More than enough space for all your work Every year companies create more data than the last, adding megabytes, gigabytes and terabytes. Well, today, we’re taking bytes out of the conversation. For $10/user/month, businesses get unlimited storage for all their employees and can store files up to 5 TB in size (To put that in perspective, no desktop or laptop on the market today even has a hard drive big enough to capture and store a file that size).
More security As of today, all files uploaded to Google Drive will be encrypted, not only from your device to Google and in transit between Google data centers, but also at rest on Google servers.
More productivity Some of the most common file types stored in Drive are Microsoft Word, Excel® and PowerPoint® files. We’ve now built the power of Quickoffice into Docs, Sheets and Slides, so you can open and edit those documents in their native format using Office Compatibility Mode directly on Android and Chrome browser today, and coming soon to iOS. No need to buy additional software or decide how to open your file. Editing Office files is just a click or tap away from Drive on your computer, tablet or phone.
Ready for your business, available today Google Drive for Work includes the benefits and guarantees of Google Apps for Business, like 24x7 phone support and a 99.9% uptime guarantee. You also get access to all of Google’s productivity apps like Docs, Sheets, Slides, Sites and Hangouts, so you collaborate in even more ways. Drive for Work also offers enterprise-grade security and compliance, including a SSAE 16 / ISAE 3402 Type II, SOC 2-audit, ISO 27001 certification, adherence to the Safe Harbor Privacy Principles, and can support industry-specific requirements like HIPAA.
Drive for Work is available globally, today. If you’re a current Apps customer you can upgrade from the Admin console to get new features like unlimited storage. If you’re new to using Google at work you can learn more about Google Drive for Work on the web, or contact us for more information.
Drive in particular has been instrumental in creating a hub for storing, finding and sharing information. City employees, firefighters and police use Drive as the central storage for files ranging from PDFs to JPEGs, Word docs to videos, and for everything from meeting agendas to department staff lists, and from research reports to contracts. Our firefighters recently used a Drive shared folder as the main repository for all files involved in a recent study on consolidating firefighting resources among our nearby communities, so everyone involved could access key files, whenever they needed them. Our police department uses Drive to share policies and procedures among officers, since it’s so easy to pull up files whether they’re on their Android devices in the field or on their laptops back at headquarters.
Hangouts play a similarly major role in supporting our town’s governance. Officials use Hangouts to go over town budgets together, so they can review the numbers in Sheets while being able to see each other face-to-face. Just recently, we hosted a town meeting and used Hangouts to connect everyone from remote locations. We worked through and discuss all the motions, amendments and documents that had been distributed to citizens through Drive, Google Groups and Google+, all while feeling like we were meeting in person.
Hangouts also helps in emergency planning. Our fire department recently held a Hangout to discuss our “code red” plan, and everyone involved was impressed with both the ease of use — getting connected instantly just by clicking from the invitation in Google Calendar — and the strength of the sharing function, especially compared with past experience using Skype and GoToMeeting.
Google Apps has made sharing news, documents and updates with both our staff and citizens a breeze, and the impact is real and powerful. Not only are employees and residents happier, but we’re seeing quantitative results, like the 50% drop in call volume to the police and fire departments during Hurricane Sandy due to the ability to post emergency information to a public Google site in real-time. Going Google with Apps and Drive has made our town more than just the starting point of the Boston Marathon — it’s become the model of a beacon of information for citizens everywhere.
The last decade has been especially tumultuous as our business has changed rapidly. With people reading news online instead of in print and the rise of the 24-hour news cycle, we’ve re-evaluated how we define ourselves as a newsroom. And our legacy systems were holding us back as we tried to compete with a new wave of digital-only publishers.
One of the biggest issues we faced were slow, expensive systems that kept reporters in the newsroom instead of finding and researching stories in the field. With a large newsroom flung all across the state, traditional desktop and local server-based programs just didn’t cut it. To file a story, reporters often sent their editor an email with a Microsoft Word attachment, and the story would have to be copied and pasted into our local system. To push the story to our website, someone copied and pasted it into WordPress, added images and hyperlinks, formatted it, and published it. If the reporter filed a newer version of the story, the process started back from the beginning and all changes were lost. The process was painful for everyone involved.
That all changed when we moved to Google Apps. Now we use the Drive API to complete the process in a single click. We connected Drive, WordPress, and Adobe InDesign to make a tedious and slow process easier and faster.
In our new system, reporters and editors write their stories in Docs, using collaborative real-time editing, comments and revision history to make process quick and painless. We then use the Drive API to capture the text of the story, strip out comments and editing notes, and push it directly to our website — no copying and pasting. The text also flows into InDesign fully formatted, making the production of our print newspaper easier, faster and cheaper as well.
We also use the Drive API for project budgeting, which is how our newsroom tracks and prioritizes articles using metadata like wordcount, category, story importance and estimated submission time. Editors use the budget to plan our online content strategy for the day and decide what will go in the next day’s paper. As a reporter submits a budget line to let his or her editors know to expect it, a Doc is created via the API, keeping everything tied together and easy to track.
Google Apps costs next to nothing and lets us work the way we want. Instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on complex systems, we can spend that money on reporters. And in an industry where seconds, pennies and flexibility matter, Google Apps has helped our business focus on what’s really critical — breaking news that matters to Maine.
Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is John Paul Besong, SVP & CIO at Rockwell Collins, a Fortune 500 manufacturer of communication, aviation electronic, and information management systems, services and solutions.
In 1933, Rockwell Collins — then less than a year old and known as Collins Radio — supplied the equipment to establish a communications link with the South Pole expedition of Rear Admiral Richard Byrd. It was an exhilarating start to what would, over the next 80 years, include a number of industry milestones, including providing communications for the Apollo, Gemini and Mercury programs, pioneering GPS navigation, and more recently, developing the industry's only aviation head-up synthetic vision system.
Today, we're one of the world’s leading aerospace and defence companies. Our team of about 20,000 employees builds systems to ensure pilots around the world arrive and land safely. Our aviation electronics are installed in the cockpits or cabins of nearly every commercial air transport aircraft in the world. And our communication systems transmit about 70 percent of U.S. and allied military airborne communications.
Because we operate in an industry that places a premium on safety and serve clients that prioritize security, our technology — and our IT environment — has to be safe, trustworthy and reliable. Recently, I realized these priorities, along with our risk averse culture, had left us with IT tools that kept our operations secure and consistent but left our employees and our IT team frustrated.
The problems were widespread. With our legacy mail system, less than 10 percent of our employees — those with company Blackberries — could check their email and calendar on the go. A majority of our engineers expressed dissatisfaction with our development tools. And we were having trouble attracting young new talent. After digging deeper, I sent out a company-wide survey, and the message came through loud and clear: our employees wanted a faster, more flexible platform that was safe and let them access their info and collaborate on the go and from multiple devices.
We looked at a number of options, and after an extended evaluation process, decided that Google Apps for Business was the best solution for both protecting sensitive company information and giving our employees the consumer-friendly collaboration tools they were asking for. With the help of Maven Wave, our Google Apps implementation partner, we made the move successfully and completed our official go-live just a few weeks ago.
Google Apps is moving us into the next era of user-centric computing by allowing our employees to use technology at work the same way they do at home. To start, we’ve replaced the legacy mail system with Google Apps for email, calendar, storage, documents and video chat, and all employees can access their Google Apps account on their own mobile devices — Android, iPhone, tablet, whatever they choose to use. We have also deployed a campus-wide employee wireless network so people don’t feel chained to their desks.
Our employees are now exploring and adopting all of the other collaborative features of Google Apps as well. Three weeks into our deployment, 12,500 employees are using Drive for secure file storage and document sharing, with more than 750,000 files uploaded to Drive. Nearly 20,000 Google Docs, Sheets and Slides have been created. And finally, approximately 10,000 files have already been shared on a read/write access basis, enabling employees to co-author and collaborate within a single document.
Rockwell Collins is a Fortune 500 company with employees located across the globe, and we need to leverage technology to collaborate better and to work more efficiently. Now that our employees can respond to each other almost instantly and work from virtually anywhere with Google Apps, I believe we’re paving the way for the next phase of Rockwell Collins’ journey.
These changes will let organizations do two things: first, you’ll have a more tailored Google+ experience with enhanced control options, like making Google+ posts restricted to your domain by default or the ability to hide employee profiles in external searches.
Second, you can save time and money while meeting face-to-face with colleagues using 15-person HD video calls with Google Hangouts. So the next time you need to quickly chat with a colleague or hash out a decision, you can just jump into a Hangout with one click from Calendar or an email invitation.
All new Google Apps customers will see these updates from the moment they register, and current users will see these great updates in the next month. Read more about these changes in our Help Center.
No parent should ever feel that way — especially in today’s hyper-connected world. Businesses now use mapping technology to monitor of all their valuable assets. Parents need the same tools to protect the most precious assets of all: their children. This is the idea behind the FiLIP watch, a location-aware, communication device developed just for kids.
Millions of people today have smart phones with Google Maps already installed. Knowing this, we developed a similarly-sophisticated piece of technology for kids — one with Wifi, a mobile network and mapping APIs that can provide real-time location data. This lets parents see exactly where their children are at all times, on the same Google Maps interface they already know and understand how to use. Kids can also call their parents directly from their watch. By combining voice capabilities with location technology, families have a simple, yet powerful way to communicate.
Because kids tend to lose or forget things, it made sense to develop a product they would want to wear, rather than a device they would have to carry. That’s why we embarked on a whole new frontier — wearable technology.
Partnering with Google gave my team access to developers who have been at the forefront of wearables and data analysts who could help us understand how to optimize location data and get it on a map. Using their insights, we created a product that lets parents keep tabs on their most important possession, while being fun for kids and parents to use together.
My son, Filip, still remembers the day he got lost. Recently, when his teacher asked all the kids what they want to be when they grow up — Filip said he would be chairman for the company his father named after him. I love knowing my products help parents be truly connected with their children. But the thing I love most about my job is developing something my son is so connected to. As a father, that’s a great thing.
A project of this scale calls for high performing and reliable technology, so when we started working with Coca-Cola to build the infrastructure for the Happiness Flag campaign, we knew we had to use Google Cloud Platform. By using Google Cloud Platform, we turned a big, innovative idea into reality on a global scale.
To create the Happiness Flag, we leveraged the whole Google Cloud Platform stack as shown below:
Google App Engine enabled us to handle the computing workload, capable of handling millions of images via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and email, to the searches for images and view requests. The architecture was scalable to meet this kind of transaction demand and the fluctuations in traffic. We stored all the images in Google Cloud Storage, where integrated edge caching support and image services made it an ideal choice for serving the images. Meanwhile, Google Compute Engine gave us the capability for long-running processes, such as the Twitter integration and advanced image transformations. We were able to show how powerful the creation of hybrid environments can be, using both Platform-as-a-Service (Google App Engine) and raw virtual machines (Google Compute Engine) in the cloud.
We used other out-of-the-box Google Cloud Platform technologies like Memcache, Datastore and Task Queues to ensure outstanding levels of performance and scalability. We know that many fans will be viewing the Happiness Flag on their mobile devices, so we needed a platform that would offer different capacities of computational power. The system provides amazing user experience with high performance and low latency, regardless of the device and its location. Using Google Cloud Platform, the campaign runs smoothly 24/7 and includes redundancy, failover techniques, backups and state-of-the-art monitoring. Plus, it’s affordable.
After the physical flag was unveiled before the opening match, the digital mosaic was made available with a Google map-like zoom in and out with eleven levels of detail. Anyone who submitted an image can now search for themselves on the virtual flag and the search results will show up as pins in the mosaic, like locations found in a Google map. By clicking on the pin, their photos open up in an overlay and they are taken to the maximum level of zoom in to see the "neighborhood" around their image in the flag. After the match, a link to the Happiness Flag site was sent to each participant as a souvenir.
Our goal was to help Coca-Cola create a project that would celebrate the 2014 FIFA World Cup™ by enabling fans from all over the world to express their creativity in a show of unity and art. What better way to open the games than by displaying the Happiness Flag, which is a symbol of the spirit of the game and its fans.
As they coded their way to better government services, participants got the chance to master tools like Google Cloud Platform, which enables developers to build, test and deploy applications on Google’s reliable infrastructure. They also used other Google solutions such as Google Maps, Google Apps and the Google Search Appliance.
The specific challenges weren’t announced until game day, so participants showed up having no idea what kinds of applications they’d be developing. Colorado requested tools for managing records and tracking donations during natural disasters. “We’re looking to you to make the lives easier of citizens and volunteers who show up at disaster assistance centers,” Williams told the crowd.
Winners included the GovSafe team, who created a website that allows victims from disasters and volunteers to fill out a form online that could spare them the hassle of entering the same information multiple times for various paper documents. Recognizing that the government is not quite ready to go fully paperless, GovSafe incorporated hard copies into their system and used a printer to demonstrate the impact.
For the Wyoming challenge, competitors developed solutions allowing the public to see how taxpayer dollars are being spent. Although that data is publicly available, individuals can’t gather and visualize it without help from government workers. “This should really help us provide better information to our citizens so they know what’s going on,” explained Flint Waters, Wyoming’s CIO.
The CodeRangers team placed first for designing a mobile and desktop tool that displays the geographic distribution of public sector payments to private vendors. The public can easily see the location of vendors on a Google Map and can tell how much payment goes out of the state. They can drill down to the department level and see their spending patterns. They can also run queries by vendor names. “Governmental transparency is vitally important for citizen oversight of how our democratic process works,” said team member Anne Gunn. “The money comes from all of us, and we should know how it is being spent.”
Congratulations to everyone who took part in the GovDev Challenge, from the coders who traveled from far and wide to the officials who helped us with every step of the planning. We hope the event will serve as a blueprint for future partnerships between Google and the government, forged with the shared goal of solving tough problems with private sector talent. Together we help transform government, one innovation at a time.
Chesterfield, which serves students across 62 schools in Virginia, joins a number of other large districts who have chosen Chromebooks for the 2014-15 school year. They join Oakland Unified School District (8,000 devices), Boston Public Schools (10,000 devices), Milwaukee Public Schools (11,400 devices), Edmonton Public Schools (13,000 devices), and Chicago Public Schools (16,000 devices).
Chesterfield is one of many public school districts that believe providing access to technology for every student is possible even when budgets are tight. They chronicled their journey on a website they created, called “Anytime, Anywhere Learning,” so the community could engage in the project and efforts. One of the most important steps the District took was running an in-depth pilot study where teachers, students and administrators tested 6 pilot devices in the classrooms, to determine which were best for their schools.
Adam Seldow, Executive Director of Technology, letting younger students test the new Chromebooks
After testing and assessing the devices, Chesterfield selected Chromebooks for all 32,475 middle and high school students. What’s especially remarkable is that they were able to move to Chromebooks with existing funds — without requesting additional budget, since Chromebooks are nearly half the cost of PC desktops and laptop alternatives. Chesterfield also saved by reducing the amount of classroom peripheral devices such as interactive whiteboards, which they could replace with web-based tools. They selected Dell Chromebooks with local partner TIG, who committed to provide training and support for the journey to ensure students, teachers and administrators could take full advantage of the many benefits of the new technology.
Choosing Chromebooks wasn’t just about selecting a piece of hardware - it was about meeting Chesterfield’s goals at the right price to bring great education to all students. As Chesterfield Superintendent Dr. Marcus Newsome explained, "anytime, anywhere learning is a tenet of our strategic plan made possible by highly trained teachers, and actionable by our students' access to Chromebooks.” And as Adam Seldow, Executive Director of Technology, said, “with Chromebooks, we are now able to provide students with more opportunities to pursue their interests both inside and outside of the classroom."
With multiple accounts, schools can test out tablets at a meaningful scale before buying hardware for every student. Here’s how it works:
“Bump” tablets together as usual to get them set up -- you now have the option to specify the number of students who’ll be sharing each tablet (up to 5).
Students complete setup by signing into one of the the tablets you’ve configured, then setting a pin code for individual access.
From then on, each student can pick up their assigned tablet, select their account, and enter their pin to get back to all their stuff.
When each student has their own account it’s easy for them to collaborate on class projects using Docs, Drive, and other Google Apps. And teachers can use Google Play for Education to instantly send students the apps, books, and videos that match their academic needs and speak to their unique interests.
It's easy for your school to scale to 1:1 when you're ready -- just set up any new tablets with the student accounts you’ve already been using. The apps teachers have already assigned to each student will download automatically.
Drill down to user level Reports The Apps Usage Activity page shows data on how individual users are working with Gmail, Drive, storage and other apps. Choose what information you want to see and move the columns around to customize your view.
Filters Use filters to quickly find who owns a specific file, people with a high number of uploads and shares, and granular data such as all the people who have between 1000 and 2000 documents.
Security The Security page is another customizable user report that provides security related information like 2-step verification enrollment, how many files are shared externally, the number of external apps that are installed and other important information like account status and Gmail IMAP usage. Like the Apps Usage Activity report, Admins can customize column names and apply sorting and filters on the columns.
Login Audit Monitor any security concerns by reviewing the specific IP addresses and dates of all logins and any failed or suspicious logins on the Login Audit page. Admins can use this report to track suspicious activity and take corrective action like resetting passwords.
To use the new Reports page, go to your Admin console and click on the Reports icon or the View Reports link on the right side panel. Mobile data will be added soon, in the meantime you can revert to the old Reports if needed. We have many additions planned for the future so stay tuned.
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In 1933, Rockwell Collins — then less than a year old and known as Collins Radio — supplied the equipment to establish a communications link with the South Pole expedition of Rear Admiral Richard Byrd. It was an exhilarating start to what would, over the next 80 years, include a number of industry milestones, including providing communications for the Apollo, Gemini and Mercury programs, pioneering GPS navigation, and more recently, developing the industry's only aviation head-up synthetic vision system.
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