Allrecipes.com spices up the recipe world with Google Apps

Posted by David Gendel, Corporate IT Director at Allrecipes.com

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is David Gendel, Corporate IT Director at Allrecipes.com, the world’s largest digital food brand. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Allrecipes.com started in 1997, when Tim Hunt couldn’t find his favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe online. He vowed that other cooks like him shouldn’t have to deal with the same problem, and started CookieRecipe.com. From there, he created even more recipe sites that eventually came together into the site we know today: Allrecipes.com. Fifteen years after that cookie baking epiphany, we have more than one million user-generated recipes and 30 million visitors per month. That’s a lot of people looking for more than just chocolate chip treats.

I took over as IT director for Allrecipes.com a year ago, and fixing our aging email system sat at the very top of my first to-do list. We culled our top options—Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Office 365, and Google Apps for Business—and put them through the ringer. After testing, analysis, and focus groups, Google Apps came out on top. With the help of our partner, Cloud Sherpas, we moved all of Allrecipes.com employees over. Changing old habits is hard, especially when it comes to technology, but after just five months, it feels like Google Apps is second nature to us.

We want all of our employees to be able to work from wherever they are, with whatever device they have with them. With Google Apps, they can do just that - we use a mixture of mobile devices and operating systems, and our teams can switch seamlessly between them. I don’t always have my laptop with me, but with the Google Drive mobile app, I just jump into a doc on my smartphone or tablet to review or edit it, whether it’s during a meeting or on the way to the airport. Needing to fix a document on the fly doesn’t mean needing a computer anymore. We move quickly. Apps moves with us.

Hangouts also help us stay connected. Our social media manager recently moved to Australia, but with Hangouts, it’s almost as if she never left. We have video conferences with her throughout the week, and you wouldn’t know she’s halfway around the world. Our technical teams also use Hangouts for off-hours maintenance. They get excited about being able to see who they’re working with as if they were both in the office, interacting as if they were in person, and sharing their screens to help expedite problem solving. We love that video conferencing is so seamlessly integrated with the entire Apps suite, and we don’t have to use or pay for a separate program.

Food is more than just food – it brings people together and creates shared experiences. At Allrecipes.com, we’re proud to provide so many people with the foundation for those experiences. Google Apps brings our company closer so we can focus on helping home cooks make magic in their kitchens, one cookie or casserole at a time.

Turning potential customers into real ones: NIVEA rolls out Google Search Appliance

Posted by Felix Müller, International Digital Marketing Manager, Beiersdorf AG

Editor's note: Our guest blogger is Felix Müller, International Digital Marketing Manager at Beiersdorf AG, a global leader in skin care with headquarters in Hamburg, Germany.

Skin care has been our core expertise for 130 years. From our headquarters in Germany, we at Beiersdorf AG market one of the world’s most successful skin care brands: NIVEA. In order to move forward in an industry that we've been in for a long time, it’s important for us to have a finger on the pulse of the market and focus on the ever-changing needs of our customers. Today, more of our customers are using the Internet to find our products and we wanted to make that an easy experience for them.

Google Search Appliance offers visitors to our websites a significantly enhanced experience. It is a scalable hardware solution that offers a Google-like search experience for our public NIVEA websites worldwide. For our users, it offers the same kind of easy, fast and relevant search experience that they know from Google.com, while our company benefits from complete flexibility and control over the online user search experience. That is a great help to us, particularly when it comes to turning potential customers into real ones. We have now rolled out the Google Search Appliance globally for a total of 74 conventional and 12 mobile, country-specific websites of the NIVEA brand.

Google Search Appliance has personalized and improved the visitors’ experience on NIVEA websites: when searching for products, they receive country-specific suggestions and results that also adapt based on patterns in the respective market. For example, if a site visitor in Germany starts his or her search with "de", the first suggestion he or she will see is “deo ohne aluminium”, while the same query in France will suggest “devenir testeuse nivea”. So that the search process actually yields successful results, searches in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Dutch and Arabic are supported by extensive features such as integrated thesaurus and an automatic, self-learning spellcheck function. The upshot is that the Google technology now makes it a whole lot easier for our customers to search for content that is relevant to them.

See what other companies that use Google Search Appliance have to say.

Hard Rock Hotels in Mexico & the Dominican Republic find their groove with Google Apps

Posted by Jaime Garcia, IT Corporate Director of the All Inclusive Collection

(Cross-posted on the Google Latin America Blog)

Editor's note: We are excited to have guest blogger Jaime Garcia, IT Corporate Director of the All Inclusive Collection with over 5,000 employees at Hard Rock hotels in the Mayan Riviera, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta, and Punta Cana. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

At Hard Rock hotels, we don’t want to be a normal hotel; we want our guests to feel like rock stars from the moment they walk in the door. But, with 1,200 employees that use our IT platform across four locations, it can be challenging to create a consistent guest experience. We need tools that help us make decisions in the moment -- the party doesn’t stop at the Hard Rock!

As the IT Corporate Director of the All Inclusive Collection (which runs all of the Hard Rock Hotels in Mexico and the Dominican Republic), I’m responsible for providing tools to our employees that will let them to work together effectively and focus on our customers. On our old system, Microsoft® Exchange, we had a large datacenter for the hotels to maintain. Our communication tools weren’t flexible enough to make decisions on the go and we couldn’t guarantee that we were running the same promotions at the same time. We worried about the effect on our guests’ experience. I decided that we needed to move to Google Apps and get off of our on-premise infrastructure. Google Apps was fast, safe, and agile and met all of the security standards I was looking for, so I knew that all of our customers’ information would be protected, too!

Since moving to Google Apps, we've improved internal communication and are now spending half as much time on things as we were previously. While our hotels are in Mexico and the Dominican Republic, our sales teams are located all over the globe—North America, Europe, Asia, and here in Latin America—and they’re moving all the time. With Google Talk and Google+ Hangouts, we rarely use the phone anymore, it’s easier to jump on a Hangout from any device and from any of our locations. When our sales team in Miami make an important reservation for a wedding or a big group, they chat via Google Talk with the hotel in Cancun, providing immediate assurance and confirmation that everything will run smoothly.

Having so many guests across our hotels, problems can arise at anytime day or night, so we can’t have downtime. Rather than worrying about keeping our servers and email running, we spend our time managing tools through a browser. We've saved thousands of dollars in IT infrastructure and telecommunication costs, and my IT headaches are gone. I used to have a team of guys helping me manage servers and keep our email up and running. Now, only two of us manage all of the tools.

Google Sites and Google Calendar have been fundamental in organizing our promotions and standardizing our guest experience by allowing us to share across hotel locations. We just had a promotion across all our branches for Christmas and the holidays. We made a site with all of the dates, rates, and details of the deal and we could easily monitor how it was rolled out across each hotel. This process used to take weeks, and fixing discrepancies between the locations was messy. Now, it’s simple, consistent, and happens in real time.

On Google Apps, we really feel like a team, working together despite being countries apart. We are able to provide the same level of rockstar service in all of our hotels and create great experiences for our guests. All while improving our customer experience – rock on!

Safer Internet Day: How we help you stay secure online

Posted by Alma Whitten, Director of Privacy, Product and Engineering

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog.)

Editor's note: Staying safe on the internet means being smart whenever you're online -- at home, at work and on your mobile device. The tips shared below are intended to help you protect yourself and your family. For more information about what Google does to protect our enterprise customers' data, check out our trust series on this blog and our security white paper.

Technology can sometimes be complicated, but you shouldn’t have to be a computer scientist or security expert to stay safe online. Protecting our users is one of our top priorities at Google. Whether it’s creating easy-to-use tools to help you manage your information online or fighting the bad guys behind the scenes, we’re constantly investing to make Google the best service you can rely on, with security and privacy features that are on 24-7 and working for you.

Last year, we launched Good to Know, our biggest-ever campaign focused on making the web a safer, more comfortable place. Today, on Safer Internet Day, we’re updating Good to Know to include more tips and advice to help you protect yourself and your family from identity theft, scams and online fraud. You can also learn how to make your computer or mobile device more secure, and get more out of the web — from searching more effectively to making calls from your computer. And you can find out more about how Google works to make you, your device and the whole web safer.

For example, we encrypt the Gmail and Google Search traffic between your computer and Google -- this protects your Google activity from being snooped on by others. We also make this protection, known as session-wide SSL encryption, the default when you’re signed into Google Drive. Because outdated software makes your computer more vulnerable to security problems, we built the Chrome browser to auto-update to the latest version every time you start it. It gives you up-to-date security protection without making you do any extra work.

Even if you don’t use Google, we work hard to make the web safer for you. Every day we identify more than 10,000 unsafe websites — and we inform users and other web companies what we’ve found. We show warnings on up to 14 million Google Search results and 300,000 downloads, telling our users that there might be something suspicious going on behind a particular website or link. We share that data with other online companies so they can warn their users.

We know staying safe online is important to you — and it is important to us too. That's why we've had independent third parties perform inspections and audits for the data protections in Google Apps.

Please take some time today to make your passwords stronger and turn on 2-step verification to protect your Google Account. Talk with friends and family about Internet safety. And visit our new Good to Know site to find more tips and resources to help you stay safe online.

A Look Back at 2012: The Expansion of Learning on the Web

Posted by Jaime Casap, Global Education Evangelist at Google

2012 was a year of opening doors to learning on the web for more and more students each day. With the web, students and teachers are using new technology and devices to collaborate with each other in class, from home, and around the world. We want Google in Education to help open more doors and we’re pleased to announce there are now 2,000 schools using Chromebooks for Education–twice as many as 3 months ago. And with several Chrome devices available today, there is a device for any school, any student, anywhere.

The most recent schools to join the fray include: Transylvania County Schools in rural North Carolina deploying 900 devices; top Catholic prep school St.Thomas Aquinas High School in Florida going one-to-one with 2,200 devices; and urban charter network Rocketship Education in the Bay Area of California using 1,100 Chromebooks as part of their blending learning approach. The Google Apps for Education community also continues to grow, with Chicago Public Schools bringing 270,000 students, teachers and administrators into the cloud.

Connor and Meg at Spring Valley High School are two of the over 14,000 students in Richland School District Two in South Carolina who are now using Chromebooks for 1:1 learning.

This week I had the opportunity to speak with many in the global education community as I traveled from the FETC conference in Orlando, Florida to the BETT Show in London, U.K. I’d like to share some thoughts from my journey.

Looking back in Florida one year later with Chromebooks for Education
This week at the FETC 2013 conference, we hosted a panel where school leaders reflected on this past year. In January 2012 some of the first districts announced that they were moving “one to one” with Chromebooks and that they were choosing the web as their learning platform. On the panel Tuesday, these educators talked about the impact the web has had in their schools: enabling tech support internships, allowing homebound students to collaborate remotely, and teaching students to become digital leaders. The results of the hard work of educators and students shows clearly in the impact at Leyden and the changes at Richland Two one year later.

Learning with the web in London
Yesterday morning I landed at London’s Gatwick airport, straight from the redeye and into the exhibition hall of the world’s largest education technology conference, BETT. Steve Philp, one of the first educators to use Chromebooks in the UK, shared his views on his year with Chromebooks and the web. Bruno Reddy of King Soloman Academy in London also spoke about how the web has impacted his classroom and how it will help his students in the long term:

"In an increasingly digital age, it’s great to see that the students I teach have been able to harness these skills in such a way, and it puts them in good stead for the years ahead.”

On Saturday, I fly out of London, and onwards to the next educator event with even more of the Google in Education community. You can find upcoming live and virtual events on the calendar page of our website. I hope to see you soon – in person or on the web.

Google Forms, Refreshed

Posted by: Nick Santos, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted on the Google Drive blog.)

With Google Drive, you can do more than just create, store, and share stuff. A variety of apps can help with everything from editing spreadsheets to signing documents electronically.

Forms let you easily create questionnaires and automatically collect responses in a spreadsheet. Today a new version launches, rebuilt to bring you a faster, cleaner, and more collaborative experience.

Now with collaboration 
Create a form faster than ever. Just as with Docs, Sheets and Slides, you can now collaborate with others in real-time. If you need to work with two colleagues on a survey, all three of you can work on the same form simultaneously and even have a group chat on the side, without leaving the form.

Better editing 
Even if you’re working solo, some new changes will make creating and editing forms easier. All your changes are auto-saved and you can quickly undo/redo edits. Improved copy-and-paste will let you copy a list of bullets from the web or multiple rows of text from a spreadsheet; then, when you paste into a form, each line will be appear as an individual answer. And you can use keyboard shortcuts to get things done more quickly.

Some things unchanged 
With the new Forms editor, you can continue using all the features you’re already familiar with:

• Scale: Whether you’re collecting responses from ten friends for a baby shower or ten thousand attendees at a conference, you can count on Forms to reliably collect data for any number of responses. 
• Analyzing: See the responses you’ve received right in Google Forms or collect them neatly in Google Sheets. And you can now download a .csv file for more detailed analysis and reporting. 
• Sharing: If you share a form directly in Google+, anyone in your circles can respond without leaving their stream. Or if you send a form via email, respondents can submit their answers right from Gmail.

This update to Forms will be rolling out to Rapid Release over the next few days, and to Scheduled Release in the coming weeks. You can create forms directly from Google Sheets or Drive, or install the Chrome Web App for easy access from your browser. Also check the Google Drive +page all week for tips and tricks.

Chicago Public Schools get high marks by going Google

Posted by Lachlan Tidmarsh, CIO, Chicago Public Schools

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Lachlan Tidmarsh, Chief Information Officer for the Chicago Public Schools, the third largest school district in the United States. Chicago is one of many districts that have moved to Google Apps for Education. Join the Google team at FETC and BETT this week to learn more.

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) is a diverse learning community that encompasses 681 schools, including 472 elementary schools, 106 high schools and 96 charter schools. With over 40,000 teachers, administrators and support staff across the city working to improve the education of Chicago children, communication and collaboration are essential.

Technology can play a vital role in making the teaching and learning experience as effective and rewarding as possible. For years CPS relied on two different communication systems—Microsoft Outlook used by administrators and principals, and OpenText FirstClass used by our teachers. Even after federal subsidies, our cost to run these systems exceeded $2 million per year. Having two different systems was frustrating for users and remote access was clunky.

After deciding to move to a single consolidated system, we vetted our two final options—Google and Microsoft— with our teachers and administrators. The decision was overwhelmingly to go with Google Apps for Education. For one thing, many of our schools were already using Google Apps and were enthusiastic about the collaboration capabilities. From an executive management viewpoint, Google Apps would save the district millions of dollars each year. Who could argue with that?

Of course, we had to ensure that the applications were secure, that they met our functional requirements, and that our people were productive on day one. We engaged Google Apps partner SADA Systems to help with the migration and training, and set a goal of finishing before the start of the 2012 school year. Between March 28, when we signed the contract, and August 20, we migrated 270,000 administrators, teachers and students to Google Apps. It was easily the fastest and smoothest migration of this scale I have ever seen.

We had staffed up our help desk but had very low call volumes and little drama. The real key to this was strong communication from the get-go and well-planned training. We established “Google Heroes” in each school to lead the charge. Our “Heroes” were critical to ensuring we had at least one trained user in each school from day one. As a result, many of our teachers and principals knew what was coming and when. We also offered a variety of additional training options for faculty and staff, including online tutorials, blogs, and classroom-based instruction. In follow-up surveys of trainees, we received satisfaction levels of 80% and higher for both the training and the tools.

When school started in fall, many teachers immediately began sharing assignments with students through Google Drive. As the year progresses, they continue to find new ways to enhance the educational experience inside and outside the classroom using Google Apps. For example, some teachers create daily quizzes in Google Forms to determine if students have understood key concepts and adapt the next day’s lesson plan accordingly. In the case of a major weather event such as a snowstorm, we can use Google Apps to efficiently coordinate school operations and make sure students know where they can go to for safety.

For Chicago Public Schools, Google Apps is fundamentally transforming both educational and administrative processes for the better – all while saving us millions of dollars each year.

Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana Sees an Opportunity with Google Apps

Posted by Jeff Ton, SVP of Corporate Connectivity & Chief Information Officer for Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana

Editor's Note: Our guest blogger this week is Jeff Ton, SVP of Corporate Connectivity & Chief Information Officer for Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana, based in Indianapolis. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Goodwill Industries’ mission is to give people an opportunity in life that they may not otherwise have, like a job or better education. As one of the larger Goodwill organizations, we at Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana aim to run as efficiently as possible to best serve our 3,000 employees spread across 29 countries and the greater Indiana community.

When I joined the company in 2010, we were running Microsoft® Exchange 2003 and we badly needed an upgrade. As a CIO, the last thing I want is to tell the executive staff we have to spend two months and thousands of dollars to upgrade our email system. We chose Google Apps because we wanted a cloud solution that gave us leaner infrastructure, better business capabilities, and security. We saved tens of thousands of dollars, and avoided future costs from server maintenance, upgrade costs and lost time dealing with email problems.

Since moving to Google Apps, we’ve changed how we communicate and collaborate with our 1,200 business users. Google Forms and Sheets in Google Drive have been powerful tools for us. Our Corporate Connectivity Committee – a cross-functional group spanning four different business areas – used a Google Form to collect research during a six-month tour of our 70 locations into a Google Sheet. They were able to analyze results and find the best ways to distribute information to employees and make them feel more included the company. This would’ve been a messy process before, compiling 70 different questionnaires. I also use Google Sites for my personal dashboard to collect, maintain, and organize data. I spent about four months trying to piece this together on our old platform, but it never worked. On Google Sites we had it working in about 20 minutes. It updates in real time so my monthly report is a 5-minute task instead of a month-long project.

Google+ Hangouts have also transformed the way our teams connect. Our Benefits Committee used Hangouts instead of traveling to attend in-person meetings about a new payroll system and benefits structure. Additionally, our recruiting team uses Hangouts for interviews – again, saving driving time without sacrificing the face-to-face relationships with candidates. I personally use Hangouts for my weekly meetings with my staff when I am working from home. Using video makes the meetings much more cohesive, and we can work simultaneously in shared Docs so we’re all on the same page.

As a CIO, the best part about moving to Google Apps is seeing the adoption happen organically – the first time a Google Doc was shared with me, it came from outside of IT. Google Apps has helped us immensely, allowing us to take our focus off of internal processes and problems and put it instead on those who really need it.

Korea’s POSCO launches “Smart Workplace” powered by Google Apps and Google Search

Editor's note: Today’s blog post is from POSCO (formerly Pohang Iron and Steel Company), a multinational steel-making company headquartered in Pohang, South Korea. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

For more than 40 years, POSCO has been a pillar of economic development in Korea. Now the fifth largest steel company in the world, our organization has seen dramatic growth and we are proud of our extraordinary productivity and ongoing innovation. While we are well-known in our community and throughout the world for our steel works, we are also committed to effectively managing, inspiring and growing our workforce. Without our employees, the steel and other products wouldn’t be possible.

Our POSPIA 3.0 Smart Workplace initiative is just one of ways we are ensuring that our employees are engaged, empowered and given every opportunity to succeed in the global business environment. Smart Workplace launched on December 10, 2012 with key partnerships from Google and other technology providers.

As a part of this initiative, we have invested in tools like the Google Search Appliance and Google Apps. Google Apps has made it possible for POSCO to offer the right blend of technology to facilitate better collaboration, productivity and efficiency in the workplace. With tools like Gmail, Calendar, Google+ Hangouts and shared docs on Google Drive, our employees are working together more frequently and with better results. We are no longer tied to the traditional top down approach to management. Instead, with Google Apps, our organization has more flexibility to work together at all levels within the company and collaborate easily and effectively across businesses and borders. We want the entire POSCO family of companies to benefit from this way of working together, and we plan to roll out Google Apps to our family companies in the future.

POSCO Smart Workplace launch December 10, 2012. POSCO employees moved to Google Apps and the revamped POSCO Enterprise Portal went online with the Google Search Appliance.

One of the most exciting benefits we have seen is around real time collaboration within teams using Calendar. Previously, coordination meant using manual spreadsheet or colored paper Post-It notes. Now, employees can not imagine living without the ability to visualize a day, week or month and easily coordinate schedules, meetings and teams.

The Google Search Appliance (GSA) has also helped productivity, letting employees find information and search through over 10 million documents. Before we implemented GSA, many of our office employees would have difficulty finding the right information. Now the search results are fast, and most importantly - relevant to what they are searching for.

POSCO is steeped in great tradition, but we also recognize the need to evolve both in how we run our business and how we engage the workforce that keeps our business running. Google Apps and GSA are helping us manage our technology evolution so that we can continue to innovate and provide the materials that make up the world’s infrastructure.

Update Jan 31: minor edits made to post.

Quixote Studios helps Hollywood visions come alive with Google Apps

Posted by Bill Schechtman, IT Director at Quixote Studios

Editor's note: Our guest blogger is Bill Schechtman, IT Director at Quixote Studios, a Los Angeles-based company that rents stages, vehicles and production supplies for photo shoots and movie and TV productions. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

At Quixote Studios, we work with the bleeding edge of American pop culture. We’ve hosted pop legends like Madonna, brought Jay-Z’s “On To The Next One” to life, and stood in for countless precinct offices, crime scenes and killers’ hideouts on the CBS show “Criminal Minds.” We have more than 200 employees at six locations giving studios what they need to make movies, helping photographers and fashion houses make their clothes look stunning, and playing a part in bringing the television shows you love to the small screen every week.

We work in a forward-leaning industry, but until we moved to Google Apps for Business, we worked with painfully outdated technology. Our server was unreliable and our employees couldn’t access email from their smartphones. Fixing these and a host of other problems was my first priority when I joined Quixote Studios as IT Director two years ago. We considered Microsoft Exchange, but the storage, licensing and support costs were more than we bargained for. We also looked at Office 365, but it didn’t offer the full suite of tools we needed or the simple pricing structure Google Apps has. So, with the help of our reseller, Dito, we switched to Apps.

We started with the fundamentals: moving everyone to Gmail and setting up device syncing so people could access email from their phones and tablets. Before we knew it, we started seeing employees picking up more advanced product features on their own: shared calendars became a company standard and Docs became the norm for team meeting notes.

But Google Drive has been the real revelation. Every important document in our company is stored in Drive, from onboarding and exit forms to organizational charts, permits and checklists. It's a far cry from our old system, a complicated file server that was stuffed full of different versions of Microsoft Word and Excel files, all with their own cryptic names for versions or dates.

Drive has also dramatically improved the way we collaborate. Creating our company all-hands presentations, for example, is a team effort that involves up to ten stakeholders working together on a single document at the same time. It's powerful to see that many employees collaborating so seamlessly and efficiently. It's even more exciting to think about how much time we save by eliminating the need to send attachments back and forth or check that we're working on the most up-to-date version.

Google Apps has helped turn technology into an incredible resource for our employees – smooth, hassle-free email and an easy collaboration hub. Now we can put all of our energy into helping our clients do great things. As someone in charge of IT, it’s comforting to know those systems will grow right alongside Quixote Studios as we continue to help make Hollywood’s big ideas come to life. And Scene!