Posted by Steve Johnston, Second City Communications

Editor's note: Our guest blogger is Steve Johnston, president of Second City Communications, the business solutions division of the legendary improv theater company, The Second City, and our partner in yesterday’s April Fools’ joke. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

The Second City, the venerable Chicago comedy theatre known for its creative method and improvisation, is a far cry from a Silicon Valley start-up. Nonetheless, in a very real sense we’ve been in the “interactive” and “social collaboration” space for five decades. We believe in providing a great experience for our audience and are hardwired to innovate and attack convention whenever possible.

The Second City has been called the “Harvard of Comedy,” and our alumni list includes stars such as Alan Arkin, John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Mike Myers, Steve Carell and Tina Fey. Our business division, Second City Communications, brings the same audience-empowered approach to the boardroom, creating content marketing, entertainment and training programs for some of America’s best-known companies. You can see some of our handiwork on this blog.

Second City Communications has been using Google Apps for over a year. Apps provides the interactive collaboration with our clients that’s necessary to co-create compelling, engaging videos that enhance companies’ training communications. We begin by using Google Docs to get multiple companies brainstorming ideas around hot corporate topics such as ethics and compliance, as well as sales effectiveness. From there, we bring our special brand of humor into the mix. We then share scripts in Google Drive to get real-time feedback from clients, helping us make sure the videos resonate with employees and reflect real challenges in the workplace.

Because you can’t really get the full effect of a script without hearing it, we meet with clients over Google+ Hangouts. Our actors do fun “table read” sessions so clients can listen and react while we observe it all. Our clients make sure we talk the talk of their audiences and bring a whole new level of authenticity to the creative development process. We continue to create these videos, called RealBiz Shorts, with more than 250 Fortune 1000 clients, who use them to change behavior and transform company culture through smart comedy.

When you look at these training videos, you see something that’s not only humorous, but also anchored in reality. RealBiz Shorts get employees more engaged with existing programs. It’s like marketing for training! See for yourself.

It’s 2013, folks. New approaches for a new time. Google Apps plays a key part of our creative development process to build big ideas with our clients. It gives us vital tools to bring improv agility and nimbleness to enterprise collaboration, and helps us bridge the gap between comedy and the corporate world.

Funny thing is, it’s working. Beautifully.

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.

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!

Posted by Joel Hughes, Senior Vice President of eMedia strategy and IT at Scranton Gillette

Editor's note: Our guest blogger this week is Joel Hughes, Senior Vice President of eMedia strategy and IT at Scranton Gillette, a media and publishing company based in Arlington Heights, Illinois. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Scranton Gillette has been around for more than a century - we’ve lived to see the first Model T, a man walk on the moon and the birth of the Internet. We’re a media and publishing company, so you can imagine our industry has changed quite a bit since we were founded 108 years ago (typewriters, anyone?). It's not easy to keep afloat in the business world, let alone in a market that’s undergone so many massive and fundamental changes. But we've been fortunate enough not only to survive, but to thrive, and we owe much of that to our technology.

We first opened our doors in 1905 as a publisher dedicated entirely to the transportation construction industry. We’re still a publisher, and we still cover the transportation construction industry, but now we're a full-service media agency that covers a variety of verticals and helps with everything from website development to event planning. Just as we've outgrown our publisher roots, we've also outgrown the slow-moving stereotype that many associate with the publishing industry. To us, speed and technology are essential to growing our business. Technology can make or break an organization, so if our solution fails or slows us down, we won't hesitate to find something newer and better.

That’s exactly what happened over the Fourth of July weekend in 2011. Our Exchange server died during the holiday break and left us without email or access to our shared company files. We'd been considering a switch to Google Apps for a few months, so this shutdown solidified our decision. We couldn't be tied to a physical server anymore, let alone an unreliable one. We needed a more trustworthy system that would let us be more quick-moving and nimble, and we knew that meant moving to Google Apps.

By the time our employees returned to the office after their Independence Day barbeques, we’d already started our migration to Apps with the help of our reseller, CloudBakers. We haven’t looked back since.

Apps has completely changed the way we communicate. We’re headquartered in Illinois with a satellite office in Arizona, and we want our remote workers to feel just as part of the team as everyone else. Hangouts do exactly this: they facilitate a closer connection and collaboration that conference calls just can’t match. Google Chat is equally integral to our day-to-day. It’s perfect when you’re not in the right place to hop on the phone and need a quicker response than an email typically gets. We didn’t have a dedicated chat client before we moved to Apps, and I can’t imagine going back to that way of working.

Google Drive has been the biggest eye-opener for us. Documents are our lifeblood, so it's essential for us to have a robust system around organizing and sharing them. Before, we just saved everything to our hard drives and sent files back and forth as attachments. That got messy and confusing fast. Drive gives our documents a better, safer, more accessible home. Our employees store their spreadsheets, presentations, mocks and proofs in one place and share them to the right people with just a few clicks. Our marketing team, for example, has a folder on Drive dedicated to campaign materials, knowing that everyone collaborating on those campaigns—internal and external—can access all the images, ad copy, videos and proofs they need without having to search through their mailbox. It’s comforting to know that every document we need can be found in Drive.

A company can’t survive for over 100 years without the ability to see trends before they happen and adapt based on those trends. That’s not always easy to do, so you need a technology solution that can adapt as quickly as possible. With Google Apps, we're confident we have the right tools to last us another century.

Posted by Rich Rao, Director of Sales and Operations, Google Enterprise

Working with Google and Analysis Group, MIT research scientist Andrew McAfee recently conducted a study to understand the comparative costs of a business moving to the cloud versus remaining with a traditional on-premise IT system. In this comparative cost model, McAfee finds that the typical small- to medium-business (SMB) will significantly reduce its IT costs by doing away with its on-premise technology and moving to the cloud.


For example, a business with 16-100 computers can expect to save 37% by moving to the cloud – even if there’s no IT labor reduction. With savings achieved by moving to the cloud, these businesses are able to invest in areas that help expand or strengthen their business, whether it’s opening a new branch, starting a new product line, or hiring more people.

Bill Hipsher, Director of Business Development at USstoragesearch.com confirms, "Over a one-year period, Google Apps cost one-quarter of what we were spending on our on-premise IT before moving to the cloud – and over our business lifetime, it drops to just one-tenth of the cost. The hardware, software and time savings helped us expand our call center, which led to the creation of more than 30 new jobs this year."

In his study, McAfee also notes that SMBs' technology use is a strong indicator for the future of IT. Because SMBs are more flexible in their decision-making and aren't bogged down by legacy costs, they're able to choose an IT system that best suits their business. Thus, moving to the cloud frees up money for SMBs to drive business and job growth, and can set a precedent for how large businesses adopt cloud technology.

At Google, we’re proud to work with SMBs across the country to help them save money and move to the cloud. Visit our website to learn more about moving your business to Google Apps and explore McAfee’s comparative cost model in Google Sheets to adjust and tailor the model to your business.

Posted by Mike Hudson, Creative Director of Handsome Coffee Roasters

Editors note: To celebrate National Coffee Day, today’s guest blogger is Mike Hudson, Creative Director of Handsome Coffee Roasters, an artisan coffee company headquartered in Los Angeles, CA. See what another coffee company that has gone Google has to say.

I have a passion for coffee – a passion so strong that, while working at a digital marketing agency, I spent my weekends working part-time as a barista at a legendary coffee shop in Los Angeles. It was there that a few co-workers and I sat down and hatched a plucky business plan: to roast our own coffee. In 2011, with little more than our gumption, a Twitter handle, a webpage, and 1956 Ford Falcon van that carried a mobile coffee cart we aptly named the Handsome Traveler, Handsome Coffee Roasters was born.

We took the Handsome Traveler to big events and festivals in Los Angeles, and began to cultivate a large and dedicated following along the way. And we grew with them: in just one year, our company went from the original founders to 18 full-time employees. We recently opened our flagship retail coffee bar in the Arts District of downtown Los Angeles, and have plans to expand to New York City next year.


Put simply, we couldn't have grown this quickly without Google Apps for Business. We’re small but global – we have a coffee bar in Los Angeles and a travel schedule that takes us to Nicaragua, Norway and everywhere in between, and Google Apps is a tool that caters to our on-the-move team. With Google Apps, we know we can share travel and employee schedules with Google Calendar, communicate across time zones with Google Chat, and access our permits, notes and updated sales figures from Google Drive. We can do everything on the go, from any device, whenever we need to. We even hold rigorous strategy sessions on Google+ Hangouts with various participants playing along on their mobiles.

Starting a business couldn’t be any easier with Google Apps. We can manage a Herculean amount of data, documents and communications without getting bogged down and wasting hours fiddling with antiquated technology. Thanks to Google's tools, we get to focus on what we really love: roasting and serving amazing coffee.

Posted by Ronen Lapidot, Senior Vice President of Information Technology, Perry Ellis International

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Ronen Lapidot, Senior Vice President of Information Technology at Perry Ellis International, a designer, distributor and licensor of apparel and accessories for men and women. Perry Ellis International joins other retail organizations in going Google. See what they have to say.

Far from a typical fashion house, our apparel spans a variety of categories including men’s and women’s clothing, accessories, children’s apparel, even evening gowns for the red carpet. In total, we manage a portfolio of some of the best known brands in fashion, including Perry Ellis®, Original Penguin®, Jantzen®, Laundry by Shelli Segal®, Nike® Swim, Callaway® and more. With 2,600 associates spanning across 65 store locations and 30 offices worldwide, we rely on technology to stay connected.


The increasingly fast-paced global economy of the past several years has made it even more important to be able to work together efficiently, act quickly and share information across the company to help us all understand the state of the business and act as one global team. We were using a popular, premise based email solution, but with so many offices around the world, we knew the only way to keep our brand fresh and our business agile was to move to the cloud.

With the help of Cloud Sherpas, we moved the entire company to Google Apps. Now our global teams are able to connect through Gmail’s video chat feature to meet “face to face” about upcoming projects, designs and merchandise. With so many offices in different time zones, it’s great to be able to give our associates the option to work where they’re comfortable, even if it’s just going home to have dinner with their families before a jumping on a video chat with colleagues in China or Indonesia. This has been especially helpful for offices with eight or ten hour time differences between them and has made us feel more like one cohesive team instead of siloed offices.

Being able to work together easily across offices not only brings the team closer together, it also saves significant time and costs. We recently opened two international offices in Indonesia and Bangladesh. Usually I travel to each location for weeks at a time to interview and hire employees and oversee the regional office openings. With Google Apps, we were able to interview job candidates via video chat and work with regional managers on important policies and resources that needed to be in place for these new offices and associates. I was elated to discover that what normally takes significant travel time and costs could be done right from my desk. I sat there amazed as I watched documents fill in with information from my colleagues across the world. I think that’s when I realized we were all going to be able to do things very differently, now that we were in the cloud.

Posted by Anna Agishtein, Google Apps Team

Summer vacation is heading into the final stretch, but summer camps are still going strong. At the end of the summers that I spent as a camper, I always came home with new friendships and a renewed sense of confidence – not to mention a lifetime of memories. Here are three summer camps that use technology to make camp more accessible to more kids and create a memorable experience for their campers.


While outdoor adventures are fun, they’re not for everyone. SuperCamp is a camp that's more focused on the classroom, with programs for middle and high school students to increase their grades, confidence and motivation. While living on some of the nation’s most known university campuses like Stanford, Brown and Wake Forest, campers can improve their test taking and studying techniques, practice their writing, develop their communication skills, and more. Starting in 2001, founder Bobbi DePorter wanted to reach more parents whose kids who would benefit from their summer programs, so she turned to her husband Joe, who found that Google AdWords could do just that. Since using AdWords, Joe and Bobbi have seen a 37% increase in camp enrollment, translating to an average return of $14 from every $1 spent on AdWords. By transitioning from traditional marketing techniques to web tools, Bobbi and Joe have grown SuperCamp into a comprehensive program that spans four continents.


For younger kids interested in science and technology, there is a summer camp designed just for them. Ideaventions is a science and technology program in Virginia for kids ages three to thirteen. Husband and wife duo Ryan and Juliana Heitz founded the program in 2010 to encourage kids to pursue their passion for all-things science in a hands-on environment. As the couple personally invested in getting the camp up and running, they needed a cost-effective communications solution, which they found with Google Apps for Business. By choosing Google Apps, Ryan and Juliana save money on computer software, and they’re quickly and easily able to share lesson plans with employees through Google Docs. Managing everything in the cloud means that campers aren’t tied to a particular computer, so they can go back to their projects at any point in time. And parents like that they are able to login and engage with the content their kids are reading. Google Apps allows the Heitz’s to reallocate the time spent on back office work to working side-by-side with the kids.


MAKE magazine’s Maker Camp brought summer camp to the web this summer with a free, virtual DIY camp for teens. This online “summer camp” on Google+ encouraged 13- to 18-year-olds (as well as their parents and teachers) to get creative with up to 30 different types of fun projects themed around creativity and “the art of making.” From junk art robots to potato cannons, Maker camp counselors posted projects on the MAKE Google+ page and hosted Hangouts On Air with campers to review the day’s project and chat about tips and tricks. On Field Trip Fridays, participants get behind the scenes access at locations like the research and innovation lab at +Ford and +National Geographic. It was a wonderful way to connect with fellow campers around the world and to get inspiration for new project ideas.

Google tools give these summer camps new ways to communicate, collaborate, grow and stay focused on what matters the most: the campers. See you around the campfire!

Posted by Jim Reed, geologist and R&D director, RockWare Inc.

Editors note: RockWare is a geological software company based in Golden, Colorado. Founded in 1983, RockWare develops a suite of earth science and mapping applications used across several industries and fields, including civil, environmental and geotechnical engineering.

As the early morning sun rises, we head into the Rocky Mountains’ Front Range to take some field measurements. The scenery is breathtaking: rusty-hued sandstone formations tilting at dramatic angles from the ground below. Studying the Earth’s natural history and uncovering the mysteries that lie beneath its surface is just another day as a RockWare geologist.



Using a GPS device and a few specialty tools, we move around the site and record the tilt of the rock formations. These data points don’t make much sense to the untrained eye. However, by plotting our data on a map, we can gain an intuitive three-dimensional understanding of the rocks and their orientation.

When we return to the office, we quickly import the data we recorded in the field into Google Earth Pro. The software produces interactive 3D visuals, which we can easily share with customers. At RockWare, we make extensive use of the Movie Maker feature, which allows us to animate complex events over time. For example, if a toxic spill is leaking into the water table, we can model the spread and speed of contamination. These animations help our clients understand the impact of these geological events and act accordingly.

We’ve seen a positive impact on sales and marketing, too. Google Earth Pro, in conjunction with RockWare’s software, gives us the tools to tell a client’s story through video, rather than just creating static maps and reports. With more dynamic ways to showcase our work, we’ve been able to advertise in a way we’ve never been able to do before. As a result, we’ve seen growth in our customer base via referrals and word-of-mouth.

Many of our customers already use Google Earth Pro in the office, which streamlines my job as a consultant. Instead of spending extensive time on product training, we can dive right into the project. Google has essentially created an environment where it's easy for RockWare and our clients to collaborate on geological projects, which simplifies the decision-making process.

Google Earth Pro brings our projects to life. It has not only contributed to RockWare’s business growth, it’s also reinforced my love for geology. Going out in the field, taking measurements, and actually being able see what I’m mapping makes my job that much more incredible.

Posted by Evan Trent, Vice President of Digital Strategy and Technology, School of Rock

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Evan Trent, Vice President of Digital Strategy and Technology at School of Rock, a national music program headquartered in Burr Ridge, Illinois. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.



For more than a decade, School of Rock has been inspiring kids to rock on stage and in life. We offer music lessons on guitar, bass, piano, vocals and drums in a performance-based environment at over 90 company-owned and franchised schools in the U.S. and Mexico. Our goal is to inspire our students to learn, motivate them to excel, and, as a result, help them to gain confidence.

We’ve been growing rapidly in recent years, primarily been through franchising. We ran Microsoft® Exchange for years, but as the number of franchise schools continued to grow, we found it more and more difficult to offer a simple start-up process and manage and deliver remote support. We needed to move to a web-based solution that didn’t require multiple installations, software updates, and desktop support. After researching a few different options, we found Google Apps for Business had the tools we needed to rock on. We also found that many of our franchisees were already big fans of Google products and were using them outside of School of Rock.

We began the transition to Google Apps in January 2012 through our implementation partner, Cloud Sherpas. The migration was straightforward, and Cloud Sherpas offered training sessions for our employees and franchise partners to ensure a seamless transition. Google Apps completely transformed how we work with our franchisees and how each location works together as a team. Sharing information with students, faculty and parents has become much easier with Google Docs and Google Groups. We also find Google’s mobile-friendly approach in tune with our younger and more mobile employees.

Since we struck an amazing chord with Google Apps, we also decided to rethink our PC-based culture. We no longer wanted to deal with the administrative overhead and the security and reliability issues that came with traditional PCs. So in March, we deployed Google Chromebooks to about one quarter of our locations, and we’ve been rolling them out to increasingly more schools. We use them for just about everything, from accounting to video conferencing to putting on shows. The Chromebooks are extremely fast, require zero support, are easy to manage across multiple remote locations, and they cost only a few hundred dollars each. They’ve also been incredibly helpful for those of us who travel often since the battery life often lasts much longer than our previous PCs and they have built-in 3G access.

Google Apps for Business and Chromebooks have greatly reduced the time, money and energy our franchisees need to invest in technology, and that’s music to our ears.

Posted by Ella Kim, Google Enterprise team

From growing the fruit and sending it off to the crushpad to bottling that first blend, winemakers are working from sunrise to sunset. When you see how much work goes into creating the perfect bottle, it’s apparent that a strong passion for wine is the driving force behind each company’s success. Here’s how three Californians with a love for wine turned to Google Apps for Business to help them start their own wine labels.

When longtime friends Noah Dorrance, Baron Ziegler and Steve Graf started Banshee Wines, all three still had day jobs. While they wanted to fulfill their dreams of opening a winery, they worked and lived in different areas of Northern California, and it was tough to get started. Without a physical office to work from, they turned to Google Apps for Business to create a virtual one. Today, they’re able to keep track of sales information, manage employees who are spread out across the country, and be accessible at any time on their mobile devices. Google Apps continues to provide them with a platform that helps them stay connected and work together.

Like the founders of Banshee Wines, Stacia Williams had another career for years, but was never able to ignore her passion for wine. In 2010, she started Cairdean Winery with her husband, Edwin Williams. They both knew starting a winery would be far from the typical desk job, and they needed the technology to keep them connected while they were constantly on the go. The mobility of Google Apps for Business was particularly beneficial for the duo who purchased a vineyard in one location but are building a new facility in another. They can send email, see calendars, and share documents whether they are checking on their grapes in the field or working on their new winery and tasting room in St. Helena, California. No matter where they are during the day, Google Apps helps keep their business running smoothly.

Husband and wife team Jeff Munsey and Felicia Alvarez established Pithy Little Wine Company in 2009. Their vision is as simple as their name: create good wine with no frills. The pair needed technology that matched their philosophy, and Google Apps provided just that. By choosing Google Apps for Business, the founders have a platform that allows them to stay organized, work together, and communicate with their customers – all in a cost-effective way. From using Gmail to communicate with customers, to using Google Forms to give managers better visibility in the workplace, Google Apps helps manage project workflow seamlessly. With Google Apps, they’ve been able to turn their dream of owning a winery into a reality.

What these three companies have in common are founders who share an intense passion for what they do. With a lot of hard work, they’ve brought their wineries to life, and we’re happy Google Apps made things a little bit easier.