Tag Archives: Google Apps for Work

Looking back at Marie Curie’s radical discovery: How the Mother of Modern Physics might have used Google Apps

Posted by Erzsi Sousa, Product Marketing Manager

(Cross-posted on the Google for Work Blog.)

Editor's note: We’re jumping into our Delorean to explore how some of our favorite historical figures might have worked with Google Apps. Today, in honor of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we imagine how Marie Curie’s discovery of radioactivity, which won a Nobel Prize and revolutionized modern cancer treatment, might have played out in a Google Apps universe.

Consider what Marie Curie accomplished in the face of adversity and with few resources. Despite being refused a place at the French Academy of Sciences and almost denied her first Nobel Prize for being a woman, she continued her work undeterred, securing a second Nobel Prize in Chemistry and developing methods for treating cancer with radiation therapy. To celebrate her, we explore how she might have worked in a different time — by using some of the tools we use today.

The radioactivity in Curie’s lab was so strong that it harmed her health — archivists today still use protective gear to handle her papers. Instead of carrying these radioactive documents, Curie could have kept them in the cloud with Google Drive, allowing for easy access whenever and wherever she needed them, without risking her well-being. Drive’s organization features could also have helped her organize her files and notes in folders, easily distinguishable by color and category.
Her easy access to files would also be secure with Drive’s built-in security stack. And to prevent anyone from stealing her discoveries, Marie Curie could have conveniently protected all of her files using the Security Key for 2-step verification along with password protection. This would ensure that she was the only one who had complete access to all of her work (she may even have thrown on a screen protector to shield her work from spying eyes on the train). To share the right documents with only the right people, Marie could have used sharing controls to give different groups access to relevant research.

With the voice typing feature in Google Docs that supports 40 languages, she could have dictated her numerous notes in her native Polish without stopping her research. She could have then used Google Translate to convert her papers into other languages, so that the wider global science community could see what she was working on.


Curie could have used Gmail’s Priority Inbox to create labels and organize her messages related to research, teaching and fundraising. Each label filters emails into its own section in her inbox, making it easy to notice new emails when they arrive. She might have created a “Physicist Community” label for correspondences with Pierre and other influential scientists like Henri Becquerel and Albert Einstein. She might also have used a “Fundraising” label to organize messages from members of the press and government who funded her research, including U.S. presidents Warren G. Harding and Herbert Hoover.
Even Marie Curie could have been the victim of seemingly neverending reply-all email threads. With Gmail, she could have avoided these distractions by muting the message so responses are automatically archived. For example, Curie could have muted the message from her Sorbonne colleagues who abused “reply all” in RSVP emails or broke out into a physics debate, letting her focus on important emails only.
With Google Hangouts, Curie could have broadcast her physics classes to a global audience using Hangouts on Air. As the first woman professor at the Sorbonne in Paris, making her classes available online could have given more women access to lectures from a renowned physicist during a time when many universities wouldn’t admit female students. She might even have started her own grassroots movement, using live video chats to bring advanced science into the homes, coffee shops, underground classrooms, etc., of whoever chose to tune in.

Marie Curie accomplished award-winning work, even without access to the most advanced lab technology of the time. It’s humbling to consider that despite any limitations she encountered, Curie’s pioneering work in radioactivity remains so relevant today as we continue to make advances in not just physics and chemistry but also engineering, biology and medicine, including cancer research, on the basis of her discoveries.

Looking back at Marie Curie’s radical discovery: How the Mother of Modern Physics might have used Google Apps

Posted by Erzsi Sousa, Product Marketing Manager

Editor's note: We’re jumping into our Delorean to explore how some of our favorite historical figures might have worked with Google Apps. Today, in honor of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we imagine how Marie Curie’s discovery of radioactivity, which won a Nobel Prize and revolutionized modern cancer treatment, might have played out in a Google Apps universe.

Consider what Marie Curie accomplished in the face of adversity and with few resources. Despite being refused a place at the French Academy of Sciences and almost denied her first Nobel Prize for being a woman, she continued her work undeterred, securing a second Nobel Prize in Chemistry and developing methods for treating cancer with radiation therapy. To celebrate her, we explore how she might have worked in a different time — by using some of the tools we use today.

The radioactivity in Curie’s lab was so strong that it harmed her health — archivists today still use protective gear to handle her papers. Instead of carrying these radioactive documents, Curie could have kept them in the cloud with Google Drive, allowing for easy access whenever and wherever she needed them, without risking her well-being. Drive’s organization features could also have helped her organize her files and notes in folders, easily distinguishable by color and category.

Her easy access to files would also be secure with Drive’s built-in security stack. And to prevent anyone from stealing her discoveries, Marie Curie could have conveniently protected all of her files using the Security Key for 2-step verification along with password protection. This would ensure that she was the only one who had complete access to all of her work (she may even have thrown on a screen protector to shield her work from spying eyes on the train). To share the right documents with only the right people, Marie could have used sharing controls to give different groups access to relevant research.

With the voice typing feature in Google Docs that supports 40 languages, she could have dictated her numerous notes in her native Polish without stopping her research. She could have then used Google Translate to convert her papers into other languages, so that the global science community could see what she was working on.


Curie could have used Gmail’s Priority Inbox to create labels and organize her messages related to research, teaching and fundraising. Each label filters emails into its own section in her inbox, making it easy to notice new emails when they arrive. She might have created a “Physicist Community” label for correspondences with Pierre and other influential scientists like Henri Becquerel and Albert Einstein. She might also have used a “Fundraising” label to organize messages from members of the press and government who funded her research, including U.S. presidents Warren G. Harding and Herbert Hoover.

Even Marie Curie could have been the victim of seemingly neverending reply-all email threads. With Gmail, she could have avoided these distractions by muting the message so responses are automatically archived. For example, Curie could have muted the message from her Sorbonne colleagues who abused “reply all” in RSVP emails or broke out into a physics debate, letting her focus on important emails only.

With Google Hangouts, Curie could have broadcast her physics classes to a global audience using Hangouts on Air. As the first woman professor at the Sorbonne in Paris, making her classes available online could have given more women access to lectures from a renowned physicist during a time when many universities wouldn’t admit female students. She might even have started her own grassroots movement, using live video chats to bring advanced science into the homes, coffee shops, underground classrooms, etc., of whoever chose to tune in.

Marie Curie accomplished award-winning work, even without access to the most advanced lab technology of the time. It’s humbling to consider that despite any limitations she encountered, Curie’s pioneering work in radioactivity remains so relevant today as we continue to make advances in not just physics and chemistry but also engineering, biology and medicine, including cancer research, on the basis of her discoveries.

Launching Salesforce Lightning with a global community, a live event and Hangouts

Posted by Sarah Franklin, VP of Admin Marketing, Salesforce

Editor's note: Today we hear from Sarah Franklin, VP of Admin Marketing at Salesforce, the leader in enterprise cloud computing and the sixth largest software company in the world. See how the company brought its community together and announced a recent product release using Google Hangouts. 

It’s not every day that we have the opportunity to bring together people from 119 locations across the globe. The Salesforce marketing team put our heads together to decide how to announce Salesforce Lightning — a metadata-driven platform that is highly customizable, and empowers people to work faster and smarter — differently than previous product releases. We decided to focus on what’s always been at the center of our company: our customers. For us, the solution was simple and collaborative. We chose Google Hangouts to introduce Lightning, so we could share this exciting announcement with our community of developers and users in 20 countries via live video.

We chose Hangouts because we wanted to show our community that we’re committed to using innovative tools. We’d already been using Hangouts in a variety of ways, such as connecting with colleagues in different offices (and sending each other emojis) and hosting webinars with our admin community, so we knew it was a great choice to bring many people together from around the world.

Whether it was 7 a.m. or midnight in their local timezone, people gathered at universities, community centers and local pubs to join the product launch. The day after our announcement, we also hosted a second private Hangout with over 200 people across Europe, the Middle East and Africa in case they missed the launch due to timing. These events created a deeper sense of camaraderie among an already strong community. We sent our community leaders a webcam and tripod, so it was easy and cost effective to get a group together since all they needed was an internet connection. Hangouts gave us the opportunity to encourage dialogue between admins, developers, partners and users in a fun and immediate way.

Many companies measure the success of a product launch based on the press they receive or the number of website visits they get in a single day. We flipped that. Our goal was how could we involve our community and put our customers at the center of this launch. We defined success by the number of customers we involved. More than 19,000 people from our community, from Bangalore to Tokyo to New York City to Paris and hundreds of places in between, tuned in to join the launch.

Our executives were floored when they saw people from all around the world on the screen. We overcame the language barrier by having translators onsite in some of the non-English speaking countries to make sure everyone felt included. We created a personal connection with customers who spoke different languages and brought together engineers, users, executives and the marketing team who have a common passion for our customers’ success.

By focusing on forward-looking technology, we hosted an event that made more than 19,000 people feel like they were in the same room. And with our core focus on connecting companies to their customers, we couldn't think of a better way to introduce our products to the world than with Hangouts.

Going Google just got easier

Posted by Rich Rao, Head of global sales, Google Apps for Work

Word processing and spreadsheet programs are the mainstay of office productivity software. Let’s face it: without a great way to write memos, crunch numbers and flesh out ideas, you can’t get any meaningful work done. For a long time, productivity software was a bit like a midsized sedan: sturdy, dependable, loaded with features and a little dull.

Nine years ago with Google Docs, we saw an opportunity to build something that would enable people to work together in new ways. Fast forward to today and Docs is a productivity powerhouse. Now’s a great time to give it a fresh look if you want to take advantage of its unmatched collaboration tools. We’ve made it easy by covering most of the features some claim to be missing and adding nifty new stuff like Voice Typing and Explore. All in all, we think you'll find it’s the perfect tool for work.

In fact, we're so confident that Docs has all the features you need, without the ones you don't, that we're making it even easier to give it a try. If you're worried about switching to Docs because you still have an enterprise agreement (EA) with another provider, we'll cover the fees of Google Apps until your contract runs out. We'll even chip in on some of the deployment costs and set you up for success with one of our Google for Work Partners.

Once your current EA is up, we offer a simple contract with no traps or gotchas. For a lot of businesses, it’s cheaper, too. Our estimates suggest that businesses with basic EAs and no dependencies can potentially unlock savings of up to 70% by switching to Google Apps for Work.

There’s a new way of working, and we think that once you see Docs and the rest of Google Apps for Work in action, you’ll never want to go back. We want to help you experience it now, even if you’re locked into an existing EA. If you’re in the US or Canada, click here now to learn more and see how Google can work for you. If you’re outside the US or Canada, stay tuned – we’re actively working to bring this offer to our global markets as well.

Custom email, apps and more for Google Domains

Last year we introduced Google Domains in the U.S. to make it easy for your business to get online with a domain name and website. We wanted to make finding, buying and managing domains for your business simple, and we partnered with best-in-class website builders like Blogger, Shopify, Squarespace, Weebly and Wix to help you create your site — no technical experience required.

Since then, we have helped people register hundreds of thousands of domain names and create tens of thousands of websites, many of whom are businesses like yours looking to build and expand their online presence. Through your continued feedback, today we’re introducing upgrades to improve the Google Domains experience by adding:

  • Custom email addresses - create an email address like, you@yourdomain or sales@yourdomain via Google Apps for Work.
  • Over 90 new domain name endings - purchase domains with new endings like, .life, .world, .business, .cool, .pizza, .gifts, and .football (here’s the new full list).
  • Domain ownership transfer - allows you to always make sure the right person is managing the right domains (learn more here).

Custom email addresses are a key part of building your online identity. Email addresses such as you@yourdomain help you establish credibility when you communicate with customers. Setting up a custom email address with Google Domains is an optional service for $5/month/user, and with that you’ll also get the full Google Apps for Work productivity suite. Google Apps for Work includes helpful business tools like video meetings, shared calendars, online document editing and 30 GB of file storage.
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New domain name endings offer more choice and flexibility as you pick a memorable address for your business website.  New endings are continuously opening up to the web, like .legal, .accountant and .services, and can help you create a name that matches who you are and what you do. Check out some of the people on Google Domains already using these new domain name endings: sublimation.kitchen, smilesnap.social, thecooler.ninja, and marcblair.photography.
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It’s our mission to help your business easily get online and succeed with a domain name, and we want to make sure we continue to offer you the best tools and experience possible in our beta.  So, if you have any input, questions or feedback, please don’t be shy!

See you online at www.google.com/domains.

Posted by Ben Fried, VP and CIO