App to School!

This week our Google Apps for Education team is attending the Campus Technology Conference in Boston. This 4-day gathering focuses on emerging technologies in higher education, both in the classroom and campus-wide. As anyone in the education field can attest, the business of teaching -- and learning -- is changing very quickly. We're continually impressed and excited by all of the innovation happening in this space. In response to a new educational ecosystem, we're also delighted and proud to see two of our Apps Education customers, Arizona State University and Abilene Christian University, recognized for their implementation of cutting-edge technologies designed to serve the next generation of students.

Google Apps Education Edition is gaining momentum: more than a million users worldwide have adopted it to embrace the possibilities of technology in education. Our great customers are at the core of our mission, which is why we're in Boston to help kick off the new school year with a few of the thousands of schools who have chosen Apps. We are also welcoming more than one dozen new universities of all sizes, from all over the country as customers of Google Apps. While at the conference, we also announced our latest endeavor to showcase some of the universities deploying Google Apps. This September, we will head "App to School" by embarking on a cross-country road trip (in a retrofitted, eco-friendly bus, of course). We're looking forward to meeting students to talk about Google Apps and hear how they're using our productivity tools on and off campus.

Since launching Apps Education Edition, we've had great conversations with CIOs at leading universities about the benefits of bringing Google technology on campus. The "App to School" road trip extends that conversation to where the rubber meets the road (pun intended): to what used to be called "end users" -- the people who actually use our technology every day. One of the things we've found to be true is that we should always focus on the individual. We hope to learn how the folks we meet are using our products in cool ways that we might not have imagined. Learn more about Google Apps Education Edition.

We look forward to seeing some of you on the bus. You can also check out our road trip route.

Posted by Jeff Keltner, Business Development Manager, Google Apps

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Get started with Google Docs templates

Posted by Joyce Sohn, Product Marketing Manager

The Google Docs Team has launched a new template gallery for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Now, whether you need business cards, letterhead, or employee time sheets, you don't have to start from a blank slate. Find the template that's right for you and start customizing it with your information – you'll save time on formatting and formulas.

To access the template gallery:

1. Log in to your Google Apps account at http://docs.google.com/a/example.com (Be sure to replace 'example.com' with your actual domain name.)
2. Click 'New'
3. Select 'From template...'

The gallery includes hundreds of templates – some designed by Google and others developed by Avery Dennison, Vertex42.com, TemplateZone, and Visa Business. So before you get started on your next project, take a look at what's available in the Google Docs template gallery!

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Spreadsheet gadgets: free collaborative spreadsheets for your web products or services

Posted by Jonathan Rochelle, Product Manager, Google Spreadsheets

If your company, organization or customers are in love with spreadsheets (might be more like a love-hate thing), and you want to more easily integrate other data, services or logic into your spreadsheets, you're in luck. If you're a web software developer looking for simple, collaborative data on the web, you're also in luck.

Using Google spreadsheet gadgets, your programs (html/javascript/flash) can be easily integrated with spreadsheets - either within the spreadsheet itself, or embedded in any web page, where it can access data from a google spreadsheet. Building great re-usable products using this technology is simple - simple enough to make this platform viable even for one-off, custom capabilities. Of course, if the organization you're targeting is a Google Apps user, they'll even be able to use your cool new gadget on their Start Page.

So if you need a specialized, spreadsheet-friendly capability - a special report format, a lookup to an external data source, a custom visualization or chart, a specialized calculation - take a look at spreadsheet gadgets. You might get some ideas of what's possible by looking at some currently available gadgets made by google and other developers.

For example, here's a Gantt Chart Gadget (powered by ViewPath) that’s reading data from a spreadsheet. You or a collaborator could update the underlying spreadsheet - and wham, the Gantt chart is updated. You could even feed that spreadsheet from a form...



Just to prove you can create practically anything, here's a Pile of Money Gadget embedded directly in a spreadsheet to give a vivid representation of cost trade-offs:


...the possiblities are endless. To get started, check out the documentation.

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Taylor Woodrow Migrates 1,800 Users to Google Apps

Posted by Robert Whiteside, Head of UK and Ireland

Every day more than 3,000 businesses sign up for Google Apps and move to the cloud, and today we'd like to share one of those stories. Taylor Woodrow is a construction firm in the UK that recently migrated all of its 1,800 employees to Google Apps to introduce greater mobility and flexibility to the company's communications.

Rob Ramsay, the company's Director of IT, says that Google Apps offered the perfect package: “Many of our staff are highly mobile. The ability to provide them with access on the move to email, documents, spreadsheets, and everything else that comes with Google Apps will help increase productivity.”

Taylor Woodrow’s needs are not unique to its particular business. Rob could be talking about the needs of tens of thousands of other companies when he notes that “Our employees can now get in touch with their colleagues easily from whatever location they are working at. The mobility coupled with the speed of roll-out, the lack of requirement for a physical infrastructure and the speed of new product development is very beneficial.”

Finances also came into play in their decision to move to Google Apps. Taylor Woodrow estimates that they are saving approximately £1 million on infrastructure and support costs. The products are all hosted and managed by Google, which removed the need to install any software or hardware on site.

And since no construction company can build without worrying about safety and security, it makes sense that Taylor Woodrow is also deploying Google Message Discovery, which provides email security, content policy management, discovery, and archiving services to ensure that employee email is properly protected and retained.

We’re very happy that another large enterprise like Taylor Woodrow has decided to use Google Apps as a foundation of their business, and we’re excited to continue to help businesses of all sizes build their future in the cloud.

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