Posted by Matt Charman, Senior Product Marketing Manager


Today we’re launching the #maketime website, which builds on the movement to hold uninterrupted time on our calendars during the hours when we’re most creative. The website helps you prioritize time for the things that keep you inspired, over the things that just keep you busy.

Did you know that we spend 2.25 hours a day on average answering emails and 86 hours a month on average in meetings? The workplace is changing. We have the freedom to work and collaborate across any device and the flexibility to finish tasks and create from wherever we are. But we’re also more accessible.


Use the #maketime website to look at how you spend your work hours, so you can stamp out needless time takers, and not just save time, but #maketime for the things that are important to you.

Here are a few ways you can save time to #maketime with Google Apps.

Save time with Reminders in Google Calendar
Use Reminders in Google Calendar to combine an evolving and editable to-do list with your scheduled events. See the items on your list that you haven’t “checked off” yet at the top of your calendar each day, until you give them that triumphant swipe “complete!”

And Reminders sync with your contacts, so you can add phone numbers and addresses. When it’s time to call in dinner reservations at a favorite restaurant, dial directly from the Reminder.


Save time with machine learning and Inbox
From Inbox, use Smart Reply to respond to emails without typing out the reponses yourself. Machine learning recognizes emails that can be answered with short replies and creates natural language responses instantly — often with a few versions to choose from.

Save time by researching and collaborating in Docs
Switching between tabs and tools costs incremental time that adds up. In Docs and Slides, you can use the Research tool to do a quick Web and file search for terms you need to gather more info on. And now you can do the same on the go within the Docs app on Android.

From Docs, Sheets and Slides, you can also use the instant comments feature on the Web or your Android or iOS device to add teammates to the conversation by simply adding their names (just start typing names and contacts will appear in the comment box). So when you’ve got some great feedback on a line of text or a table of data, you can add a note right next to it that sends an email. No need to go back into Gmail to draft an additional note.

Also in Sheets, Explore deciphers your data for you and automatically creates charts and insights that illustrate trends. The time cost on your end: seconds.


Save time by converting image text
One of the coolest recent innovations in Drive for Work is the Optical Character Recognition that converts text in images into text documents to collaborate on. You can take a photo of a whiteboard brainstorm or an inspiring message on the other side of the subway window and turn that photo into a shared doc.

We can’t stop the clock — or to a large degree control the number of emails that flood our inboxes or the amount of traffic that slows our work commutes. But we can find ways to make more minutes meaningful.

Posted by Steen Andersson, Group Product Manager, Google Drive

(Cross-posted on the Google Drive Blog.)

When you store important files in Google Drive they’re not only safe, they’re accessible from any device. And finding them again from any device should be super easy so we’re rolling out a new search experience to get you better results — even faster.

Drive lets you search across all your files, regardless of the device they came from. To make that easier, you can use these new ways to find your files:

• Narrow your search to a file type from the search box on Android, iOS, and the web.
• Open advanced search instantly from the search box.
• Access recent files or search Drive from the home screen using 3D Touch on iOS.
• Search Drive using the iOS search bar without opening the Drive app.

Several behind-the-scenes improvements give your search queries even better results than they did before. And to get more specific results, anyone can now do the following:

• Search for shared files by file owner using their name or email address.
• Use advanced search options like the date a file was modified, words it contains, or who it was shared with.

This is all part of an ongoing effort to make Drive the easiest place to find your files. Look for these features as they roll out in the coming weeks.

Posted by Billie Laidlaw, Assistant Director IT Resources, RSPCA

Editor's note: Today we hear from Billie Laidlaw, Assistant Director Resources-IT at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), the UK’s oldest and largest animal welfare charity with 1600 employees across England and Wales. In 2014 the £43 million that the organisation received in voluntary donations helped rescue more than 128,000 animals from cruelty, abuse and neglect. Read how the RSPCA is using Google Apps for Work to help give these animals a new chance.

I often refer to our IT spend as kitten food, since that helps us focus on its value. Every pound we save with our solutions helps to rescue, rehabilitate and rehome animals across the country. So when our legacy email system reached the end of its working life, we wanted great value for money in the short term and opportunities for cost-saving and innovation further down the line. With Google Apps for Work, we got both.

We started the rollout with the IT team, then added superusers, then everyone else. We called these stages “ready,” “steady” and “GO.” In the “steady” stage, we trained up superusers and gave them t-shirts and flags so their colleagues knew who to turn to for advice. We installed timers on everyone’s desktops with a day-by-day “Countdown to Google” that created a real sense of excitement about the change and used Forms to gather post-go live feedback from 1,000 members of our team. The response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic.

From the start, we saved significantly on equipment costs alone. Our previous system operated from more than 40 servers, all of which have been decommissioned and will never have to be replaced. At £3,500 per server, that saved us £140,000 just on equipment. And digital signage now costs one tenth of the price we used to pay, from £1,500 per store to a solution using Chromebox and Slides that costs just £150 per store. Chromebooks have proven so cost effective that we bought 150 this year and plan to adopt them further. And because they connect to Drive, we don’t need to carry heavy paperwork around, which is good for the environment, our budget, and our backs. Also, when we needed to add 500 staff to our email platform, we did it in a matter of days with no additional infrastructure other than the provision of Android smartphones.


Every year we find new homes for more than 50,000 animals, and Google Apps tools make that rehabilitation process so much faster. Our 500 RSPCA inspectors are out in the field every day, investigating animal cruelty and complaints. Under our old system, none of them were connected to a central email hub, but now they all have Gmail and Drive on Android phones and access to Chromebooks, so they can instantly share test results, check documentation, send pictures and request temporary accommodation for an animal at one of our animal centres. And as soon as an animal is ready for rehoming, the quest begins to find new owners. We used to make promotional videos that we would burn to DVDs and deliver to our shops and centres by hand once a month, but now we can use Slides and a Chromebox to send promotions instantly to our screens, the same day an animal’s ready for a new home. No driving, no hassle with DVDs.

We’re committed to creating a more united, mobile, flexible workforce by the RSPCA’s 200th anniversary in 2024, and with Google Apps for Work, we’re well on the way to making that a reality. Working together in Docs isn’t just making our internal processes more transparent, it’s connecting people from parts of our organisation that otherwise operate independently and allows us to share knowledge and advice across the country. Hangouts let us meet face-to-face online and keep workflow moving with instant messaging. We’re also using Calendar to keep in synch and Sheets to work out duty rosters and book holidays.

Every time a supporter puts a pound in one of our collection tins, they want it to be spent wisely. By streamlining our services with Google Apps for Work, we make sure that more of that money serves the animals who need it. In the end, it could be food for a kitten, or a puppy, a horse, a seal, a hedgehog…

Posted by Erzsi Sousa, Product Marketing Manager

Editor's note: We’re jumping into our Delorean to explore how some of our favorite historical figures might have worked with Google Apps. Today, in honor of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we imagine how Marie Curie’s discovery of radioactivity, which won a Nobel Prize and revolutionized modern cancer treatment, might have played out in a Google Apps universe.

Consider what Marie Curie accomplished in the face of adversity and with few resources. Despite being refused a place at the French Academy of Sciences and almost denied her first Nobel Prize for being a woman, she continued her work undeterred, securing a second Nobel Prize in Chemistry and developing methods for treating cancer with radiation therapy. To celebrate her, we explore how she might have worked in a different time — by using some of the tools we use today.

The radioactivity in Curie’s lab was so strong that it harmed her health — archivists today still use protective gear to handle her papers. Instead of carrying these radioactive documents, Curie could have kept them in the cloud with Google Drive, allowing for easy access whenever and wherever she needed them, without risking her well-being. Drive’s organization features could also have helped her organize her files and notes in folders, easily distinguishable by color and category.

Her easy access to files would also be secure with Drive’s built-in security stack. And to prevent anyone from stealing her discoveries, Marie Curie could have conveniently protected all of her files using the Security Key for 2-step verification along with password protection. This would ensure that she was the only one who had complete access to all of her work (she may even have thrown on a screen protector to shield her work from spying eyes on the train). To share the right documents with only the right people, Marie could have used sharing controls to give different groups access to relevant research.

With the voice typing feature in Google Docs that supports 40 languages, she could have dictated her numerous notes in her native Polish without stopping her research. She could have then used Google Translate to convert her papers into other languages, so that the global science community could see what she was working on.


Curie could have used Gmail’s Priority Inbox to create labels and organize her messages related to research, teaching and fundraising. Each label filters emails into its own section in her inbox, making it easy to notice new emails when they arrive. She might have created a “Physicist Community” label for correspondences with Pierre and other influential scientists like Henri Becquerel and Albert Einstein. She might also have used a “Fundraising” label to organize messages from members of the press and government who funded her research, including U.S. presidents Warren G. Harding and Herbert Hoover.

Even Marie Curie could have been the victim of seemingly neverending reply-all email threads. With Gmail, she could have avoided these distractions by muting the message so responses are automatically archived. For example, Curie could have muted the message from her Sorbonne colleagues who abused “reply all” in RSVP emails or broke out into a physics debate, letting her focus on important emails only.

With Google Hangouts, Curie could have broadcast her physics classes to a global audience using Hangouts on Air. As the first woman professor at the Sorbonne in Paris, making her classes available online could have given more women access to lectures from a renowned physicist during a time when many universities wouldn’t admit female students. She might even have started her own grassroots movement, using live video chats to bring advanced science into the homes, coffee shops, underground classrooms, etc., of whoever chose to tune in.

Marie Curie accomplished award-winning work, even without access to the most advanced lab technology of the time. It’s humbling to consider that despite any limitations she encountered, Curie’s pioneering work in radioactivity remains so relevant today as we continue to make advances in not just physics and chemistry but also engineering, biology and medicine, including cancer research, on the basis of her discoveries.

Posted by Scott Johnston, Director of Product Management, Google Drive

Security has always been a top priority for Google. It’s no different for Google Drive: so far this year we’ve launched a number of security enhancements, including Information Rights Management (IRM), custom audit alerts, new sharing controls, Password Alert, new password recovery options, Whitelisted Domain sharing and the Security Key.

Earlier this year, the number of paying organizations actively using Google Drive crossed one million, including companies like The New York Times, Uber, Fossil, Wedding Wire and BBVA. To show our ongoing commitment to keeping their work and employees safe, we’re rolling out new updates and features for our customers.

Enhanced eDiscovery with Google Apps Vault
To give businesses even more visibility and control over employee files, Google Drive will offer enhanced eDiscovery capabilities for Google Apps Vault. Retention policies and legal hold capabilities, similar to those currently available for email and chat, have been extended to cover files in Google Drive. These capabilities help you meet your legal obligations and ensure that employee files are archived and available as long as needed, even if employees delete those files from their Drive. These new capabilities are in a limited rollout now, with full availability planned for the coming months.

A new standard for privacy
Over the years we’ve completed third-party SOC2 / SOC3 security audits and achieved ISO 27001 certification to provide transparency and accountability around our security procedures. Today, we’re furthering our commitment to protect your data by adding the new ISO/IEC 27018:2014 privacy standard to our compliance framework. This audit validates our privacy practices and contractual commitments to our customers, verifying for example that we don’t use your data for advertising, that the data that you entrust with us remains yours and that we provide you with tools to delete and export your data.

More secure, even on the go
More and more employees are using phones and tablets for work, and usage of Google Drive on mobile is on the rise. In fact, in January of this year, Google Drive first appeared on ComScore’s list of top 25 mobile apps at number 25, and since then it has climbed to number 16 on the list.¹ To protect company data on mobile devices, both company- and employee-owned, we’ve continued to update the Mobile Device Management (MDM) included for our business customers. With mobile device and application management, you can monitor usage, enforce strong passwords and enable device encryption. If an employee phone is lost or stolen, you can wipe all of the data. Or if an employee leaves the company, you can selectively wipe corporate data while leaving personal data untouched.

Today businesses rely on the cloud to make their work more accessible and collaborative than ever, and they also want it to be more secure. We’re committed to making Google Drive the safest place for all of your work.

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1 Source: comScore Mobile Metrix, August 2015, U.S.

Posted by Jamie Holyland, Director of communications, Epic CIC, UK

Editor's note: Today we hear from Jamie Holyland, director of communications at London youth support organisation Epic CIC. Epic saved £67,000 last year by switching to Google Apps for Work, with projections to save £140,000 annually. Read how Google Apps re-energised the 155 workers at Epic with forward-looking solutions.

When government budget cuts threatened our organisation's financial health, we didn't expect a technology change to keep us afloat. But that's exactly what happened. We provide a wide range of youth services in inner London, including an assistance program for teenage parents and programs to help young people find employment. In the wake of increasingly severe public funding cuts, Epic joined the private sector after 25 years with the local authority of Kensington and Chelsea. Ending even one of our projects was a step we didn’t want to take, and by transitioning to Google Apps for Work, we didn’t have to. The £140,000 a year that we save with Google gives us room in our budget to maintain all of our services. Now Epic is not only financially sustainable, it’s more efficient, more secure, and primed for a future of cloud computing.

Google Apps pulled our fragmented organisation together. Before we switched over last year, few of our 80 part-time staff had a work email account or online calendar; we relied entirely on phone calls, texts and face-to-face meetings to communicate. Now, almost everyone uses Gmail and calendar to stay organized and in touch. Whether staff are working with young people at one of our six youth centres or at any of our other eight offices, they can use one of 50 Chromeboxes to check their accounts. And for management rushing between meetings and our 20 case workers who operate off-site, we have 40 Android devices for them to stay connected from anywhere.

The impact on our efficiency has been huge. Google Apps for Work has reduced the number of emails we send by 50 percent in two months. The Chromebooks our 25 senior and middle managers use take seven seconds to start up, compared to the 20 minutes we spent starting up some of our old machines, so their time is spent fixing problems for our other 130 staff rather than waiting for technology to warm up.

Cloud computing is the future for our kind of community work, where teams are spread thin and wide. For example, instead of relying on a scattered paper trail to register attendance at our events, we now use Forms to track participation as they happen. Under our old system, the quarter of a million files we had stored on the local authority hard drives were full of confusing duplications. In one case, we found the same document saved in 47 variations by over 50 people, with no clue as to which was the final version. Now, the whole team can work together on a single shared Doc. And because there’s only ever one version, we don’t just save time, we stay aligned and build off of each other’s feedback seamlessly. We found Drive to be more secure, too, because its privacy and file access controls let us control information in more nuanced ways than we could before.

Maintaining our services without public funding was a daunting challenge, but Google Apps helped make it possible. Even better, the tools bring our team together and save us time, so we can spend more of our resources on the people who need them most.

Posted by Erzsi Sousa, Product Marketing Manager

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

Editor's note: We’re jumping into our Delorean to explore how some of our favorite historical figures might have worked with Google Apps. Today, on the anniversary of Isaac Newton’s knighthood, we imagine his research in a Google Apps universe.

In April 1705, Isaac Newton was knighted for his many accomplishments. Since we’re self-admitted history nerds (how better to appreciate the advancements we enjoy now?) we asked ourselves: what if the Isaac Newton of 1705 used today’s Google Apps?

Newton was one of history’s foremost masters of mathematical formulation. What if he had been able to archive and automate his complex formulas in Sheets? We imagine he might have used the product function, =PRODUCT(factor1, factor2), to test different values for his second law of motion: force equals mass times acceleration (f = ma) — showing how apples of different sizes fall with different rates of acceleration from a tree.


While writing his famous Principia, Newton might have solicited feedback from his colleagues, like mathematicians Isaac Barrow and John Collins, by creating a Google Group and inviting them to edit in Docs. Working in Docs would have been helpful for keeping track of his notes while developing calculus — it might even have helped to avoid a heated debate with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who claimed he discovered it first. There’s no dispute over who first documents an idea when there’s access to revision history.


Newton famously feared criticism and was no stranger to controversy, so we imagine he would have been a strong advocate of using technology to keep his research secure. Should he have any concerns about a collaborator secretly passing sensitive information to his rival, Robert Hooke, he could adjust the sharing settings. He could even restrict the ability to view, share, download or print his treatise on optics after he’d already shared it.


Newton communicated through writing by hand — it’s estimated that he left behind about 10 million words of notes, letters and manuscripts — but we think he might have used Hangouts for urgent conversations. If Newton needed to speak with his colleagues at the Royal Society about whether Leibniz was guilty of plagiarism, he’d meet with them face-to-face on a Hangout. Or, if his wig wasn’t looking particularly great that day, he could’ve started a group chat and shared pictures of his calculus notation as evidence (maybe even including a few emoji to lighten things up).

As a professor at the University of Cambridge, Newton lectured about optics and presented his research about the properties of light. He might have shared illustrations of prisms to explain rainbows and the color spectrum, uploading the images to a shared Drive folder rather than passing around delicate hand-drawn sketches. Using Drive’s Optical Character Recognition, he could turn his handwritten notes into searchable text. Old notes he wrote on refraction and diffraction would be easy to find and reference as he developed new theories on the nature of light. As one of the most important thinkers and scientists of all time, how valuable would it have been for him to so easily archive and pull up his every great thought and idea?


Sir Isaac Newton’s findings changed our understanding of the world around us and are still relevant to our lives 300 years later. But even more inspiring is the way his curiosity and intellectual daring influenced generations of thinkers to be relentless in pursuing new ideas — a principle (pun intended) that drives us here at Google.

Posted by: Scott Johnston, Director of Product Management, Google Drive

Since we launched Drive for Work 9 months ago, we've watched as more and more businesses moved to the cloud — and seen that they prioritize data security as much as we do. Security ranks at the top of the list of concerns that companies have about moving to the cloud, which is why we’ve put security front and center in our products from the beginning. And to keep your company’s data even more secure in Drive, we’re launching new sharing controls, alerts and audit events to Google Drive for Work and Google for Education over the next several weeks.

Set sharing settings by department
Sometimes different file settings make sense. You might, for example, have a research department that needs to keep information confidential and a sales team that needs to share presentations with their clients. To help manage these different sharing needs, now when you make selections in Drive settings from the Admin console, you can turn off sharing outside the domain for one organizational unit, while still allowing others to work and share files with anyone they need to.
To keep track of when specific actions are taken in Drive, you can set up custom Drive alerts. So if you want to know when a file containing the word “confidential” in the title is shared outside the company, now you’ll know. And there are more events coming to Drive audit, including download, print and preview.
There are lots of moving parts to running a company, and now it’s easier for IT to find out about the things they care about with custom alerts — like when a new app is installed or a shared calendar is deleted — and get those right in their inbox.

Let people reset their own passwords
Recovering passwords isn’t the most pleasant thing we do in our lives. But now IT can let employees securely reset their own passwords, so they don’t lose valuable time being locked out of their account. If this doesn’t make sense for your organization, admins can simply turn this ability off.

Disable downloading, printing and copying of any file with IRM
With Information Rights Management (“IRM”) you can disable downloading, printing and copying from the advanced sharing menu – perfect for when the file you’re sharing is only meant for a few select people. This new option is available for any file stored in Google Drive, including documents, spreadsheets and presentations created in Google Docs.

Share quickly with anyone outside your organization
When it comes to sharing, like giving final inventory lists to your caterer or last minute logos to your design agency, you want to make sure people can see it right away — whether they use Drive or not. Now, you can share with any email address and they’ll be able to view the files you share —without having to sign-in to a Google account. Admins can disable this feature for certain departments that want to require sign-in before , while enabling it for others.

All the above are rolling out over the next month.

Stay tuned for more
We’re also working on the ability to establish trusted domains, so businesses and schools that have multiple Google Apps domains or want to work with trusted partners or customers, can select multiple Google Apps domains that are OK to share with from Drive and Classroom. And on expiring access, because occasionally you only want to share files for a temporary amount of time. With expiring access you can set a future date when access will be removed. Stay tuned, there's more to come from Drive and Drive for Work.

Posted by Michael De Blauwe, Project Leader of the Innovation Lab at VDAB

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Michael De Blauwe, project leader of the Innovation Lab at VDAB, the public employment bureau for Belgium’s Flanders region.

In the past, clients walked into one of our employment offices and waited to meet with one of our consultants. Today, they don’t have to leave home to get face-to-face feedback on their resumes or participate in mock interviews. Timing is critical for job seekers, and at VDAB – the public employment bureau for Flanders – we’re using Google Apps to more quickly and efficiently help people in need of job services and training. We’re also reaching more people while saving money by reducing the number of physical employment centers by nearly 30%.

What used to take a week for an in-person resume workshop followed by a practice interview, now happens in less than 24 hours. Our thousands of employment specialists use Google Hangouts and Google Docs to review customers’ resumes and coach them on interview skills. This digital transformation has been a hit with job seekers. In 2013, we had 4,920 people use our new e-coaching services, and 83% said they would recommend it to friends.

We’re not just using Apps to serve more people — we’re delivering better service. VDAB job coaches now use Google Drive to store resources and Docs to comment on clients’ resumes while speaking with them on Hangouts. All of a client’s job-related files are stored in one place, with all feedback contained within the document.

Our team also works together more efficiently. Because our coaches work from different locations throughout Flanders, it’s helpful to have a central repository that allows people to share information and work together from different locations. We use Google Drive to share information about job openings and Google Sheets to track customer queries in a single document that everyone can access. Before Google, we’d send thousands of emails back and forth to share resources, respond to customers, and schedule appointments.

When we made a company-wide push behind Apps in 2012, using our early Google adopters to inform others, we found that it was already taking hold. Now that all of VDAB has switched to Apps, we’re moving faster, helping more people build their job-seeking skills and matching more employers with qualified candidates.

We worked with Capgemini, a Google Apps Premier Partner in Belgium, who performed this successful migration.

Posted by Graham Russell, Founder and Managing Director of Ambush Security

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Graham Russell, Founder and Managing Director of Ambush Security, a family owned security business that has protected Southern Queensland, Australia, since 1986. Learn how Google Apps for Work gave their team the flexibility to collaborate and work securely from anywhere.

Ambush Security is a local family-owned business based in Queensland that has provided electronic security systems to homes and businesses for over 25 years. With a 100 strong team, many of which are out in the field, it’s important for us to stay connected, wherever we are.

We needed a simple solution to help us manage the 250+ personal devices used across our team, one that offered easy access to work data from any device and ensured the security of that data. As a company that embraces new technology, the decision to go Google was simple. Security is what we do, and that’s exactly what Google Apps offered us – a tool that would help us remain trustworthy.
We didn’t realise how much of an impact moving to Google Apps could really make until we considered all of the recent benefits:

• Cost savings: We save $75,000 AUD per year by reducing our hardware equipment purchases. Now all of our employees are free to use their personal devices for work.
• Time savings: Google Apps has enhanced our work productivity and allowed each employee to save an additional 1 – 2 hours per week, because all of the information they need is right at their fingertips on Google Drive.
• Secure data: With easy-access to network permissions, our IT Managers can manage the devices and data securely, whatever devices our team chooses – especially important if a device is accidentally lost or stolen.
• Productivity savings: Our sales team can now easily offer client quotes on site without having to head back to the office. All the information they need is available on Google Drive.
• Mobility: When data can be accessed anywhere and at any time, we find that the team feels more empowered. They have the flexibility of choosing to pack their bags and leave the office early, have dinner with the family, and complete their work from home.

Since introducing Google Apps to our business, our team is happier and more productive and our business data is secure. Now, we can continue protecting homes, businesses and families across Queensland knowing that every aspect of our business is in safe hands.

Posted by Rachel Barton, Product Manager, Google Drive

(Cross-posted on the Google Drive blog.)

Browsers are pretty amazing things. Before, if you wanted to do any serious computing, you’d have to install software onto your computer. But these days, most of that can be done right from within the browser. For example, you can use Google Drive to preview files directly in Gmail, create and share Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, and even edit other file types like Microsoft Office documents without installing a single thing on your hard drive.

But here’s the catch: when it comes to browsers and installed applications working well together, they aren’t quite on the same page. To change that, today we’re launching a new extension for Chrome that lets you open files from Google Drive directly into a compatible application installed on your computer. This includes apps like advanced image and video editing software, accounting and tax programs, or 3D animation and design tools. So, no matter what you keep in Drive, using the web to access and manage files doesn’t mean you’re limited to using applications that only work in your browser.

To get started, install the latest version of the Drive app for Mac or PC (version 1.18) and sync your files. Then, visit Google Drive in your Chrome browser (make sure you’re on the new Google Drive). Finally, right-click on the file and select “Open with” to see a list of compatible applications on your computer that can open it. For example, you can choose to open a PDF file with Adobe Reader, or a .psd with Photoshop, make your edits and save back changes to Drive which will sync across all your devices and other collaborators.

This extension will be rolling out over the next several days. Learn more in the Help Center.

Posted by Ganesh Shankar, Product Manager, Google Drive for Android

(Cross-posted on the Google Drive Blog.)

Google Drive makes it easy to keep your stuff safe and accessible from any device, but it doesn’t stop there. We want you to easily find and share your documents, photos, and PDFs with others. So, in addition to a Material Design facelift, the latest update for Android gives you new ways to add, locate, and share from Drive.

Improved Search
The search tool makes it even easier to find the content you’re looking for by providing updated results as you type each letter into the search box.

Posted by Rytis Vitkauskas, Co-founder and CEO of YPlan

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. Over the next few weeks, we’ll share a handful of stories from disrupters and trailblazers in the UK who are using Google Apps for Work to support their mission while growing at faster and faster speeds. Today we hear from Rytis Vitkauskas, co-founder and CEO of YPlan, a mobile app that lets users discover amazing experiences they can do that same night.

For many, planning a night out on the town means grabbing the local weekly newspaper and thumbing through it to find entertainment and club listings. My co-founder Viktoras Jucikas and I think there’s a better way to plan an exciting night out with our mobile app. YPlan provides curated entertainment listings for London, Edinburgh, New York, San Francisco and Las Vegas, and gives our users the ability to easily buy tickets with two taps on a smartphone. The app has surpassed one million downloads to date and our company has swelled to 60 employees. Growing rapidly, we’ve learned some valuable lessons. The following are five insights that might help business leaders stay focused and keep momentum when growing their business.

1. Identify a real problem — the more personal the better — then try to fix it
YPlan started as a solution to solve a personal problem. My co-founder Viktoras and I previously worked in finance but quit our jobs to travel to San Francisco to find inspiration. In San Francisco, we found it challenging to easily find things to do on our free nights. There wasn’t a central destination to find events and book tickets. So we decided to create an app to solve that problem.

2. Model early and often 
In the early stages of our business idea, we came up with 50 different project ideas before finally settling on YPlan. We constructed a business model, subjected it to an intense process of testing, then eventually scrapped it and started over. When we returned back to London we started the concept for YPlan. We conducted user testing that included Viktoras and I running around to make sure people had their tickets on time (we hadn’t finished the e-ticket mechanism by that point). Testing heavily during the first few months highlights problems you might not have anticipated and gives you the opportunity adapt your product accordingly.

3. Growth stems from your culture and early DNA 
From early on, we established a culture of creativity, collaboration and a relentless focus on our customers, which has been a foundation for our future growth. From the first day we stopped negative office patterns of blaming and arguing, and instilled frequent communication, positive reinforcement and team problem-solving. Our primary focus is to deliver the best experience for our users and our employees tackle that task creatively on a daily basis.

4. Communication and collaboration fuels growth 
YPlan’s success is largely due to successful collaboration and integration with our partners. With our teams working in at least three time zones simultaneously, Google Drive allows us to collaborate globally in real-time. It’s our central communication hub for content sharing and project collaboration. Having files accessible from anywhere on a mobile device is big plus. This has enabled seamless working and communication with our local teams, which has directly affected our global success and allowed us to expand.

5. Growth opportunities start with the user 
When surveying growth options, look to your users and learn from that data. We’re constantly analysing the data we have on our existing users to see how we can improve our services. At any one time we have two thousand versions of the app running in parallel, undergoing a highly selective process of A/B testing, which means the app is constantly being refined. Closely studying our user data led to us introducing “collections.” We knew people wanted to choose from a wide variety of events, but had to present numerous selections in a way that wasn’t a boring list of options. By adapting our interface to meet the needs of users, we now provide a curated experience, which in turn leads to consistently high retention rates after download.

Posted by Chuck Coulson, Google Apps Technology Partnerships

Work today is very different from 10 years ago. Cloud computing, once a new idea, is abundantly available, and collaboration is possible across offices, cities, countries and continents. Drive for Work enables collaboration and content sharing for businesses large and small and helps them share and access their files — even from different cloud applications.

Google Drive extends the reach of business applications by taking content that previously was only available in a single application, and making it available across multiple applications — all while maintaining security. For example:

• Marketing teams can create collateral in Drive that’s accessible for sales reps who spend time in a salesforce automation (SFA) app on their mobile phone. 
• Support reps working in a helpdesk app can use Drive to share a customer-submitted error log with engineers. 
• Accounts payable clerks working in an accounting app can generate an invoice and share the invoice directly with a vendor through Drive. 

To help businesses gain more value from Drive for Work, we’ve partnered with leading Software as a Service (SaaS) application vendors to build deeper integrations with Google Drive. Here are a few examples:

• Freshdesk provides a customer support service that allows helpdesk agents and customers to attach videos, pdfs, screenshots and other files from Drive to their support tickets. (website; blogpost) 
• Insightly provides a CRM system for small businesses that makes it easy to search or browse files in Drive and attach files to the relevant contact, organization, project or opportunity. (website; blogpost) 
• MavenLink provides a project management system allowing Drive users to seamlessly share files in a collaborative project workspace with team members, contractors, and clients. (website; blogpost) 
• Sage One, from The Sage Group plc, offers a small business accounting solution for businesses to manage their finances online, with invoices automatically backed up to Drive for easy sharing and access from any device. (website; blogpost) 
• Smartsheet offers a project management platform where users can attach Drive files to a project so everything is in one place. (website; blogpost) 
• Solve CRM, by Norada, has integrated with Drive so customers can use Google Sheets to manage and report on sales data. (website; blogpost) 
• Xero provides online accounting for small businesses and integrates with Google Drive so employees can easily export and share reports. (website; blogpost) 
• Zoho CRM, by Zoho, allows users to browse their documents from Drive and associate documents to customer information such as contacts, leads, accounts, activities, potentials, cases and more. (website) 

And this is only the beginning. We’ll continue to work with our ecosystem so the most popular applications, and those that are most frequently used within our community, can help businesses store and access all of their content in Drive.

If you’re a developer and would like to learn more about our APIs that enable you to extend the functionality of the Google Apps platform check out developers.google.com. For a list of cloud applications that integrate with Google Apps, please visit the Google Apps Marketplace.

Posted by Scott Johnston, Director of Product Management, Google Drive

People want tools that are both powerful and easy to use. For employees, that means they should be able to access their work wherever they are, on their favorite device or share their work securely with their colleagues, even if they’re in different offices, cities or countries. For IT managers, that means never worrying about storage quotas again, or being able to track access and sharing across users and files. We realize how important this is, so earlier this summer we introduced Google Drive for Work, a package that wraps all of this together for just $10 per user per month. Here’s a look at what’s been brewing with Drive for Work over the past two months.

Helping employees collaborate on the go

Before we introduced Drive for Work, businesses like retailer Chico’s and aerospace and defense company Rockwell Collins were using Drive to increase collaboration across distributed teams. Travis Perkins relies on Google Drive to store and share more than 1.3 million documents across thousands of physical locations, to help reduce employee travel and save time. OVS uses Google Drive to streamline its supply chain by sharing and syncing their files across desktops, tablets and smartphones so people have the information they need, no matter where they are or what device they’re using.

Today more than 1,800 businesses sign up for Drive for Work each week. Customers like WeddingWire are taking advantage of the full capabilities of Drive for Work to help provide their employees with the collaboration and file sharing tools they need on any device, whether they’re in the office or on the road.

Extending the Drive ecosystem

Drive for Work includes everything you need to keep all your work safe, easy to share and available anywhere. A growing number of partners are building tools on top of the Drive platform to meet the particular needs of our customers. In addition to the new Audit view built into the admin console, Drive for Work also includes an Audit API that partners have used to build advanced insight and security extensions like Data Loss Prevention (DLP). Other partners have built tools to help move business content into Drive from any location, including old file servers, local hard drives or other cloud storage products.

Keeping your work safe and available

To help keep your work safe, all files uploaded to Google Drive will be encrypted, not only from your device to Google and in transit between Google data centers, but also at rest on Google servers. Our reliability engineers monitor Google’s systems 24x7 in order to quickly identify and address any issues that might arise. Last year, Google Drive achieved 99.985% availability, which averages to less than 90 minutes of disruption per year (our SLA guarantees 99.9%). If there’s ever an issue, you can read up-to-date status information on the Status Dashboard, and if you ever need to speak to someone, help is just a call away in over a dozen languages across 50 countries.

If you’d like to join the more than 190 million people actively using Drive, you can learn more about Drive for Work online or contact us for more information. If you’re already a Google Apps customer, you can upgrade with just a couple of clicks in the Admin console.

Collaborating should be easy. Let technology do the hard work and help you get back to what’s most important — your business.

Posted by Arvin Reyes, Chief Information Officer, KFC Philippines

Editor's note: A few weeks ago, we announced Google Drive for Work, a new premium offering for businesses that includes unlimited storage, advanced audit reporting and new security controls. To celebrate the announcement and show how Drive helps businesses around the world, we’re sharing a few stories from a handful of customers using Drive (and the rest of the Google Apps suite) in innovative ways. Today’s guest blogger is Arvin Reyes, Chief Information Officer for KFC Philippines, which operates 230 restaurants and six plants in that country. To learn more, read the full case study, or see what other organizations that use Google Drive have to say.

KFC has been on a steady growth path since being introduced to the Philippines in 1967. With restaurants, plants, and offices across the country, fast and easy communication and information sharing are vital to our success. This means tools like file storage, email, calendaring, and document creation need to be user-friendly for employees and relatively trouble-free for our IT team. But until recently, our mix of email and document management software caused more problems than it solved – with server over-capacity and slow response time, they just slowed down our business growth.

We decided that a single communications platform with everything from storage to email to document creation was the necessary solution, and Google Apps was our answer. Not only did Apps meet all our requirements for cost-effectiveness, reliability and ease-of-use, but in Drive we saw a way to help our increasingly mobile workforce, which needs access to documents while out of the office.

We’ve boosted our productivity on creative work by 15% by switching from snail mail to Google Drive. Before we made the move, we sent creative materials back and forth between our home office and our advertising agency through messengers and the postal service, racking up costs and taking time away from other tasks. Now, with Drive, we can share large files like high-resolution images and merchandise artwork through the cloud, so material gets to our agency (and back to us) faster and at a significantly lower cost. And with a single location to store everything we’re working on, we’ve dramatically improved our ability to collaborate on projects.

Gmail makes us better at communicating: Now that everyone has 30GB of mail storage available, they don’t need to waste time constantly cleaning out their inboxes to make room for new emails, or asking colleagues to re-send emails because they can’t find them. Our IT team loves Gmail because complaints about email services have decreased to zero since we began using it – in fact, IT’s support work for communication tools has gone down by 25% since we started using Google Apps. That gives our team more time to focus on activities that are more directly tied to the bottom line.

Google Apps makes everyday problems like scheduling meetings disappear. Our old decision making process used to require the scheduling of several meetings and calls, with various reports and documents emailed back and forth among different teams. Now we schedule meetings on Google Calendar, where we can see everyone’s availability. For these meetings, we use a single shared document in Google Docs that serves as a running update on progress. This new workflow fundamentally changed the way we work with one another. What used to take days to decide is now possible within hours.

Google Apps not only makes it easy for us to manage storage and bandwidth, it keeps our employees happy. After six months on the platform, 95% of people told us they’re satisfied with Google Apps, which means they can enjoy their work of serving and helping our customers.

Posted by Chuck Coulson, Drive Technology Partnerships, Google

Google Drive for Work is a new premium offering for businesses that includes unlimited storage, advanced audit reporting and new security controls and features, such as encryption at rest.

If you're getting ready to move your company to Drive, one of the first things on your mind is how to migrate all your existing files with as little hassle as possible. It's easy to migrate your files by uploading them directly to Drive or using the Drive Sync client. But, what if you have files stored elsewhere that you want to consolidate? Or what if you want to migrate multiple users at once? Many independent software vendors (ISVs) have built solutions to help organizations migrate their files from different File Sync and Share (FSS) solutions, local hard drives and other data sources. Here are some of the options available for you to use:

• Cloud Migrator, by Cloud Technology Solutions, migrates user accounts and files to Google Drive and other Google Apps services. (website, blogpost)
• Cloudsfer, by Tzunami, transfers files from Box, Dropbox and Microsoft OneDrive to Google Drive. (website)
• Migrator for Google Apps, by Backupify, migrates and consolidates personal Google Drive or other Google Apps for Business accounts into a single domain. (website, blogpost)
• Mover migrates data from 23 cloud services providers, web services, and databases into Google Drive. (website, blogpost)
• Nava Certus, by LinkGard, provides a migration and synchronization solution for on-premise and cloud-based storage platforms, including Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Amazon S3, as well as local file systems. (website, blogpost)
• SkySync, by Portal Architects, integrates existing on-site storage systems as well as other cloud storage providers to Google Drive. (website, blogpost)

These are just a few companies that offer migration solutions. Please visit the Google Apps Marketplace for a complete listing of tools and offerings that add value to the Google Apps platform.

Posted by Jon Spruce, Google Programme Leader, Travis Perkins plc

Editor's note: A few weeks ago, we announced Google Drive for Work, a new premium offering for businesses that includes unlimited storage, advanced audit reporting and new security controls. To celebrate the announcement and show how Drive helps businesses around the world, we’re sharing a few stories from a handful of customers using Drive (and the rest of the Google Apps suite) in innovative ways. Today’s guest blogger is Jon Spruce, Google Programme Leader for Travis Perkins plc, the UK’s leading company in the builders’ merchant and home improvement market and largest supplier to the building and construction market. See what other organisations that use Google Drive have to say.
Travis Perkins plc supplies building materials for projects small and large across the United Kingdom, from home improvements to Terminal 5 at Heathrow airport. Creating quotes for a variety of different jobs and tasks, then making sure the materials get where they need to be, requires serious coordination. We chose Google Apps to enable collaboration across our 2,000 locations, 24,000 people and 17 different businesses. And since making the switch, Google Drive in particular has played a significant role in making our company operate smoothly and efficiently: we use Google Drive to store and share more than 1.3 million documents, which has reduced travel, email traffic and the time taken to get things done.

Before Google Drive, the process of creating quotes was disjointed and confusing. We’ve made a series of acquisitions over the last 30 years, and with each one, also acquired a new technology and system, which left us with a mismatched set of storage and document creation products. People created their own ‘kingdoms’ of data, and expected they’d be able to share information – with very limited success. With Google Drive, we can deliver quotes to customers at a steady pace, while making sure that employees across the Travis Perkins Group can provide and access the most up-to-date information at any time.

Drive has also taken the sluggishness out of the quote pipeline. In one of our businesses, BSS Industrial, we start by creating a document about the project at the customer’s local branch, then create a shared folder, and add in blueprints, estimates, and photos – anything the rest of the team needs to build and fulfill the quote.

As employees locate and price supplies or visit the building site to take precise measurements, everyone can update the same files. We no longer worry about which email or spreadsheet is correct, since we all work together on the same project quotes. Drive gives us an accurate, up-to-date picture of our progress at any given moment.

Posted by Chris Ridd, Managing Director, Xero

Editor's note: A few weeks ago, we announced Google Drive for Work, a new premium offering for businesses that includes unlimited storage, advanced audit reporting and new security controls. To celebrate the announcement and show how Drive helps businesses around the world, we’re sharing a few stories from a handful of customers using Drive (and the rest of the Google Apps suite) in innovative ways. Today’s guest blogger is Chris Ridd, Managing Director for Xero in Australia. Xero is a cloud-based accounting software company with 300,000 customers worldwide and over 800 employees across offices in the U.S., UK, Australia and New Zealand. 

At Xero, our core business is making beautiful, intuitive cloud based accounting software that helps small business owners spend more time doing what they do best, and less time worrying about keeping their books in order. Xero started life as a small four person operation in New Zealand. Eight years later, we’ve grown to 300,000 customers worldwide and 800 employees across 17 offices in the U.S., UK, Australia and New Zealand.

This rapid growth was great, but it came with challenges, like finding the right people and new premises. One of the biggest challenges was coordination. With hundreds of employees dotted around different parts of the world, it soon became apparent that we needed to improve how we documented information, shared content and communicated.

I have to admit, it was ironic that although our core product is cloud-based, we weren't actually using this same technology to its full extent within our own business. Instead, teams used a combination of cloud software and legacy desktop software that required continual expensive upgrades. With a highly mobile team based all over the globe, we needed a communications platform that would scale with us, make it easy to collaborate from anywhere, and help us maintain our fluid and mobile way of doing business.

To that end, in December last year we decided to change to Google Apps, and I’m pleased to say this has led to huge boosts in productivity and openness. Tasks that used to be time consuming – like emailing a document around for edits – now take just hours. Teams can also now jump into a document from Google Drive and collaborate on product release notes, spreadsheets, blog posts, and dozens of other documents with people around the world in real time.

Whether we conduct meetings in break-out areas or our in-house cafe, open laptops are ever-present, with Xero employees writing minutes in real-time so that everyone has their action items as soon as they walk out the door. Having 99% of our documents saved in Drive gives us a central place where people can find and store everything — and that means no more lost files, confusion over multiple versions, or duplication of work.

Moving to the cloud has made international coordination so much easier. Hangouts bring far flung teammates face to face, and during these video meetings people will often work together on the same document right from within he Hangouts window. Being able to work from anywhere — the office, home, the airport or the back of a taxi — has made everyone feel much freer because they can work wherever they want, on any device without worrying about losing documents.

Although it’s difficult to quantify how much money we’ll save with Google Apps, I’ve seen a lot less hardware around the office. In fact, we no longer need to spend money and time updating and maintaining servers. Productivity gains have been impressive, too.

By embracing the cloud-technology our customers use every day, we’ve been able to vastly improve the way Xero employees across our offices communicate, collaborate and share ideas. ‘Anywhere, anytime on any device’ is a key benefit we promote to customers, and it’s great to see we can now embrace that every day within Xero.