MWV embarked on a journey to unite its global workforce on a single email platform. Critical to their "One MWV" initiative was to enable users in 34 countries and speaking a wide variety of languages to collaborate and easily communicate as one global team.
Mark Gulling, MWV's CIO, explains that "The shift to Google has enhanced our ability to effectively collaborate by simplifying our email infrastructure, and delivered a richer set of communication tools. Google provides not only a rich collaboration suite, but a constant stream of innovative, market-defining products that enhance and constantly evolve our user's working experience." Gulling reports a number of benefits since switching to Google:
Increased productivity. Users, from executives to individual contributors, have reported increases of over 30 minutes per day, thanks to powerful search capability and the organization features of Labels, Filters, and more.
Online information sharing. Users have rapidly adopted Google Sites to share information and media. Approximately 200 group, product, and project collaboration sites have been created since MWV switched to Google Apps.
Real-time communications. MWV has used Google Docs and video chat to help people stay in touch and collaborate in real time, avoiding unnecessary travel or videoconferencing costs.
Innovation. MWV's product sales team was able to quickly roll out a new quote management framework based on Google Forms and Google Docs with the help of Google Apps Script.
MWV's users are excited about the switch to Google and the new features available to them. As Mel Shaffer, VP of Global Service Delivery, says, "Moving to Google has givenMWV the ability to ride a wave of collaboration and technology features that would be difficult to duplicate in any other product."
Continuing, Shaffer adds, "Google's innovative product design and commitment to user experience translate into a feature-rich user experience that is unparalleled in the IT marketplace today. Additionally, Google's price point enables IT to reduce costs and minimize or eliminate capital investment – a true win for our enterprise and our users."
Join us in welcoming MWV to the growing ranks of businesses who have gone Google.
Social information is important for businesses: employees searching for information needed to do their jobs benefit from real-time news too. They might be developing a new breakfast cereal, or designing a marketing plan for a clothing line, or writing strategy report for a political campaign. In all of these cases, understanding what is being said just as Twitter users are saying it can be invaluable.
Google’s focus is to provide the most relevant search results to users. In the case of the GSA, this means accessing information from multiple sources, aka universal search. To this end, we already offer a feature called Related Web Results, which allows employees to view results from Google.com alongside corporate search results.
Customers have told us that placing web results next to intranet ones often allows employees to think differently about a particular topic and approach it in new ways. By integrating enterprise search with more of the information that exists in the cloud, like tweets, employees can more easily leverage the wisdom of the crowd.
To turn the Twitter box on in GSA results, follow the instructions provided here. It should take no more than 15 minutes to get up and running. It can be enabled for only some users, all users, or set up so users can choose themselves whether they want to see the Twitter results by using a keyword trigger (like 'twitter'). Integration info and how-tos for this feature can be found here, and happy realtime reading.
Posted by Cyrus Mistry, Product Manager, Google Enterprise Search
Sort by relevance. The first change is the addition of relevance ranking in Docs search results. Until now, when you searched for a document, spreadsheet, or presentation, results were sorted by "last modified" date.
Now, search in Google Docs will look at various "signals", including whether you've authored a document, whether they've been explicitly shared with you, and other factors to present the most relevant items at the top of your results list. This personalization improves search across shared files, and each user gets the results that are most relevant for them.
Adding to this personalized approach, we've also added a new menu on the right side of the toolbar to let you view, and fine-tune, your search results by "Relevance," "Starred," or "Last Modified" results.
Stemming and synonyms. Search in Google Docs now also includes automatic stemming and synonyms, so that your results are good even if your typing is off. If you search for "meeting note," results will include a few variations of those words, including "meeting notes" (which is what you probably meant to type).
Posted by Balazs Racz and Liviu Panait, Software Engineers, Google Apps Search
Mattson’s headquarters are in Fremont, California, but we have offices in Germany, Canada, Korea and Taiwan. Our IT staff supports 600 users with a wide variety of needs, from engineers/designers, to sales, manufacturing and customer support in India.
We wanted to put more power in users' hands and, as an IT team, get away from administering basic functions so we could focus on the business and run a leaner operation. For email, we had Microsoft Exchange and we calculated it was costing us $172 per user per year. The speed internationallywasn’t that great because our Exchange servers were in Germany and people had to have VPN access.
We compared Google Apps Premier Edition to messaging solutions from Microsoft (too expensive) and Cisco (also out of our price range). Migration is a distant memory because it was relatively easy and required only a day of training.
Google Apps was a pleasant surprise, if you think about what you get for $50 per user per year ($4.17/month). The security is great and, in addition to email and calendaring, it also provides us with an online knowledge database created using Google Sites. Previously, our engineers and other groups put resolution documents or published articles on network file shares. Today, they use Google Sites to create websites by product to host documents related to new engineering releases and engineering problem-solving documents. We use this information in the field to quickly diagnose issues.
We went from silos of knowledge to a transparent online community that allows everyone to share and contribute information. As another example, we built a site to collaborate on customer issues that features video chat and shared documents. Now we can address customer issues more quickly.
Google Apps has changed the way we do business – we’re even looking to extend ERP to the web. We turned off four servers and we’re communicating better than ever before. We’re more organized. We don’t lose emails, and we no longer spend time looking for them. Google translates everything for us in all the languages we operate in, which is huge. The biggest benefit is that our productivity has increased because we're collaborating a lot better.
Our CEO and CFO love Google Apps. In fact, the CEO sent us an email saying, “I'm so glad you're moving our company forward,” and our CFO tells me all the time how much he appreciates easy access to what he needs from wherever he’s traveling. As an IT person, I feel proud. We have bragging rights now because we’ve implemented something that helps us work together better – while at the same time cutting our capital expenditures.
I will be speaking on a live webcast on Thursday. I invite you to join us with your questions.
Technology has the potential to transform the educational experience and to connect students, instructors, and researchers in new ways. We think it's critical for schools and institutions to expose learners to these tools and practices to impart information literacy skills required to succeed in their careers – as students and beyond.
Sharing a strong belief in the power and possibility of open platforms, Google and Blackboard have recently teamed up to combine our platforms, and we wanted to share a few powerful examples of these integrations with you here.
Enhancing collaboration in the classroom. Earlier this summer, Northwestern University took the lead on developing a way to facilitate classroom activities by letting instructors embed Google documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and calendars into Blackboard course sites. Individuals enrolled in Blackboard courses are automatically added as collaborators to these documents, and single sign-on capabilities allow documents to be accessed without logging in twice.
A recent student newspaper article details how these new capabilities are being used in courses ranging from foreign language to world history enabling new models of academic collaboration and assessment. What Northwestern has accomplished exemplifies one of the best recent examples of tying together the unique capabilities of Google Apps for Education and Blackboard Learn.
Now, more than ten different institutions, Google, and Blackboard meet on bi-weekly calls to regularly discuss the future of the Bboogle project. Northwestern has also made this Blackboard plugin available through an open source educational tool community called OSCELOT for other clients to download and contribute back to.
Enabling coordinated collaboration. As part of a class project at Penn State University, a team of students examined ways to improve their online learning experience by integrating Blackboard with other systems. After some analysis, their top recommendation was to develop a solution that combined events from their multiple school-related and personal calendars into a single location.
By integrating with Google Calendar, they were able to create a Blackboard plugin that combines events from Google Calendar with academic course schedules, assignment due-dates, and group meeting times from Blackboard. Their plugin was also made available as an open source project at the end of the semester. More details, including user documentation, are available through OSCELOT at this link.
Connecting researchers where they teach. The London International Development Center was formed to connect researchers from the University of London's six Bloomsbury Colleges. Its mission is to find ways to solve complex problems relating to international development by bringing together scientists from interdisciplinary backgrounds. By creating a Google Spreadsheet that integrates behind the scenes with the familiar Blackboard user experience, the LIDC provided a way for researchers to search and connect with each other by name, college, and research interest.
Facilitating new ways to communicate. Google Wave represents a new way to approach group collaboration and communication, and thus the potential for impacting education using such a tool is significant. Imagine creating a course assignment within Blackboard that triggers a contextualized Wave of thought and conversation that can react to changes in course content within the LMS and relay thoughts and comments from subject matter experts around the world back into an assessable course discussion forum or blog.
Today we invite you to join a discussion of how you think Wave should be used to enhance educational experiences. Log into Wave and click this link to post your thoughts, then see your comments show up within the discussion forum in this Blackboard course.
The examples listed above are just the beginning of what's possible when combining the power of the Blackboard and Google platforms, and we salute the institutions that are on the cutting-edge, creating these integrations.
– George Kroner, Blackboard Developer Relations Engineer
Posted by Gabe Cohen, Google Apps Education Edition team
James Hollow: Socialwok has really helped our teams collaborate on projects. Its feed-based group collaboration format is really intuitive, and is a great way to keep track of the conversations around any project or initiative. We create feeds to keep track of all our projects. Members of the Alien-Eye team working on different aspects of the project can post status updates on what they have done, share media files and different Google Apps like Google Docs and Google Calendar.
Given the large number of projects at Alien-Eye, we have many Google Docs as well as media files. Often, it can be very difficult to stay organized and get access to the necessary information. Socialwok's consolidated enterprise keyword search is incredibly handy; all the content on our Alien-Eye social network is indexed and the results are presented split by category. Socialwok even indexes across the different Google Apps file types like Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets and Google Presentations.
We also really like the mobility Socialwok affords us. Our strategists and producers spend a large portion of their time meeting our clients and partners in downtown Tokyo. With Socialwok's mobile web version, we have an intuitive interface to pick up project threads and feedback, and make decisions on the move. You just hop into the feed, post a comment, and the system syndicates it for you using email notifications and Gmail instant messages.
This can save up to half a day on a single project timeline. Given the large number of projects that are running at Alien-Eye, we get significant productivity benefits from using Socialwok as our de facto project management system.
Socialwok also allows you to invite external collaborators to any feed. All communications on a project are then archived in a single location and can be referenced easily using keyword search or feed directory browsing. Some of our more progressive clients have already started using this functionality, with great results.
Ming Yong: While Socialwok has become Alien-Eye's hub for internal communications and communication with some collaborators, most of their clients still have email-based work flows. The Socialwok Gmail gadget integrates the Socialwok user's home feed into the Gmail interface. In addition, you can post to the project feed via keyword-based email addresses, and Socialwok will automatically post the message to the right place.
To try out Socialwok, go to http://www.socialwok.comand log in using your Google Apps or Google account info.
Posted by Chris Kelly, Google Apps Developer Marketing team
