Editor's note: Today we speak with Melissa Pateritsas of Shaw Industries Group, which uses Google Apps along with Smartsheet. Read on to find out how these integrated solutions foster collaboration and add greater efficiency to the Shaw Industries supply chain. Register here to join our Hangout on Air on July 20 at 10 a.m. PT to learn more about how Smartsheet, a Google recommended app, can improve your business.
Can you tell us about Shaw Industries and why you chose Google Apps and Smartsheet?

Shaw Industries Group is committed to creating an efficient and sustainable supply chain for its flooring enterprise. Being the world’s largest carpet manufacturer and a leading floorcovering provider means sustainability isn’t just a moral or ethical imperative, it’s smart for business. More efficient supply chains produce better, lasting products with fewer costs.

With offices and sales representatives across the United States and world, Shaw’s sales reach nearly $5 billion every year. Our growing business needed an even more efficient (and sustainable) way to bring daily operations into the digital age. So we turned to two powerful collaboration tools: Google Apps and Smartsheet.


In Smartsheet, we could make good use of the collaborative work management (CWM) platform that marries the power of a project and process management solutions suite to the familiar interface of a spreadsheet. And we saw Google Apps as an opportunity to improve efficiency and collaboration across teams. With a strong working history, the two work in tandem very well and together were exactly what we needed to achieve our digital transformation.

You mentioned the importance of supply chains for Shaw Industries. How did considerations around the supply chain impact your decision to switch to Google Apps and Smartsheet?

Part of creating an efficient and sustainable supply chain is lowering overhead costs. The processes used to produce carpet and flooring at our various manufacturing facilities differed slightly from location to location. The many manufacturing divisions had common needs, but also their own unique challenges. Any solution would have to address these differences, while commonalities would cause overlap. It didn’t make sense to have different support teams for each process, especially if half of what the teams did was identical.

Sharing plans and projects was also challenging. The systems we had in place were costly and time-consuming. We needed a way to increase visibility and update project statuses, not only for our team, but also for external parties like clients and vendors.

What results are you seeing now that you’re using Apps and Smartsheet?

Turning to Google Apps’ collaborative tools was a positive first step. Google Drive allowed us to easily share documents and files both internally and externally. Documents could be instantly shared and jointly edited by employees around the world in real time. Plus, going paperless made our operations more ecologically friendly.

Smartsheet’s suite of project and process management solutions, which feature Google Apps integration, further enhanced what Google already had to offer. Smartsheet offers great flexibility. With them, we can easily create templates that we can edit and customize to meet diverse needs.

We also simplified project roll-ups — which were previously done by hand. Using cell linking, engineering managers could automate the process, saving time and effort, and automatic updates solved the problem of visibility that we struggled with. We could now easily share individual projects with stakeholders, both internal and external, ensuring that everyone was on the same page.

Also, today our separate business units are able to build custom and individualized solutions on a strong foundation that addresses both common and distinct needs. Managers and engineers can automate processes that had previously been done by hand, spending more time and energy on devising ways to make our products better and longer-lasting. These new solutions are built using familiar interfaces and services that employees already know how to use.

Can you tell us about the process of adopting Smartsheet?

Adopting Smartsheet was a simple transition because of its familiar spreadsheet-like GUI. We didn’t need additional software. Everything we needed could be done within the frameworks that Google and Smartsheet already offered.

So where does the company stand now in terms of its digital transformation?

We’re definitely in the midst of transformation. With Smartsheet and Google solutions, and their simplicity and the scalability that a worldwide enterprise like Shaw needs, we’ve reduced overhead and complexity and cut time spent on processes. We now have more time and focus on building for the future. We can also proudly say that we’ve met our goal to create easy-to-adopt digital practices and a more efficient, sustainable supply chain.

Posted by Chris Hewertson, CTO of glh

Editor's note: Today’s post is from Chris Hewertson, CTO of glh, the largest owner-operator hotel company in London with over 5,000 rooms throughout London as well as two locations in Malaysia. Chris was recently named “disruptive player in the crowded hotels market” in the CIO top 100 list. Here, he shares his secrets to success.


In 2013, we launched the world’s fastest hotel wi-fi and put our focus on digital. We had big ideas to transform our business, and we knew we couldn’t do it alone.

We’re always looking for new and innovative technology solutions that can help us deliver the best guest-centred experience in hospitality. Hosted services and real-time responses are becoming more and more of a basic customer expectation in other industries so we thought, why not hotels? We worked with implementation partner Cloudreach to adopt Google Apps as our fully integrated, enterprise-wide cloud collaboration and storage solution.

Let product enthusiasts within your teams help usher a smooth adoption With over 33 hotels, more than 1000 users and nearly 4 million files, how were we going to move everything and everyone onto Google Apps for Work? The answer was obvious – Jedis.

Well, not Jedis exactly, but pretty close. Our nominated Google Guides were a group of 65 champions across all our locations and departments – from night managers to head housekeepers – who helped kick-start our Google Apps for Work adoption. Their support and enthusiasm for the tools meant we could truly bring Google Apps for Work into every part of our business.

Not only did they help us cut down old and unused data as part of the migration process (we have now almost halved our original 3 million files), they encouraged everyone to use the tools for creative solutions. This is a great example of how a user led change approach can lead to high levels of engagement and adoption while minimising the need for a traditional data migration.

Find creative ways to use new tools to improve customer experience At glh, we take guest complaints seriously and try to accommodate each request as much as we can. At our biggest hotel, room moves and changes happen daily. Guests move rooms to be closer to their travelling party, away from their boss (yes, really) or even to avoid odd numbers.

Before Google, this would cause major disruption across a number of teams from Housekeeping to Concierge. Now, all teams can see and edit real-time room changes in Sheets, and housekeepers can even use it on their mobiles. As a result, we’ve significantly minimized delays, confusion and complaints.

From internal invites to office polls, Forms has been a welcome addition to the working lives of all of us at glh. Now we have a form that allows staff to check out a guest from anywhere in the hotel in seconds. No more printed paper that was popped into a box at reception.

Invest big savings from new technology tools into workplace improvements Trans-atlantic Hangout conversations have led to a 42% reduction in conference call charges. Hourly printouts of various logs and reports of over 1,000 pages are now shareable digital Docs that are securely stored on Drive. The logs are updated in real time and available on any device.

It’s just over a year since we introduced Google Apps for Work, and in that time we’ve made so many apps-based ideas a reality – like our Manager of the Month initiative, where everyone votes using a Form.

Our Google Guides, who were so central to our training and awareness a year ago, are still coming up with new suggestions all the time – it’s amazing how creative people can be.

Posted by Robert Cheetham, Founder and CEO, Azavea


Editor's note: Today we hear from Robert Cheetham, founder and CEO of Philadelphia-based geospatial web software and analysis firm Azavea. Read about how Azavea has relied on Google for Work tools for more than eight years and recently started using Chromebox for meetings and Chromebooks so employees can work together from anywhere.

When I founded Azavea in 2000, I dreamed of creating a great work environment focused on driving social impact by applying geospatial technology. We're a certified B Corporation, and our mission-driven work includes climate change, elections, public safety, transit, water infrastructure and natural resources. Inspired by my first job working for a local government agency in Japan, where cubicles don’t exist, I designed our workspace to have an open layout, long before it became popular in contemporary offices. Today, we rely on Google Apps, Chromebooks and Chromebox for meetings to support this collaborative environment and help us work closely together on our software and data analytics projects.

In the early years, when Azavea only had a handful of employees, we installed basic workplace software from a CD-ROM and had limited server space. When we outgrew our email system in 2008, we chose Gmail. Our employees quickly started using Google Calendar, Docs, Hangouts and Sheets because they integrate so closely with Gmail. These tools helped us work effectively together on projects, so it was a natural next step.

In 2012, our software developers started asking for supplementary computers to let them work from home, when traveling for client meetings or even in the office kitchen. We looked into tablets, but they were expensive and didn’t have fully functional keyboards. As longtime Google users, our Operations team investigated options from Google.

Chromebooks are fast, affordable, secure and remarkably powerful, so we started offering them as supplementary devices for people who wanted more mobility. Our colleagues can easily switch between their main workstations and portable Chromebooks, and the long-lasting battery makes them the perfect companion for frequent travelers, office roamers and remote employees. I typically travel for a week each month myself, so I use my Chromebook on long flights as well as meetings and conferences where there may not be convenient power. It typically lasts more than nine hours, while a laptop only lasts two or three.

The company now has more than fifty people, and when we moved to a new office a few months ago, we needed a videoconferencing solution for a dozen new meeting rooms, we once again turned to Google and picked Chromebox for meetings. Like the other Google products we use, Chromebox is affordable, easy to install and integrates with our existing workplace software, like Hangouts and Calendar. Anyone can quickly set up and join a meeting. As a small firm, this ease of use is critical for us — we don’t have a team of dedicated IT staff, so we don’t have capacity to constantly deal with technical difficulties or high-maintenance updates.

I wanted to start a company that felt like a community and made an impact. Over the past several years, Google has significantly enhanced our company’s operations because their products simply work and easily scale as the company has grown. Our teams are able to work effectively together, no matter where we are.

Posted by Koen Bosmans, Senior System Administrator/Service Desk Team Lead, Tessenderlo, Belgium

Editor's note: Today we hear from Koen Bosmans, Senior Systems Administrator at Melexis, a microelectronics supplier based in Tessenderlo, Belgium. One of the world’s top producers of sensors and microchips for the automotive industry, Melexis is expanding into new industries, with great success. Spread across 11 offices in nine countries, read how this truly global company uses Google Apps for Work to build its international team.

There’s a good chance you’ve used one of our products without realising it. The sophisticated microchips we make are in everything from children’s ear thermometers, to airbags, to smartphones, to drones. And as the demand for microelectronics has grown, so has our business: Melexis shares are worth 20 times more now than when I started working here in 1999, and today we employ 1,200 staff worldwide in Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Switzerland, China, Malaysia, the Ukraine and the US. As early as 2010, we could see that this rapid expansion might lead to “silo thinking” that prevents outstanding engineers in different countries from working together effectively in a global team. That’s why Melexis management asked me to research alternatives to the open-source software we were using.
I ranked five IT solutions on 25 criteria — including web accessibility, document sharing and OS compatibility — and Google Apps for Work came out on top. We bought 500 accounts and got ready to deploy them over 13 weeks. But after the first fortnight, I realised that Google Apps training was so straightforward I could ask a student working in my department to do it. He travelled the world for three months and trained the entire company.

Google Apps improves staff satisfaction with their work environment and rewards teamwork. In the first quarter after we switched to Gmail, the number of complaints about email dropped by 65%. No more spam or slow webmail, and Calendar has ended confusion over meeting room bookings. Expansion is much easier, too; instead of having to install servers and data lines in every new office, all we need is an internet connection. Plus, we can expand without asking engineers to relocate, since as part of a virtual team, they can talk to colleagues anywhere in the world over Hangouts while working together on a shared document in Sheets. And wherever we are, Drive saves time by letting colleagues work simultaneously on single documents — whether it’s our R&D teams collecting test data in Sheets, or the IT team preparing a presentation on Slides for our monthly meeting.

Through my experience using Google Apps within our IT team, I understand how something as simple as face-to-face contact through Hangouts can make a team so much stronger. My IT Service Desk team is made up of eight people split over six locations, and we meet every two days on Hangouts to discuss work. I noticed that seeing each other so often created a relaxed and friendly dynamic that made it easier to share advice and help each other.

At Melexis, we don’t just work hard, we play hard, too. Fun is part of our DNA, and three years ago, we invited everyone to take part in an international computer game LAN party. We’ve been doing it every year since, and it’s always a great opportunity to get to know each other across different locations.
Google Apps makes these international LAN parties possible. Staff use Forms to sign up for some of the four or five games we’ll be playing in competition, and we organise times and equipment through a community on Google+. Presentations on Slides explain what we’re doing, and we use Sheets to keep score.
The party starts at 6pm on a Friday. In each office, staff decorate a room, put on fancy dress, and set up a Hangout between all the offices, even our senior leaders get dressed up and take part! Projection screens, microphones and speakers let the offices communicate with each other while the organisers announce gaming fixtures. Our scoreboard is in Sheets, which automatically updates its graphs with all the new information from every match.
In the first year, we had 120 participants, and that number’s been going up every year since. We’ve even given out best-dressed awards for themes from Halloween to superheroes.
Now, when I travel between our offices in different countries, staff walk up to tell me how good the LAN parties are for the company and morale. But there’s no question that combining our talents and pulling together through technology, wherever we are, lies at the heart of our global success.

Posted by Adam Garrett, President, Fifth Manhattan

Editor's note: Today we hear from, Adam Garrett, president of Dallas-based Fifth Manhattan. Learn how Fifth Manhattan switched to Chromeboxes for a simpler, more affordable desktop computer solution.

When I joined Fifth Manhattan as president in 2014, I wanted to expand our customer base. We provide credit card payment processing services for small to medium-sized businesses and help them cut costs, increase revenue and provide a higher level of customer service. Big nationwide retail chains have substantial marketing budgets, but your local Italian restaurant and auto body shop don’t. That’s where we come in.

One of my first orders of business was to upgrade our aging fleet of desktop computers. The team needed simple, easy to use computers with web access, so we decided to buy one Chromebox and try it out. We were astonished by how simple it was to set up and deploy. After the pilot, we bought Chromeboxes with Chrome device management licenses for each of our 30 employees. Since then, we’ve given a Chromebox to each new hire.

Because of Chrome, we no longer need a traditional IT help desk. Fifth Manhattan has six full-time IT staff members, but they focus on building and managing our internal CRM platform. Before Chrome, they spent hours every week troubleshooting computer crashes. Today, they spend less time managing Chrome and deploying new devices and more time on their core responsibilities. Since we switched to Chromeboxes, we’ve only had one issue with a device — and it was a hardware malfunction, no fault of Chrome.

As a payment processing company, we deal with highly sensitive data like bank account information and social security numbers, so security is critical. We’re required to maintain compliance with PCI regulations governing customer data. As part of this, we limit the number of employees who have access to sensitive internal data and monitor all usage carefully to avoid breaches. Chrome makes this easier to do. Administrators can set up different “organizations,” or teams so they can create customized settings for each team to limit which applications they can access. For example, our telesales team only need to use our web-based CRM tool, so we limit their usage to that, while account managers need access to their Chrome web browser and applications like Gmail and an e-signature solution. In addition, we can turn off incognito mode and disable saving to external flash drives. These settings help us control employee access so we can prevent data breaches and leaks.

Fifth Manhattan employees are now able to work remotely, thanks to Chromebooks and Google Apps. We have five extra managed Chromebooks for employees to use if they’re unable to come into the office because of travel, parental leave or bad weather. As president, I travel often for customer meetings. My Chromebook lasts for more than eight hours, which comes in handy during cross-country flights and long meetings. I can even access my desktop applications remotely from my Chromebook using Chrome remote desktop.

When I joined Fifth Manhattan, I wanted to grow our payment processing business into a thriving enterprise. Google Chrome has helped me scale the business from 35 employees to 100 in two years and makes it easier for everyone to focus on their work, not IT.

Posted by John W. Penney, Creative Director & CEO, BlackDog Advertising


Editor's note: Today we hear from John W. Penney, creative director and CEO of Miami-based BlackDog Advertising. Read how the company used Chrome devices to build engaging hotel kiosks for a major hotel chain.


I’d always wanted to start a business that used technology in creative ways — so I founded BlackDog Advertising in 1989. Since then, design has been at the center of our culture.

Members of the Blackdog Advertising team (from left to right): Jason Carbonell, interactive director, John Penney, founder and creative director and Humberto Abeja, art director

We sell to businesses that use technology to engage customers, so our solutions need to be eye-grabbing and intuitive, elegant and approachable. Devices like the Chromebit and Chromebox align perfectly with our design-first approach and provide both cost-effective and dynamic solutions to expensive static light boxes and point-of-sale ads.

Our team became well-acquainted with the efficiencies of Google productivity tools like Hangouts and Gmail when we switched to Google Apps for Work from Microsoft Office about five years ago. This led us to give Chrome for Work a try, and we saw even greater benefits for collaboration, ease of use and cost. That’s how we discovered that Chrome devices could work really well for our clients in the hotel and tourism industries.

We tested whether we could use a combination of devices and monitors to create compelling interactive signs and quickly realized that we could centrally manage a constant stream of images and video with the Chrome device management console, for pennies on the dollar. The decision to build personalized apps on the Chrome Web Store that could be instantly updated across all of our clients’ kiosks was a no-brainer.

Our client, a major hotel group, posed a challenge that pushed this line of thinking even further. They asked us to build something that would replace the three-ring binders their concierge professionals have used for decades to show hotel guests activities and restaurants they might enjoy. We knew the use of tablets, which they suggested, would be expensive to implement over the long run and instead urged them to explore Chrome devices and touchscreen monitors. The Chromebit and monitor together cost less than a single tablet, but offered the added features of easy content deployment and theft protection. Hotels may carry up to 20 pitch books on hand, costing about $75 each. Our Chromebit kiosks, which can each replace all of a hotel's pitch books, cost no more than $400 — a savings of over $1000 for some hotels.

Chromebit kiosk showcasing area events, activities and attractions for hotel guests

Blending vivid imagery, video and interactive features, Chrome kiosks provide a modern alternative to the three-ring binders concierge professionals used to use when showcasing area events, activities and attractions. And hotel guests can interact with the kiosks on their own to plan or add to their itineraries, even after normal work hours, when the concierge desk is closed.

We can use Chrome to design, test and introduce new solutions that our clients love. It’s reliability, ease of use and affordability make it an attractive option to replace all kinds of signage — not just concierge kiosks. Our clients have requested Chrome for other uses, such as ticket sale kiosks — all possibilities we’re eager to explore. Chrome’s marriage of approachable design and robust technology has created a new revenue stream for us, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to uncover where else Chrome will take us.

Posted by Prabhakar Raghavan, Vice President of Engineering, Google Apps



Editor's Update October 13, 2016: We're no longer accepting signups for the Google Sites Early Adopter Program. Please monitor the G Suite Updates Blog for an announcement when new Sites launches to general availability.


Google Atmosphere, Google’s global enterprise event series, lands today in Tokyo, where I’m addressing an audience of several thousand enterprise IT execs, along with our very own Diane Greene and local customers such as ASICS and Fujitec. We have two exciting announcements to share — new experiences we’re adding to the Google Apps suite, with Search and Sites.

It’s no secret that the growth of information inside the enterprise continues to accelerate. In fact, today the average knowledge worker spends the equivalent of one full day a week searching for and gathering information.¹

Google Springboard puts the right information at your fingertips Google is no stranger to helping enterprise customers sort through their corporate information and making it more useful for employees. We’ve been a leader in Enterprise Search for nearly 15 years and have partnered with some of the largest companies in the world. As we continue to invest in applying technologies like machine intelligence to power our web search engine, we’re working on a new way to bring all of this power to the enterprise: Google Springboard.

Google Springboard helps you find the right information that you need at the moment that you need it. It searches quickly and easily across all of your information in Google Apps including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, Contacts and more. Springboard also assists you throughout your workday by proactively providing useful and actionable information and recommendations.

A totally rebuilt Google Sites Google Sites is one of the most popular products among our enterprise customers, and we’ve been working on an update that makes it even easier for employees to share information within their company.

With the new Google Sites, you can build beautiful, functional pages to aggregate and distribute content across your enterprise, optimized for every screen. A new intuitive drag-and-drop design experience supports real-time collaboration by multiple editors, just like in Docs, and offers easy access to all your content from Calendar, Docs, Drive, Maps and more. The new Sites also includes themes and layouts designed to scale and flex to any screen size, so they’re as useful when you access them on the 30-inch monitor at your desk or your smartphone on your commute.

Ready for early adopters We’ve been previewing Google Springboard and the new Google Sites with a small set of customers, and we’re excited to begin to extend each of these new apps to more customers through an Early Adopter Program. If you’re the admin of a company that runs on Google Apps for Work you can express your interest in the Google Springboard Early Adopter Program or the Google Sites Early Adopter Program. We have a lot more in store for both Google Springboard and Google Sites, and we’re excited to help you start to take back the time you spend searching for and gathering information.²

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1 Study from McKinsey states that the average information worker spends 8.8 hours or 19% of their average work week searching for or gathering information.
2 The Early Adopter Program for the new Google Sites will have no impact on customers’ usage of classic Google Sites.

Posted by Jan Castelijns, Head of Systems Engineering and IT Operations, Travix, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Editor's note: Today we hear from Jan Castelijns, Head of Systems Engineering and IT Operations at Travix, a global online travel technology company that sells low fare flight tickets to 2.5 million passengers from 28 countries every year. Founded in 2011, Travix has rapidly built up a network of 500 staff in seven offices worldwide. Read why they chose Google Apps as the IT infrastructure behind their rapid expansion.


When Travix started out in 2011, it was through the merger of three companies. We gained strength from that diversity, but we also inherited three corporate IT systems. So the first thing the CEO asked me to do when I joined was to find one system we could use across the whole company. He recommended Microsoft Office 365, but implementing it was more demanding than anyone had expected. Months into the process, I went back to him with a realistic projection of the time and resources necessary to finish the rollout, and a recommendation that we put the project on hold. The hunt began for alternatives. That’s where Google Apps came in.

Google Apps is perfectly suited for an expanding global business. We have offices in Amsterdam, Oosterhout, Berlin, Bangalore, Singapore, California and London, and in all of these places, Office 365 required infrastructure modifications before implementation. By contrast, Google Apps was ready to go right out of the box.

Our corporate IT systems need to be quick, reliable and safe, with a minimum of costs and management overhead. Google Apps costs less to implement, less to maintain and allows greater contractual flexibility than Office 365. Because Google Apps is also entirely cloud based, we don’t need to install servers, as recommended in the hybrid server-cloud Office 365 solution. In fact, Google Apps allowed the decommissioning of 10 existing servers, each of which is priced at $3,000.

Rolling out Google Apps took just six weeks. g-company led training with one-on-one sessions for executives, small workshops for staff and even presentations over Hangouts for our Bangalore team. But key to our rapid deployment were the “ambassadors” – staff prepared to support their colleagues when Google Apps went live. After setting up our systems engineers on Google Apps, I sent out a Form for people to register as ambassadors and the response was overwhelming: 104 people signed up for 50 positions. This was a clear sign for us that our people were willing to embrace this change and make this transition work.

At Travix, we already worked with other Google products in particular fields, like Google Analytics and Google Adwords in marketing and Google BigQuery and kubernetes in engineering. Now we have Google Apps for everyone.

Staff here have become very enthusiastic about Google Apps, as they see how the tools fit into their working lives. Gmail, Calendar and Hangouts let staff stay on top of their work anytime, from anywhere. Rather than book meeting rooms through a separate app, now everything is on Calendar, saving time and hassle. Drive has been organically and rapidly adopted across the organisation, and Forms has been a huge success that we didn’t even plan for. Instead of starting a gigantic email thread or using a free survey tool found on the internet, we now use the simple Forms interface to get swift feedback, with answers fed directly into Sheets for analysis.

Hangouts in particular has changed the way we communicate, whether through the efficiency of instant messaging or by working more closely with colleagues abroad. Hangouts on Air allows staff in other offices to participate in our CEO’s presentations in Amsterdam, and because the stream is recorded, engineers in Bangalore and California can watch it too, despite the time difference. Collaboration between team members no longer requires a kind of “email ping pong” and stressful version control. We can just open Hangouts and Drive and go through a document together, whether an engineering design in Docs, a marketing product plan on Slides, or details of a tender on Sheets.

A growing global technology company demands an IT solution that works in any location, on any device. On top of that, it has to be cost-effective, easy to maintain and ready to use in short time. It’s my job to provide that for my colleagues. With Google Apps, that’s exactly what we’ve got.

Posted by Paul Hsu, Chief Operating Officer at Fancy

Editor's note: Today we hear from Paul Hsu, Chief Operating Officer at Fancy, which uses Google Apps with ProsperWorks CRM to help manage merchant partnerships, gain transparency into sales team activity and optimize their internal processes. Register here to join our Hangout on Air on June 14 at 9 a.m. to learn more about how ProsperWorks, a Google recommended app, can improve your business.

Fancy, the place to discover, engage with and buy goods from top brands, works with trendsetters and tastemakers to curate thousands of goods. Keeping track of new merchant product launches can get complicated, but Google Apps helps ease the coordination process. For example, we often need to schedule last minute meetings to review products that we want to feature at the start of every day. We use Calendar to find meeting times that fit our schedules, Drive to share product launch proposals and Sheets to manage product launch timelines. Since Google Apps tools are designed to work and integrate smoothly with one another, running these meetings is a seamless process. We’ve used it heavily since we started the company, and the tools have been vital to our productivity and growth.

Growing with Google With a quickly growing merchant partnership base, we’ve found it increasingly important to keep track of all potential vendors and new interactions. Working with thousands of merchants and even more products, we needed a CRM solution to help scale this part of our business.

Since we were already using Gmail, Calendar, Sheets, Contacts and Drive for most of our operations, we saw ProsperWorks as an effective CRM solution, given how integrated it is with Google’s entire ecosystem of apps.

ProsperWorks with Gmail and Calendar After we integrated the ProsperWorks Chrome extension — which only took a few short hours — our brand development team began using it immediately. They used ProsperWorks to track communications and interactions with merchants in Gmail and identify items that required follow-up. We saw an increase in our team’s productivity and growth in our brand partner network that we directly attributed to this integration.

With easy-to-use and intuitive tools from ProsperWorks, we experienced a significant increase in the number of merchant partnership deals closed due to the ability to better track customers and share real-time information that helped us close deals.

ProsperWorks with Drive and Sheets In addition to the benefits for our brand development team, our executive team gained tremendous insight through ProsperWorks reporting capabilities, which work perfectly with Sheets. ProsperWorks' integration with Sheets allowed our brand development team to simply aggregate, organize and visualize our sales in a single dashboard. This gave us immediate access to important insights, such as those gleaned from comparing pipelines by stage, opportunity assessments, customer types, team workload, monthly team progress and even the status of our leads. We were able to get a bird’s eye view of all our sales pipelines without leaving Google Apps.

Using ProsperWorks with Drive gave us insight into product category gaps that we weren’t pursuing and showed us categories that had more partners than we needed. With ProsperWorks, we were able to easily identify these areas and refine our focus to develop partnerships that would expand our reach into new categories while reducing time spent on categories we had already built out.

Optimizing our brand management team with ProsperWorks and Google Apps for Work On the ground level, our brand management team used ProsperWorks as a way to communicate, manage workflow, manage and assign tasks, share documents and more. Our brand development team has thousands of interactions daily across Gmail, Calendar and Hangouts, and it’s really helpful that on ProsperWorks, the profiles and status of each lead are automatically updated so that every email exchange, event and file is easily accessible by any team member.

Using Google Apps alongside ProsperWorks has helped us optimize the processes of our brand development team and make better decisions faster, which definitely gives us an edge over our competition.

Posted by Rahul Sood, Managing Director, Apps and Search for Work

For six years, the Google Apps Marketplace has helped businesses do more by being the number one source to find third-party apps and integrations that extend what's possible with Google Apps. But with hundreds of popular apps to choose from, it’s sometimes hard for customers to discover the newest and most innovative ones.

Enter New & Notable, a new section in the Google Apps Marketplace that surfaces the latest and best third-party apps and integrations for Google Apps, and the developers behind them.

Here’s a preview of some of the products highlighted this month:

• Asana Dashboard: The new Asana Dashboard integrates with Google Sheets, allowing users to export task completion and performance information for wider tracking across teams. Read more here.
• Hubspot CRM: With the new HubSpot CRM app, users can now log emails sent from Gmail into HubSpot with one click, and automatically sync meetings between Google Calendar and HubSpot, no matter which system they came from. Read more here.
• Xero: With their latest integration, Xero — a provider of online accounting software for small businesses — lets users view Gmail messages alongside Xero transaction and activity details. Users can also save emails in Xero for reference, start a quote or invoice from within a Gmail message. Read more here.
• Zendesk: With their latest integration, Zendesk automates the Google Apps admin tasks of forwarding support e-mails into Zendesk and listing Google users within Zendesk. Read more here.
• Zoho People: Zoho People is a new HR management app for small businesses that lets users manage their HR portal directly from their Google Apps account, as well as add users directly to Zoho People, saving them from having to manually re-enter employee information. Read more here.

Find these apps and many more (like AppSheet, GQueues, ZipBooks, Any.Do, Infogram, and LogoMix) in New & Notable. If you’re on the hunt for killer apps that help you get more done with Google Apps, it’s the best place to start.

Posted by Andy Coppin, Operations Director at Bartle Bogle Hegarty

Editor's note: Today we hear from Andy Coppin, Operations Director at Bartle Bogle Hegarty, a global advertising agency based in London. Founded in 1982, BBH has twice won Agency of the Year at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival with groundbreaking campaigns for clients including Audi, British Airways, Tesco and Unilever. With offices in London, Los Angeles, New York, Shanghai, Singapore, Mumbai and Stockholm, read how the BBH team uses Google Apps for Work to enhance its global network.


A good idea can cross borders. That’s one reason why we have just one office in each global region, instead of one office in each country like most of our competitors. It keeps campaigns focused and recognises that our adventurous staff see travel as a perk, rather than a chore. So when we overhauled our IT system in 2010, we needed a system that enabled both close international collaboration and great mobility. Google Apps for Work opened up far-reaching creative possibilities that change the way we work.

Mobility we need with lower cost, more dependable tools
Google Apps is ideal for flexible and mobile working. Gmail and Calendar are web-based, so client-facing teams are never out of touch as they travel to meetings abroad. Previously, remotely connecting to our old servers could only be done with an unreliable VPN. It proved to be an expensive liability with a tendency to fail. Drive is not only cheaper, it’s also dependable. The instant messaging function on Hangouts is perfect for teams on the road. Chromebox for meetings has become so powerful and easy to use that it’s entirely superseded the separate video conferencing system we installed five years ago.

Managing IT and administrative controls internally, for faster troubleshooting
The simple administrative interface and modular design of Google Apps for Work means we can solve IT problems internally instead of spending on external support. My colleague Will Triantos, our Global Google Technical Lead, not only administers the entire platform for 1,000 staff in eight offices, he’s also constantly creating new ways of using Google Apps to improve work at BBH. Fast, friendly and comprehensive support from Cloud Technology Solutions (CTS) means all the advice we need is always on-hand. With their support, we migrated our entire Stockholm office to Google Apps in less than a week.

Fostering a culture of creative IT, sharing and efficiency
Using Sites, Drive and Google APIs, Will has created a much-improved new intranet. While our previous intranet was based on servers around the world that cost us £20,000 a year to license, the new intranet is entirely cloud-based, so we don’t pay to maintain our own hardware. Because it uses Sheets to present our global company directory, we can always be confident we have up-to-date contact details for all our offices. With its connections to Drive, we can upload documents like historical advertising pitches in a few seconds, instead of in ten to thirty minutes. And because any of our staff can upload, rather than just one administrator in London, each office can share news and holiday information specific to them. Teams anywhere can access their local Google+ communities or submit Forms to make catering requests from kitchen staff, and users access the intranet with their Google Account single sign on, too, so their Gmail, Calendar and Drive is embedded and only a click away.

Most IT FAQs are answered on our intranet, so Will is free to find other applications for Google Apps. To take a simple example, before new BBH staff arrive at the office, they fill in a Form on Sites that connects to a Sheet in HR, so we have all their details in advance. And at the building entrance they sign-in to a Form on a tablet that emails reception, so the right person can be there to meet them. Small things like that add up, make a great impression and prove that cutting admin in one area frees creative thinking elsewhere.

Posted by Steve Coulbourne, Technical Director, AOL

Editor's note: Today we hear from Steve Coulbourne, technical director at AOL, a global digital media and technology company focused on “Culture and Code.”


I’ve been part of the AOL team for more than 15 years. In that time I’ve seen the technology we use evolve immensely. When I first started, the company had standard desktops and a legacy IT system. Since then, we’ve shifted from clunky hardware and software to “lightweight enterprise” — prioritizing convenient, immediate access and ease of use.

Our CEO, Tim Armstrong, believes that if you keep doing things the same way, you’ll continue to get the same results. We take this philosophy seriously when it comes to our technology. Our global Chief Technology Officer, William Pence, provided clear vision for modern, cloud-based, and forward looking technologies, which propelled our investment and focus in this space. When we decided to start using Google Apps, we were most interested in unifying and improving how we work together across teams — especially between AOL’s different entities.

In recent years, we’ve completed many acquisitions (think Huffington Post, TechCrunch, and the integration of Verizon’s Digital Media Services to name a few). Having Google Apps during the period of potential confusion and chaos has helped us perform due diligence activities even quicker.

We started exploring Google Apps in 2010 and chose it over Office 365 because Microsoft required us to staff a whole team to manage SharePoint and its infrastructure. We also realized that adoption of Google Apps would be easier and more cost effective because of Google’s reputation for ease of use and the familiarity many of our employees already had with its tools.

Over the course of six months, we unified 13 domains into one with help from a third-party integrator to move from Microsoft Exchange to Google. From a set-up perspective, it took about two to three weeks to get everyone up and running with local peer (i.e., collaboration champions) and IT helpdesk support. Employees immediately started sharing their favorite Apps “hacks” with colleagues (for example, we use Google Forms for invite submissions, which alerts employees when events are filled and creates a culture of excitement and inclusion).

As a result, we were able to decommission 18 of our 22 globally distributed Messaging servers (more than 80 percent), eliminating 130 terabytes (TB) of drive space needs. We’re also migrating on-premise file shares into Google Apps, which will allow us to reallocate another 120 TB of file storage.

I led the initiative for company-wide adoption of Google Drive, Docs and Hangouts, and the entire company has been fully migrated since February 2015. With recent acquisitions, we've quickly integrated our collaboration tools to maintain focus on business value and production.

In terms of security (such as granting and denying access to data as needed), we’ve reduced costs. When you’re working in the cloud, there’s no need to bring on a third-party vendor to ensure data is secure. Moving away from premise-based solutions has provided us the flexibility to decrease our acquisition integration timeline from a messaging and collaboration perspective. We’re now able to offer the services of companies we acquire the same day that a deal is signed.

In certain instances, the collaboration capabilities of Google Apps enabled quicker time to market for our products. For example, the content and assets for each morning’s AOL homepage is queued up in real time on Drive. Also, our Business Communications team can edit articles at the same time — greatly reducing time to publication.

With multiple brands under the AOL umbrella, Apps also allows us to be more transparent and give everyone access to files and documents. With Apps, our employees are productive from anywhere — whether it’s on AOL’s campus or on the network — and connected as a unified team.

Posted by Doug Bohaboy, VP of Marketing, Mimeo


Editor's note: Today we hear from Doug Bohaboy of Mimeo, a content distribution and digital printing company based in New York City. Learn how Google Apps helped Mimeo deliver at breakneck speed while keeping its employees connected.


When I first started at Mimeo, a content distribution and digital printing company, in 2005, we had fewer than 100 employees. I could stand up and talk to anyone in our New York office. I knew everyone.

Today, we have over 800 employees in six locations, including four international offices in the UK, Germany, India and China. Our New York office had ballooned to multiple floors. That’s why we turned to Google Apps to keep our distributed workforce productive, efficient and competitive in an evolving market. Google Hangouts, Google Docs and Google Calendar keep us organized and coordinated across multiple time zones.

To compete with other online suppliers, we need to move fast and fulfill orders quickly. Customers can place an order for a complex printed document on our website at 10 p.m. EST and expect it to be fulfilled and delivered the next day. This means people at our New York headquarters need to communicate rapidly with our global manufacturing facilities. With Hangouts, our teams can video or text chat instantly from any device, whether it’s a desktop computer or mobile phone, at any time of day or night.

We made the switch to Google Apps from Microsoft Exchange in 2010 to give people tools to work more closely together — without wasting time on IT issues. Before 2010, our IT team had to deal with issues that didn’t add value to the company, like scheduled server maintenance and helping employees fix email problems. These minor issues added up to 1,000 hours each year. Now, our IT team spends 100-200 hours a year addressing minor issues — equating to huge financial and time savings.

Google Apps, and particularly Docs, increases our efficiency. Today we create about 90 percent of our documents using Docs. Employees often collaboratively edit documents together when they’re sitting across the room from each other. Docs also makes meetings more efficient by giving us the ability to take shared notes and assign owners. The whole team doesn’t need to be in every meeting — we can tag team members who need to share their input on one small section, and they can contribute on their own time.

With offices in the UK, Germany, China and India, we use Hangouts to collaborate more meaningfully with more face-to-face time. The ease of meeting person to person also helps us appreciate the cultural diversity of our team, which contributes to our open culture that embraces diverse ideas and paths to problem solving. Whether from Memphis or Berlin, any of us could easily hop on a video chat in Hangouts while also having access to intuitive tools, making training new employees from any location seamless.

As companies like ours grow increasingly global, Google Apps is helping to create more mobile, flexible work environments. Our biggest goal is to do more for our customers while keeping our employees in sync by making Mimeo a great place to work. We know that our customers depend on Mimeo for fast, reliable service that consistently exceeds their expectations. Google Apps helps our employees make the most of their time and creativity, ensuring we retain the competitive advantage that’s made us a globally recognized company.

Posted by Diane Greene, SVP, Google

Applications have long been the lifeblood of the enterprise. This has never been more true than in today’s market. And Google has never been more committed to the enterprise. We’re excited to expose our APIs to enterprise developers who can now incorporate advanced technologies such as image recognition, speech recognition, location and maps, email and calendaring into their applications.

Google I/O is a great opportunity to share what excites us about the massive digital transformation happening at companies around the globe. We’re thrilled about the speed of innovation with all of our enterprise products, particularly Google Cloud Platform, Google Apps, Maps, Android and Chromebooks. We’re laser focused on creating what developers need to build successfully in the cloud.

At Google, we continue to push new innovations that enable developers to turn great ideas into world class applications. We can also help you get your apps in the hands of your customers through marketplaces like Google Play, Chrome Web Store, Google Apps Marketplace and Cloud Launcher, which serve billions of Android and Chrome users and millions of businesses.
Today’s announcements at I/O further build out our developer toolkit, with new features to help developers build what’s next for the enterprise.

• New APIs for Sheets & Slides: With the new Sheets API, we're giving developers a new level of access to some of the most popular features in Sheets. Create new spreadsheets, populate them with data and formulas, insert charts and pivot tables, and pull results right into your apps. Developers can use Sheets in a powerful workflow to push data from their app into Sheets, allowing users to collaborate on that data, before the updated data is pulled back into the original app. The Slides API enables developers to push data from other applications into Slides in order to create custom, polished presentations quickly.
• API Partner Ecosystem: A number of partners, including Salesforce, SAP Anywhere, Conga, Prosperworks, Anaplan, Sage, Trello, and Asana are already connecting their services through these new APIs, and we look forward to seeing even more developers follow suit.
• Enhancements to the Classroom API: We’re giving developers programmatic access to our most powerful features within Google Classroom. The Classroom API lets school reporting systems sync coursework and grades from Classroom and quickly connect teachers and students to their learning content.

Whether you’re using Google Cloud Platform, integrating with our Machine Learning APIs or building on top of our Google Apps suite, we’re committed to delivering the tools and technologies that help businesses improve productivity, securely connect information across platforms and power new workflows. Earlier this month we announced a BigQuery integration with Google Drive that allows customers to run queries, gather insights and then share that data with teams in a familiar and easy to understand template, no matter where they are. We also recently added two new security certifications, ISO27017 for cloud security and ISO27018 for privacy. And customers like Land O Lakes are taking advantage of our cloud and APIs to revolutionize their fields — in this case, modern farming.

Ever since I began my career in technology, I’ve been working to advance the way the enterprise runs. I worked on some of the first relational databases for Sybase and Tandem and then, at VMware, helped to create an entirely new industry centered around virtualization. Fast forward to today, and I can say that I’ve never been more excited about the potential for the cloud to transform businesses. There was a period in time where the energy was around consumer applications, but we can now see that people are realizing just how much innovation can be done in the enterprise, and it’s enticing more and more developers. While we’re excited about the innovations that we’re bringing to market, we’re even more excited about how you will take advantage of these new advancements. As the momentum continues in the enterprise, we can’t wait to see what you build next.

Posted by Greg Bennett, Imaginea

Editor's note: Today we hear from Greg Bennett of Imaginea Energy, an oil and gas company based in Calgary, Alberta Canada. Learn how Google Apps helps Imaginea defy industry stereotypes as they work to produce energy sustainably, securely and profitably.


At Imaginea Energy, our vision is an Oil and Gas industry that is much better for the Planet, and for People, and for Profits. This vision is reflected in our culture, the mindsets of our people as well as in our organizational model. Together, our organizational model and culture promote curiosity, teamwork and 10X thinking — values that affect everything from our team-driven project pitches, to idea generation to the tools that are integral to creating solutions that match our aspirations, like Google Apps for Work.

We switched from our previous platform because our legacy storage, productivity and email tools didn’t reflect our open and transparent culture or our vision of the future. The closed IT environment made it difficult to collaborate together beyond very small teams: file-sharing was non-existent, which created insane revision situations and confusion about document version control. Google Drive changes all of that. We've migrated nearly 260,000 files to Drive, all of which can be accessed from anywhere, on any device, without deploying a rigid shared drive structure.

Google Docs, Sheets, Slides and Forms have absolutely transformed how we work together. With real-time editing, commenting and data collection, we can quickly share ideas and insights and rapidly move work forward together. At a recent meeting we had over 30 people generate 20 pages of new ideas in under two hours. Seamless collaboration and rapid ideation like this simply wasn’t possible before.

Google Apps for Work combined with our flexible working environment provide maximum autonomy, which our employees leverage to increase their productivity both in and out of the office. Visit our headquarters on a Friday and you might find up to 40% of our people foregoing their commute in favour of working from home (or a coffee shop, or a park). This flexibility really works for our company and our team.

With access to information online or offline, the ability to work remotely extends to the vast 30,000 km2 of rolling prairie that our operations cover. Operators can capture data even without internet access. Once they re-connect, all of their offline work is instantly synced, eliminating redundant data-entry and confusion.

Our ability to work from anywhere has been further enhanced by using Google Hangouts. Whether a field operator is at one of our 600+ active wells or a team member is running a training presentation from 7,000 kms away in Europe, Hangouts connects our people face-to-face. Our field staff have cut down on the 500 km round trip visits to headquarters — now they can spend more time on-site, and less time driving by communicating and holding meeting via Hangouts. Reducing driving time increases the safety of our team, and also reduces our environmental footprint and operating costs.

Not only has switching to Google Apps saved us significant time, it will also reduce our IT spend. By mid-2016, we’ll have saved over 50 percent on IT maintenance, money that can be redeployed to develop solutions to business problems and maximising our team’s capabilities.

Google Apps gives us the security we need without compromising information flow or flexibility. The Admin console lets us customize mobile device management and quickly respond to changing security events. On a recent trip to Paris, a company device was stolen on the subway. Within 12 minutes, access credentials were changed and our data was secured. This security extends behind the scenes to every part of Google Apps. We may never have world-leading security experts on our staff, but luckily we don’t have to: Google does. Having trust in our tools, combined with the trust we invest in our employees, means we can focus on creating value without obsessing over security.

At Imaginea, we defy industry stereotypes by focusing on Planet, People and Profit together. When you set out to reimagine an industry like oil and gas, achieving that vision is only possible with the right people and the right tools. With Google Apps, we’ve set course to truly transform our business and the energy industry.

Posted by Courtney Osgood, Head of Communications at Paint Nite

Editor's note: Today we hear from Courtney Osgood of Paint Nite, a Boston-based events company that offers consumers a creative social experience at local bars. Learn how Google Apps helps Paint Nite maintain its close-knit company culture and keep teams connected no matter where they work.


Paint Nite offers a different kind of nightlife experience. Guided by a local artist, our customers spend a few hours sipping cocktails and painting at a local bar.
Working together to create something great is in our DNA, which is why we’ve used Google Apps since the company was founded in 2012.

As we’ve grown, Google Apps has helped us maintain our tight-knit culture while successfully scaling our business. In the past year, we’ve added more than 950 cities and towns that are now hosting Paint Nite events, and more than doubled our employees at headquarters from 40 to 100+.

Work-life balance is a big priority at Paint Nite. Our founders recognize that everyone has commitments outside of work, whether it’s spending time with family, pursuing a hobby or volunteering. Paint Nite offers unlimited vacation time and allows employees to work from home any time. Tools like Google Apps help our employees take advantage of this policy. Teams use Google Hangouts to chat about projects throughout the day, whether they’re at the office, at home or working from a coffee shop. We use Hangouts for our weekly all-staff meeting so all employees can join from anywhere and feel like they’re in the same room.

Google Apps helps teams stay organized, which is important given how quickly the company is growing. Our employees love using Google Calendar, which makes it easy to schedule meetings with colleagues who are working remotely. Calendar also lets us book conference rooms in advance, which is a small but critical feature for a rapidly growing company with limited meeting space.

Google Apps also saves us time. Our data analytics team, for example, uses Google Forms to manage dozens of data requests each day. At Paint Nite, we rely on our data to make decisions or share information — a digital marketing manager needs to know how many cities we operate in for a new advertisement, or our communications team wants to share year-over-year growth figures with the local newspaper. Before they started using Forms, our analysts spent hours each week sorting through requests manually. It was an inefficient and frustrating process. Now, if anyone at Paint Nite needs company data, he or she can submit a request using Google Forms.

As we continue to scale from a local startup to a international brand, it’s crucial that our teams stay connected, whether people are working from our main office, at home or on the road. Google Apps helps us do this while maintaining the close-knit, flexible work environment we've grown to love.

Posted by Mary Gourley, Google for Work, Public Sector (and proud mum of three)

For all the amazing things mums do, they deserve much more than just one day to recognize their greatness. As Sunday approaches, Google Australia is celebrating an organization that makes Mother’s Day an everyday affair.
St Kilda Mums provides new and pre-loved baby goods to mothers in need. What began as a living room operation seven years ago has grown to four warehouses and more than 1,000 volunteers accepting and distributing nursery gear to thousands of families.



So what’s their secret superpower for supporting thousands of mums across Melbourne? Technology. Products like Google Forms and Drive on mobile devices and desktops allows St Kilda Mums to organise incoming donations and better coordinate logistics across the network of staff, social workers and volunteers. The requests are received instantly in the warehouse, matched with the donated stock and dispatched to the family in need.
We're proud to play a small role in enabling St Kilda Mums through Google Apps for Work. We applaud the staff at St Kilda Mums, volunteers and all the mothers out there who keep the world turning with their love and power. And to all my fellow working mums, you’re my heroes!

Happy Mother’s Day from all of us at Google Australia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Stella Schieffer, Product Manager

(Cross-posted on the Gmail Blog.)

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

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

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

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

Posted by Matt McNamara, Director of Engineering at Expensify

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


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

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

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

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

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