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The City of Calgary does more with less for citizens through a new search-centric website

Monday, August 15, 2011

Posted by David Watson, Executive Project Sponsor for Calgary.ca for The City of Calgary.

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is David Watson, executive project sponsor for calgary.ca for The City of Calgary. He sponsored a sweeping program to bring greater efficiencies to operations and provide enhanced and broader services to citizens. At its heart is a new search-centric website launched today, and powered by the Google Search Appliance.

Many municipalities today are under increasing pressure to reduce overhead while providing a wide array of services to citizens. In The City of Calgary, we looked to the Internet to enable us to provide enhanced citizen services as efficiently as possible. Our research showed several interesting facts:
- Over 93% of Calgarians use the Internet.
- Only 18% of traffic came directly to our home page - 55% of people came from search engines, primarily Google.
- Citizens want to interact with us online, instead of spending time on the phone or in-person - 60% noted better convenience, such as not having to drive to a city facility. Others noted speed and 24/7 availability.
- More than 40% of Calgary citizens said they wanted more services online.

Our public-facing web presence, which has 16,000 pages of content, across 28 business units, with a wide variety of applications, functionality, documents and information for our citizens, handled 9 million visits in 2010. The major drawback was that the information was difficult to find.

Forty-seven percent of Calgary citizens surveyed reported that the incumbent search engine on Calgary.ca did not work well. It required knowledge of city acronyms and terminology, something many citizens, understandably, don’t possess. Our content and our site was cluttered, out-of-date, and difficult to weed through. We struggled with maintenance as individual business units continued to add to our already packed site.

In response, we formed the Web Leadership and Renewal Program in 2007. Among the chief goals was to provide citizens with easy-to-use search and better access to city programs and services. This led us to create an entirely new, search-centric site which was first concepted and tested in November 2009, and finally launched today.

The Google Search Appliance (GSA) is the cornerstone of this new site and our efforts to improve access to services and programs and increase government efficiency. It is linked to a content management system, ESRI for interactive mapping, and to websites such as calgarymayor.ca to provide a holistic, integrated search experience.

Now, citizens can search for everything from YouTube videos on saving water to animal services and permit information, and they can easily serve themselves by finding answers to everyday questions. Calgary.ca is just as easy and effective as searching on Google.com. The search-based concept lets Calgarians type in common keywords or phrases to find what they need, without specific knowledge of city acronyms or terminology.

We can conserve phone and in-person resources for more complex requests and apply valuable government resources more strategically. Citizens benefit from the convenience of finding most of what they need online. They can avoid unnecessary driving and parking fees and have 24/7 access.

Certain search features of the GSA were very important to us. Topping the list were best bets, synonyms, and spelling correction. Related searches and content rating were also vital, as well as the ability to easily promote the relevance of a search result based on its popularity. The Google Search Appliance provided all of these capabilities, plus it had a reputation for being very easy to install and maintain.

Citizens are rapidly adopting search now. Early metrics show that only 4% of visits to the old calgary.ca used the internal search engine. In comparison, 65% of visitors to the new calgary.ca used the the GSA, and the search results page is the second most visited page after the home page.

Ultimately, our job is to provide city services as efficiently as possible. We strive to do more with less. By making the right content easy to retrieve, citizens get the convenience they seek—and we can reduce unnecessary overhead and increase the value and variety of our services and programs.

Google Apps is big in Japan

Thursday, August 11, 2011



On July 20th we held our second annual Google Enterprise Day in Tokyo, Japan. Despite typhoon warnings, we had 1,577 attendees, over twice the number of attendees as last year’s event. The packed agenda consisted of 35 speakers across 20 sessions, including Google Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, COO of SoftBank Telecom, Ken Miyauchi, and Yasuki Sato from Toda Corporation.

Google Enterprise Day was an opportunity for Google to share with Japanese business leaders our vision for a 100% web world, where business applications are delivered via a web browser, enabling improved reliability and productivity with access from anywhere, at any time. This was a particularly important topic following the devastating effects of the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan earlier this year. Business continuity and disaster management have become real concerns in the last few months for businesses in Japan. Well known construction company, Toda Corporation, shared why they moved to Google Apps after losing access to their on-premise servers and business applications during the tsunami. Moving to a 100% web-based platform meant that Toda Corporation could be up and running quickly, with no time spent installing hardware or software.

Several new Google Apps customers announced that they had gone Google at the event, including SoftBank Group, Nortiz, Casio, and Mitsui Soko. Casio’s CIO, Atsushi Yazawa, shared his decision to move to Google Apps. “In deciding to move to Google Apps, speed of innovation was a big factor. Google Apps constantly provides new features and products with a great level of service and reliability. Google Apps also allowed us to decrease our total cost of ownership while diverting our IT professionals from repetitive maintenence tasks to more business-centric work that adds value to the organization.”

Ken Miyauchi, COO of SoftBank Telecom, SoftBank Mobile and SoftBank BB spoke about its successful deployment of 26,000 employees across the business to Google Apps. SoftBank spoke about some of the benefits they’ve started to see from this switch – a reduction in servers and the costs and resources to maintain them, more efficient email with much bigger storage limits, better access to email and documents from mobile devices, and greater creativity resulting from better collaboration across departments and teams.

Sota Umezu, Manager of Sales Strategy in the Sales Promotion Division at SoftBank says, “Google Apps has changed the way we do business. For example, when gathering information from employees, we used to email attachments to each employee, ask them to fill in their information, and manually aggregate their input in numerous attachments back into a master copy of the file. With Google Docs employees all update the same document, making a 6 hour process a 30 minute process. The ability to access data from anywhere and collaborate in real time has greatly improved productivity,”

We really enjoyed hosting such innovative business leaders at this year’s Enterprise Day. If you’d like to see some of the presentations from this event, you can watch the videos on YouTube.

The computer that keeps getting better...

Wednesday, August 10, 2011



One of the best things about Chromebooks is that they improve over time with frequent automatic updates. Over the last few months we’ve gotten great feedback from many of our Chromebooks for Business and Education customers, and we’re excited that this week’s latest stable release of Chrome OS includes their top feature requests: VPN and secure Wi-Fi (802.1x) support, and access to virtualized applications.

With VPN support, users can remotely access their private school or business network from a Chromebook so they can use important internal systems while taking advantage of the Chromebook’s portability.

Secure WiFi (802.1X) support lets organizations protect their wireless network and systems by requiring authentication credentials in order for a Chromebook to connect to the network.

Finally, while most new applications will be built for the web, we recognize that some users need to access desktop applications.1 With the technology preview release of Citrix Receiver for Chrome OS, Citrix customers can now access virtualized versions of their desktop applications, like Adobe Photoshop, using a Chromebook.

Also in this week's release, Chromebooks resume even more quickly – 32% faster in most cases. And users can save paper by using Google Cloud Print’s Print to Docs feature. We’re excited for feedback, and to get the latest features, fixes, and improvements, all users need to do is open their Chromebooks!

If you’re interested to learn how Chromebooks can help your school or business, contact our team.

1. IDC, 2010. “Worldwide Software as a Service 2010–2014 Forecast: Software Will Never Be the Same.”

Cox Schepp builds in more productivity with Google Apps



Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Nathanael Andrico, CIO for Cox Schepp Construction, a leading provider of construction services in the southeastern region of the United States. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

At Cox Schepp, we focus on completing our clients’ construction projects in the most cost-effective way possible. We’re based out of Charlotte, North Carolina with offices in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida with 150 employees across the region. Our team is spread out across our offices and we work on projects in the field as far west as Texas. Streamlining our operations and minimizing costs across offices is a priority for us so that we can spend more time focusing on our clients.

Prior to Google Apps, we were using Microsoft Exchange 2007. As our business expanded, we found that we were pouring a lot of time into keeping all of our offices and mobile teams up and running on the server. When we began evaluating cloud service providers, we were primarily concerned with finding an archiving solution for our growing business.

The cost of maintaining an Exchange server was growing as we wanted greater redundancy across our records. We had gotten to the point where we had to impose 4 gigabyte and then eventually 2 gigabyte limits for everyone’s Exchange inboxes. This proved to be burdensome very quickly as our project managers often send large image files back and forth containing everything from architects’ plans to photos of a job’s progress.

Cox Schepp switched to Google Apps approximately one year ago. We purchased both Google Apps and Postini Archiving and Discovery. We chose Google Apps because we saw its potential to streamline our operations and solve our email archiving challenges at a competitive price point. We wanted a turn-key experience, so we worked with the implementation partner Dito who was able to quickly and easily bring us on board. We also decided to take advantage of the Apps platform’s extensibility and integrated CloudLock from the Google Apps Marketplace as an additional layer of compliance and security features.

After deploying Google Apps, we wanted to make sure all of our offices were readily equipped to take advantage of all the useful product features. Since there’s only one of me and multiple offices, we appointed some deputies among different teams to serve as local gurus to help their colleagues learn more about how to use Apps.

Google Sites has been the breakaway hit across the company since we started using Google Apps. It’s been a really useful way to share information and manage projects. People also really enjoy using video chat, which was something we didn’t anticipate when selecting Apps. It’s been great to see that Apps has not only delivered a strong email platform with a great archiving solution, but has also helped us collaborate more effectively in ways we didn’t initially foresee.

Moving from an onsite solution to Google Apps has solved our email archiving challenges, reduced our overhead IT costs and enabled seamless project collaboration. This change has allowed us to spend less time devoted to building IT infrastructure and more time devoted to building our clients’ designs.

Journal Communications builds a new business model based on the cloud

Tuesday, August 9, 2011



Editors note:Today’s guest blogger is Michael O’Brien, CIO for Journal Communications, a Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based media company with operations in publishing, radio and television broadcasting, interactive media and printing services. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Journal Communications owns and operates 33 radio stations, 13 television stations in 12 states, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel newspaper, and several community newspapers and publications in the Midwest. For the past several years, our IT infrastructure for those media stations and papers has been completely separate. We had 17 implementations and multiple versions of Microsoft® Exchange and SharePoint with multiple servers for each location, most of which were not backed up or redundant. The company managed for years without significant problems, until our second largest market, Las Vegas, had a catastrophic hardware crash - just weeks after we officially decided to move to Google Apps. Email, calendar and contacts were not recoverable for many. Some employees had been with the company for 15 years or longer and they lost everything. Now the future of using a redundant, web-based solution really hit home with the company leadership.

When I joined Journal Communications in May 2010, my first priority was to bring multiple IT divisions together and have them start working more collaboratively. We had 18 months left on our Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft, but we realized that if we really wanted to reach this collaborative goal, it would be very expensive and hard to do with the existing portfolio of Microsoft products. Prior to Journal Communications, I had been a CIO at a start up, and one of the decisions I made early on was not to have anything brick and mortar if we could avoid it. I came to Journal Communications and saw all this legacy hardware and software, and knew we needed to build a future business model based on cloud computing.

Despite the existing contract with Microsoft, we decided to move to Google Apps. As we all know, email and calendar have evolved from nice-to-have tools to mission-critical business applications, and everything Google has come out with so far, simply just works - the Google tool set sells itself. Google Apps make the business environment more productive and more cost effective. Instead of IT being seen as a cost center, we’ve really taken the boundaries out of a static IT organization and started to make decisions that provide current and future business value. Until we transition completely, we still have hundreds of servers surrounding MS Exchange and SharePoint, and they just need to go away. My goal is to end up with a media based company that is as much in the cloud as possible, this includes our Publishing ERP system. We are also evaluating the idea of going cloud with phones. Portions of the IT team now use Google Voice and calls through Gmail. Imagine a department and then large portions of an organization with no desktop phones - Journal Communications does.

We’re rolling out Google Apps to over 2,700 Journal Communications employees and will be done by Q1 2012. We realize that this is a significant business change, but even some people who were originally skeptical are getting on board. This is just the beginning of moving to a more digital, cloud based world where we can work together across offices, know that our data is stored in the cloud and accessible from anywhere with any device, and start to move our business systems out of our brick and mortar data centers. We’re entering a new age at Journal Communications. We’re not your grandmother’s newspaper, nor your grandfather’s TV or radio station.

Security First: Google Apps and Google App Engine complete SSAE-16 audit

Friday, August 5, 2011



One of the ways our customers can be are assured their data is protected is through third-party audits and certifications. Since 2008, Google Apps has successfully undergone annual SAS 70 Type II audits. This year the SAS70 Type II audit has evolved into the SSAE 16 Type II attestation and its international counterpart, ISAE 3402 Type II. We’re happy to announce that Google is one of the first major cloud providers to be certified for compliance to these new audit standards.

Over the past few weeks, Google has successfully completed the audit process for the SSAE 16 and ISAE 3402 standards for Google Apps and Postini services. In addition, we expanded the audits to include Google App Engine, Google Apps Script, and Google Storage for Developers. Together with the SAS 70 Type II (covering dates prior to June 15th, 2011), these third party audits provide additional assurance to customers that their data is well protected.

Third party audits are only part of the security and compliance benefits of Google Apps and Google App Engine products. We protect our Apps customers’ data by employing some of the foremost security experts, by executing rigorous safety processes, and by implementing cutting-edge technology. These protections are highlighted in our security white paper and data center video tour. For more information visit our Google Apps Trust page.

We take extensive measures to protect our users’ data and we are constantly innovating to develop new features and capabilities in these areas.

New in Gmail Labs: Preview Pane

Thursday, August 4, 2011



(Cross-posted from the Gmail Blog.)

When we check our email, many of us rely on the message snippets to figure out which emails to open first. We've been listening to your feedback though, and we know that sometimes, you want more than snippets. This is why I’m happy to announce that you can now preview messages in your inbox using a new feature in Gmail Labs called Preview Pane. It’s probably a very familiar layout to those of you who have used Gmail on a tablet device. We also think it’s going to work especially well if you have a larger resolution screen.


Click the image above to see a larger version.




After you enable Preview Pane from the Labs tab in Gmail Settings you’ll see a toggle button in the top right corner of your message list, which lets you switch between preview and list views.


For those of you who have more vertical space you can also move the preview pane below your message list. You can enable this using the dropdown arrow next to the toggle button:


By default there is a 3-second delay in marking a conversation as read after previewing it. If that doesn’t feel natural to you, you can change the timing in the General tab of settings:


If you’d like to remove the new layout, simply return to Gmail Settings and disable the lab. Finally, don’t forget to let us know what you think about the latest addition to Gmail Labs.

Putting big data on the map: helping customers see location-based information

Friday, July 29, 2011



Today, all types of businesses rely on geographic information to make better decisions about their customers, products and processes. As part of our ongoing effort to make geographic information accessible and useful, we offer the Google Maps API Premier to businesses that want to integrate Google Maps directly into their own applications and websites. Interactive maps have become critical to many basic business functions from asset tracking in the logistics industry to inventory planning in retail.

Earlier this week, we announced a new collaboration with SAP aimed at helping enterprise customers use Google’s mapping services with SAP’s business analytics software. As this demo from SAP shows, the Google Maps API lets companies visualize geographic data more easily, leading to better business decisions. Access to SAP and Google tools on tablets and other mobile devices means that employees can review their business data whenever and wherever the need arises.

Google is committed to helping businesses and software vendors build, run and support innovative applications that involve huge data sets. These “big data” sets require massive storage and processing power, a task Google’s cloud infrastructure is uniquely well suited to handle. Today, in addition to the Google Maps API, Google also provides the Google Prediction API and Google Storage for Developers to support businesses working with their important big data. Like the Google Maps API, businesses and developers can use these services to process data or build applications.

Happy SysAdmin Day from Google - here’s to many happy returns (on investment)



Today is System Administrator Appreciation Day - a humble holiday for all the men and women who keep our IT systems churning and burning. At Google, we’ve had the opportunity over the years to work with many talented teams of SysAdmins, and across the board two things are true: these folks care deeply about technology and giving people the best tools to work together.

We’ve heard stories of teams who spent thousands of hours managing email systems, dealing with laptops going haywire, sorting through disaster recovery scenarios, patching servers and software, working with employees frustrated over lost data, resetting passwords, archiving mail, and managing other tasks fearlessly.

The most enjoyable part of my job has been helping these hard-working teams recover extra time in their days, and making their budgets go further (while helping them look good to executives!) by moving to the cloud. We’ve heard great stories about teams who had so much leftover time that they went out for haircuts and some of them even had time to choreograph a dance to our Gmail Motion April Fool’s joke.

Motorola’s Sr. Director of IT Strategy and Services, Jason Ruger, getting his hair cut after moving to Google Apps.

Here are some of our favorite stories over the past year:

  • Andrew Murrey, VP of IT Infrastructure, Cinram: “Since moving to Google Apps, my IT team is much happier. We previously had 16 full-time people managing our messaging systems, spending about 8,000 hours per year backing up email, fixing file storage problems, or managing server issues. We now need only two folks to look after messaging and the other 14 are now more focused on business-critical projects. They’re so happy they wear Google t-shirts about once a week!”
  • Dan Moore, CIO, Quality Distribution: “The lower hardware requirements of web enabled applications allow our IT department to spend more time delivering improvements to the user experience. One of our first examples of this was our implementation of video and voice chat via Google Talk into our driver recruiting process.”
  • Luke Leonhard, Web Services Manager, Brady Corp: “Our jobs went from constraining and limiting people’s usage to making sure everyone uses these tools as effectively as possible to be as productive as possible.” Check out the photo of the Brady SysAdmin team below.

Google and the Brady Corporation team during Google Apps Go Live

To all of the SysAdmins out there supporting the more than 30 million users of Google Apps, our hats are off to you. So serve up the ice cream and cake, and celebrate the hard work of your SysAdmin today.


SysAdminDay

A look back as we move ahead: Google Docs and Google Sites

Thursday, July 28, 2011



We’ve all been frustrated by technology that gets slower, less reliable and less useful over time. Google Apps is different – it actually gets better automatically week after week without patches or updates to manage. People can absorb this stream of innovation without being distracted from their workflow, so this month we’re taking a look back to highlight the most interesting ways that Google Apps has grown up over time. Last week, we started with Gmail and Google Calendar.

Today we’ll break down how Google Docs and Sites support better teamwork, mobile productivity, ease of use and trustworthiness – four areas where Google Apps excels. We’re holding a webinar next Thursday to explore these developments (details below), so join us if you’re interested in learning more. We hope you’ll find a few capabilities here that you didn’t know about before, or haven’t tried in some time.

Designed for Teams
Google Docs and Sites were built from the ground up to make teamwork seamless. Being able to simultaneously edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations without the hassles of attachments is just the start.
  • Great documents come from great discussions, so in addition to collaborative editing, Google Docs also enables conversations right alongside your content. Comments can be directed to specific co-editors, who can then respond in the document’s discussion panel or over email.
  • Sometimes you want to collaborate freely with others in a spreadsheet, but other situations call for a bit more control. Data validation lets you enforce cell input restrictions. You can also protect sheets – making them view-only – or hide sheets entirely within a collaborative workbook.
  • Forms in Google Docs also offer a structured way of collecting information in a spreadsheet from others. Questions can be multiple choice or open-ended, and your surveys can include branching logic to display different questions to a respondent depending on how they respond to earlier questions.
  • When a document, spreadsheet or presentation isn’t able to truly capture an idea, try a collaborative drawing. The same real-time co-editing found in those other formats is part of the drawing editor, too.
  • Across documents, spreadsheets, presentations and drawings, revision history lets you see any edit made by any collaborator since the file was created, which comes in handy when you need to revert changes or view a previous version.
  • Google Sites can really bring a collection of information together neatly – including embedded documents, spreadsheets and presentations – into a collaborative team, project or public website. Anyone with edit access can contribute and share, no programming skills required.
  • In today’s world of distributed contributors, working across language barriers can be critical. With automatic document translation, site translation, and even a translation spreadsheet function all powered by Google Translate, being productive in multiple languages has never been easier.
  • If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it, so we added built-in analytics within Google Docs and Google Sites, which provides content owners with aggregate stats and metrics about who’s accessing their files and sites.
  • Beyond collaborative documents, spreadsheets, presentations and drawings, you can upload and share any type of file with Google Docs, including pictures, videos, and special file formats like CAD drawings. Simply upload to Google Docs and decide who should have access. You can even set permissions to a mailing list, which automatically adjusts access as individuals are added to and removed from the group.
  • Shared collections is a great way to efficiently manage sharing access across a group of files. Instead of sharing file-by-file, you can share a whole folder of information all at once.
  • And if you’re looking to bring more efficient collaboration to Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint without upgrading to Office 2010, give Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office a try.

Productive Anywhere
Mobile access to email, contacts and calendar information is pretty common now, but access to documents, spreadsheets, presentations and team sites across all major smartphone platforms is unique to Google Apps.
  • Unlike software and files that live on one specific computer, you can access and work with information in Google Docs and Google Sites from any computer without hassles like software licenses and VPN connections.
  • Beyond simple mobile document viewing, you can edit documents and spreadsheets from Android and iOS devices. This can be a faster way to make a simple change than firing up your laptop.
  • The Google Docs mobile app for Android allows you to browse, search, open and share your Google Docs files from your phone or tablet. This app even lets you convert mobile phone pictures into editable documents.
  • Google Sites are also optimized for smaller screens through automatic mobile rendering. When you’re viewing a site on a small screen, we can automatically display a version of the site that’s easier to use on your phone or tablet.

Simple & Affordable
Google Docs and Sites bring together the best of two worlds: the power of the web and the richness of traditional software applications, all at a dramatically lower cost than buying, installing and managing client software.

Pure & Proven Cloud
As with Gmail, the collaboration tools in Google Apps for Business are backed by a service uptime guarantee and transparent system performance information. And compared to sharing information using old tools like thumb drives, Google Apps can help businesses keep their data a whole lot safer, too.
  • Our 99.9% uptime SLA guarantees reliable access to Google Apps, and our commitment doesn’t have any exceptions for planned maintenance. This is because our systems are designed to handle updates without interrupting service for customers.
  • Our publicly available status dashboard offers transparency about the health of our systems, and 24x7 phone and online support is there when you need it.
  • Google goes to extensive lengths to protect the customer information in our data centers, including extensive personnel background checks, security-focused processes, advanced technology, and around-the-clock physical protection.
  • Google Docs and Sites have completed a SAS 70 Type II audit, and have achieved the U.S. Federal goverment’s FISMA certification.
  • With default https connections, your information is encrypted as it travels from your web browser to our servers. This helps protect your data by making it unreadable to others sharing your network.
  • Google Apps accounts can be further secured with 2-step verification, which requires users to sign in with something they know (their password) and something they have (their mobile phone). With verification codes available via SMS, even basic mobile phones can serve as powerful authentication devices.

As with Gmail and Google Calendar, Google Docs and Sites have been on a fast innovation path (85 improvements last year alone!) that you just can’t get from typical software upgrades every three to five years. So if you missed any of these new features over the years, give them a go – you’re bound to find a few that’ll help you work more efficiently. And if you’d like to hear more about many of these updates, join us for a free webinar next Thursday.

A look back as we move ahead: Google Docs and Google Sites
Thursday, August 4th, 2011
9:00 a.m. PDT / 12:00 p.m. EDT
Register here