Posted by Posted by Alastair N. Jenkins, President & Chief Executive Officer at GeoDigital

Editor's note: They power our homes and supply clean water - utility companies fulfill our most basic needs. This week we're showcasing the Utilities Industry and the ways they’re relying on Google Maps for Business to improve operations and keep the lights on. Today’s guest blogger is Alastair N. Jenkins from GeoDigital.

If you've ever pruned or weeded in your backyard, you've had a glimpse at what we do at GeoDigital. We help keep weeds and trees under control on nearly 300,000 miles of utility corridors so power lines stay clear and the electricity keeps flowing to homes and businesses across North America.

We don’t actually trim the vegetation, we record it. Keeping track of growing vegetation is a never-ending task and one that requires us to compile a lot of data. To organize and gain better insights from the information we collect, we rely on Google Maps Engine.

Maps Engine has become an integral part of our operations. Using LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology, we first survey the land and gather utility corridor data with specialized air and ground mapping services. We then turn this data into business intelligence that the utilities companies can use to plan vegetation management. They also use this information for compliance reporting to regulatory agencies.

To make this information easy to digest, we have integrated Google Maps Engine and Google Earth Pro with our Software as a Service (SaaS) solution. Users can view color-coded LiDAR imagery that depicts existing vegetation, projected tree growth, and other obstructions that may interfere with utility maintenance activities. Multiple Google Earth layers - including Borders and Labels, Places, Photos, Roads and 3D Buildings - provide context, so planners can make better, faster scheduling and deployment decisions, while analysts can more efficiently report on regulatory compliance. Mobile workers gain the same benefits using their phone or tablet. For the utility companies, getting this kind of information in an actionable format used to take months and now it can be just a matter of days.

With Google Maps Engine we’re at the forefront of the vegetation management and compliance markets, helping our utilities customers stay ahead of the weeds.

Posted by Heman Khanna, Software Engineer, Google Apps for Business

More than ever, people are bringing their own mobile phones and tablets to work. This "bring your own device" (BYOD) trend appeals to companies that want their employees to be productive on the go, with devices they enjoy using. As an admin, your role in a BYOD environment is to make sure users keep their mobile devices secure.

Comprehensive mobile device management is included with Google Apps for Business, Government and Education. Organizations large and small can manage smartphones and tablets - including Android and iOS - right from the Google Apps Admin console, with no need for special hardware or software.

Today we’re adding new Android device management features based on top requests from our customers.

1. Selective wipe - Remove Google Apps account data without wiping a user’s entire device. 
2. SD card wipe - During a full device wipe, wipe SD cards in addition to the internal memory.
3. Device Policy app - Ensure that security policies are enforced across all devices by requiring the latest version of the Device Policy app. 
4. Wi-Fi configuration - Enter wi-fi settings in the Admin console once -- and they'll be automatically pushed out to all managed Android devices.

Android users can stay connected on the go with mobile apps like Gmail, Drive and Hangouts. Admins can manage their domain with the new mobile Admin app. And admins can let employees bring their own devices to work while keeping those devices secure and saving their employees time with Google Apps device management.

To learn more about these mobile device management features, visit our Help Center or start managing devices right away by visiting your Admin console at admin.google.com.

Posted by Jeremy Heath, Network Manager, Sutton and East Surrey Water

Editor's note: They power our homes and supply clean water - utility companies fulfill our most basic needs. This week we're showcasing the Utilities Industry and the ways they’re relying on Google Maps for Business to improve operations and keep the lights on. Today’s guest blogger is Jeremy Heath from Sutton and East Surrey Water.

At Sutton and East Surrey Water (S&ESW), we supply water to almost 700,000 customers each year, stretching more than 2,000 miles. To manage such infrastructure for our day-to-day operations, quickly assigning and tracking jobs in the field is a top priority. Like many utility companies, we’ve relied heavily on paper-based work orders to manage customer service calls and repairs, a process that added extra work hours for our employees. Then we discovered Google Maps Coordinate.

Introducing Maps Coordinate to S&ESW’s meter fitting and repair teams allowed us to improve productivity and cut costs. Before every team would spend an hour at the end of the day filling out paperwork. Today, we can use the Google Maps Coordinate smartphone app to record data and build reports on a daily basis. Replacing our paper-based workflow with Maps Coordinate has resulted in a 17% increase in operational efficiency and an overall return on investment (ROI) of 500% based on time and cost savings.

Using the same technology as Google Maps, the Coordinate app provides our dispatchers and repair teams with a unified view of past and present job details. Our employees in the field can share their location, manage jobs and record data directly in the app. And because it incorporates the easy-to-use Google Maps interface and rich set of mobile features, we can provide our employees with a tool that is simple and familiar, minimizing training requirements.
Without the need for complex configurations, adopting Coordinate’s web and mobile app was simple and easy to do for our employees. Since we were able to run Maps Coordinate on our existing smartphone network and back-end technology, we deployed the mobile and web-based apps across S&ESW within weeks. This helped us to further reduce development time and costs.

Integrating Google Maps has changed the way we communicate and operate our business. Its allowed us to achieve an impressive ROI and save thousands of dollars in printing costs alone. Above all, we’re meeting demands for better quality service and providing the clean water that our customers depend on everyday.

Posted by Bryan Friehauf, product line leader-software solutions for GE’s Digital Energy business

Editor's note: They power our homes and supply clean water - utility companies fulfill our most basic needs. This week we're showcasing the Utilities Industry and the ways they’re relying on Google Maps for Business to improve operations and keep the lights on. Today’s guest blogger is Bryan Friehauf from GE.

Electric companies are responsible for providing safe, reliable energy to thousands of households. At GE’s Digital Energy business, we know our utility customers have a big job to do and are constantly looking for efficient ways they can meet growing energy demands.

To help our clients improve mission-critical operations, we’ve developed a suite of applications for the utility industry. GE’s Smallworld™ technology brings users smarter ways to plan and design networks, manage jobs in the field and visualize assets using Google Maps. With access to Google’s mapping tools, we’re giving our customers location-based technology that is fully customized for their operations and easy for their employees to use.

By integrating the Google Maps API, GE’s Smallworld-powered Distribution and Outage Management Systems can display location-based information on a Google Map. With a GE device in-hand, a utility worker can see infrastructure that’s down in real-time and quickly respond to the situation. This gives our utility customers a portable solution for gaining information on-the-go.
In addition to having instant, mobile insights, our Smallworld applications give users access to data visualization on a map that is familiar and accurate. Teams in the field can use features like Google Street View, helping them more efficiently locate assets that are hard to uncover, such as transmission lines, or a repair job.

From planning electric, gas and water distribution systems to designing telecommunications networks, having the right tools to visualize and manage complex infrastructure is critical for today’s utility industry. But with Google Maps integrated as part of our applications, we’re making it a little easier.

Posted by Pascale Bernal, CIO of Gaz réseau Distribution France (GrDF)

Editor's note: They power our homes and supply clean water - utility companies fulfill our most basic needs. This week we're showcasing the Utilities Industry and the ways they’re relying on Google Maps for Business to improve operations and keep the lights on. Today's guest blogger is Pascale Bernal, CIO of Gaz réseau Distribution France (GrDF). 

The GrDF natural gas pipeline is 194,600 kilometers (120,900 miles) long. In other words, it’s almost five times longer than the circumference of the earth. Google Maps for Business has made it possible for us at GrDF to manage every detail of that network and build on top of it.

In less than six months, we used Google Maps for Business, including Google Maps Engine and Google Earth, to import and organize more than 18 million data points about our pipeline. Google’s map solutions helped us create Gazm@ps Raccordabilité, an online platform that better serves our customers, technicians and partners.

Gazm@ps helps us run more efficiently by providing our sales, marketing and technical teams with continuously updated views of streets and municipalities served by GrDF. Each day, more than 1,000 employees access customer locations, geographic coordinates, Google Maps Street View, and municipality information through the familiar Google Maps interface. Our natural gas technicians use Google Earth’s 3D maps in Gazm@ps to plan installation and service work before they go out into the field. We also use Google Maps for Business to combine our geographic information system and customer relationship management systems inside Gazm@ps. With one click our salespeople can instantly see anything they need to know about a potential customer’s property, including location, coordinates and Street View. This costs 60 percent less than our previous customer relationship management system.


Prospective customers use Gazm@ps when they visit our customer website and enter their address to instantly find out if they are eligible for GrDF service. Each eligible customer is connected with a salesperson who can access relevant information, including a Street View of the service location and details about the municipality they live in. Since we launched Gazm@ps in July 2012, our user base has grown by 30 percent per quarter and the site now accounts for 10 percent of GrDF’s overall site traffic.

We’re also using Google Maps for Business to create Gazm@ps System, an external site that will help heating and plumbing service providers, home builders and local authorities access our mapping data. Using Google Maps to share this information is much easier than the expansive spreadsheets we used before. We’re also developing Gazm@ps Zio, a tool for infrastructure operators that verifies mapping data the partners send to the government for its national database of power distribution, sewerage and telecommunications systems in France.

We serve more than three-quarters of the French population while managing vast amounts of infrastructure, so having accurate, easily accessible data about our pipelines and our customers is essential. While we connect all the pipes underground, we use Google Maps for Business to help us better connect with our new and old customers above the ground.

Posted by Tarun Bhatnagar, Director, Google Maps for Business

Editor's note: They power our homes and supply clean water - utility companies fulfill our most basic needs. This week we're showcasing the Utilities Industry and the ways they’re relying on Google Maps for Business to improve operations and keep the lights on. 

Utility companies have a lot of information and assets to manage. From water to electric power, demand for clean, reliable energy is at an all-time high. This puts even more pressure on the industry to find the best solution for improving operations, whether it's integrating simple asset management, investing in visualization tools or integrating real-time communications with customers.

Google Maps for Business brings the power of Google Maps and Google Earth to an organization improving decision making, optimizing operations and creating engaging applications. Its scalable, familiar technology offers a diverse set of map applications, APIs and cloud-enabled tools that are fully customizable. When applied to utilities companies, Google’s enterprise mapping solutions can let organizations see their data layered on a Google Map and securely share this information with employees, key stakeholders and the public.

This week you’ll hear from several leaders in the utilities space who are using maps to solve industry challenges. By adopting Google Maps for Business, these companies are changing the way they manage jobs, streamline and consolidate processes and better engage with their customers. You’ll hear stories from companies around the globe who have opted for easy-to-use mapping technologies as a way to optimize operations.

Check back here this week and learn more about how today’s utilities are realizing the benefits of Google Maps for Business.

Posted by Ryan Falor, Product Manager, Google Groups

(Cross-post noted on the Gmail Blog)

With Google Groups, you can manage a mailing list, coordinate with your team, and find experts who share your interests. Over the last year we have been working on improving the experience and adding new features while keeping our old version running.

Today we’re retiring the old version and excited to be bringing the new Google Groups to everyone. If you haven’t tried Groups in a while you’ll notice improved options for managing your groups and long time users may be surprised by all the features we have added along the way.

One of the recently improved features is the ability to create an inbox that allows you to collaboratively share, distribute and track responsibilities with others. Imagine you and a few co-workers are organizing an event for your global team and want a single email address to coordinate with vendors, attendees, and speakers. Members of the group can work together to manage email, assign items to each other, and mark items resolved. This can be a great feature for teams seeking a really simple way to get things done without sharing passwords or losing track.
Additionally, there are several new moderation tools to make managing your forum easier and faster. For example, you can now use canned responses in forums and use streamlined options to make moderating forum posts easier. And if you are on the go, you can browse and moderate your groups with our mobile website.

You can learn more about the new Google Groups in the help center.

Posted by Daniel Shemtob, owner and founder of The Lime Truck

Editor's note: In honor of National Small Business Week, we'll be sharing stories about small businesses that have gone Google. Our guest blogger today is Daniel Shemtob, owner and founder of The Lime Truck, a Los Angeles-based food truck that serves new American cuisine. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

My passion for food started before my seventh birthday, when I taught myself how to make mushroom and olive Passover Matzo pizzas. Over a decade and many pizzas later, I decided to make food my career: I opened a food truck, The Lime Truck, in 2010, and won the Food Network’s “The Great Food Truck Race” in 2011, just a year later. We’ve been moving full speed ahead ever since.


I love running a food truck company, but it’s also a chaotic undertaking. We employ more than 25 people, dish out at least six menu items, and make stops at more than 30 different locations in the Los Angeles area each week. Organization is key and having the proper lines of communication is essential. I moved the company to Google Apps in June of 2011 primarily for dependable email, but we realized quickly that Calendar and Docs were just as indispensable.

Our shared Google calendar is our time management lifeblood. We have an invite for each truck that details each day’s menu and shift schedule, so everyone can see who’s working where, when they have to be there, and what they’re serving. Most importantly, we can update it at any time and know our whole team is looking at the right information. That way, if we run out of Crab Ceviche and have to switch in the Yum Yum Lamb Sandwich, we just update the shared calendar invite, and everyone knows what’s on the menu.

We got one of our partner farms to switch to Apps, and it’s made our communication with them significantly faster and easier. Now, we track everything in Docs - ingredients, quantities and delivery addresses - so all the the latest information is in one place. Getting notifications when someone adds a comment in a doc lets me and our farm know exactly where someone needs help or that something has changed.

Before using Google Apps, I felt more like a project manager than a business owner. Now, I get to focus on what I love - helping my company grow. I just opened my first restaurant, TLT Food, in Westwood and I'm writing a cookbook. Food is my life and The Lime Truck is my passion – well, that and our amazing Ahi Tuna Poke Nachos - and I wouldn’t be where I am without the help of Google Apps.

Posted by Kim Plahn, President, Dunn Bros. Coffee

Editor's note: In honor of National Small Business Week, we'll be sharing stories about small businesses that have gone Google. Today’s guest blogger is Kim Plahn, President of Dunn Bros. Coffee, a franchise based in Minnesota with over 80 coffee shops. See what other customers that have Gone Google have to say.

When Ed and Dan Dunn started Dunn Bros. Coffee in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1987, they refused to open just another coffee shop. They would be different -- their high-quality craft roasts would be as popular as the community of fans that flocked to them. Like the legendary Eugene, Oregon coffee houses that inspired them, Ed and Dan sought to foster the connection between customers through their shared appreciation of exceptional coffees, fresh roasted in the store every day. As CEO of Dunn Bros., I’ve made sure our blends change while that core value stays the same.

Kim Plahn, CEO, Dunn Bros. Coffee

Dunn Bros. Coffee has grown to over 80 locations in eight states since we opened our first shop. But that growth wasn’t always easy: until a few years ago, we were bogged down by the limitations and costs of our servers and legacy hardware. We needed a new IT system that was more cost-efficient and would let us focus on scaling our business.

Since we don’t have a dedicated IT department, we turned to our partner, Agosto, to help us find a better way for our corporate team and dozens of franchisees to communicate, coordinate and operate easily, whenever and wherever we were. They told us we needed Google Apps for Business, and it didn’t take us long to agree.

All the tools available to us as part of the Google Apps suite make partnering with our Support Center staff and franchisees a breeze. We use Groups to encourage discussion between our store owners, who have in turn transformed it into a forum for sharing best practices, troubleshooting and brainstorming. Sites lets us share our recipes, roasting profiles, training documents and marketing plans all in one place, so our employees don’t have to search through dozens of emails to find the latest version of the document they need. We have a shared Calendar with our weekly calls, new coffee releases, and promotions, so everyone’s in the know and on time.

We can’t imagine a day without Google Apps, and neither can our franchise owners. All we need is a cup of Dunn Bros. coffee to get us started in the morning, and the rest falls into place.

Posted by Janet Yoon, Project Manager, Google Emerging Markets, The Philippines

In the last few years, educators in The Philippines have moved to provide their students with technology that will prepare them to thrive in their future jobs. A major part of this initiative was the entire Department of Education for the Philippines moving to Google Apps for Education, a cloud-based suite of applications that let teachers and students communicate and collaborate across the classrooms and campuses of the archipelago. Since last September, The Department of Education (DepEd) has already moved 5,000 schools, 200 divisions and 600,000 staff to Google’s services. On top of that the Commission of Higher Education and the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority have also made the switch to Google Apps.

This week institutions of higher learning in the Philippines are joining the move to the cloud. At the launch of the “Schools Gone Google” program yesterday, The University of the Philippines (UP) and 15 other schools, such as University of San Jose Recoletos and Ateneo de Zamboanga, announced they too would be moving to Google Apps for Education. UP joins over 40 universities in the Philippines that have migrated to, or are in the process of going Google, including AMA Computer University (with 150,000 students and faculty), Ateneo de Manila University, De La Salle University and Silliman University.

We have been humbled to support this investment in the future of the Philippines and have been working with these institutions to help them get the most out of their experience. The “Schools Gone Google” program aims to provide Google Apps for Education to as many education institutions in the country as possible through the Google Apps Supporting Program (GASP). We’re looking forward to seeing where the cloud takes the education sector in the Philippines and continuing to provide students and teachers with the educational support and tools to flourish.