Posted by Wim Roose, Head of IT at Vooruit

Editor's note: Today we hear from Wim Roose, Head of IT at Vooruit, Belgium’s most culturally significant arts centre, as he describes how Google Apps has given it the freedom to develop and grow while remaining true to its values. With 80 members of staff, hundreds of artists and countless partners to manage each year, communication and collaboration has become key to running the centre efficiently without losing the essential spirit of the organisation.


Vooruit is a unique place, not least because of its rich history and visionary objectives and aims. Can you tell us a little about its history and vision?

Vooruit was originally designed and built in 1914 as a festival and arts centre. It had a ballroom, a cinema and a theatre, as well as exhibition spaces and venues for debates and meetings. It quickly became the epicentre of the Ghent-based labor movement, and the building itself became a symbol of the socialist movement in the interwar period. Even the name Vooruit itself means “cooperative.” Although it was abandoned and fell into disrepair, it was regenerated in the early 1980s by a group of friends who wanted to re-establish its significance and honour its history, and that’s what we still do today.

We welcome around 300,000 visitors a year and host up to 600 events annually, meaning there’s something for everyone. We’re incredibly aware of the role we’re playing in Vooruit’s continuing history to provide arts services to the public, which is why we were determined to find a 21st Century IT solution that would allow us to work in the spirit of creativity, collaboration and cooperation that shaped the original Vooruit.

Tell us why you chose Google Apps to help deliver Vooruit’s objectives.

Google Apps was an intuitive choice. As an IT guy, I love the openness of the Google ecosystem. We wanted to find a way of working that suited the company’s ethos rather than working against it, something that would allow us to work freely and collaboratively instead of having to conform.

We also needed something that would support our organic growth and help us meet the efficiency needs of the modern world, and Google’s cloud-based apps do just that. Our building may be historic but the way we work needs to be as efficient and modern as any business operating today. In fact, our investment in a digital office was necessary as well as logical — if we’re to continue to work with the government and other organisations to deliver public arts and culture services, we need to be compatible with their way of working, but without compromising our own values. Google Apps make that possible.

Can you explain how you use Google Apps to increase efficiencies?

As opposed to working in the limiting and closed building automation system we largely relied on before, the Google ecosystem allows us to integrate everything into one interface, and for me that’s a giant step forward.

Gmail was the starting point for our digital revolution, and underpins how we work. We’ve migrated all 100 members of our staff from Outlook to Gmail, and we now send and receive up to 12,000 emails each month. Many of us now use Google Keep to create our “to do” lists, which means we can work collaboratively on projects with ease. The continuous updates to each project list allow us to work together with maximum efficiency, meaning no more duplication of effort or jobs left undone, as we all share access to the same real-time information. Gmail also allows us to track communications more effectively, and we can now communicate with each other — and artists and external partners — much more easily.

You’ve said that Vooruit is all about collaboration and cooperation — how does Google Apps help support this?

Google Drive has also been an integral part of our digital solution, and we now have around 25,000 files stored in the cloud, including Google Docs, Sheets and Slides. It’s been fundamental in terms of allowing access to information freely and easily. The planning of exhibitions and projects is a core part of what we do, but our existing planning software had limited document storage capacity. We now use Drive next to the planning software, which not only acts as a file server, but also a new way of communicating via the files themselves. We can upload all the relevant information for any one project in one place, which can be accessed wherever we are thanks to the cloud storage, meaning it’s much easier to work together.

The use of Google Docs has also revolutionised our way of working with others. We were at a point where some people were working in the cloud and some were saving documents locally, so all our assets were everywhere but nowhere at the same time. It was a mess — we couldn’t find anything when we needed it. Now we have single documents stored in one place, annotated with comments that allow us to communicate with project managers, contractors, suppliers and building guards. The fact that colleagues and partners can all access the same Google Docs and update information simultaneously has made us instantly more efficient and collaborative.

What about communicating outside the core Vooruit team? How has Google Apps helped Vooruit to integrate with the wider world?

We’re already ahead of the communications curve by using Hangouts instead of arranging meetings in person. Our aim is to reduce our environmental impact as an organisation, and not driving 100km to a meeting with an external partner can really contribute towards meeting our green targets. Daily meetings with artists and cultural organisations from across the world are also now possible without leaving our desks, broadening our reach and our potential, as well as saving us time and money.

What does the future hold for Vooruit in terms of IT?

Google Apps is key in helping us create a modern way of working that will grow with us, providing us with the flexibility to be creative as well as the efficiencies we need to succeed commercially. We’re constantly evolving while remaining true to our philosophy and we needed the fundamental change that would enable our organisation to be ready for the future and appeal to new recruits, artists and partners. Google’s cloud-based solutions have helped us prove that, as an arts organisation, we’re as willing and prepared to work digitally as any other industry, without having to compromise Vooruit’s original creative or collaborative values in the digital age.

Posted by Ben Flock, Director of Operations Support, Osmose


Editor's note: Today we hear from Ben Flock, director of operations support at Osmose, which provides inspection, maintenance and rehabilitation services and products to electric and telecommunications utilities. Read how Osmose provides its field workers with connectivity using Chromebooks.


In business, as in life, connection breeds success. When you feel connected to your team, your network, your customer, your family, relationships are stronger and everybody wins.

Osmose is in the business of connecting people. We do the work that ensures your utilities are up and running so when you open your laptop, you can connect to the internet, and when you pick up a landline telephone, you get a dial tone. We offer reliable service by maintaining the poles on which utility and electric lines are strung. This means our crews spend most of their time away from the office, and we rely on Chromebooks to keep them connected in the field.

Foremen are our first line of management and key to our operations. In the past, foremen had little connectivity and limited technology when working on a job site. They used paper and pen to collect data and complete administrative tasks. When they worked remotely they often missed important family events, such as childrens’ ball games or recitals. This made it hard for us to attract and retain staff. The problem compounded as we grew: we've tripled our number of field crews since 2006. Each crew has on average three people in it: a foreman plus two other field workers.

To connect our teams and provide greater mobility, we replaced paper with Chromebooks. The devices combine the best features of tablets and laptops: they’re light, easy to use and have keyboards. Chromebooks are tough and sturdy, and well-suited for field work, including some models which have waterproof keyboards and rubberized edges so they can withstand rough weather and hard treatment in the field. They provide our crews with the capabilities they need at a price that has allowed us to provide one for each field crew at a relatively low cost.

Chromebooks play a central role in our employees’ work from the day they start at Osmose. All onboarding forms are completed online, eliminating the vast majority of our paperwork. Every crew member is issued a Chromebook during their eight-week training period, which makes the process faster and more convenient because they can refer to it for information any time they want.

Our foremen use Chromebooks on a daily basis and see the most significant benefits. They’re able to send data from the field, communicate with the main office and access safety information with the touch of a button. They can easily complete administrative tasks without carrying heavy binders. And it’s now possible for our crews to enjoy a better work-life balance because they can work from anywhere and their colleagues and family can reach them at any time via email or Google Hangouts video calls.

We’re now expanding how we use Chrome devices. We’ve introduced Chromebox for meetings in our conference rooms and our training environments. Some of our vice presidents are also using Chromebooks for everyday computing because of their portability and convenience. These devices are helping to fuel our growth and accomplish our mission to help people stay connected.

Posted by Phil Sellers, CIO of Georgia Department of Community Supervision

Editor's note: This week, we’re sharing two stories from Georgia state government agencies that have gone Google. Today we hear from Phil Sellers, CIO of Georgia Department of Community Supervision, which oversees 200,000 probationers and 25,000 parolees across the state. See how Georgia Department of Community Supervision has saved millions of dollars and switched to virtual offices with Google Apps for Work and Google Chromebooks.


The mission of the Georgia Department of Community Supervision (DCS) is to protect and serve our citizens by effectively supervising offenders. As CIO, it’s my job to make sure our busy officers have the technology they need to serve the community.
Last year, the Department of Community Supervision went through a big transition. The state merged three different departments into the DCS, which added over 100 new offices to our existing 50. Because our staff spends most of their time driving around conducting community supervision visits, they’re rarely in the office. This means dozens of offices sat empty each day and we were wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars on rent each year. As a state government agency, efficient spending is always a top priority, so we knew we needed a change.

We decided to try something that had never been done in Georgia state government history: eliminate the majority of our offices entirely and allow hundreds of our 2,100 staff members to work remotely instead. Our existing desktop computers and office applications didn’t have the features to support remote workers, so we started looking into alternatives. I was familiar with Google’s cost-cutting, collaborative and mobile-friendly features, so my team led the switch to Google Apps for Work and Google Chromebooks.
We’ve since saved millions of dollars on rent, enterprise licensing contracts, hardware, IT support costs and employee productivity. We no longer have dedicated IT services for routine storage and email support, and our small IT staff of 35 doesn’t need to roll out patches and antivirus software. If an officer closes her Chromebook or loses power, she doesn’t have to worry about trying to recover lost data. If we need to replace a device, it’s inexpensive and fast to get someone back up and running.

We’ve also reduced security concerns, which is crucial for a government agency. Officers used to store their data on laptops, so if their device was lost or stolen, they’d lose sensitive information about parolees and probationers. With Chromebooks, we store everything in the cloud and can easily wipe and replace a device if needed. Officers use a 2-step authentication to enter our systems, which adds another layer of security.

Chromebooks and Google Apps played a key role in making the switch to “virtual offices” a success. 95% of the devices in the field are Chromebooks and Android phones, so officers working remotely can easily access the apps they need and share information with their colleagues using Google Docs, Google Drive and Google Hangouts. Because officers can work from anywhere, they can design their own schedules, helping them better manage their work-life balance and be more effective at visiting the offenders under their supervision. Since we’ve adopted the policy, officers are more productive, and sick leave and employee turnover have decreased.
Every technology we build, buy or deploy should help officers do their jobs better. That means encouraging chiefs to get out of the office and ride along with their officers and giving IT staff the freedom to develop new applications without having to worry about maintaining devices or troubleshooting storage and email. Since working in the cloud with Google, the Department of Community Supervision has been able to provide our officers with the tools they need to serve the communities that depend on them.

Posted by Josh Diemert, Lead Systems Administrator, Scheels

Editor's note: Today we speak with Josh Diemert, lead systems administrator for Scheels, a 26-location sporting-goods chain with stores in 11 states.


Scheels, an employee-owned, privately held business with more than 6,000 employees, has a long history of adapting to changing times. Founded in 1902 as a small hardware and general merchandise store in Sabin, Minnesota, it added sporting goods in 1954, athletic clothing in 1972, and eventually grew into an all-sports chain. In this interview, we see how the company continues to adapt today, using Chrome to deliver better service to its customers with expert advice.

Why is technology important to Scheels?

We aim to understand our customers and give them personal attention and local information. We’ve taken the in-store experience to a new level by leveraging technology to make shopping fun, while at the same time empowering our sales team to deliver a better quality of service.

How has Chrome helped?

Chrome has dramatically improved our digital signage. We use Chromebits to power digital signs in key parts of the business, like our fishing shops. The signs display information on nearby river conditions and advice on the latest equipment and local fishing techniques. They’re incredibly popular features that have helped build customer loyalty.

Given the success of our digital signage, it made sense to use Chrome for our in-store kiosks. The kiosks allow customers to order items that aren’t available in their local store. It’s the best of both worlds: hands-on advice from a local professional and access to the large inventory of an online retailer.

Our sales team also uses Chromebooks to streamline the customer workflow. Some purchases require background checks and a lot of paperwork, but Chromebooks makes it easy and more efficient to fill out the required forms. The technology also puts the right information at our employees’ fingertips, helping them provide better on-the-spot advice to our customers.

How did you get started with Chrome?

About three years ago we transitioned to Google Apps with the help of Google Apps Premier Partner Agosto. We purchased our licensing through them. They also gave us guidance on migrating our data out of Lotus Notes and into Google Apps, and showed us the benefits of Chromebooks over the legacy machines we were using. When we saw the difference, we decided to try Chrome for digital signage, kiosks and our sales staff.

What other kinds of benefits have you gotten from Chrome?

Before Chrome, it was a pain to get digital signs working — it could take a week or more to set up our legacy hardware. With Chromebits, it takes ten minutes to set up a digital sign, and we can manage them all from one location. This saves valuable time for our IT department.

We’ve also saved money. We were considering Windows laptops for our sales associates, but by choosing Chromebooks we’re saving $200 per laptop.

Overall, the biggest benefit has been giving our customers the attention they deserve, whether by offering local information, access to a larger range of products through our in-store kiosks, or making the customer workflow process easy with Chromebooks. We pride ourselves on being experts on everything we sell. With Chrome, our experts can spend more time with our customers and show them the personalized customer support that helps them choose exactly the right camping gear for a first family camping trip or the mountain bike that’s exactly the right height and weight. We’re such big believers in Chrome, we now turn to it as the first option for any new challenge.

Posted by Lewis Graham, Chief Executive Officer, Jtel

Editor's note: Today we hear from Lewis Graham, Chief Executive Officer of Jtel, which provides call center technologies for telecommunications companies and enterprises. Read how Jtel is transforming the call center industry using Chrome, which has added efficiency, time savings and ROI (45% increase for Jtel customers).

Think about the last time you needed to get in touch with a business. How did you contact them? You may have picked up the phone, but it’s just as likely you sent an email or a text message, tagged the company in a post on social media or visited the website to chat with a customer service rep. Today, there are dozens of ways for people to communicate with businesses. Companies who embrace this fact are rewarded with more engaged customers.

Jtel set out to reinvent the call center so businesses can handle all the ways people get in touch with them. Based on our 25 years of experience providing call center technology for telecommunications firms and enterprises, we’ve built a new multi-channel call center platform using Chromebooks and WebRTC. WebRTC is an open source project for real-time browser-based communications that was developed by Google. The Chrome and WebRTC solution eliminates telephones while letting agents handle email, chat and voice calls. Rather than switching between a phone and computer, the agent uses just one device.

Chrome has improved our call centers on three important fronts: call center teams work more efficiently, their calls are more effective and they save time. Chrome devices are easy to configure and manage, and they’re highly reliable — particularly important because call centers are notoriously difficult to install. Chrome and WebRTC have dramatically reduced the time required to set up a new call center: it takes four hours to set up a center with 200 to 300 Chromebooks, compared to the four days it takes to set up a traditional call center of similar size.

Chrome saves our customers money as well. In a traditional call center, each agent needs a PC and a telephone. There are also high deployment costs for each agent because of the complexity of the systems. Between hardware and implementation, it adds up to almost $1,300 per agent. Chrome and RTC save a huge chunk of that — about $800 per agent. By our calculations, that leads to a 45 percent increase in ROI for our customers.

Chromebooks with WebRTC also transform the way companies interact with their customers. It lets agents connect with customers in multiple ways, not just by phone. And it allows companies to integrate their call centers with their CRM systems so they can create self-service modules for their customers. This empowers customers to resolve issues on their own.

Companies need to to be able to help customers, however they choose to get in touch. Today, that’s through phone calls, emails, text messages and live chat. As these channels keep evolving, we will, too, thanks to Chrome and our partnership with Google. Chrome is helping us build the future of communications.

Posted by Jaime Hinojosa, Information Technology Officer, Elsa State Bank


Editor's note: Today we hear from Jaime Hinojosa, Information Technology Officer at Elsa State Bank, which has served Texans since 1945. Learn how Elsa State Bank overhauled its IT department to provide its workforce with the tools to be more mobile and productive.

Elsa State Bank's 20,000 customers across South Texas depend on our expertise in commercial, consumer and agricultural finance. We’re always looking for ways to better serve our customers and grow our customer base. As an IT officer, I introduce, evolve and maintain the technology that helps our 100 employees acquire more customers. Security, durability and affordability are top of mind when I’m researching a new solution.

In 2010, we looked to modernize our IT solutions. Our employees wanted greater flexibility to pursue customer leads outside of the office. At the time, our employees were using laptops and smartphones that didn’t have the security, functionality or mobile management we needed. I started researching other solutions and discovered Google Apps for Work, Google Mobile Device Management (Google MDM) and Android devices. I believed these solutions would help us achieve our goal of giving our team greater mobility with tools that not only advanced productivity but that also offered the security, central management and cost efficiency we required — I was right.

Today we use Google MDM to manage 40 Samsung Galaxy smartphones and Samsung Note tablets. These Android devices help us save time and money. One example: We used to print and ship 300-page binders for board meetings, which was wasteful and inefficient, but now, board members use Android tablets during meetings to view and share annual reports and quarterly earnings presentations.

Our employees are already benefitting from greater mobility at work. Lenders now commonly travel to construction sites to meet with customers, receive progress updates and pursue more loan opportunities. Loan officers who work away from the office can receive reminders about upcoming client meetings on their Android smartphone, locate and reach their destination using Google Maps and retrieve relevant customer documents from the cloud with Google Drive.

The security of Google Apps was essential to our purchasing decision. Since commercial institutions can be targeted by cybercriminals, protecting our customer data is especially important. Our centrally-managed Android devices help us save time and money without compromising security, and IT administrators benefit from capabilities like mobile device management. Remote administration also helps us save time and money from a pure logistics standpoint — we don’t have to be on site to solve individual problems that arise.

Before we adopted Google Apps for Work and Google MDM, our employees were clamoring for tools that allowed them to work from anywhere and better serve our customers. The integration of Google Apps and Google MDM, supported by Android devices, has vastly improved what our employees can accomplish each day. These tools have helped keep Elsa State Bank competitive amid a rapidly evolving work environment.

Posted by Leon Paternoster, Deputy Head of IT, Suffolk Libraries

Editor's note: Today we hear from Leon Paternoster, Deputy Head of IT at Suffolk Libraries in Ipswich, UK. Suffolk Libraries serves the UK county’s population of over 700,000. Learn how Suffolk Libraries uses mobile technology to keep its members engaged and interested in visiting their local branch.


As a modern library network, we’re more than a place to read — we connect our members to the world around them. That connection could be a book, a newspaper or access to the internet. My job as deputy head of IT involves supporting and growing our libraries’ web services. Making access to information fast and easy across any and every library-owned device is a main focus for my team.
We know our members love browsing the web when they visit the library, so we wanted to make getting online as seamless as opening a book. In 2014, we worked with our partner Ancoris to replace many of our outdated Windows PCs with Google Chromebooks. We also purchased a number of touchscreen Google Chromebases, which allow children to interact with websites without using a keyboard or mouse. Ancoris developed a Chromebook Access Management System (CAMS) that integrates the Chromebooks with our existing library management system. This controls who can log on and how long they can stay online. Today we have more than 200 Chrome devices available for visitors to check out across our 44 branches. Now visitors are able to go online anywhere in the library. From young children playing literacy games to students diving into heavy research, customers of all ages can engage with material — whether at a shared table or in a quiet nook — on their Chromebook until the device is due back.

Chromebooks and Chromebases have been so cost-effective — both initially and once deployed — that we’ve been able to increase the number of computers available to library users while upgrading our technology overall.

Now that we have fast and simple ways for our visitors to get online, our branches are hosting new programs that people love. For instance, some branches have introduced “Code Clubs,” weekly meetings for younger visitors to play games and explore coding languages like Python and Scratch. We also provide a free family history service that helps members research their family trees online.

From an IT perspective, Chrome devices are ideal. They’re secure, easy to use and require very little of our team’s time to manage. With Chrome Device Management, we don’t have to worry about data on lost or stolen devices because we’re able to centrally shut down devices that we’ve identified as lost or stolen. Despite staff concerns about theft, we haven’t had a single Chromebook stolen. And with automatic system updates, the Chromebooks stay fast, up-to-date and ready to use at a moment’s notice.

Our technology is a huge draw for library members. They look to us as a portal for information as well as a resource for pursuing their interests and professional goals. Chrome devices are the perfect library companion for our visitors and a simple solution for our IT team.

Posted by Daniel Durgan, IT Business Partner at ISG

Editor's note: Today we hear from Daniel Durgan, IT Business Partner at ISG, an international construction services company delivering fit out, construction, engineering services and a range of specialist solutions. Daniel explains why there’s never been a better time to digitally transform the construction industry.

The construction industry is undergoing a digital revolution. Companies that have for decades relied heavily on printed contracts, drawings and documents are now moving to online tools to save time and money and keep productivity up in a marketplace that’s more expansive and more demanding. At ISG, we’re using Google’s cloud-based tools to ensure that we’re at the forefront of this industry shift.

With Google Apps, we’re taking full advantage of technology-enhanced collaboration, productivity and mobility. Over the course of a few hours, I can use Google Drive to review a presentation on my tablet, Gmail to check emails and Google Calendar to schedule meetings on my phone while away from the office. I can also jump into a meeting with colleagues from around the world from any of the 26 Chromeboxes that are set up in one of our conference rooms. Whether I’m on a site visit, in the office or on the move, Google Apps allows me to continue working and collaborating with my team.

Projects move fast with real-time collaboration It’s essential for our business to control who has access to certain documents. Drawings must only be issued to authorised people, and each person must review the latest version as it’s being developed. Drive enables us to completely control what’s shared inside and outside of our company — the fact that our team alone has 1.5 million files in Drive speaks to our reliance on the tool for secure file storage.

Google Docs allows us to collaborate on shared documents at the same time, no matter where we are in the world. I can start shaping up a proposal in London and invite a colleague in Europe to work on it with me. There’s also more of a human element. When someone comments, you see their face next to it — it ties you emotionally to the process. We keep track of all our revisions in Sheets to monitor our progress. And we can always instant message each other with quick questions or suggestions, so we feel connected, all the time.

A lot of what we do is very visual. It’s hard to describe building plans and designs over the phone. With Hangouts, we can bring everyone together to discuss these plans and drawings as if we were all in the same room. We can move quickly from stakeholders to contractors to suppliers to make sure the right people are involved in the right conversations.

Staff expect more from an IT solution A big part of my team’s role is to help build relationships and ensure employees communicate effectively and get the support they need. When we sent out a survey using Forms to ask all our staff what they’d like to see from IT, they told us they wanted to find out more about our Google tools. We’re using Synergise Google Apps Training to help our stakeholders go beyond the basics and use the suite to its full potential.

Quality: getting it right the first time Quality is extremely important in our business, so we carry out frequent on-site check-ins to ensure teams are following the proper processes and delivering a high standard of construction correctly the first time. When we do these quality checks, we submit recommendations and observations using Forms on Android tablets. The information is imported into Sheets, and using Apps Script, we create dashboards, so employees across teams and functions can easily track the check-ins in real time.

We’re improving the way we work all the time, and that’s thanks to the support and enthusiasm of our employees. Many of our automated solutions have been suggested by them, and it’s great to see how passionate they are about Google Apps. There’s also an excitement among my team around what the future holds for us and our industry with new tools at our dispense and a new way of working for our customers.

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 Curtis Howell, Redfin Senior Product Manager for Customer Engagement

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Curtis Howell, Redfin senior product manager for customer engagement. Read how Redfin makes it easier for buyers to find their ideal homes.


Redfin launched in 2006 with the mission to change the way people buy and sell homes. Unlike traditional real estate brokerages, Redfin real estate agents are paid based on customer satisfaction, not just commission, so the agent’s and client’s interests are aligned. Redfin uses technology to improve the customer experience at every step, from the initial home search to the closing table.

We used the Google Maps Javascript API to build the web interface for Redfin.com and the Google Maps Android API for the Redfin Android app. People are familiar with the Google Maps interface so they intuitively know how to navigate and search when they come to our site or use our Android app.
People often want to search for houses based on places-of-interest, such as a park or a landmark, and the Google Places API allows them to do just that. They can also find houses for sale in specific neighborhoods by drawing a polygon on a map and then searching within that area.

Finding houses for sale on a map is only the beginning of the homebuying process. The next step is touring homes in-person with a Redfin agent. Our customers often schedule multiple tours in one day, so Redfin uses the Google Maps Distance Matrix API to estimate the time it takes to drive between homes.

Google’s location-based search increased the rate of completed searches performed on our site by 4 percent. Data shows that faster searches leads to more satisfied and loyal website users, which ultimately leads to more clients for Redfin.

Map-based search is one aspect of our technology that makes our agents more efficient and able to deliver great service to Redfin customers. Because Redfin is more efficient than traditional brokerages, we’re able to provide full service and still save our customers money.

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.

Editor's note: Today Jac de Haan, Developer Marketing for Google Maps for Work, speaks with Anna Hill, Chief Marketing Officer of The Walt Disney Company, UK & Ireland, and Spitfire Studio Client Services Director Tim George. They give us insight into how Disney and Spitfire Studio used Google Maps APIs and Google Street View. The immersive experience brings together more than 1,000 Winnie-the-Pooh assets, including videos, images, stories, downloadable content and games while also providing helpful guides, hints and tips for new mums. Fans navigate the 3-dimensional site and explore different character locations, including Pooh’s house, all through 360° photospheres.


Jac de Haan: Anna, the first question’s for you. The new Hundred Acre Wood site is both modern in its immersive and interactive nature and historic, paying homage to Hundred Acre Wood, the home of Winnie-the-Pooh that we all know and love. What was Disney’s goal in building the website, and why did Disney choose Google Maps for it?

Anna Hill: 2016 marks 90 years since families were introduced to the characters from the Hundred Acre Wood, when A.A. Milne’s first story was published. Winnie-the-Pooh and friends have stood the test of time with their heart-warming stories that continue to inspire children and adults alike.

Disney wanted to create the world of Winnie-the-Pooh for parents and children to easily interact with the classic characters and inspire their play time. Google was the perfect partner for delivering the platform—research shows that mothers are very actively searching the Internet for advice, tools and new content. So, we partnered with Spitfire Studio to design and develop the site, which we wanted to be optimised for tablets as well as traditional desktop computers. We anticipated that the site would continue to evolve, so it was intentionally designed to make adding new map locations and content within existing areas over time incredibly easy and seamless. We want to continue building on the experience as we see how children and parents engage with the site and content.

Jac de Haan: Tim, tell us about how you used Google Maps APIs to develop the site.

Tim George: The site’s main interface is a map of the Hundred Acre Wood, which includes graphics of characters — Pooh, Rabbit, Eeyore, Piglet and others — and their houses. It’s built using the Google Maps Javascript API, so you can navigate, with zoom and panning, just like any other Google map. We provided our own graphics, so you really feel like you’re in the world of Winnie-the-Pooh.

Places on the map like Pooh’s House and Eeyore’s field are marked with customized pins. Click on a character, and the Google Maps Street View Service launches you into a Street View of that location — you can find yourself right inside Pooh’s House or out in Eeyore’s field. You can pan and look around, just like you can in Street View. We did this using our own creative assets. Once you’re there, you can click objects and access games, advice, videos and more.
We wanted to personalize the experience, so we used the Geolocation capability of the Google Maps JavaScript API along with a Weather API to reflect the weather in your location. The site will suggest play ideas best suited to your local weather, such as rainy-day activities during a stormy afternoon.

Jac de Haan: Anna, how does this Google Maps API integration empower your developers and benefit Winnie the Pooh fans?

Anna Hill: Google Maps APIs are great to have in your creative toolkit, and they let you think and work in unexpected ways. Integrating Google Maps by detecting the locations of website visitors lets us create a more well-rounded experience for both parents and children. In partnership with Spitfire, we’ve created something we’re immensely proud of, and Google Maps play a big part in that. We look forward to seeing how families interact with the Hundred Acre Wood experience and hope that they have a lot of fun engaging with our characters — just as they have for the last 90 years, but now in a thoroughly modern way.

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 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.