Posted by Eran Feigenbaum, Director of Security, Google Enterprise

In the early days of the cloud, security concerns were often at the top of business minds as they considered moving to Google Apps. More recently, though, security has become a major reason businesses are moving to the cloud. The reason for this shift is that businesses are beginning to realize that companies like Google can invest in security at a scale that's difficult for many businesses to achieve on their own. This investment has produced an infrastructure and a set of services with robust data protections for our customers.

Today we are proud to announce that Google Apps for Business has earned ISO 27001 certification. ISO 27001 is one of the most widely recognized, internationally accepted independent security standards and we have earned it for the systems, technology, processes and data centers serving Google Apps for Business. Our compliance with the ISO standard was certified by Ernst & Young CertifyPoint, an ISO certification body accredited by the Dutch Accreditation Council, a member of the International Accreditation Forum (IAF). Certificates issued by Ernst & Young CertifyPoint are recognized as valid certificates in all countries with an IAF member.

“As a multi-billion dollar, global provider of packaging and packaging solutions, MWV understands the value of international standards. Many of our own processes are ISO certified. So, I am thrilled that Google Apps, our core communications platform, is also now ISO certified with its recent ISO 27001 certification. This certification validates what I already knew, through due diligence, about Google Apps - that the technology, process and infrastructure offers good security and protection for the data that I store in Google Apps. I think it's important, find it assuring and am very pleased that Google Apps will be audited and certified to this Information Security Management System ISO standard on an ongoing basis”

- Chet Loveland, CISO and Global Compliance Officer, MWV

This new certification, along with our existing SSAE 16 / ISAE 3402 audits and FISMA certification for Google Apps for Government, help assure our customers that Google is committed to ongoing development and maintenance of a robust Information Security Management System (ISMS) that an independent, third-party auditor will regularly audit and certify. For more information on the security audits and certifications for Google Apps, please review our certification 1-pager.

Posted by Mike Mercurio, CEO, SDAR

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Mike Mercurio, CEO the San Diego Association of REALTORS®, California’s largest local branch of REALTORS®. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

People have been buying and selling property for centuries, often with the help of a professional who understands the complexities of real estate transactions. The San Diego Association of REALTORS® (SDAR) was created more than 100 years ago to give these professionals the opportunity to connect and discuss issues on a local level.

Our goal as an association is to give our 12,000 members the education and tools they need to be successful. It’s no secret that the real estate market has been challenging recently, so we are constantly looking for ways to help our members reduce their costs, streamline their operations, and find better ways to communicate with their buyers and sellers. We’ve been using Google Apps at our association main office and 5 service centers and have found the tools to be particularly useful in the real estate industry, so we decided to announce that we will be offering Google Apps to our members at our annual REALTOR® Expo and Conference.

We believe that Google Apps will transform the way our members do business. With Google Sites, they’re able to create websites for buyers with new listings and open houses, information on neighborhoods and schools, as well as directions and maps to each property. They can also create sites for properties on the market. Instead of calling or emailing clients, our REALTORS® can just update their sites, so buyers and sellers always have one place to go.

The most important aspect for members, however, has been the mobility of Google Apps. Since email, documents, and sites now live in the cloud, they can access this information from anywhere with an Internet connection -- at a property, from the office, or from home. Speed is of the essence in this business, and since REALTORS® are always on the go, being able to see new emails and respond right away is incredibly helpful.

With the uncertainty of the economy, we’re very happy to have found a way to significantly help our members’ businesses.

Posted by Dylan Lorimer, Google Maps Engine Product Manager

In September 2011 we launched Google Earth Builder, a product that allows customers to use Google's cloud computing infrastructure to store, manage and share their own geospatial data and maps.

Google Earth Builder enables secure access to geospatial data it hosts through our geospatial apps like Google Earth and our geospatial APIs like the Google Maps API. Customers have used the platform in a variety of ways, including third parties using it to power their applications, data providers using it to commercially distribute their geospatial data, and customers creating their own 3D globes with private mapping data.

We didn’t think “Earth Builder” reflected the true capabilities of the product or vision that we have for easily accessible geospatial data. So, today we're renaming Google Earth Builder to be called Google Maps Engine. Today we’re also announcing the launch of our Google Maps Engine grants program for nonprofits.

We hope that Google Maps Engine will power the next generation of world class mapping applications, and we are excited about all the new innovations that we’re working on bringing to the platform soon.

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Juan Merelo, technical services manager at Pratt Industries, America’s 6th largest recycled paper and packaging company headquartered in Conyers, Georgia. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

At Pratt Industries, we’re all about recycling, and we take pride in playing such a big role in maintaining a healthy environment. Every day, we collect thousands of pounds of paper from cities, schools and supermarkets across the country to create recycled packaging. More than 3,500 employees in 70 locations nationwide work together to make this happen, and we rely on technology to keep our operation organized and running smoothly.

In 2009, we ran into some problems when our Microsoft® Exchange server started failing. Since email is a critical communication channel for our business, we had to find a quick solution. We wanted a stable cloud-based network that would help us run our business more efficiently. The 99.9% uptime and cost savings associated with Google Apps made it a clear choice. And it’s a good thing we decided to switch because shortly after we signed up for Google Apps, our Microsoft® server unexpectedly crashed and we were forced to migrate all our employees immediately. In less than three days, we were able to set up nearly 2,000 Google Apps accounts, a task we thought would take weeks.

Google Docs has also saved us time and money – and helps us get things done more quickly. When parts of Alabama were hit by tornadoes, one of our mills went offline. To get the facility back up, we needed an IT person on the ground. I had to drive several hours and spend valuable time to fix the network. After the tornado, we used Google Docs to sketch out plans for restoring our systems. Now, if a facility goes down, we can easily share step-by-step instructions and photos with on-site employees to rebuild the network. And because we use Google Docs to share these instructions, they can access the plans on any device with an Internet connection.

More recently, we had to change network circuits at 60 of our plant facilities. Previously, we would fly an engineer to each location to gather critical data for the changeover. Now we’re able to coordinate the project remotely with shared spreadsheets in Google Docs. We provided on-site contractors with secure access to our spreadsheets, so they could collect and organize data at our facilities. Google Docs saved us two months of work and close to $60,000 in engineering costs, and we collected more accurate data because it was input directly at the project site.

Google Apps has given us new ways to make our business significantly more efficient. I’m constantly amazed at the ways our employees are using the products, and I’m looking forward to seeing even more innovative uses.

Posted by Sarveshwar Duddu, Software Engineer

Cross-posted on the Google Docs blog.

Today we’re introducing the research pane—a new feature that brings the web’s wealth of information to you as you’re writing documents.

The research pane taps into Google Search directly from Google documents, so whether you want to add a cool destination to your itinerary for an upcoming trip to India or you're looking for the perfect presidential quote for a political science paper, you don’t even have to open a new tab.

You can access the research pane from the Tools menu by right clicking on a selected word that you want to learn more about, or by pressing Ctrl+Alt+R on Windows or Cmd+Alt+R on Mac. From the research pane, you can search for whatever info you need to help you write your document. With just a couple clicks you can look up maps, quotes, images, and much more.



If you find something you like, you can add it by clicking the insert button or, for images, by dragging them directly into your document. If appropriate we’ll automatically add a footnote citation so there’s a record of where you found the info.

Hopefully bringing knowledge from the web to Google documents will make your writing process just a little bit more efficient.

Posted by: Jeremy Ellis, General Manager, Brazos Bookstore

Editor’s Note: Today’s guest blogger is Jeremy Ellis, General Manager of Brazos Bookstore, a neighborhood institution based in Houston, Texas.

Brazos Bookstore has been part of the Houston literary community since 1974. In addition to selling a diverse collection of books, we pride ourselves in connecting our community with authors from our area and around the globe. When the store’s ownership changed in 2006 and the possibility of shutting down became known, the community of Brazos fans petitioned to keep our doors open. Thanks to them, we’ve been able to continue our long-standing tradition where we host author events, readings and exhibitions from writers such as Walter Cronkite, Julia Child, Kofi Annan, and P. J. O’Rourke, to name a few.

When I joined the staff in September 2011, Brazos was still operating in many ways as it did in the 70s and 80s. Employees would schedule the author series on a single paper calendar, and only one of our computers had email set up. All of our software was outdated, and the programs that were available ended up causing more roadblocks than value.

We needed a system that could better manage our day-to-day operations. Since I was already familiar with Google from personal use, moving the bookstore to Google Apps for Business was a natural transition. Today, all seven of our employees are able to access their email and calendars from any computer in the store, at home, and on their smartphones. This accessibility not only eases communication between the staff, but also keeps everyone up to speed on events, shipments and other activities at the shop.

Scheduling author visits on Google Calendar is easy, instant, and live, and it’s saved us from double-booking authors. I’m now able to easily collaborate with our buyer when we’re planning in-store events, which has streamlined the process for ordering books and helps me track book sales from author readings.

Google Apps has given us the organizational tools we need to continue serving Houston’s literary and arts culture. Our vision over the past forty years hasn’t changed, and now we have the technology to support our store for the future.

Posted by Joe Faith, Product Manager

Google Cloud SQL frees you from the chores of managing, maintaining and administering relational databases. It powers your App Engine applications with a familiar relational database (MySQL) in a fully-managed cloud environment.

Since we launched preview last October, Cloud SQL has improved performance and added features like scheduled backups, multihoming to increase availability and to improve application performance, and more powerful instances. Many businesses and developers have also started using Cloud SQL to administer their databases in the cloud.

For example, Daffodil, a global software firm, wanted to build and scale cloud applications with an easy-to-use database management system. After trying different solutions, they migrated to Google App Engine and Google Cloud SQL last year. After the migration, the engineers at Daffodil saved 100 hours of engineering work, allowing them to focus on their app and worry less about infrastructure.

Today, we’re announcing a two-tier pricing plan to Cloud SQL that will be enabled on June 12th:

• If you’re a business building lightweight applications or just want to try out the service, the flexible pricing option is for you. You pay for what you use.
• If you’re a business building heavy-traffic applications, we offer pricing packages, which are more economical and help you predict costs in advance.

We hope the new Cloud SQL pricing plans help you build App Engine applications tailored to your business’s needs. Post your questions in our user forums or comments on our Enterprise Google+ page.

Posted by David Newall, EVP, Sales and Data Solutions at iv3 Solutions

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is David Newall, EVP, Sales and Data Solutions, at iv3 Solutions. The company’s PropertyIntel PING product supports the underwriting efforts of iv3’s property and casualty insurance clients.

Gathering information about a property can be a time-consuming and sometimes frustrating task for both the insurer and the homeowner. We’d have to send out inspectors or have a long phone call to gather detailed information about a property. We noticed that Google Maps makes it easy for people to find directions or see a 360-degree view of a vacation spot, and we wanted to apply this to our business.

At iv3 Solutions, we built a real-time online report called PropertyIntel PING. This report uses the Google Maps API for Business and Street View. By combining Google Maps technology with our own address mapping and property information, we’re able to give our clients an immediate and detailed view of the property. This saves time and reduces frustrating phone calls with the property owner and the insurer. The Google Maps API also allows us to gather critical property data without having to store and maintain all of the basemap data on our servers -- and we can even add our own property data to provide more accurate results to our clients. Because of this technology and its integration with Google Street View, insurers can show their customers a customized “mash up” of rich photography, custom GIS data, aerial views and more. In the end, insurance companies are able to develop stronger relationships with their customers because they’re spending less time worrying about the technical details.

 With PropertyIntel PING, we’re helping our clients save time, increase profit, and improve customer service, using the power and ease of Google Maps API for Business. Find out more about iv3 Solutions and how you can integrate Google Maps into software.

 

Posted by Mike Matthes, City Manager of Columbia, Missouri

Editors note:Earlier this week we announced the City of St.Louis is going Google. Today we welcome another guest blogger from Missouri, Mike Matthes, to tell us how he recently moved Columbia to Google Apps for Government. 

I grew up in Chillicothe, Missouri. Until last year, I worked for the City of Des Moines in Iowa for 15 years. When I got the opportunity to move back to my home state and became the City Manager of Columbia, Missouri, I jumped at the chance. Columbia is a boomtown with outstanding quality of life that emphasizes the value of public services for the citizens. I find great joy in serving the public, partnering with our city employees, and supporting them as they work with the community.

After I moved to Columbia, I realized the city was challenged by an antiquated email system that couldn’t keep up with the latest technology trends and our employees’ needs. When my iPad acted as nothing more than a paperweight, I knew we needed a change. 

Columbia is fortunate to have an open-minded City Council and IT Department, so we started looking for a new email solution last fall. When I worked for Des Moines, I became familiar with Google Apps for Government. We chose the Google email and communication platform for 2,000 Des Moines employees because it could help the city save budget while enabling our employees to be more productive. When I looked at Google Apps again, I was struck by the tremendous product enhancements made in just a year since I last reviewed its offering.

We quickly decided to move all 1,188 Columbia employees to Google Apps for Government after evaluating available email and communication solutions. With the help of Google Apps reseller Onix Networking, all city employees were flawlessly transitioned to Google Apps in April 2012.

The only comments I received were gratitude from our employees for finally being able to communicate and collaborate smoothly. Email and calendar just work, and other advanced collaboration features in Google Apps bring much more efficiency to our workplace. Eighty percent of our employees are mobile, such as police, fire and public works staff. They have been starving for mobile productivity for years. Now they can easily check email, documents, and sites from the field. 

Although most reasonable people dread an annual budget process, I’m actually looking forward to it this year because all 18 of our departments will be using a Google Site to collaborate and share information easily while preparing for the budget. This site also integrates a Google calendar that marks budget due dates with a countdown clock for all departments.

For Columbia, going Google is a force multiplier. With resources saved and productivity enhanced, our city employees are able to better focus on their core mission of serving citizens. Being a part of modernization efforts of both Columbia and Des Moines makes my job as a public servant meaningful.

Posted by Kevin Maggiacomo, CEO of Sperry Van Ness

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Kevin Maggiacomo, CEO of Sperry Van Ness, one of the largest commercial real estate advisory firms in the world. They employ over 1,400 advisors and staff in more than 150 markets. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

As CEO of Sperry Van Ness, I’m constantly looking for ways to improve the work our 1,400-strong workforce does and how we do it. With the help of Google Apps Reseller SADA Systems, we implemented Google Apps across the entire organization to bring efficiency to an industry that isn’t traditionally known for being collaborative or efficient. Google Apps helped us solve workflow bottlenecks and process inefficiencies to move us beyond best practices to next practices. It has been a huge win for us.

There’s an old saying related to technology that “usability drives adoptability.” Getting everyone transitioned onto a single platform can be a challenge for any organization, but the learning curve for Google Apps was almost non-existent. Since all our tools -- Docs, Sites, Calendar, Gmail and more -- are all easy to access, they smoothly and seamlessly became part of our operating culture. Our entire organization went from implementation to total adoption in less than 30 days.

Creating a culture of teamwork and collaboration has been a key driver of our business model for years – it was just more difficult and costly prior to using Google Apps. Aside from email, chat, and conferencing, Google Sites allowed us to quickly replace our intranet. Additionally, Google Docs gives us an easy and secure way to collaborate on documents in real-time throughout the entire sales process.

In addition to the efficiency and productivity gains, the cost savings was a driver in our decision to use Google Apps. By moving our platform to the cloud, we dramatically reduced the cost and complexity of our IT infrastructure in favor of a system that’s faster and more robust. The frosting on the Google Apps cake is that we’ve been able to eliminate dependency on Microsoft products, allowing us to grow and scale faster. The discussions we used to have about platform scalability and synchronization have faded away, allowing us to spend more time on our business.

With great confidence, I can say that implementing Google Apps can resolve many of the workflow management, collaboration, and process automation issues that companies still struggle with -- it did so for Sperry Van Ness.

Posted by Nicole Locklear, Channel Marketing Specialist at NexTraq

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Nicole Locklear, Channel Marketing Specialist at NexTraq. NexTraq is a GPS fleet tracking company headquartered in Atlanta that helps business owners across the US and Canada track the movement, behavior and activity of their vehicles.

NexTraq, a GPS fleet tracking company, helps customers manage their fleets with reporting, alerts, dispatching and routing tools. Several years ago, our company noticed a simple problem: it took too long to train our customers how to use our products. After looking at several other mapping possibilities, we realized that we should give our customers something they already used in their daily lives: Google Maps. Our customers already used Google Maps to get directions, view landmarks with Street View and Satellite View and avoid bad traffic. This made the decision to move to Google Maps API for Business easy.



By using Google Maps, we were able to free up internal resources -- such as developers and engineers -- because of the outstanding support that Google provides during implementation. Even though we deployed Google Maps on a large scale, the implementation was seamless. Our customers love Google Maps for Business because it brings Google Maps features directly to the business setting. For example, they can look at their route for the day, pinpoint heavy traffic, and reroute their vehicles accordingly. Not only are they saving time, but, as gas prices rise, they’re cutting fuel costs as well. Being able to see the street view of any place a vehicle is located gives customers an added layer of comfort. If an employee can’t find a service stop, a dispatcher can see a 360-degree view of where the employee is standing and direct them based on landmarks and other surroundings.

Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, we went with a solution that we knew our customers already knew and loved. Google Maps API for Business was the best move we could have made for our customers.

Posted by Ju-Kay Kwek, Product Manager, BigQuery

Cross-posted on the Google Developers Blog.

BigQuery enables businesses and developers to gain real-time business insights from massive amounts of data without any upfront hardware or software investments. Imagine a big pharmaceutical company optimizing daily marketing spend using worldwide sales and advertisement data. Or think of a small online retailer that makes product recommendations based on user clicks. Today, we are making BigQuery publicly available, an important milestone in our effort to bring Big Data analytics to all businesses via the cloud.

Since announcing BigQuery in limited preview last November, many businesses and developers have started using it for real-time Big Data analytics in the cloud. Claritics, a social and mobile analytics company, built a web application for game developers to gain real-time insights into user behavior. Crystalloids, an Amsterdam-based analytics firm, built a cloud-based application to help a resort network analyze customer reservations, optimize marketing and maximize revenue. This just scratches the surface of use cases for BigQuery.

BigQuery is accessible via a simple UI or REST interface. It lets you take advantage of Google’s massive compute power, store as much data as needed and pay only for what you use. Your data is protected with multiple layers of security, replicated across multiple data centers and can be easily exported.

Developers and businesses can sign up for BigQuery online and query up to 100 GB of data per month for free. See our introductory pricing plan for storing and querying datasets of up to 2 TB. If you need more than that, contact a sales representative.

We hope you'll be able to gain real-time business insights using BigQuery. Share your BigQuery use cases and feedback in our user forums or on our Enterprise G+ page.

Posted by Zachary Curry, Manager of Information Systems at Pure Energy Services Ltd.

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Zachary Curry, Manager of Information Systems at Pure Energy Services Ltd., a publicly traded oilfield services company headquartered in Calgary. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Since 2001, Pure Energy has provided equipment and services for oil- and gas-producing companies in Canada and the U.S. In recent years we’ve grown nearly 20% per year, and today Pure Energy employs over 1,500 people based in our corporate offices and at more than 20 field locations. With 90% of our staff working outside of our corporate office, we needed a system that could better manage our expansion, easily accommodate new users and provide access to our staff in the field.

Using Google Apps helped transform some of our internal processes, allowing us to work more efficiently. Our business requires a lot of safety and task documentation, and each employee in the field must complete training for hundreds of tasks. Even though we’ve implemented multiple systems to help manage these tasks, there were still operational gaps and paper-based processes. Google Docs helped us simplify the tedious and time consuming task of managing these processes and tasks. Now that we’re moving the majority of our documentation to Docs, our station managers can more easily provide up-to-date information to their field staff and our corporate executives in shared files. In certain business units, we’ve also started to use Google Forms to track job training completion for each employee, making it easy for station managers to see exactly which employees can complete certain jobs at a glance.

Google Apps Scripts has helped us streamline our equipment utilization tracking processes. In the past, our corporate office had to compile 20 individual spreadsheets sent in from our field locations that was then manually inputted into a single spreadsheet. By the time the main corporate spreadsheet was updated, the information was usually out of date and therefore largely irrelevant for decision making purposes. Using Apps Scripts, we now get real-time updates of our equipment utilization through automatic email notifications to our managers at corporate office, saving us time in completing this important operational task.

With a growing company, particularly one that’s as geographically dispersed as ours, it’s important to have a dependable and easy-to-use Information System in place. Google Apps has helped us streamline numerous internal processes all while keeping us connected and collaborating efficiently.