Posted by Monique le Conge, Department Director, Palo Alto Library

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Monique le Conge, Department Director for the Palo Alto Library, a municipal library funded by the City of Palo Alto, California. Join Monique on September 12th at 1pm PST for a webinar via Google+ Hangout On Air to learn how you can replicate these successes at your organization and ask her questions directly during a live Q&A.


The Palo Alto Library has been providing our community with resources to enrich lives since the early 1890’s. With five libraries located at the heart of Silicon Valley, we witness the role technology plays in advancing life-long education, and we actively make it our mission to facilitate learning in the community by providing the latest tools. In an effort to abide to by our mission, we launched a Chromebooks lending program in November 2011, becoming one of the first libraries to do so.

We launched the Chromebooks program after piloting a few of the devices as an alternative to the laptop lending program that we developed more than five years ago. The old laptop program gave library patrons the ability to use laptops in one of our branches for up to two hours. While it was helpful for some, the program didn’t provide our library patrons with the time and flexibility they needed to explore the Web. Additionally, the administration was concerned about the security of patrons storing local files on the machines.

Today, members of our community, both young and old, are able to check out one of our 60 Chromebooks and take it home for up to seven days to research material for school reports, educate themselves on health matters, or simply watch videos. The possibilities are endless.

What’s great about the Chromebooks is that they are simple for our patrons to use, regardless of their technology experience, and they’re small enough for anyone to easily carry. Users can save their documents and favorite apps to their Google accounts, so that they can retrieve their information at another time from any Chromebook they check out or from any device running Chrome – like an iPhone or Android tablet. And all user data is wiped out after individual use, protecting each user’s privacy. But perhaps my favorite thing about the Chromebooks is that they don’t require any manual software updates or maintenance. Due to shrinking budgets and reduced library staff, IT maintenance is something we pay close attention to when providing new technologies to our patrons, and the Chromebook program has been a breeze to manage.

Our lending program has become so popular that we are expanding the program to include all of the library branches in the coming year. We’ve also received several phone calls from other library systems who are interested in adopting a Chromebooks lending program. We’re thrilled to be able to provide members of our community with Chromebooks because we know they’ll be able to use a Chromebook to grow and learn no matter what their level of technology experience is.

Posted by Edward Hanapole, CIO, Kaplan

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Edward Hanapole, CIO, Kaplan, one of the world’s largest education companies headquartered in New York, NY. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

At Kaplan, education is our business. Successful student outcomes are our yardstick for performance. We provide higher education programs, professional training courses, test preparation materials and assessment tools for K-12 students. The range of student services has grown immensely since our founding in 1938 as a test prep company that helped many young people gain access to university education. Today, Kaplan employs more than 25,000 people around the globe in over 30 locations and serves approximately one million students annually.

In our business, it’s critical that we stay up-to-speed on the latest technologies because technology based on rigorous data analysis yields the blueprint for how we can improve instruction and curriculum design, and it allows us to help our students attain their desired results in the most effective and efficient way possible. We want to give our employees the same web-based tools that our students are using at home, so we moved the majority of our employees to Google Apps in 2011. It’s not just Gmail that has changed -- Google Apps has significantly impacted our company culture. We now use Google+ Hangouts to hold a lot of our meetings. Even if I’m in the same office, I often prefer using Hangouts and a shared meeting notes document so I know people are actually paying attention.

We're starting to see great usage of Hangouts across our business. Greg Marino, CEO of the Kaplan Higher Education Group, uses Google+ Hangouts to stay regularly connected with his organization's Chief Difference Makers, employees from around the country who help drive employee engagement at various sites. He finds Hangouts convenient, simple to use and cost-effective. As time goes on, I expect usage to increase across our operations.

We are entering a beta test for a new online educational platform that will allow other schools, organizations, businesses and individuals to share information and knowledge with their audiences aligned with best instructional practices. This exciting, highly innovative solution is built on top of the Google engine.

We’ve also been working with Google partner, Genesys, to pilot new Chromebooks and Chromeboxes at our New York call centers. These new devices have replaced our PCs, helping speed up our workflows and avoid aggravating crashes. Through the pilot process, we’ve found Chrome devices to be much faster, simpler to use, and they require no set-up time and far less troubleshooting. We have the ability to leverage real-time, web-based communication, allowing us to do away with phones in our call centers entirely. This will improve our customers’ experience while saving us time, resources and money. Our long-term goal is to deploy Chrome devices across our 65 North American campuses.

The real potential is that Google Apps and Chrome OS devices give us the ability to introduce innovation to our students and employees on an ongoing basis with relative ease.

Posted by Richard Birdsall, Co-founder and Co-owner, Genesis Medical Education Consultants

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Richard Birdsall, the co-founder and co-owner of Genesis Medical Education Consultants, a continuing education provider offering state of the art courses to California's health care professionals, headquartered in Orange County, CA. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.


Since 2007, Genesis Medical Education Consultants has provided continuing education for California health care professionals in a safe, professional, and hands-on environment. For an industry that prides itself on being at the forefront of technology, it seems that many healthcare education providers are still behind the times. My mother and co-owner, Shari, and I saw this as an opportunity to set ourselves apart from existing companies.

We started using Google Apps for Business when we opened shop, and it has not only helped us keep pace with companies that have been around for years, but to outperform in multiple areas. We use Google Docs to assemble faculty schedules, create student rosters, and draft manuals and course syllabi. Google Drive ensures every file is available from anywhere we sign in, and all of these materials are easily shared with our instructors. Calendar helps keep us all organized, and we even post a schedule of classes on our website, making it easily visible to both our current students and potential students. With three full time employees, we could customize the exact size of the services we needed with Google as opposed to a one-size-fits-all approach many companies have – all at a very small fee.

In addition to Google Apps, we have two Chromebooks in our office, which we find incredibly easy to use and dependable. Before we had the Chromebooks, teaching at other facilities would keep us offline for the entire day – our old PCs were too clunky to take with us and didn’t have 3G access. Chromebooks changed all that. Now, we’re able to take our Chromebooks with us to any location and get connected in seconds, and we’re able to check email and interact with our students and any time. Chromebooks also save us a ton of money since we don’t have purchase additional software – a savings sent directly back to our students. We are able to charge a fraction of the price as the other guys due to a reduced overhead. And I've saved so much time not having to update every program on our computers since it updates on its own!

With a marriage of Chromebooks and Google Apps, our productivity on back-office processes has increased by at least 40-50%. We’re enrolling new and returning students every day and plan to open another facility in San Francisco next year. As we expand, we plan to purchase more Chromebooks, which we will give to our instructors to use in and out of the classroom. Without a doubt, in helping us establish our business and continue to compete with other companies, Google Apps for Business and Chromebooks ace the test.

Posted by Hugues Vincent, Google Apps team

A country code top-level domain (ccTLD) such as .com.es or .jp helps companies build a local footprint on the web, and ccTLD support is one of the most-requested features for Google Apps. We’re delighted to announce that today – thanks to a partnership with domaindiscount24.com – that we now offer 30 top-level domain (TLD) options, including 22 ccTLDs, with prices starting at $8 per year.

Now, businesses that wish to sign up for Google Apps but don’t yet have a domain name have plenty of local options to choose from during sign-up. Your new domain comes configured with all Google Apps services, including Gmail for your custom email addresses (@yourcompany.com). Your domain will be registered with domaindiscount24.com.

Here is the full list of TLDs now available when you sign up for Google Apps:

Global	Asia-Pacific	Latin America	Europe
.com	.in	.co	.be
.info	.co.in	.com.co	.ch
.org	.org.in	.com.mx	.cz
.net	.net.in	.mx	.de
.mobi	.co.nz		.es
.biz	.com.tw		.com.es
.name	.jp		.me
.cc			.nl
.tv			.pl

We hope this gives new Google Apps customers more flexibility in their domain registration to help boost their local presence on the web.

Editors note: domaindiscount24.com is a member of the KeyDrive Group. All registrars of the KeyDrive Group manage together more than 6 million domains for more than 300,000 customers worldwide.

Posted by Adam Dawes, Product Manager - Google Apps

For many of our business customers, maintaining stringent security standards is critical. This is something we’re deeply committed to, and we have invested lots of time and resources into consistently enhancing security, archival and discovery features for our customers.

Since we acquired Postini, we've been working toward integrating its security and compliance capabilities directly into Google Apps. In the past two years, we developed and released numerous Postini features directly in Google Apps, such as user policy management; email content filters; archiving, retention and eDiscovery with Google Apps Vault; and many more. As we look ahead to 2013, we’ll continue these feature integrations and gradually transition Postini Google Message Security (GMS) and Google Message Discovery (GMD) customers to Google Apps. This will enable them to take advantage of the Postini features built directly into Google Apps that are more flexible, powerful and user-friendly.

As part of the ongoing integration of features, starting today Google Apps administrators can use a new feature to manage routing and basic filtering of email to on-premise systems as well as email to Google Apps users. This feature will make it easier for groups like sales, support and operations to use generic email addresses such as sales@ or support@. Messages to these addresses typically need to be routed to ticketing or alerting systems outside of Gmail, and now Google Apps has the capability to define routing rules to get these messages to their proper destinations.

We will communicate additional details about the transition to our customers in the coming months. We are also developing tools and resources that will assist with the transition.

After the migration, customers can explore other Google Apps such as Gmail and Google Docs. Google Apps offers compelling cost savings and productivity benefits that millions of businesses are already enjoying. We look forward to helping our Postini customers enjoy these benefits - when they are ready.

More information on the new email routing feature can be found in the Google Apps Help Center where there are also more details regarding the Postini transition.

Posted by Joe Kaptur, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted from Google Docs Blog)

Editing with others in real-time makes it easy to get stuff done in Google spreadsheets in only a matter of minutes. But with so many people working in the same space, it’s possible to modify a section that a collaborator didn’t intend to be touched. That’s why, today, we’re updating the Named Ranges feature in spreadsheets to let you also protect them.

To get started with Protected Ranges in a shared spreadsheet, highlight the cells you’d like to protect, right-click, and choose Name and protect range from the menu.

Click through the presentation below to see the feature in action.



Even more spreadsheet features added this month 

Along with the arrival of protected ranges, you can now add colors and patterns when you apply cell borders in Google spreadsheets. We also updated find and replace to make it possible to search using patterns (also called regular expressions). For example, “^[A-Z]+” will find all the cells that start with uppercase letters.

As always, Google spreadsheets is getting better every day, so stay tuned for even more features and updates in the coming weeks.

Posted by Brittany Wenger, Winner of Google Science Fair 2012

(Cross-posted from Google App Engine Blog)

Editors note: Today’s guest blog post comes from 17-year-old Brittany Wenger, the winner of this year’s Google Science Fair. Brittany built an application on Google App Engine called the Global Neural Network Cloud Service for Breast Cancer. This artificial neural network can detect complex patterns in data, learning how to classify malignant or cancerous cells it hasn’t seen before. Learn more about her project.



When a patient has a palpable breast lump, the first step a doctor takes is to determine whether the mass is malignant or benign. One relatively simple diagnostic procedure is a form of biopsy called fine needle aspiration (FNA). Though these tests are less invasive than others, they are historically less accurate as well. My goal was to create a tool for doctors to use when interpreting test results from these procedures.

For this project, I decided to create a neural network built on Google App Engine, using data published to the Machine Learning Repository by the University of Wisconsin. A neural network attempts to replicate the brain as a form of artificial intelligence through networks of computers and can be used to detect extremely complex patterns. It learns from its mistakes, so it can classify a case it hasn’t seen before as malignant or cancerous based on specific criteria like clump thickness or bland chromatin. Because the diagnostic power of the network improves the more data it has, building on App Engine is a way to ensure the app can continue to scale easily, no matter how much information goes into the system.

I got started integrating my neural network application code, written in Java, with App Engine in a few hours using the SDK’s Greeting Service sample code as a starting point. The application has two main parts, a training module, that implements the neural network itself and runs the training process over the input data stored in static files, and a web interface that takes input data and returns the network’s analysis.

Google App Engine provides the scalable infrastructure I need to collect information from every hospital in the world and run when there are many concurrent requests, as usage of my application increases. Because my network is built as a cloud service, not only is my app working on the web, but mobile tablets, smartphones, old PC systems, or new technologies can also easily access the service from any hospital with an internet connection.

The neural network I developed is 99.11% sensitive to malignancy when using leave-one-out testing with original data. Thus far, I have run 7.6 million trials. Moving forward my goal is to make the application accessible to the global medical community so more data can be deposited and used to improve the diagnostic power of the network.

Posted by Alandha Scott, Google Apps Team

Editors note: Chief Financial Officers are key decision-makers in any organization’s move to the cloud. For a financial perspective on cloud computing such as Google Apps for Business, visit our United States and Europe websites or download the research reports.

We often hear from CIOs and IT leaders about the benefits they've seen since moving their organizations to the cloud. The role of the CFO in this decision is sometimes overlooked, but it's an important one.

We wanted to learn more about what CFOs consider to be the benefits of moving to the cloud, as well as their concerns. We recently surveyed over 800 CFOs in the United States and Europe, and we learned that almost 81% of our U.S. respondents say that they think completely implementing cloud technology would improve employee productivity, and 71% say it would reduce the time required to bring new products and services to market. In fact, in Europe 67% have adopted or are making plans to adopt cloud computing and 52% of American CFOs surveyed say their companies always include cloud-based systems in their IT decision-making processes.

Some of the benefits CFOs highlight include significant capital and operational savings, better security, and productivity gains that come from the ability to work from any device or together with others using tools like Google Docs. In our webcast, even self-described "archetypal CFOs" highlighted their hopes for improved productivity when employees can work from home or elsewhere, as well as reduced costs when moving to a service model. Furthermore, 69% of surveyed CFOs in Europe believe that cloud computing increases the IT department’s ability to innovate.

But it’s not just this research that shows how CFOs can benefit from adopting cloud technology. Since adopting Google Apps for Business, Milwaukee-based Journal Communications' VP of Finance has used Google spreadsheets to do his company’s acquisition models and financial reporting, saving time and ensuring that decisions are made with team input and the most up-to-date information.

Posted by Hong Zhang, Google Apps Enterprise Mobile

People are using phones and tablets more than ever before to get work done from anywhere – in the field, at home or while traveling. Along with this increase in flexibility and productivity come new challenges for businesses managing all of these mobile devices. We launched tools to manage mobile devices across all mobile platforms for Google Apps last year, and since then we’ve been hard at work adding a number of new capabilities to help organizations better manage smartphones and tablets.

Some of our newest features are focused on helping administrators enforce tighter security using mobile settings in the Apps control panel to keep company data safe. We now offer administrators more ways to promote strong passwords on users’ phones and tablets and allow policies that enforce data encryption. New features also let administrators set policies to allow or block the use of the phone’s camera on Android 4.0+ devices and comply with organizational email retention policies. And now administrators can enforce these policies where available without disabling phones running older versions of Android that don’t support all the latest policies.

Through the Google Apps Device Policy app, administrators have the ability to remotely erase data from lost or stolen devices. Now we’re extending this capability so that IT admins can grant end users the ability to remotely delete data from their phone as soon as they notice it’s missing using the My Devices page.



As employees increasingly depend on their phones and tablets we’ll continue to work on making it easier and more secure for organizations to manage their fleet of devices. You can watch this video or visit our Help Center for a detailed look at how our enterprise mobile offerings can benefit your business.

Posted by the Google App Engine Team

(Cross-posted on the Google App Engine blog.)

In addition to the startups and businesses we frequently highlight on our blog, we have seen educational institutions and their students build amazing applications, using Google App Engine as a platform for teaching and groundbreaking research.

Earlier this year we announced funding for researchers looking to use App Engine for scientific discovery. Today we are introducing the Google App Engine Education Awards to foster continued innovation from educational institutions in areas outside of research. Through this program we are inviting faculty members, initially from the United States, to submit proposals for using App Engine for their course development, educational research, university tools or for student projects. A selection of the proposals we receive will receive $1,000 in App Engine credits to assist in making the proposal a reality.

App Engine allows you to build scalable applications using the same technology that powers Google’s global-scale web applications. With no hardware to setup, App Engine makes it simple to learn how to write a simple web application or to build an application that handles millions of hits a day. If you haven’t already tried App Engine, we encourage you to download the SDK, follow the Getting Started Guide and take advantage of our free tier to deploy your first application.

If you teach at an accredited college, university or community college in the United States, we encourage you to apply. You can submit a proposal by filling out this form. Applications must be received by midnight PST August 31, 2012.