the development of the new ISO 27018 privacy standard for cloud computing, and look forward to opportunities to engage in similar efforts in the future.

Next year, the bad guys will keep all of us on our toes as we expect the number of threats and their sophistication to increase. We will keep raising the bar — for example we have been working to improve passwords with the new Smart Lock for Android feature, and developing identification technology that makes typing-in complex Captchas obsolete. As we enter 2015, you can expect our continued investment in security and a guarantee that we will continue to find ways to make it simple for people to use our services in a secure and transparent manner.

Posted by Lafeea Watson, Public Relations Manager, Krispy Kreme

Editor's note: Today’s post comes from Lafeea Watson at Krispy Kreme, a global retailer of sweet treats with over 875 shops in more than 20 countries around the world. This holiday season, Krispy Kreme has chosen Chromebooks to power an in-store holiday campaign, connecting customers around the world to toast to the holidays with their coffee and doughnut, face to face. Learn more about how you can use built-in Google Apps with Chromebooks.

When Vernon Rudolph opened Krispy Kreme back in 1937 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, it was a wholesale bakery that sold doughnuts to local grocery stores. The scent of its fresh-baked doughnuts, however, was too good for passers-by to ignore, and Rudolph was faced with request after request to let people buy them on the spot. He cut a hole in the wall, allowing him to serve eager his fans directly on the sidewalk, and Krispy Kreme as we know it was born.

We’re just as dedicated to delighting our customers and giving them even more reasons to come by beyond our tasty treats today. This year, working with our creative partners at VML, we created a “Joy Goes Around Holiday Hangout” interactive experience so customers can have conversations with people in 16 countries through Hangouts and Chromebooks in 17 of our retail stores.

The Joy Goes Around Holiday campaign is an interactive in-shop experience that allows our guests at participating locations around the world to toast to the holidays through customized Krispy Kreme Hangouts. We are also creating video of customers getting into the holiday spirit that they can then share with others over social media channels.

We’re thrilled that we’re helping people share a cup of coffee and an Original Glazed doughnut as if they were sitting across the table from each other. With Chromebooks and Google Hangouts, we’re bringing our global community closer together. We’re celebrating the things we have in common and the experiences that bring us joy.

Editor's note: We previously posted about an update to security in Gmail. As it turns out, the news isn't relevant for Google Apps for Work users because of a differing security policy—so we've removed this post. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused. To learn more about Gmail security updates for consumer accounts follow the Official Gmail Blog. - updated December 18, 2014

Work on any of your devices.
We created new mobile apps for Docs, Sheets and Slides across Android and iOS, where you can edit your documents, presentations and spreadsheets on the go. While working in the cloud means you have access to your documents on any of these devices, you can still access or create documents even if you don’t have a data or WiFi connection.

Edit your images directly
Sometimes the best way to convey a thought is visually and you need your images to look just right, which is why we made it easier to edit and adjust images. You can now crop your images, even masking the crop to specific shapes, and add borders in Docs, Slides and Drawings. Plus, you can connect objects and images in Slides and Drawings, recolor and change opacity of images in Slides, and even add effects.

Get things done faster
We want to help you take care of your common tasks. And you know what lots of people make in documents? Bullet lists. So now, just type an asterisk (*) and it will automatically become bullets in Docs and Slides. Nobody likes having to do the same thing twice (unless you’re Santa) so just copy and paste your charts between different spreadsheets in Sheets. For all the regression lovers out there, you can also add trendlines, and to further visualize trends, you can add miniature charts, or sparklines, into individual cells.

Get answers to your surveys
Forms is a great way to gather information, and across 2014, we added lots of new ways to ask questions and get answers. You can customize themes in Forms to add your own flare and create short URLs that are easier to share. There are also lots of new question options, like limiting one response per person and shuffling the answer order.

Add tons of functionality from 3rd parties
Add-ons for Docs, Sheets and Forms are tools created by developers that help you do those extra things you need help with, whether it’s printing mailing labels or adding MLA-approved citations, right from your document.

Let there be tables
You can add borders and backgrounds to your tables, and merge cells together to get your tables to look just how you want. And when you convert your legacy files to Docs, the table cells and borders will still be there so you can keep working.
And let everyone, including blind and low-vision users, get work done
Across Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings and Forms, it’s much easier to use a screen reader, with better text-to-voice verbalization and improvements to keyboard navigation. You can now use braille support to read and enter text in Docs, Slides and Drawings. And you can collaborate easier with others in Docs, Sheets, Slides or Drawings because screen readers announce when people enter or leave the document, and you’ll hear when others are editing alongside you.

We’ll continue to make a ton of updates behind the scenes to ensure everything keeps running faster and smoother next year. Four cheers (Docs! Sheets! Slides! Forms!) for a happy work life in 2015.

Posted by Steve Cook, Co-founder, CookNSolo Restaurants

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Steve Cook, co-founder of CookNSolo Restaurants, a Philadelphia-based group of food enterprises. 

What happens when you stick two guys with a passion for food and restaurants in a room with a laptop? For me and my co-founder, Mike Solomonov, that scenario led to the creation of CookNSolo Restaurants, which has more than 10 restaurants in Philadelphia, from Percy Street Barbeque, inspired by authentic Texas-style barbeque, to Zahav, a high-end Israeli restaurant. People (mostly my wife) often ask how we keep up with the pace of opening and managing so many restaurants. Our answer, and secret sauce, is Google Apps.

Our most popular restaurant is Federal Donuts, a spot dedicated entirely to donuts, fried chicken and coffee. We launched it as a creative side project, but after months of consistently selling out before noon, we realized that fried chicken and uniquely flavored donuts like Salted Tehina, Marshmallow Marshmallow and Chocolate Sea Salt, really hit the spot for Philadelphians. We opened four more locations. As we grew, and as we fried more chicken along the way, we came up with another creative idea: use the 1,000 pounds of chicken bone leftovers we produced each week to make delicious soup, and donate the proceeds to a local non-profit dedicated to helping Philadelphians suffering from hunger, homelessness and poverty.

That’s how Rooster Soup Co. was born — and the idea took shape in a Google Doc. Mike and I jotted down the concept in a shared document, adding our thoughts and ideas as they came to us, and commenting on one another’s additions as we went. Whether we looked at the doc from our laptops in the same room or pulled it up separately from home, we always knew we were working with the most up-to-date document. As our idea became a more formal proposal, and our proposal needed a timeline, budget and input from our partner, the Broad Street Ministry, we extended the collaboration to six more CookNSolo team members. We added them as editors, so we could all work together in the same document, regardless of where we were and when we could get the work done. That collaboration led us to launch a Kickstarter campaign to fund the new restaurant, where we’d make and sell the soup, then donate 100% of net profits to the Broad Street Ministry. Our Kickstarter closed in July, and we beat our funding goal of $150,000 to start the nonprofit.

As we continue to grow our business, we need to rely on technology more and more everyday to help us keep up the pace. We use Google Apps, which is helpful for staying on top of our customer service — not an easy feat when you grow from 2 guys to over 150 employees. For many customers, trying to contact a restaurant can feel like shouting into a black hole, so we pride ourselves by replying quickly by email. With Google Groups, any customer support or reservation inquiries go to a team of people, so if one person is on vacation, another can pick up in their absence and send a response within 24 hours. We’re also dependent on Calendar: we create invitations to track private events at each of our restaurants, inquiries about large catering order and delivery deadlines.

Along the way, Google Apps has been instrumental in helping us manage our business growth, stay creative and stay true to our mission. Who knows what's next for us, but I can guarantee that we’ve helped create our recipe for success with Google Apps.

Posted by Barry Toole, ‎Voice and Convergence Manager, MWV

Editor's note: Today Avaya is announcing its Avaya Agent for Chrome, a new solution that delivers a web-based contact center application through the simplicity and speed of Chromebooks. Our guest blogger is Barry Toole at MWV (MeadWestVaco), a global leader in packaging solutions. MWV is using Avaya Agent for Chrome to streamline contact center operations for their customer service teams. Please note: this blog post content was updated on December 16, 2014 to include requested changes from MWV and Avaya.

What do perfume dispensers, frozen pizzas, and six pack beverage carriers have in common? Packaging. At MWV, we help shape consumers' experiences with products through packaging for food, beverage, tobacco, beauty and personal care, healthcare, and home and garden markets around the world. We’re everywhere our customers are – operating facilities in 30 countries and marketing our products on every continent. The global nature of our business means that many of our interactions with customers happen over the phone, and we need to make sure we’re offering the best possible experience.

We’ve been using Google Apps for our business since 2009 and recently simplified our IT environment by introducing 500 Chromebooks across the company. Employees love that Chromebooks boot up in seconds, eliminating the long reboot cycles we experienced with our old PCs. We’ve been an Avaya customer for more than 40 years and see them as the leader in contact center software. When we got the call that they were producing a contact center application for Chromebooks, we jumped at the opportunity. We knew the migration to the Avaya Agent for Chrome would be seamless because everyone here is already familiar with the Chrome browser; we easily got up and running.
We introduced the new solution to agents in our customer contact center, who take high-value orders, and employees in our logistics group, who coordinate the delivery of raw materials and finished goods. Both groups need an easy-to-use, fast solution that lets them work from anywhere. The Avaya Agent for Chrome eliminates the need to download software, saving time for end users and IT.

The Avaya Agent for Chrome also supports employee mobility. Agents can now work from home on their Chromebooks with full Avaya contact center functionality. In the event of a snowstorm or network interruption, we can move our operations to any site that has Wi-Fi. Employees no longer need a physical phone and can simply and securely carry out their jobs using only their Chromebook. As a result we’re saving costs on additional hardware.

Moving to Chromebooks has helped prepare us for a future that demands fast action and flexible ways of working. We plan to expand the Avaya Agent for Chrome solution to all MWV employees who directly interact with customers — in total, about 100 people in the contact center and logistics groups. As we scale our business to better serve our customers, we look forward to this solution growing with us without adding extra cost or complexity.

Our new partner program is simple in design, having just three tracks, each designed to address specific customer needs (partners can join multiple tracks):

• The Sales Track is for partners whose core competency is marketing and selling Google for Work and Education products at high volume. Selling includes ongoing account management
  and renewals associated with a partner’s customers.
• The Services Track is for partners who provide the full range of services to customers, such as selling, consulting, training, implementing and providing technical support for Google for Work and Education products.
• The Technology Track is for partners who create products and solutions that complement, enhance or extend the reach or functionality of Google for Work and Education products.

To ensure the best customer experience, we have also updated the requirements and application process for the Google for Work and Education Partner Program, which will roll out in early 2015. Partners will receive a range of benefits to help them better support customers, including:

• Access to Google for Work Connect, our one-stop community for partners to access marketing campaigns, sales content, support resources and training
• Ongoing program communications
• Console to manage customer accounts
• Use of the designated Google for Work or Google for Education Partner badge
• Resale discount on the list price of our suite of products
• Listing in our partner directory

We will also offer an updated Premier tier, which is reserved for partners that have demonstrated higher levels of excellence within their track. Premier partners will receive exclusive benefits and support, including:

• Designated partner manager support
• Co-marketing opportunities with Google
• Access to marketing funding and other financial incentives
• Exclusive training and events
• Use of the exclusive Premier Partner badge

From Cloud Sherpas to Sprint, Ancoris to Devoteam, CDW to Promevo, and many more, our partners are helping transform businesses around the world. With the new Google for Work and Education Partner Program, we will continue to invest in creating world-class business relationships with our customers and provide the support and investment our partners deserve.

Posted by Rudy Blanco, Digital Learning Coordinator at The DreamYard Preparatory School

(Cross-posted on the Google for Education Blog)

Editor's note: Today’s guest author is Rudy Blanco, Digital Learning Coordinator at The DreamYard Preparatory School, in the Bronx, New York. He is a product of the New York City public school system and spent three years as a special education teacher at DreamYard Prep. In his current role, Rudy focuses on teaching students and other teachers how to learn through the use of technology.


DreamYard Prep is a public high school in the Bronx where arts and scholarship closely overlap. As a Title I public school in an underserved community, we see the unique potential of technology to prepare our students for an increasingly digital world. The culture at DreamYard Prep encourages teachers, students and staff to try innovative approaches. If you have a crazy idea, you try it out, remix it and make it work. Through this experimentation, we’re trying to achieve our ambitious goal of infusing our curriculum with the arts, social justice and digital learning.
For us, technology is a way of showing what we’ve learned, publishing and amplifying it. Before we started using Google Apps for Education three years ago, we had very basic Word Processing and outdated computers. We wanted to introduce technology that would improve gateway skills like research, communication and productivity. So at the start of the 2011 school year, we created Google accounts for all teachers, students and staff. We now have 650 Apps users and 150 devices, including 60 Chromebooks and 15 tablets. This year, we introduced Classroom to 13 classes across grades and subjects.

By using Google Drive and Classroom, science teacher Emily McLaughlin saves over eight hours each month that was previously spent printing, copying, distributing and grading student packets. Now, she simply creates a Google Doc and uses Classroom to share it with her students. Emily and her students work together in Docs, making edits and conversing through comments. A new set-up in Emily’s classroom reflects this collaborative learning — students gather in pods of four rather than facing the front of the class. These pods of students give each other feedback and answer questions together. Even across classes, students work together. Ninth graders in my digital literacy class, for instance, teach their research skills to 10th graders in Emily’s class. We want students to know they have the power to teach not only themselves, but also each other.

With Google Drive, students can edit, store and share everything. They type assignments in Google Docs, create presentations using Slides, and organize their body of work in Drive folders. At any moment, an administrator can click a button to pull up work by all 370 of our students: .jpgs of visual art projects, English papers, lab reports, and videos of peer interviews. The revision history and comments in Docs allow us to see a project’s evolution over time.

We took this archive one step further and kicked off a portfolio program in partnership with Parsons The New School for Design. Each student creates his or her own blog, archive of work from grades 9-12, and a digital portfolio using Google Sites or platform of choice. The program began last year with four teachers and has since doubled. We hope, over the next several years, to expand the portfolio program to all classes at DreamYard Prep and help every student share his or her story with the world.

Posted by Carolin Silbernagl, Co-Founder and CEO, dotHIV

Editor's note: In honor of World AIDS Day, today we hear from Carolin Silbernagl, Co-Founder and CEO of dotHIV, a charity and domain registry that supports AIDS organizations by selling .hiv web addresses.

In the 1980s, when the death toll from AIDS and HIV-related illnesses began to mount, the end of AIDS was impossible to imagine. Three decades later, thanks to medical breakthroughs and the diligent work of activists, wiping out AIDS is no longer just a dream. At dotHIV, we raise money for AIDS organizations by selling the .hiv extension to nonprofits and businesses. Through a simple redirect, .hiv domains work as second entrance doors to existing websites: yourdomain.hiv then leads to the same homepage as yourdomain.com. And for each click on any type of .hiv URL, we donate money to HIV/AIDS charities.

The dotHIV team

The idea behind dotHIV came about in 2009, when a few friends in the advertising industry were working on a pro bono campaign for HIV prevention. We had grown tired of the usual approach of putting up posters and shooting TV commercials and thought: why not place our message in a space that people look at every time they open a web browser — and raise money at the same time? Their agency offered to let us borrow office space and software to get the idea off the ground, but as our footprint grew globally with employees and volunteers around the world, we realized we needed better tools to help us collaborate from our many remote locations. That’s when we turned to Google Apps. We were already familiar with the tools and knew how powerful they could be in helping us work faster and more efficiently, and since it’s free to nonprofits, we focus less on operations and more on getting out the word about dotHIV.

Google Apps is at the heart of everything we do. We have full-time employees, part-time volunteers, an advisory board, business angels and sponsors, located across four continents, so it’s essential to have tools that make our remote team feel like a real team. We hold daily standup meeting using Google Hangouts, so we get to see each other face-to-face consistently (and to remind us that we’re in this together). We write up and revise all our website content from a Google Doc, so each stakeholder can add recommendations and changes as comments or suggested edits rather than editing directly in a silo and emailing their version as an attachment. Project timelines live in Google Sheets, which are updating constantly, so no matter what time zone you’re in, we know where we stand in a process.

Once we create documents and presentations, we store them in Google Drive so we have access anytime we need them, from any device. We’re also using Drive to build up an archive of photos and videos that tell the dotHIV story.

We’ve even tapped into Google Cloud Platform to build new features for our website. For example, we used App Engine to create a click counter that will appear on every web page with a .hiv address. Whenever someone clicks on these pages, it triggers a small donation to an AIDS support group, with the funds coming from our domain registrations.

We started dotHIV with a small group of believers. Today, we’re a global network of experts who are using our diverse experience to support the fight against AIDS, and who are hopeful that the end of AIDS is in sight.

Mike: How do you foster the close collaboration we see among Minnesota teachers?

Mark: I think a lot of our collaboration comes from the tradition among Minnesotans of a strong work ethic. People are willing to put in the time to help their communities.

Ben: Minnesota is an education-forward state. There’s a large community of people who have connected over the years at various events and online who share a passion for changing education.

Sean: Teachers are a special breed of folk. They give themselves over to making a difference in others’ lives. The thing that I do to foster that collaboration is provide space, time and tools.

Katrina: I look to three key ingredients: culture, tools and time. Culture is seeing the “we” and “our” in everything. These are our students, not my students. Tools like Google give us a starting point — a place for collaboration. The last piece is time: giving teachers the dedicated time to work together every day is essential.

Molly: We know that we’re better together. We’ve created an amazing network of teachers and specialists that share ideas and best practices, and know the lessons we have learned can really help other schools in the area. We share ideas at local conferences, present and attend the Summits featuring Google for Education, and participate in our Twin Cities Google Educators Group — all of which create an amazing network.

Mike: How do you help teachers support each other? 

Mark: In my district we offer year-long training for educators to become technology leaders in their schools. Molly Schroeder actually created and teaches the program, and it’s made a big impact. Participating teachers get 10 semester credits, and the school district pays part of their course fees. After this year, one in 10 teachers in White Bear Lake will have completed the program.

Ben: One great channel for teamwork is the Google Apps Hive, an interdistrict professional development program. The Hive connects pockets of innovation in schools throughout the region and brings together teachers in Google Apps for Education districts to share their best ideas, workflows, lessons and strategies. The goal of the Hive is to increase the quality of professional development and spread the word about good technology integration practices.

Mike: Which educator are you thankful for, and why? 

Sean: My dear friend Andrew Rummel, a former English teacher who’s now teaching English education at St. Cloud State University. We share a sense of the possible and the potential in education. He challenges and encourages me to remain dedicated to learning about the hard stuff. How do we do better for all kids? How can we use teaching to improve the world for our own children, and the children of people we'll never meet?

Katrina: I am profoundly thankful for our middle school media directors: Karen Qualey, Tara Oldfield and Christina Lindstrom. They get stuff done with a can-do attitude — they’re focused on students and learning and they’re willing to experiment, fail, learn and iterate. Because of their leadership, Bloomington Public Schools smoothly introduced 2,500 Chromebooks for all of our middle school students, a process that would have certainly been less successful and more painful without them.

Molly: My mom. She was a kindergarten teacher for 36 years, and touched the lives of so many people in our community. When I became a teacher, I knew that I wanted to know the students I taught as well as my mom knew her students. She showed me that being in education didn't just mean teaching the students, but really knowing them and their families. To this day, former students stop my mom and tell her what a great teacher she was, because she cared about them.

Posted by Rob Forkan, Co-Founder, Gandy’s

Editor's note: From the typewriter to the propelling pencil to our favorite, the world wide web, inventors and innovators from the United Kingdom have brought us brilliant advances that have changed the way we work all around the world. During Global Entrepreneurship Week, we’ll promote entrepreneurship in the UK through a handful of stories from early-stage disrupters and trailblazers who are using Google Apps for Work to overcome the challenges of starting a new company and inspiring others to start businesses. Today, we hear from Rob Forkan, co-founder of Gandy's, a flip flop brand dedicated to helping orphans.

My brother Paul and I started Gandy’s with the idea that something as simple as a flip flop could be inspiring. In 2004, when Paul was 11 and I was 13, we lost our parents in the Indian Ocean tsunami while on a family trip in Sri Lanka. After returning to London and finishing our education, we wanted to find a way to honor our parents’ spirits while helping children less fortunate than ourselves. We decided to create a sustainable brand to give back to children in need.

Since 2011, we’ve sold more than a quarter of a million pairs of flip flops, online and in department stores, to people around the world. The proceeds have funded a children’s home in Sri Lanka, and we plan to keep building more as the Gandy’s movement grows. Inspiration goes a long way toward building a company, but we also needed the right technology. Google Apps for Work tools have helped us lower the barriers to entry in the following ways:


1. Starting a company around an idea rather than infrastructure
From day one, we faced the challenge of immersing ourselves in Gandy’s without worrying about IT issues. We started with an enthusiastic group of young people, many who worked part-time from home, and needed technology that matched our flexible style. Google Apps helped us get the team set up quickly, easily and cost-effectively. It took me five minutes to give the whole company their own accounts. Because everyone had used Google technology before in their personal lives, I didn’t have to train anyone, which allowed us to focus on the product. A year and a half ago, we bought Chromebooks for our team of seven so they could work from home, our kitchen table, a music festival, or wherever they happened to be.

2. Competing with established players by moving quickly
As we started selling our flip flops, we realized we faced competition from companies that had been in the business for decades. Our success depends on reacting quickly to trends and adapting to consumer desires. We use Apps to work more efficiently, whether that’s viewing one another’s calendars to set up meetings or using Google Drive to share a photo of artwork that could inspire a new flip flop design. We rely on the mobility of Gmail, Docs and Drive to share ideas as they strike, and keep on track of our work when we’re on the go.
3. Staying organized in the face of complexity
One of the first barriers we faced was breaking into both wholesale and online retail, two different markets with different processes. We started using Drive to keep track of our product designs, marketing materials and merchandising assets so we can stay united as a team. Shared folders organize everything product-related, which lets us work faster on design and ensure our final products look great. Our designers easily store and share inspiration artwork, product sketches and design files. Once the design is complete and the product manufactured, we share photos with retailers so they can see how the product will look on the floor as well as on a computer or mobile screen.

We face a different challenge every day, especially as we continue to set our sights higher. Hundreds of thousands of flip flops and cups of coffee later, we’ve proven to ourselves that we can overcome these challenges using the fast and flexible technology of Google Apps.

Click to expand the full infographic below.

Posted by Ricky Kapur, Managing Director Asia, Google for Work

Posted by Eran Feigenbaum, Director of Security Google for Work

As an IT manager, we realize you spend a lot of time managing devices, applications and security settings for everyone at your organization. To make your job a bit easier, today we’re announcing new security tools to help Google Apps users take more control of their security online.

A new Devices and Activity dashboard gives your users additional insight over the devices accessing their Google account. The page shows a comprehensive view of all devices that have been active on an account in the last 28 days, or are currently signed in. And in case any suspicious activity is noticed, there’s a setting to immediately take steps to secure an account and change a password.
We are also launching the security wizard for Google for Work accounts. The security wizard guides users through steps they can take to turn on or adjust security features, like providing contact info for account recovery (if the domain security policy allows it), or reviewing recent account activity and account permissions. Plus, it only takes minutes for users to update their settings. This tool prioritizes all administrator settings for security features that end users are permitted to turn on. Access the wizard at g.co/accountcheckup.
Security in the cloud is a shared responsibility and keeping your company information secure is at the core of what we do everyday. By making users more aware of their security settings and the activity on their devices, we can work together to stay a step ahead of any bad guys.

Posted by Kiyan Foroughi, Founder and CEO, Boticca

Editor's note: From the typewriter to the propelling pencil to our favorite, the world wide web, inventors and innovators from the United Kingdom have brought us brilliant advances that have changed the way we work all around the world. During Global Entrepreneurship Week, we’ll promote entrepreneurship in the UK through a handful of stories from early-stage disrupters and trailblazers who are using Google Apps for Work to overcome the challenges of starting a new company and inspiring others to start businesses. Today, we hear from Kiyan Foroughi, founder and CEO of Boticca, a curated global marketplace for original fashion accessories.

While traveling in Morocco in 2008, I met a jewelry maker named Myriam who commuted four hours daily between her village in the Atlas Mountains and the market in Medina. I knew there had to be a better way for talented independent designers to sell to consumers and share their stories with the world. I returned to my role in finance with my interest piqued in solving this new problem. After a year of research and planning I quit my job to start building an initial team and website. Since launching in October 2010, Boticca has connected global customers with high-quality, handcrafted fashion accessories, designed all over the world.

We built our website with the vision for a different way of buying: telling a unique story for each product, and shipping directly from the designer. By creating Boticca, I’ve learned how technology can connect a global community and overcome the challenges of building a company from the ground up. Here are four of the biggest barriers we faced in growing our business, and how we broke through them with technology:



1. Finding a cost-effective solution that supports our growth
In the early days, we had to move quickly despite the constraints of a limited budget. Our team of six used separate tools for email, calendars and document-sharing, but when you stacked them together, our Frankenstein solution cost up to £30 per user each month. In July 2010, we switched to Google Apps to bring email, calendar, docs and sheets together into a single product. Since we can pay on a monthly basis with Apps, we didn’t have to invest a large sum upfront or sign a binding contract, as is common practice with other vendors. I can add accounts for staff as they’re hired rather than buying 100 licenses but using only 40. Besides saving us money, Apps gives us flexibility.

2. Creating seamless workflows with freelancers and external partners
Before we built our editorial team, we relied on clusters of freelancers to outsource work. We wanted to give external partners access to our workflows, brand guidelines and internal information in an efficient way. Google Apps helped make the experience working with freelancers seamless. When we worked with a freelance editor to write the product descriptions on our website, we used Google Sheets to share product URLs and deadlines for each 100-word description. Our development team could open the shared Sheets to see the descriptions take shape as the writer typed them, and then use the content to populate the website right away.

3. Focusing on product and service instead of administration
One of the first balancing acts we faced as a new company was managing the administrative side of the business while building our product. We like to test our product, break it, then re-test something new. If we had burdensome IT concerns about our tools, we wouldn’t be so nimble. Fortunately, Google Apps is easy enough for us to manage on our own. It’s so easy to use that the technical team can focus on running our platform and addressing customers, rather than managing users. When a we hire a new person to their team, we have access to set up a new account in the admin panel ourselves.

4. Communicating effectively to build an inclusive culture
As we grow, we need to maintain a culture enabled by technology rather than hindered by it. Google Apps tools help us maintain transparency and inclusion through immediate communication and easy sharing. One of our style-hunters uses Google Slides to create weekly presentations about new brands she has found to join our website. People working remotely can follow along with the latest version in Google Drive without having to email her for the file. Effective communication is the first step toward empowering each person in the company to take ownership.

Customers love being surprised and inspired, over and over again. With this in mind, we strive to come up with new ways to fulfill our purchasing philosophy. Tools like Google Apps step out of the way and let us focus on consistently delivering these ideals to both our customers and designers. If we didn’t have the ability to work and communicate together so nimbly — both inside and outside the company — Boticca wouldn’t have been able to achieve the success we have today.

Posted by Ben Pugh, Founder, FarmDrop

Editor's note: From the typewriter to the propelling pencil to our favorite, the world wide web, inventors and innovators from the United Kingdom have brought us brilliant advances that have changed the way we work all around the world. During Global Entrepreneurship Week, we’ll promote entrepreneurship in the UK through a handful of stories from early-stage disrupters and trailblazers who are using Google Apps for Work to overcome the challenges of starting a new company and inspiring others to start businesses. Today, we hear from Ben Pugh, founder of FarmDrop, the UK's first "click-to-harvest" online farmer's market.

Technology has the potential to bring consumers and producers together to make food tastier, more convenient and more sustainable. In 2012, I left my career in finance to test this potential and started talking with farmers, fishermen and consumers about how to improve the food supply chain. The following March, after months of researching and experimenting, we launched the FarmDrop pilot. More than 8,000 customers and 400 independent, local producers across the UK have signed up since and thousands of pounds of local food is being bought and sold through the platform each week.

For us, building a high-growth company has been about getting consumers and food producers excited about our online farmer’s market vision and assembling a team of talented people who believe in it even more. From scratch, Google Apps helped us tackle three of our biggest challenges head-on:

1. Establishing instant credibility without costly business tools
We started FarmDrop with no funding, but using Google Apps for Work right from the start helped shorten the otherwise difficult financial barrier to entry. Inexpensive email and collaboration tools equipped the team for work within a matter of hours, avoiding the complexity of software licenses, pricing structures and IT administration. A seemingly small thing like having an @farmdrop.co.uk email addresses made our day-old company feel like a real business. Apps helps us present ourselves professionally, which boosted morale and built trust among partners and customers from the outset.

2. Creating transparency throughout the company from day one
Joining a startup is a risk but it’s also great adventure and it’s important that everyone in the company feels like they are part of the adventure. For that to happen, everyone needs to know what’s going on in the business. It sounds simple and easy but with so much going on all the time it isn’t. Google Drive allows us to share business strategy documents, goals and performance metrics, as well as product roadmaps, even as they evolve. We’ve created a detailed timeline in Google Sheets that tracks all of our activities leading up to a major launch, so anyone can check team progress in real time. With granular sharing controls, I can grant view-only access to protect crucial data while still providing team members with access to information.

3. Enabling team members to work flexibly from anywhere
Flexibility is an important benefit of startup culture, but we don’t want it to interrupt work. On any given day, we’ll have a handful of people in the office, another handful working from home, and the rest on a farm, meeting fishermen and bakers or meeting people from new pick-up points. Apps connects us no matter where we are or what device we’re using. The development team uses Google Hangouts for their daily meeting, and can easily share their screens or move the camera to a whiteboard to share information with team members who are working remotely.

With our growth accelerating, we need to retain our sense of mission whilst the team expands. That means working together in total collaboration and being connected as a team which Google Apps enables. Our love of authentic, sustainable food and the people who make it will continue to drive us forwards to a world of better food and a healthier planet.

Posted by Ryan Bretag, Chief Innovation Officer at Glenbrook High School District 225

(Cross-posted on the Google for Education Blog)

Editor's note: Continuing our EdTech leadership series, today’s guest author is Ryan Bretag, Chief Innovation Officer at Glenbrook High School District 225, in Illinois. Since age six Ryan has “thought big” about education, questioning why we do what we do and how we can do better. After spending 15 years in schools, his current role focuses on innovation, whole-child education and technology initiatives. Ryan is also completing his doctoral work on spaces people inhabit for learning. To learn more check out the full interview with Ryan or view these recorded sessions on innovation at work from Atmosphere Live.

It’s probably shocking to hear this, especially now that I’m an educator, but when I was a student I really disliked school. I had a hard time because there was not a lot of freedom — there were so many constraints. But one day something memorable happened. My teacher asked us to write a story about a place of interest in the United States. I drew an underwater school of the future. My teacher gave me a zero and said I had not addressed the assignment, but she also gave me 100 points of extra credit for creativity. It was the first time that I was really rewarded for being creative. That teacher lit a fire in me.

When I became a teacher, I realized that technology was one of the best levers I had to give power to students. During my second year teaching, my director of technology came to me and said, ‘There’s this thing that people talk about where every kid has a computer — what do you think you could do with that?’ I responded, ‘Oh, I hate technology; I couldn’t do that.’ She said, ‘Just think about it.’ I spent a weekend thinking and came back to school Monday with about 50 pages of sketches and diagrams of things that I could do and shared with students to get their ideas. Next thing I knew, my class was one-to-one with a device for every student. I was hooked. Technology fundamentally changed everything about how I taught and more importantly how students learn — it created student choice and empowerment. It opened doors that I had never even seen before.

Now as the Chief Innovation Officer at Glenbrook I am trying to help the whole district improve learning for students by supporting learners, teachers and students alike, with technology and innovation. In my role I focus constantly on creating two things in our district: more ownership and agility. We want teachers and students to have more ownership to bring their own creativity and passion to their work. And we want them all to have more agility — to be able to move quickly with new ideas.

One thing we did to create more ownership and agility for our teachers was to audit of all our common practices. We asked ourselves, ‘do these practices create more ownership and agility or less?’ We then scaled practices that did and adjusted those that did not. This was one of the reasons we switched to Google Apps for Education. We saw that our old email and writing system didn’t provide enough ownership to students and teachers, but Google Apps did.

After a few years, I am happy to report that we’re seeing teachers take ownership of the IT tools. For example, when Classroom was introduced to Google Apps for Education, I simply sent an email announcing this to 500 faculty members. I included a few links to get started — that was it. A few weeks later, we had more than 200 people already using it. Five years ago, if I had sent that email people would have asked for training first, or been more apprehensive of a new tool.

We’ve also put curriculum in place to support autonomy and agility for students. One of the things that we’ve borrowed from Google is the notion of 20% time. It fascinated me that employees could spend 20% of their time learning whatever they wanted. We now do this across our schools. We run a program called Spartans Connect. It’s a one-day conference during which students run workshops about their passions. For example 250 kids attended one student’s workshop on Harry Potter — they dressed up and played Quidditch while also exploring the thematic components from mythology and religion. The student leader had hundreds of kids in the room, and she had them sitting on the edge of their seats.

At Spartans Connect, students got hands-on experience with the human body

My advice to other educators trying to create more ownership among teachers and students is to question what you are doing, the “why”, and encourage people to experiment with new ways to solve problems. When your teachers are empowered, they empower their students too. I think successful schools “embrace the crazy.” Be OK with some ideas being a little bit out there and be comfortable with some failure along the way.

Posted by Lisa Rodwell, CEO, Wool and the Gang

Editor's note: From the typewriter to the propelling pencil to our favorite, the world wide web, inventors and innovators from the United Kingdom have brought us brilliant advances that have changed the way we work all around the world. During Global Entrepreneurship Week, we’ll promote entrepreneurship in the UK through a handful of stories from early-stage disrupters and trailblazers who are using Google Apps for Work to overcome the challenges of starting a new company and inspiring others to start businesses. Today, we hear from Lisa Rodwell, CEO of Wool and the Gang, a handcrafted knitwear brand bringing fashion from factories into the home.

The rise of “maker culture” has revived craftsmanship in the last few years, but our co-founders Aurelie and Jade were ahead of the trend. They started Wool and the Gang back in 2008 to modernize knitting, and began selling DIY “knit kits” through retailers. In 2013, Aurelie and Jade raised funding and hired a team of seven to embark on a new journey: building an online fashion brand powered by the maker movement.

I joined in February of that year, when we moved into our first offices and began selling handmade products knit by our ‘Gangstas,’ the name we've endearingly given our employees. Three months later, we started using Google Apps to work better as a team and communicate with our network of 2,000 makers around the world. As a small and fast-growing company, we had the opportunity to move quickly by testing lots of ideas and focusing on the winners. Thanks to the momentum of the maker movement and the accessibility of powerful, easy-to-use technology, we’ve been able build a successful business in spite of three daunting obstacles:

1. Managing a global network of makers through real-time collaboration
More than 2,000 knitters have applied to be part of our gang, ranging from novices to experts, everywhere from London to Lima. We work with 200 of these “Gang Makers” at any given time, and thanks to Google Apps, communicating and collaborating with them is a breeze. Our Gang Maker manager uses shared Google Sheets to track the progress of all 200 knitters in real time; each one is updated constantly and instantly by knitters, providing greater transparency into our supply chain and enabling us to respond better and faster to market demand. It’s more cost-efficient and far less laborious than building a custom backend solution or emailing version after version of Excel spreadsheets as attachments.

2. Coordinating complex development of a physical product
We launch new products every week and ship them around the world, which poses a significant challenge as a company of 25 people. We coordinate product development more effectively by using Google Drive as a project collaboration platform. Our knit developers, who create the patterns for our knit kits, use Drive as a repository for all pattern-related files. They create pattern templates in Google Docs and share them with tech editors for approval. Then, the knit devs adapt the patterns to InDesign files, which they can upload to Drive and share with designers to finalize. Warehouse staff print the pattern files directly from Drive, then assemble them in a knit kit. Sharing our content easily allows us to reduce the complexity of product development and get our products out the door.

3. Prioritising the most important activities
As a small company, we have seemingly infinite challenges to tackle with limited resources. Google Apps help us make the most of our time and our technology investment. We can test something new, like an at-home knitting party, using tools we already have, like Drive for sharing and Gmail for communications. And because Apps for Work is easy to use, we don’t have to spend time on extra training. We can spend our energy on improving our products.

Wool and the Gang is all about creating, teaching, sharing experiences, and having fun while doing it. Our technology gets out of the way so we don't have to think about the barriers of growing our business. We can focus on pushing our knitting movement forward.

Posted by Adam Seldow, Executive Director of Technology for the Chesterfield County Public Schools

(Cross-posted on the Google for Education Blog)

Editor's note: Continuing our EdTech leadership series, today’s guest author is Adam Seldow, Executive Director of Technology for Chesterfield County Public Schools in Virginia. In June we shared that Chesterfield purchased 32,000 Chromebooks for distribution to middle and high school students over the course of two years. Today, Adam explains how Chromebooks have impacted Chesterfield, and gives advice to other schools planning technology roll-outs of any size..

In the last few weeks, we’ve distributed approximately 14,000 Chromebooks to our middle school students in record time. This has been a welcome change — in the past with other tools the IT department had many hurdles. With Chromebooks, deployment has been easy. The simplicity of the devices combined with a lot of planning helped us enjoy a smooth (and painless) deployment. Below are our top six tips for districts preparing for their own Chromebook roll-outs:

1. Be transparent and communicate often 

Communicate often—more than you think you should. We communicate via our Anytime, Anywhere Learning website, which includes a section where people can submit questions. We post the answer to many of the questions we get on the site. Having a public website has two benefits. One, it informs the community when they have questions, and two, it unifies our message and provides the school administrators with a clear way to communicate about technology.

2. Check off prerequisites to make sure you’re ready to start

Before you get close to deploying devices, make sure the technology prerequisites are in place. For example, we tested and reconfigured our wireless network a number of times. We tested the Chromebook configuration and our settings in the Google Admin console a number of times. We gave Chromebooks out to a few kids to take home last year to test the home content filtering. We tested and tested and tested again. We had huge support in this preparation from our vendor, Dell, and their sub-contractor TIG (Technology Information Group), who had logistics like this down to a science.

3. Empower the schools in the planning 

In order to be successful when deploying Chromebooks, we involved the district's schools in planning. We met individually with each Principal and discussed everything from which room we’d use for Chromebook distributions to how they could enhance existing curriculum to benefit from the new technology. These meetings helped the schools realize that we weren’t going to take a one-size-fits-all approach for each school. The Tech Department alone should not run device distribution.

4. Make professional development fun and engaging 

We did three things that made our teacher training event a success:

(1) we made it fun; (2) we put the teachers in the students’ shoes; and (3) we made the full training optional. We asked for volunteers from the middle schools to join us for a two day training over the summer called “Camp Chromebook.” We didn’t know what to expect for sign-ups, because we weren’t offering to pay teachers to attend. On the day registration opened, all 300 spots filled up within a few minutes. At “Camp”, the teachers became the students: they went through a dry run of our onboarding process and visited different classes to learn different topics. Camp also helped us load-test our wireless network since we had 30-40 Chromebooks in each room. It was an unbelievable success, not to mention a really fun way to help faculty get to learn hands-on about the devices. When these teachers returned to school, they shared their knowledge with others who didn’t attend.

CIO by day, channeling "Camp Chromebook Director" Adam Seldow for training

"Campers" (teachers and administrators) at Camp Chromebook hard at work during training

5. Streamline the distribution of devices 

We aimed to get each school’s Chromebooks distributed in two days. To do this we:

• Worked with schools over the summer and the early weeks of schools to send and collect all the necessary paperwork (e.g. parent permission forms, acceptable use policies, fees). 
• Created a card with a scannable barcode for each student to show they had paperwork completed. 
• Distributed devices to students during their English classes (since that is the only subject that every student has every year) and gave them cards with barcodes and their student ID number.
• Brought students to the gym or media center by class. We’d scan the card and then have the student walk to stations to pick up their Chromebook, their charger, and their device case. We already had everything unboxed and ready to go. 
•  Returned students to their English class immediately for an onboarding session

6. Have students and teachers learn about Chromebooks together 

After receiving their devices, students returned to their English classrooms for a 15 minute onboarding session led by one of our designated technology coaches. We had a technician on hand for any immediate support (e.g. spot changes for passwords). The session walked them through set-up: from logging in to taking selfies (what is it with people and selfies!?) and navigating the home screen. We also had each student activate the content filter, a critical step to keep them secure on the web.

After receiving their Chromebook, students returned to class for a 15 minute training session

Chromebooks have met their promise of easy set-up and management. I am happy to report that we exceeded our goal of getting all devices to each school in two days per school. When we roll out devices to other grades next year, I think we can get it down to one day per school. But we’ll keep “Camp” as two days — that was too much fun and too useful to shorten.

Posted by Kevin Ackhurst Managing Director, Australia and New Zealand, Google For Work

Starting a business requires passion, dedication, and a clear vision—and powerful tools that help entrepreneurs bring their ideas to life. In September, we shared the results of a new Deloitte report that showed that companies using an above-average number of cloud services grow 26% faster and drive 21% more profit than those that use no cloud tools.

Now we’ve teamed up with international research agency GfK to study cloud adoption among new SMBs—those established up to three years ago—in Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. Like their peers on the other side of the globe, these businesses are using the cloud as a tool for growth. Here are a few of the key insights we uncovered:

Most new SMBs are cloud users. 77% of companies that participated in the study have adopted cloud services. Cloud technology tends to be easy to set up and manage, so new business owners can let their IT run itself and instead focus their time on the work that matters .

New SMBs that take advantage of the cloud envision a brighter future. 70% of companies that use cloud services expect revenue to increase over the next 12 months, compared to 48% of businesses that don’t. Like the Deloitte study, these results point to a correlation between cloud adoption and fast growth.

Cloud services can help new SMBs build their brand. 72% of companies that adopted a custom email, like name@yourcomany.com, saw an increase in engagement and 74% saw an uplift in sales. Small businesses rely on the use of cloud services to get up and running quickly, and professional email addresses for domains are a common first step.

Getting a new business off the ground is always challenging, and building momentum in the early years can be even harder. Our latest research suggests that cloud services can help young companies build further engagement with customers, drive sales and set the business up for growth.

Posted by Hal Friedlander, Chief Information Officer, New York City Department of Education

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

Editor's note: The New York City Department of Education Division of Instructional and Informational Technology recently approved Google Apps for Education as a supported tool for their schools. For the first post in our EdTech leadership series we interviewed the Chief Information Officer, Hal Friedlander. We’re inspired by his approach to understand schools’ needs, so asked him to share more about his team’s work and their decision to authorize Google Apps for Education & Chromebooks..

Part of what makes New York City unique is its diversity. Each of the five boroughs has a rich mix of people and cultures, which is reflected across the more than 1 million students at over 1,800 schools. While some see this variety and scale as a challenge in offering technology for schools, I see it as a benefit. In NYC, we have more schools innovating, more schools piloting technology and more schools leading the charge in finding the right tools for teachers and students.

At their core, schools are learning organizations. Teachers learn something new then help their kids learn it; they’re professional learners. And they know what they need much better than I do as an administrator. The Division of Instructional and Informational Technology (DIIT) team at the Department of Education listens to what educators want, understands what drives these asks, and then translates their needs into technology requirements and an IT strategy that helps students learn.

We take the same approach here in NYC as I did in my years working in the private sector — we use the customer engagement model. We treat schools as customers and engage them as advocates of the technology. The educators who live in the community and teach students every day have the best ideas about what they need in technology, not a guy like me who works at the 30,000-foot view. The job of my team is to support technology choices that will help the schools.

Over the last year, we saw more and more schools using Google Apps for Education. After evaluating it centrally we decided to add Google Apps to our list of approved and supported tools for NYC schools this year. A number of factors drove this decision. First, a number of schools were already using Google Apps for Education. Second, since Google Apps doesn’t require special technical skills, schools were able to customize the tools to meet their specific needs. This included everything from fostering parent engagement, to managing classrooms, to creating and sharing online curricula. Administrators told us they liked Google Apps because they could be as open or restrictive as they wanted in terms of how much communication they allowed beyond the school domain.

From a central office perspective, we authorized Google Apps because it integrates easily with our existing systems and we find it very easy to manage. This means tasks like setting up student sign-on for identity management are straightforward, and we don’t have to spend a lot of resources to manage domains. The tools are intuitive, so we haven’t had to offer much training. We created a NYC DoE Google Apps for Education Resource Center to help people get off and running.

We take the same approach to evaluating devices as we do to evaluating other tools. We saw that many schools wanted to use Chromebooks, and in our assessments, found them to be an affordable, manageable option for learning. So we worked with the OEMs to ensure Chromebooks met all our specifications, and added them to our list of approved school devices. We want the schools to have choices — whether it is a laptop or a tablet or both — across price range and functionality.

People say that things can’t move quickly in the public sector, but I don’t believe that. If you’re committed to listening to the schools, finding out what they need and setting goals against getting it done, you’ll make things happen.