Editor’s Note: Recently we announced the winners of our global Gone Google ad contest. Today’s featured winner is Kristof Boden, ICT Manager at Boxx Group in Antwerp, Belgium.

Boxx Group is a young, dynamic company with great ambition. Boxx started in 2001 as a small residential construction company, now-10 years later-the activities have expanded to residential as well as utility construction, renovation and civil contracting. In 2009, Boxx Group started investing in construction grounds and the development of housing projects. Since March 2011 Boxx Real Estate has served as a reliable and professional partner in real estate conciliation for individuals and companies.

Due to a company acquisition in 2009, we decided to try and find a way to provide full collaboration capabilities to employees in all locations, in the most cost-efficient and scalable way. Both companies had been working on local Microsoft® Exchange 2003 servers up until then and were in need of an upgrade of their communication platform anyway. We briefly considered the idea of joining Windows domains across a site-to-site VPN tunnel but we quickly gave up on the idea.


We switched our full staff of 25 employees to Google Apps for Business in May 2010. Our first roll-out to 10 users was successful so we were able to decommission one of our Exchange servers. A few weeks later we migrated 13 more employees in less than 3 days and the remaining Exchange server was decommissioned.

Employees are now able to access their emails and calendars from anywhere: on their PC's at home or on their Android phones. They enjoy the flexibility of having access to data on-the-go and the ability to communicate with colleagues and customers anytime, anywhere (and at a reasonable cost!)

Posted by Kristof Boden, ICT Manager, Boxx Group

Editor’s Note: Recently we announced the winners of our global Gone Google ad contest. Today’s featured winner is Sharon Delia, Communications Director, South Carolina REALTORS®

South Carolina REALTORS® (SCR) is the largest non-profit trade association in the state of South Carolina. With 14,000 professional REALTOR® members, and a staff of only eleven employees, our association depends on fast, efficient and reliable means of communication. We needed a way to simplify our IT management while maintaining communication between our small staff on-the-go. And, considering the recovering real estate market, we wanted a streamlined way of doing business that our members could also use.

Switching to Google Apps has enabled us to do just that. With Google we streamline tasks, become more efficient and enhance productivity and organization. The benefits have been so great, we encourage our REALTOR® members to use it as well ... and they are!

When we sent an email to our members telling them about all the benefits of Google Apps - access from anywhere, great collaboration tools, and 25 GBs of email storage, just to name a few - we received multiple responses from excited new Google Apps users.

Kristin Walker, a REALTOR® at Dunes Properties in Charleston, SC was happy to find out SCR has gone Google and wrote to tell us about it. “It's great to hear SCR has gone Google!! My company completed our transition to Google Apps about a month ago. Many of our agents were already familiar with the Google platform and we have been training the others on the tools. We've got shared online calendars now and are using Google Docs for company-wide documents. It is definitely enhancing productivity!”

At SCR, our Google REALTOR® Education Calendar adorns the screaltors.org homepage. We are able to collaborate on projects through Google Docs, check email through Google Apps on our company cell phones and teach our members how to video chat with their clients. We’re even using the user-friendly Google Sites to create an online presence for our 2011 annual conference, The Unconference. But the best part is the $50,000 a year in savings for our members.

And of course, it’s comforting to know our email is reliable. So, while we watch the real estate industry bounce back, we are confident our emails will not. Thank you, Google!

Posted by Sharon Delia, Communications Director, South Carolina REALTORS®

Editor’s Note: Recently we announced the winners of our global Gone Google ad contest. Today’s featured winner is Martine Bronner, Head of Marketing at ESSEC Business School in Cergy-Pontoise, France.

ESSEC Business School was founded in 1907 and is one of Europe’s top management schools with 4,300 students, 138 academic staff and 37,000 alumni. The school, known for its international orientation, also has a campus in Singapore and partnerships with some of the best universities all over the world, including the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, IIM Ahmedabad India, SDA Bocconi Milan and Peking University.


In August 2009, we deployed Google Apps for Education to our students, alumni, faculty and administrative staff – 65,000 users in total. Google Apps has significantly increased the creation and sharing of content between all our users, with about 2,000 collaborative sites created every year on the platform.

Google Apps has provided us with a great way to lower IT costs while launching new projects that would have otherwise needed huge investment. For example, by moving to Google Apps instead of upgrading our internal messaging system we saved more than €100,000 in migration costs and €20,000 per year on email licencing. We also moved all of our teaching collaboration tools from custom internal websites to Google Sites and Google Docs. This switch has allowed us to offer long-term access to course materials for all our students.



Communicating in the cloud has also allowed us to improve collaboration between our campuses in France and Singapore. For example, the text, voice and video chat integrated in Gmail has replaced expensive video conferencing solutions for our executive board and has enabled students to easily communicate with their peers across the globe.

We benefit from Google’s focus on innovation - new features are released regularly which help us to improve the user experience. We will continue to utilise and promote these features to students and staff as they enable us to focus on our real added-value: innovation in education.

Posted by Martine Bronner, Head of Marketing, ESSEC Business School

Editor’s Note: Recently we announced the winners of our global Gone Google ad contest. Today’s featured winner is Jon West, Co-founder of 3Tailer, from Charlotte, North Carolina

My friend, Chad Ledford, and I started 3Tailer at Appalachian State University in 2005. 3Tailer, a niche online marketplace, has been focused on growing its business and we were recently selected by the Charlotte Business Journal as the 2nd fastest growing company in Charlotte, North Carolina.



Simply put, Google Apps runs our business. Google Apps has enabled our small company to minimize IT costs while maximizing our infrastructure capabilities. It’s incredibly easy to add new employees, define group mailing lists, and share documents. When building a company you have to maximize every minute of your time and every dollar you spend. Google Docs has to be the simplest way for organizations to setup email and start collaborating. Plus, I feel better knowing that our sensitive information is stored in the cloud and not on a random hard drive in our office.

In addition to the core products that come with Google Apps, we’ve also begun using the Google Apps Marketplace, relying on apps like Socialwok and ManyMoon. The Google Apps Marketplace has slowly started to open up a whole new level of productivity for our company. An added bonus for us is that everything integrates beautifully with our Android phones. There's no doubt in my mind that Google Apps has been essential in us being able to bootstrap our company from a $1,000 initial investment to millions in revenue today.

Posted by Jon West, Co-founder, 3Tailer

Editor’s Note: Recently we announced the winners of our global Gone Google ad contest. Today’s featured winner is Susan Zolezzi, Manager, Communications & Change at Monash University in Victoria, Australia.

Monash University is Australia’s largest university, with 60,000 current students across nine campuses and centres in Australia, Malaysia, South Africa and Italy, and over 250,000 alumni around the world.

Our switch to Google Apps for Education began with students in November 2009, and despite being an opt-in offer over summer break and the Christmas holiday, 40,000 students had migrated before their return for semester one! By July 2010 all students were on Google Apps and the old student mail service was retired. Between June 2010 and December 2010 we migrated over 20,000 staff from 3 systems, and to date we have seen excellent uptake and use of the new applications in addition to email. In comparison, our previous Monash email and calendar projects took years of project resources and budget and saw poor adoption.



We believe accessible and easy collaboration means better ideas. Better ideas shared by more people have the potential to be even more powerful. Going Google has provided the Monash community the ability to leverage technology for collaboration in new ways and to a much greater degree than ever before. We are seeing teacher-teacher, teacher-student and student-student collaboration in every area of the university, including in the classroom, research, study and administration.

We have professional staff developing Google Sites to attract and onboard new students; teachers using Google Spreadsheets to facilitate lab assignments; administration using Google forms to collect important evaluative feedback from staff; and students using Google Docs for shared note taking. Teachers are also using Google Docs and Sites to garner valuable insight into students’ learning experiences and outcomes by observing students working real time and providing feedback as well as using revision history to observe contributions to group assignments and thought processes.



Going Google has helped us turn nine campuses across four countries into one University by providing a platform of greater opportunities for active engagement between students, staff and researchers, producing ‘world and work ready’ graduates. Apart from the collaboration and educational benefits to the Monash community, Google Apps has been better, faster and cheaper than we could have hoped for, delivering cost and time efficiencies across the university.

Posted by Susan Zolezzi, Manager, Communications & Change, Monash University

Editor’s Note: Recently we announced the winners of our global Gone Google ad contest. Today’s featured winners are the pupils and staff of Oakwood Junior School in Southampton, U.K.

Oakwood Junior School is a junior school for boys and girls, situated in Lordswood, Southampton. The school has 240 pupils from the age of 7 to 11. We have over 300 Google Apps users and after just twelve months we rely heavily on Google Apps for the day-to-day running of the school.



We’re using Google Apps for Education for all of our pupils and members of staff. Within the school, pupils as young as 7 are able to vote for their House Captains with Google forms. They also use shared folders in Google Docs to share and store information to help them manage their micro-businesses selling biscuits. In addition, our teachers and administrative staff can arrange appointments and events with Google Calendar and staff bulletins are posted and stored using Google Sites. We’ve been able to survey our Year 6 pupils with Google forms which provided instant feedback to their teachers.



We also use Google Apps to communicate and collaborate outside the school - we share meeting agendas and minutes with our school Governors with Google Docs and this year, nearly 50% of parents booked parent-teacher meetings online using Google forms.

Our school’s strength in information technology has been externally recognised by OFSTED, the schools’ inspectorate. We have recommended Google Apps to local schools, and four other primaries in Southampton are now using Google Apps - and others are joining too!

Posted by Ian Taylor, Headteacher, Oakwood Junior School

Editor’s Note: Recently we announced the winners of our global Gone Google ad contest. Today’s featured winner is Brian Bolt, Lead Systems Engineer at Boise State University in Boise, Idaho.

Boise State University first looked at moving to Google Apps for Education in 2007. At the time, we were in the process of upgrading our email for employees and students from a system that had been in place since 1996. We realized that by choosing Google Apps for Education, Boise State could provide much more than a new email platform: an entire set of integrated, cutting edge communication and collaboration tools. And the huge cost savings would allow us to redirect scarce budget dollars and personnel away from email maintenance towards new technology initiatives that support our school.

We were proud to be the largest deployment of Google Apps for Education to students, faculty and staff when we moved to the cloud. Almost 20,000 student accounts and 3,000 faculty and staff accounts were migrated. Since then we’ve seen tremendous benefits. Every year, we save $147,000 in IT costs alone. This savings has allowed us to redeploy one and a half full-time employees to important technology projects that are core to our university. Our students and faculty alike have embraced Google Apps for Education. They are excited to use Docs and Google's other communication tools to easily share, research, and collaborate.

Boise State sees Google Apps as a great tool to help us in our commitment to academic excellence, public engagement, vibrant culture and exceptional research.



To lean more about Boise State's experience using Google Apps and the Apps Marketplace, join us for a webinar on April 7th at 11am PST

Posted by Brian Bolt, Lead Systems Engineer, Boise State University

Editor’s note: Recently we announced the winners of our global Gone Google ad contest. Today’s featured winner is Jim Coningsby, Director of Operations at The Phoenix of New Orleans.

The Phoenix of New Orleans (PNOLA) is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the recovery of Lower Mid-City New Orleans and its surrounding neighborhoods after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Since 2006, we’ve rebuilt quality affordable housing and helped develop the community assets necessary for vital neighborhoods by leveraging construction expertise and using Google Apps to coordinate and collaborate on efforts.



PNOLA has a very small staff of 5-10 people per year, but we’ve been able to leverage hundreds of thousands of volunteer hours, grant funds and donated materials to rebuild over 70 homes. As a result we have saved homeowners over $4 million dollars in rebuilding costs. We were able to accomplish so much with such a small staff due to the efficiency enabled by Google Apps. We like to think of Google as being part of our team.

We estimate that Google Apps allows us to do the same work with a staff of 7 as we could with 8. While that may not seem like much, adding another staff member would be prohibitively costly to our organization so we rely on web-based tools, like Google Apps, to make up that difference.

Prior to using Google Apps, we had been using a webmail service through our website host, but our team found the interface confusing, so they often just opted to use their personal Gmail accounts. Having multiple email addresses made us appear less professional to our community partners and funders, and also made it difficult to collaborate without a standardized set of tools.

Migrating to Google Apps took less than an hour to set up. We immediately improved the professional appearance of our organization and began working smarter together through the collaboration tools. We now track all of our upcoming volunteers and project tasks through Google Calendar so everyone is able to stay up to date with what is happening. We are also able to stay on track with our projects which typically saves us up to two weeks on each house. This in turn saves our homeowners from paying extra rent, and saves us about $300 a week on project delivery costs.

In addition, our team works together to create marketing material using Google Docs and our entire team uses Google Voice as our office phones, which not only saves us hundreds of dollars a month, but greatly improves our ability to track our communication with volunteers, clients and donors. We have our entire training manual on our intranet built on Google Sites, which is constantly updated so that new team members can get up to speed quickly. We think we’re an example of a small non-profit that can do big things with the power of the cloud and Google Apps.

Posted by Jim Coningsby, Director of Operations, The Phoenix of New Orleans

Editor’s Note: Recently we announced the winners of our global Gone Google ad contest. Today’s featured winner is Matt Silverman, CIO of Just Salad from New York, NY.

Just Salad is a casual restaurant chain with six locations in Manhattan, and two locations in Hong Kong. Founded in 2006 by two recent college graduates Nick Kenner and Robert Crespi, Just Salad caters to health conscious customers looking for a fresh and fast meal.


We implemented Google Apps in 2008, and we have been extremely pleased with the results. While we originally made the switch for the robust email functionality that Gmail offers, the other applications in the Google Apps suite ended up being an invaluable toolset for all of our staff. In the restaurant business, the corporate staff are always on the run, visiting our different stores. Having all of our email, calendar, contacts, and documents available in Google Apps allows us to make our information accessible wherever our staff may be, which greatly improves our work efficiency.

The collaboration tools within Google Docs allow us to quickly and efficiently fill out our expense reports, brainstorm new ideas for our menu and operations, and maintain comprehensive training documents that can be printed by our staff in the stores at any time. We also use shared calendars to help with labor schedules, and to keep track of tasks on a store-by-store basis.

The scalable nature of Google Apps has also allowed us to seamlessly implement email in each store we open, with virtually no time spent on setting up email clients and office applications. Our network security has also improved, by moving the bulk of our virus checking to the cloud instead of managing it on premise, we are able to avoid most of the dangerous attachments that seem to plague Microsoft® Outlook email clients.

Out of all of the time saving features that Google Apps offers, the search function in Gmail is above and beyond the greatest feature. To give one quick example, we can enter transaction totals into Gmail to pull up various receipts for web purchases. This allows us to do our expense reports incredibly efficiently, without having to hunt through printed receipts to reconcile our purchases.

Finally, Google spreadsheets has allowed us to collaborate on in-depth nutrition analysis to help keep track of nutrition values for our 70+ salad ingredients. Keeping up on nutrition is hard work when you carry as many ingredients as we do, and allowing multiple staff members to work in tandem via Google Spreadsheets has proven to be incredibly useful. We look forward to continuing to work with Google Apps as we rapidly expand our restaurant concept throughout New York City, Hong Kong, and beyond.

Posted by Matt Silverman, CIO, Just Salad

Several months ago we invited you, our Google Apps users around the world, to tell us why your organization should be featured in the next phase of our Gone Google campaign. We were humbled by your many thoughtful entries which shared your Gone Google story and gave us more insight into how Apps has changed the way you work in your company, school or non-profit.

Today, we’re excited to announce our 10 global winners and unveil their Gone Google outdoor ad right in their own city. These ten winners represent Google Apps users across three continents and five countries, representing a variety of industries including real estate, restaurant, e-commerce, as well as education and not-for-profit. Congratulations to the following organizations (and check out this map for the location of their outdoor ads):