Category Archives: Google for Work Blog

Work is going Google

How we’re collaborating with Citrix to deliver cloud-based desktop apps

Businesses of all types are accelerating their transition to the cloud, and for many, desktop infrastructure and applications are part of this journey. Customers often tell us they want to be able to use their current desktop applications from any device and any place just as easily and securely as they can use G Suite.

That’s why today, we’re announcing a collaboration with Citrix to help deliver desktop applications running in a cloud-hosted environment.

Managing and delivering hosted desktop applications requires several pieces of technology: Google brings highly scalable and reliable infrastructure, a global network to reach customers and employees wherever they may be, and a team of security engineers who work to keep Google Cloud customers secure. Citrix brings the application management, backup and redundancy from XenApp, its desktop virtualization suite, and application delivery with Netscaler. Finally, Google Chromebooks and Android devices together with Citrix XenApp offer a highly secure, managed end-point that provide users a safe and user friendly experience on which to use applications.

All this requires close partnership and excellence in engineering. Google and Citrix have collaborated for years and we're expanding that relationship today in a few key ways:

  • Simplifying the path for customers to more securely transition to the cloud by bringing Citrix Cloud to Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

  • Bringing the application load balancing expertise of Netscaler to the world of containers via Netscaler CPX on GCP

  • Integrating Sharefile with G Suite to use Gmail and edit and store Google Docs natively.

  • Expanding use of secure devices with Citrix Receiver for Chrome and Android link

This collaboration helps address key challenges faced by enterprises moving to the cloud quickly and securely. Both Google and Citrix look forward to making our products work together and to delivering a great combined experience for our customers.

Source: Google Cloud


Announcing the winners of our Machine Learning Startup Competition

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On Wednesday, July 12, Google Cloud hosted the finals of its Machine Learning Startup Competition in San Francisco. Launched at Google Cloud Next ’17 with our sponsors Data Collective and Emergence Capital, the competition aimed to bring together the best early-stage startups implementing machine learning. According to Fei-Fei Li, Google Cloud Chief Scientist of AI/ML, “AI will change the way we live and work and it’s happening at a faster pace than most people think.” We received more than 350 applications from startups across the U.S. that are leveraging machine learning to improve healthcare, financial services, retail, IoT and many other sectors.

From this strong group, 10 finalists were selected to compete for investments and the “Built with Google” grand prize of $1 million GCP credits:

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At the event, finalists took the stage to share their technology and vision with our expert judges.

Finalists had just three minutes to pitch and three minutes of Q&A to convince the judges.  They also spoke to an audience of investors representing  over 40 of Silicon Valley’s top venture firms.

After careful deliberation and debate, judges selected the following winners:

Built with Google — Grand Prize Winner ($1M in GCP Credit) — PicnicHealth

PicnicHealth creates training data for precision medicine. By engaging patients directly they provide life sciences studies with complete, structured outcomes data for any patient, from any source. To date, PicnicHealth has collected and structured 500,000 records from 5,000 different health care facilities. Their current customers include 23andMe, the National Institute of Health, Stanford, Sanofi Genzyme, and Biogen. Already leveraging Google Container Engine (GKE) and BigQuery, they plan to use the $1M in GCP credit to scale their machine learning efforts on Cloud Machine Learning Engine, Cloud Vision API, and Genomics API.

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Congrats to the PicnicHealth Team

Built with Google Prize, Runner-Up ($500K in GCP Credit) - LiftIgniter

LiftIgniter is a machine learning personalization layer powering user interactions on every digital touchpoint. Built by the team behind YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, LiftIgniter runs their full stack on GCP. LiftIgniter’s customers include Vevo, Fandom, and Tableau.

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Adam Spector accepting LiftIgniter award

In addition, Data Collective and Emergence Capital selected two startups that are eligible to receive an investment of up to $500,000:

Data Collective Choice Winner — Brainspec

Emergence Capital Choice Winner — LiftIgniter

All remaining finalists will receive $200K in GCP credits and technical assistance from Google Cloud to support the next stages of their companies. We want to thank our sponsoring venture capital sponsors, DCVC and Emergence Capital, and our supporting sponsors A16Z, Greylock, KPCB, GV, NEA, Sequoia.

A special thanks to all the startups who traveled many miles and spent countless hours preparing to participate in the competition.

The competition is just one of the many ways Google is focusing on machine learning and startups. Gradient Ventures recently launched to fund early-stage startups focused on artificial intelligence.

For more information on the Google Cloud Startup Program, check out our website.

Source: Google Cloud


Nutanix and Google Cloud team up to simplify hybrid cloud

Today, we’re announcing a strategic partnership with Nutanix to help remove friction from hybrid cloud deployments for enterprises. We often hear from our customers that they’re looking for solutions to deploy workloads on premises and in the public cloud.

Benefits of a hybrid cloud approach include the ability to run applications and services, either as connected or disconnected, across clouds. Many customers are adopting hybrid cloud strategies so that their developer teams can release software quickly and target the best cloud environment for their application. However, applications that span both infrastructures can introduce challenges. Examples include difficulty migrating workloads such as dev-testing that need portability and managing across different virtualization and infrastructure environments.

Instead of taking a single approach to these challenges, we prefer to collaborate with partners and meet customers where they are. We're working with Nutanix on several initiatives, including:

  • Easing hybrid operations by automating provisioning and lifecycle management of applications across Nutanix and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) using the Nutanix Calm solution. This provides a single control plane to enable workload management across a hybrid cloud environment.

  • Bringing Nutanix Xi Cloud Services to GCP. This new hybrid cloud offering will let enterprise customers leverage services such as Disaster Recovery to effortlessly extend their on-premise datacenter environments into the cloud.

  • Enabling Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS support for hybrid Kubernetes environments running Google Container Engine in the cloud and a Kubernetes cluster on Nutanix on-premises. Through this, customers will be able to deploy portable application blueprints that target both an on-premises Nutanix footprint as well as GCP.

In addition, we’re also collaborating on IoT edge computing use-cases. For example, customers training TensorFlow machine learning models in the cloud can run them on the edge on Nutanix and analyze the processed data on GCP.

We’re excited about this partnership as it addresses some of the key challenges faced by enterprises running hybrid clouds. Both Google and Nutanix are looking forward to making our products work together and to the experience we'll deliver together for our customers.

Source: Google Cloud


How STEM tools on Chromebooks turn students into makers and inventors

Editor's note: Over the last year, we’ve introduced new ways for students to develop important future skills with Chromebook tools, including active listening and creativity. Yesterday at ISTE we announced our latest bundles in this series, curated in collaboration with educators. In this post, we dive into the STEM tools on Chromebooks bundle, designed to help students become makers and inventors. Follow our updates on Twitter, and if you’re at ISTE in San Antonio, visit us at booth #1718 to learn more and demo these tools for yourself.

Students everywhere are exploring important concepts in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), with a level of sophistication that’s rising every year. They’re also developing skills like problem solving and collaboration that they’ll need in higher education and, eventually, in their careers, while being exposed to real-world opportunities to be makers.

“If we want a nation where our future leaders, neighbors and workers have the ability to understand and solve some of the complex challenges of today and tomorrow, building students’ skills, content knowledge and fluency in STEM fields is essential,” the Office of Innovation & Improvement, U.S. Department of Education noted in a statement in January, 2017.

To help school districts provide more STEM opportunities to students, we’re now offering a bundle of STEM tools on Chromebooks, designed to to help students become inventors and makers. These tools are available at a special discounted price and may be purchased alongside Chromebooks or independently from U.S. Chromebooks resellers.

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Let’s take a deeper look at the tools in the STEM bundle.

The Dremel 3D40 3D Printer was developed by Bosch, a company that has made reliable tools for builders and hobbyists for over 80 years. About the size of a microwave oven, a 3D printer “prints” solid objects, layer by layer. The 3D40 3D Printer supports design tools such as Tinkercad and BlocksCAD, that help students create three-dimensional versions of just about anything they can dream up.

Michael Miller is a K-5 technology teacher and high-school computer science teacher for Otsego Public Schools in Otsego, MI. “Students are being exposed to technology that’s now used in a lot of fields. Medical, dental, the food industry—they’re all using 3D printers,” he says. “It will definitely make students more future ready.”

Miller uses a 3D40 3D Printer with Chromebooks in his elementary and high school classes. Depending on the class, students use the tools to create anything from a light saber to a miniature model of a Wright brothers’ airplane. From components for robots to mouthpieces for flutes, his students bring a range of personal interests to the design and printing process.

It brings what they imagine in their head into their lives. Michael Miller Technology teacher, Otsego Public School

Although students often work on individual projects, Miller encourages them to solve problems together as a team. “If they need help, I expect them to look to their neighbor first before coming come to me.” Miller also sees how 3D printing can be a way to engage female students, who are often underrepresented in STEM fields today, as well as students who are less likely to speak up in class. “I had a high school student—a very reserved student—and it helped him feel more ownership in the class. It gave him a greater sense of belonging when he could make something.”

The littleBits Code Kit combines block-based visual coding, powered by Google’s Blockly, with programmable physical “bits” that are electronic color-coded building blocks that snap together with magnets. Using the Code Kit, which is designed to be accessible to a wide range of grades, students have fun building and coding games, all while learning the foundations of computer science. The kit also comes with lessons, video tutorials, getting started guides and other resources for educators and students.

Rob Troke, a computer science teacher at James Denman Middle School in San Francisco recently took a sixth-grade class to I/O Youth at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, CA. There, his students used the littleBits Code Kit to program light and sound patterns on a physical Bit. They quickly learned about programming logic such as loops and variables.

“I was happy to see how engaged the kids were,” he says. “It maintained their interest the entire hour, whereas with other apps and tools, I’ve seen the novelty wear off after 15 minutes.”

For some students, having a physical object linked to a coding activity helps bring additional context to computer science. It also brings electrical and mechanical engineering, often overlooked subjects in K-12, into the classroom. “Having things to play with, to figure out what they are, what they do, is extremely helpful… it’s like robotics, but without the robot,” Troke says.

Dremel’s 3D40 3D printer and littleBits Code Kit, along with free programs created by Google—like CS First and Applied Digital Skills—help bring STEM concepts to life in creative and tangible ways. To learn more about these and other educational tools, please visit g.co/educhromebookapps, check out the websites, or contact your school’s Chromebook reseller. And follow @GoogleForEdu on Twitter to see all that's launching at ISTE.

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Source: Google Cloud


As G Suite gains traction in the enterprise, G Suite’s Gmail and consumer Gmail to more closely align

Google’s G Suite business is gaining enormous traction among enterprise users. G Suite usage has more than doubled in the past year among large business customers. Today, there are more than 3 million paying companies that use G Suite.   

G Suite’s Gmail is already not used as input for ads personalization, and Google has decided to follow suit later this year in our free consumer Gmail service. Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change. This decision brings Gmail ads in line with how we personalize ads for other Google products. Ads shown are based on users’ settings. Users can change those settings at any time, including disabling ads personalization. G Suite will continue to be ad free.

The value of Gmail is tremendous, both for G Suite users and for users of our free consumer Gmail service. Gmail is the world’s preeminent email provider with more than 1.2 billion users. No other email service protects its users from spam, hacking, and phishing as successfully as Gmail. By indicating possible email responses, Gmail features like Smart Reply make emailing easier, faster and more efficient. Gmail add-ons will enable features like payments and invoicing directly within Gmail, further revolutionizing what can be accomplished in email.

G Suite customers and free consumer Gmail users can remain confident that Google will keep privacy and security paramount as we continue to innovate. As ever, users can control the information they share with Google at myaccount.google.com.

Source: Google Cloud


The SAP-Google data custodian partnership

In March of this year, SAP and Google partnered to advance innovation, agility and global reach for enterprises adopting the public cloud. As part of our collaborative development and solutions integration, we are working on a data custodian model that allows customers with specific needs to manage sensitive data on a public cloud platform.

To fully benefit from cloud computing, enterprises need to store and process their sensitive data on public cloud platforms, while complying with regulations and managing unauthorized access risks. Enterprises often need to address these requirements as part of a broader governance, risk and compliance solution for the public cloud. 

The data custodian model

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) already offers robust security capabilities and extensive compliance with public cloud security and privacy standards. To further increase customer trust, the data custodian model allows SAP, a trusted enterprise solution provider, to act as the custodian of the customer’s data on GCP. This provides greater transparency and separation of controls.

With the data custodian model, we envision enterprises defining a set of controls about how they want to handle their data on GCP, then relying on SAP, as the data custodian, to continuously monitor compliance to these controls and manage exceptions as needed. A current focus is on data access transparency for GCP services that store or process customer data. In the coming months, SAP and Google will continue to work together to enable custodian oversight and control over handling customer data on GCP. 

What are the benefits for customers?

Enterprises can benefit from the data custodian model in several ways. They can leverage SAP’s deep knowledge of GCP’s security approach, controls and workflows instead of building that expertise in-house. With SAP as a data custodian, customers have additional confidence that their data is accessed and stored in compliance with their defined data sovereignty, privacy and protection policies.

In addition, with this partnership, SAP and Google are extending and integrating their product portfolios, including GCP and G Suite to provide even greater value to customers. Look to SAP and Google to continue to collaborate on solutions like the data custodian model to enable the next generation of digital services.

Source: Google Cloud


How The New York Times used the Google Sheets API to report congressional votes in real time

There’s a common phrase among reporters: “The news never sleeps.” This is why many news outlets rely on cloud-based productivity tools like Google Docs and Sheets to share information, check facts and collaborate in real time. And The New York Times is no exception.

In May 2017, the U.S. House of Representatives voted on a new health care law affecting millions of Americans. To report the news as fast as possible, The Times’ editorial team used Sheets to tally and display House votes in real time on NYTimes.com.


Engaging voters with the Sheets API

“People want to feel connected to the decisions their legislators make as soon as they make them,” said Tom Giratikanon,  a graphics editor at The Times. But rules in the House chamber make reporting on how every representative votes in real time difficult. Photography is restricted on the assembly floor, and there is a delay until all votes are displayed on the House website—a process that can sometimes take up to an hour.

To get around this lag, Giratikanon’s team used the Google Sheets API. The editorial team dispatched reporters to the chamber where they entered votes into a Google Sheet as they were shown on the vote boards. The sheet then auto-populated NYTimes.com using the Sheets API integration.

Says Giratikanon: “It’s easy to feel like decisions are veiled in the political process. Technology is a powerful way to bridge that gap. Sharing news immediately empowers our readers.”

It’s easy to feel like decisions are veiled in the political process. Technology is a powerful way to bridge that gap. Tom Giratikanon Graphics Editor, The New York Times
House votes

How it worked

To prep, Giratikanon tested the Sheets integration ahead of the House vote. He created a sheet listing the names of legislators in advance, so his team could avoid typos when entering data on the day of the vote. Next, he set up the Sheet to include qualifiers. A simple “Y” or “N” indicated “yes” and “no” votes.

After a few practice rounds, Giratikanon’s team realized they could add even more qualifiers to better inform readers–like flagging outlier votes and reporting on votes by party (i.e., Democrats vs. Republicans). The editorial team researched how each of the 431 legislators were expected to vote in advance. They created a rule in Sheets to automatically highlight surprises. If a legislator went against the grain, the sheet highlighted the cell in yellow and the editorial team fact-checked the original vote to reflect this in the article. Giratikanon also set up a rule to note votes by party.

As a result, The Times, which has roughly 2 million digital-only subscribers, beat the House website, reporting the new healthcare bill results and informing readers who were eager to follow how their legislator voted. 

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Try G Suite APIs today 

You can use Sheets and other G Suite products to help speed up real-time reporting, no matter the industry. Get started using the Sheets API today or check out other G Suite APIs, like the Slides API, Gmail API or Calendar API.

Source: Google Cloud


How to use BeyondCorp to ditch your VPN, improve security and go to the cloud

The BeyondCorp security engineering team at Google just announced their fourth research paper: Migrating to BeyondCorp: Maintaining Productivity While Improving Security.

For those that aren’t familiar with it, BeyondCorp is a security approach used by Google that allows employees to work from anywhere, quickly and easily.

This is easier said than done. In 2010, we undertook a massive project to rethink how to provide employees with secure remote access to applications: We moved away from our corporate VPN, and introduced BeyondCorp, a zero-trust network security model.

With BeyondCorp, we no longer have a binary access model, where you are either inside the whole corporate network, with all the access that allows, or outside and completely locked out of applications. Our new approach provides a better, more convenient, and less risky way: access to individual services as you need them, based on who you are and what machine you're using.

While BeyondCorp makes applications easily accessible from anywhere, it also improves security in other ways. Over the course of the migration we’ve discovered services that we thought were long dead, because this change required taking a detailed look at our traffic, our dependencies and our employee usage patterns. It’s also allowed us to scale globally while reducing our attack surface, and increased our ability to provide access when appropriate.

This March, we began offering elements of BeyondCorp to other organizations, in the form of Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP). Already, Cloud IAP has helped Google Cloud customers put fine-grained access controls on their critical internal services and applications based on region, time, role or group. More importantly, Cloud IAP removes obstacles to getting work done. Authorized employees get in, wherever they are, and do their job, or Cloud IAP blocks them, because they aren’t supposed to have access.

BeyondCorp: a work in progress

At Google, we’ve been on our BeyondCorp journey for several years, gradually shifting more of our traffic and services away from a segmented, privileged corporate network and onto the public internet and cloud.

You may be wondering how to move to a similar model. What do you need to do? What's the potential impact on your company and your employees?  The latest installment of our research paper describes how we kept people productive at Google while shifting our security model. It covers:

  • The process of migrating individuals to our non-privileged network

  • How we supported the effort through our TechStop infrastructure (local and remote service desks)

  • How to handle edge cases

  • Diagnostic tools to troubleshoot access denials

  • The importance of self-service documentation

  • Why to run a publicity campaign about the project.

In the end, we moved to this new system successfully by breaking up the work into discrete chunks, parallelizing as much as possible, and focusing on the end-user experience. To learn more about the BeyondCorp approach and determine whether it’s the right fit for your business, read all four public research papers:

  1. BeyondCorp: A New Approach to Enterprise Security

  2. BeyondCorp: Design to Deployment at Google

  3. Beyond Corp: The Access Proxy

  4. Migrating to BeyondCorp: Maintaining Productivity While Improving Security

And to discuss whether BeyondCorp and Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy are right for your business, give us a shout—we’d love to hear from you.

Source: Google Cloud


Track projects with G Suite and Asana

Technology has transformed the way businesses operate—your teams likely do not look like they did 10 years ago. Now, companies rely on a mobile workforce and require productivity tools to help them collaborate no matter the location, and more importantly, without holding up work.

Businesses are using Asana  and G Suite to collaborate and manage projects from start to finish. Asana is a project management tool that helps teams plan, manage and track work, and is a part of the Recommended for G Suite program. With these two tools, your organization can:

  • Create tasks in Asana directly from Gmail
  • Add files directly from Google Drive to tasks in Asana
  • Keep track of deadlines by syncing your tasks in Asana with Google Calendar
  • Build custom reports in Google Sheets to analyze project data in Asana

How OutSystems uses G Suite and Asana to drive marketing launches

OutSystems is a low-code application platform that uses Asana and G Suite to manage digital marketing and advertising projects to reach its more than 7 million users. With 30 marketers across the globe, it’s important that OutSystems uses tools to streamline reviews and track project status. 

With more than 90,000 apps built on their platform, OutSystems relies on Asana to prioritize projects and create templates for marketing launches. G Suite apps are built in, which means OutSystems employees can access their favorite productivity tools, like Google Drive, Docs and Sheets, in one place. 

Teams use Drive to attach files to tasks in Asana, Docs to edit web content, and Sheets to analyze project data. OutSystems marketers also work with external freelancers, and G Suite’s permission sharing settings make it easy to protect proprietary information.

You can get started using Asana and G Suite at your business. Sign up for this free webinar on Tuesday, June 27, 2017 at 9 a.m. PT / 12 p.m. ET.

Source: Google Cloud


Sell smarter with ProsperWorks for G Suite

If you want to scale your business, you’ve likely invested in a CRM solution to manage sales workflows and speed up data-driven decision-making - but, CRMs have become a clunky epicenter for team collaboration. You need actionable data insights to drive deals forward, which often require a CRM tool that integrates with the apps you use every day. ProsperWorks for G Suite can help:

With ProsperWorks for G Suite, it’s simple to integrate your CRM with the tools you already use, like Gmail, Calendar and Docs. You can:

  • Access everything in one place—forget toggling back and forth between your CRM and G Suite applications
  • Automatically sync Google Contacts in ProsperWorks
  • View and track sales activity in real-time directly within Gmail
  • Export data from Sheets to ProsperWorks and get insights instantly without manual data entry
  • Create custom dashboards, reports and charts using the Google Sheets integration in the ProsperWorks CRM Custom Report Builder

Why UrbanVolt chose ProsperWorks for G Suite

UrbanVolt, an energy-saving firm based in Dublin, Ireland, installs LED lighting for businesses at no upfront cost (“lighting as a service”). This leasing model allowed the company to scale rapidly, but it also meant managing a higher volume of inbound leads. “We needed a solution that would allow us to scale our inbounds and deal flow with ease,” says Edel Kennedy, Head of Marketing at UrbanVolt.

The UrbanVolt team opted for ProsperWorks for its intuitive design and its seamless integration with G Suite. “ProsperWorks was the clear choice for our team. There was no learning curve since it worked with G Suite, where we spend the majority of our day,” says Kennedy.

Now, UrbanVolt employees save time because they don’t have to toggle between their CRM and spreadsheets to analyze data. Instead, they use G Suite tools like Sheets Add-on for ProsperWorks to view opportunities at various stages in the sales cycle, and create advanced dashboards, reports, charts and graphs collaboratively.

If you want to get started using ProsperWorks for G Suite at your business, sign up for a free webinar on Wednesday, June 21, 2017 at 9 a.m. PT / 12 p.m. ET.

Source: Google Cloud