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.

Shaw Industries was founded in 1946 as a small area rug company, and over the last 66 years we've grown to become the world's largest carpet manufacturer, with 25,000 employees across 200 locations worldwide. During my 15 years at Shaw, I've watched the organization grow, but our collaboration capabilities began to lag behind the needs of our global manufacturing company. We found challenges in scalability and stability in our previous email solution. Support resources were also an issue, as we required a team of three full-time employees just to keep our email up-and-running.

In 2012, we made the move to Google Apps for Business, after proving in pilot programs that it would provide the integrated tools to help our dispersed global teams work together more effectively, would meet the requirements of uptime and ease of provisioning our IT team wanted, and accommodate the security requirements we were looking for.

Prior to moving the entire company to Google Apps, we used Microsoft® Office, which did not meet the collaboration needs of a global manufacturer. We’d end up with 15 different versions of a document attached to who knows how many different emails. As an example, the marketing team wanted a way to easily share files and work together on copy for our website and ads with our agencies. With Google Drive and Google Docs, multiple team members could work on content, and you could actually see it evolve in a very short period of time from a concept to a script for a TV commercial, all in the same shared document.

True collaboration and access from anywhere was something our employees were demanding with more frequency. We knew we needed to extract ourselves from our current email environment. When I did a cost and benefit analysis, it was clear we needed to move to the cloud. We discovered that Microsoft Office 365 would cost about 13 times more for us than Google Apps. In March, with the help of our Google Apps Reseller, Cloud Sherpas, we implemented Google Apps for more than 10,000 of our associates who use email.

It turns out that collaboration doesn’t just benefit the marketing department. We have an elaborate budget process inside IT that we were able to move to Google Sheets. Now our master spreadsheet can be instantly updated in real time, shaving about two months, or 50 percent of time spent, off the budgeting process. We’ve also started to use Hangouts for a lot of our meetings. In fact, we’ve started holding our staff meetings via hangout, even though the team is only 20 minutes apart. Hangouts have allowed us to be more focused, trimming the hour long meeting to 30 minutes.

One responsibility in my job is to find ways to help our teams be more productive. That can be challenging in a manufacturing company where the majority of users aren’t necessarily tech savvy, but with Google Apps that doesn’t matter because the products are intuitive. They are now able to do things themselves, and we have wanted to allow them to be self-sufficient for a long time. After just a few months of using Google Apps, I’m inspired by the way our teams are working together and finding faster, easier ways to work.

At Kempinksi Hotels, we believe we are personally responsible for creating rich and meaningful experiences for each of our guests. As Europe’s oldest luxury hotel group, it’s important to us that we provide perfection for our guests, whether that’s planning their wedding or just making sure they’re comfortable in a city they’re visiting for the first time.

As we began planning our five year strategy in 2010, we recognized the need to free operational resources from IT and find ways to work together across 70 hotels in 30 countries to continue providing best-in-class guest experiences. We found that moving to the cloud would allow us to reduce the overall cost of ownership and IT administration at each individual hotel so they could focus on driving efficiencies out of applications instead of just maintaining them. Quickly moving all of our properties to the cloud became a key part of our broader business strategy.

After considering cloud email platforms from Microsoft and Lotus, we found Google Apps to be the most mature solution and would allow us to collaborate easily across hotels and offices around the world. With the help of Google Apps Reseller, Cloud Technology Solutions (CTS), we transferred existing messages, appointments and contacts from GroupWise to Google Apps using their CloudMigrator multi-platform migration suite.

Now that we’ve fully migrated our 5,000 employees, we feel like we have an email platform that allows us to easily scale our business across each location, adding and removing users in a matter of minutes. We’re excited about being on a platform that continues to innovate and release features like instant translation in Gmail, Google+ Hangouts in Gmail, and document storage and collaboration using Google Drive. Moving to Google Apps was key to reducing the overall cost of ownership and cost of administration to the hotels, but we believe that the true benefits will come from the creative ways our employees use these tools to work together and provide an even better experience for our guests in the coming years.