Posted by Nathaniel Ru, Co-Founder, Sweetgreen

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 Nathaniel Ru, Co-Founder of Sweetgreen, a retail food chain focused on making healthy eating easier. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Sweetgreen started as an idea I had with two of my friends, now my co-founders, while we were studying business at Georgetown University. We were frustrated by the lack of healthy eateries in Washington, D.C. and wanted to make eating healthy an affordable and easy option, especially on our undergrad budgets. We decided to make it happen ourselves, and launched our first Sweetgreen restaurant shortly after graduating in 2007.

We sell local and organic food, but we stand for a lifestyle: being healthy and environmentally conscious while creating great experiences around food. All of our Sweetgreen restaurants are designed with reclaimed materials, use biodegradable utensils, and compost waste. Our wooden tables and seats are made from pre-1980s bowling alleys, and our bowls, cutlery and cups are all 100% plant-based.


Google Apps allows us to be more than a traditional brick and mortar restaurant. We’re constantly evolving, changing and growing, and we realized early on that we needed our technology to be as flexible as the ingredients on our menu. We’re growing quickly - we’re opening two new markets this year - and we need technology that can grow with us.

We change our menu every month to highlight seasonal ingredients and keep things fresh. Our customers are generally curious about what they’re eating and what farm the ingredients come from, so we send talking points to the store managers. Google Sheets and Docs make this all happen for us. We have a running spreadsheet with the local ingredients and plan out each month in advance. The spreadsheet is then turned into a newsletter, and the great thing about Google is throughout that process every group has a chance to jump in and contribute. Once it’s completed, we send the newsletter out to our stores.

We also use Google Drive, which allows us to collaborate between departments. Marketing, Finance and HR can all look at one document at the same time, add their thoughts, and keep track of the changes each person makes along the way with revision history. It makes transparent communication easy, especially when we’re moving really fast (which is always).

Five years after the first seed was planted for this idea, we have more than 400 employees and 17 restaurants in four cities. At Sweetgreen, we believe in creating experiences that go beyond the transaction, and Google Apps has helped make that possible.

Posted by Mike Salguero, CEO and Co-Founder of CustomMade

Editor's note: Today's guest blogger is Mike Salguero, CEO and Co-Founder of CustomMade, an online platform for buying custom goods from local Makers. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

CustomMade is built on quality craftsmanship. We’re an online marketplace that matches our customers with a network of nearly 11,000 of the world’s best craftspeople - we call them Makers - to give them access to high-quality, custom-made goods. My co-founder, Seth Rosen, and I started CustomMade because we love working directly with Makers to build things that matter to people. We’ve been able to make it successful because we have tools that let us maintain the high metabolism that small companies require.

We started in 2009 as a two-person company working out of my one-bedroom apartment, and by being nimble and operating quickly, we’ve grown to 45 full-time employees working out of our headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Google Apps for Business is the agility engine that helped us get there. It’s been the backbone of our communication and collaboration, letting us focus on getting work done rather than how we get it done - a crucial distinction for a small business.

Google Apps helps us smooth out the rough edges of running a small business, like onboarding employees. Teaching new hires about the business and culture is inherently difficult, but since most of our hires use Gmail on a daily basis, we don’t have to spend as much time teaching them how to use our technology. By giving them the tools they’re already familiar with, they’re able to adapt quickly and jump right into their jobs without worrying about how to set up a meeting with Calendar or share a Doc with their teammates.

With thousands of Makers selling tens of thousands of different products, we’re a very numbers-focused company. Google Apps makes tracking goals across all of our teams incredibly simple. Our sales, concierge, and product teams all work towards weekly goals, such as site traffic and requests for custom items, which they update constantly in a shared Google Sheet. This gives me visibility into each team’s performance and metrics, and I know the data I’m looking at is always up-to-date. We also use Docs and Sheets for operational tasks, like storing creative briefs and tracking licenses, contractors, addresses and funnel conversions.

Google+ Hangouts are our secret productivity weapon. We work with 15 freelancers and consultants, including 10 in India, one in the UK and the rest across the US. Hangouts make it feel like they’re right here in the office with us. Our team hosts five to 10 Hangouts each day - they’ve become an integral part of our day-to-day routine.

Moving fast and staying nimble is essential to CustomMade’s success, and Google Apps keeps us on our toes and forging ahead. Instead of spending time worrying about IT problems or outdated Excel worksheets, we focus on connecting Makers like Marv Beloff with bow tie enthusiasts and helping bring dreams of custom wood tables to life.

Posted by Mark Prestipino, CEO at Envista

Editor's note: Our guest blogger this week is Mark Prestipino, Envista CEO. Looking for ways to provide enhanced map capabilities to its utilities customers, Envista talks about integrating Google Maps Engine into its IRIS technology. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

With miles and miles of underground pipeline and transmission lines to manage, the ability for our utility customers to quickly locate and keep track of their assets is vital to running a successful operation. Thanks to Google Maps Engine, we've been able to create a powerful map platform that makes this all possible.

IRIS, our newest solution for the utility industry, is a cloud-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technology that allows an organization to develop custom map applications without the need for complex coding. Incorporating an organization’s business and location data into a single platform, IRIS apps provides the location-relevant information needed to efficiently maintain critical assets in the field.


The secret behind our IRIS technology is Google Maps Engine, which gives our customers three key benefits:

• Scale: Founded on Google’s core infrastructure, Google Maps Engine provides IRIS users with unrivaled scale and reliability. This enables the information and image-processing power needed to store, manage and publish maps with layers and layers of high resolution geospatial data. 
• Familiarity: IRIS apps users can see their data visualized on a Google Map. This simple user interface -- combined with the incredible, up-to-date imagery of Google Earth -- lets people build their own map applications and understand what they see on a map with very little training. 
• Mobility: With pipeline and asset management primarily taking place in the field, access to map data anytime, anywhere is critical. The Google Maps Engine cloud platform allows IRIS maps to be used in almost any environment -- mobile, remote or offline.

Maps are an invaluable tool for the utilities industry -- and so is scalable, simple-to-use technology. When it comes to providing our utilities customers with a map solution they can rely on, Google Maps Engine is the clear choice for us.

Posted by Tristan Dobbs, Managing Director of IT for Classic Cinemas

Editor's note: Our guest blogger this week is Tristan Dobbs, Technical Services Team Guru for Classic Cinemas, a family-owned movie theater chain based in Downers Grove, IL. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.


Classic Cinemas has been bringing families, couples, kids and film enthusiasts together in front of the silver screen for more than thirty years – around the time Christopher Reeve donned the famous tights and cape for “Superman” in 1978. Over the years, we’ve grown to 500 employees and over 13 movie theaters in and around Chicago. We’ve also outgrown the film technology we started with. After years of using 35-millimeter film projection systems, we upgraded to 4K Ultra High-Def Digital Projectors. We’re a true 21st century cinema.

When I joined the IT department in 2012, it was clear we were in need of another upgrade – this time, from our Microsoft Exchange server. We had ongoing issues with downtime that cost the company a lot of money and the IT team a lot of time. We looked into cloud-based systems and Google Apps was exactly what we needed – the 99.9 percent uptime sold us.

We switched to Google Apps with the help of Cloud Sherpas in August 2012 and couldn’t have been in better hands. At no point did we ever have a question that they couldn't answer. Data migration? They walked us through each step along the way and made sure we didn't lose a single megabyte. Change management? They ran webinars for all of our employees about moving from Outlook to Gmail, Word to Docs and Folders to Labels. They made switching feel seamless.

We created an employee intranet on Google Sites that houses all our necessary documents – employee schedules, upcoming screenings, movie schedules and parking lists, among others. This means everything important sits in one single place, and everyone on the team can access it. No more wild goose chases over email and no more bothering groups of people with email barrages.

Google Apps also helped us bring our maintenance request system up to date. Before we switched over, people wrote out their problems in a Word doc and emailed them to us, then we printed them out, tracked them on a bulletin board, and took them down one by one as the maintenance team went on-site to handle each issue. With Cloud Sherpas’ help, we built a Google Form on our intranet, so now everyone submits their requests online. The Form automatically feeds into a spreadsheet, which alerts the maintenance team that work needs to be done. We’ve been able to dramatically reduce administration time and boost our productivity to a new level. We now have complete history and statistics capabilities, as well as the ability to identify trends and be more proactive.

Just as digital technology helped us move into the modern era of film, Google Apps has helped us adapt to the future of business. It’s been a smash hit for us - just like “Superman” was back in the day.

Posted by Jim Nonn, CIO at Egan Company

Editor's note: Our guest blogger is Jim Nonn, CIO at Egan Company, a Brooklyn Park, MN-based commercial contractor. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Egan Construction is an approximately 800-person construction company in Minnesota currently working on the Central Corridor Light Rail, the biggest construction project in the history of the North Star State. The Light Rail will stretch 11 miles through five major areas of interest, and is expected to be done in 2014. As CIO of Egan, I want to provide my organization with technology that helps connect the job site with the main office, the tools and parts warehouses and our executives.

A year ago, we were looking for a solution that would avoid having a fleet of expensive, quickly outdated and slow Microsoft Windows laptops that constantly break or need replacing. I’ve heard stories from other construction firms that Monday mornings were like the movie Groundhog Day, with the IT team tackling the same four-foot high stack of malware-infected laptops over and over while work ground to a halt. I didn’t want to experience that.

After surveying the market, we decided to move to Chromebooks for our 140-person foreman staff. They’re lightweight, turn on and off in an instant, and provide easy access to business apps that we use every day.

Chromebooks also integrate nicely with Google Apps, which we use to run our business in the field. The workers love the Chromebooks because they aren’t afraid to use them on the job. If one does get damaged, we can swap it out for another one in a matter of minutes, with zero time wasted or data lost. Also, we’ve saved so much in moving forward with Chromebooks instead of Windows laptops - about $200 per machine.

Rolling out Chromebooks to our staff was extremely easy. We have two people and an intern in our IT support department, and I wanted the intern to manage the deployment process. I figured he’d only get so far, then my IT guys would have to jump in, but he did it all on his own. If I would have rolled out the same number of Windows laptops, I would have had to hire additional staff just to manage that. And with Chromebooks, we haven’t been plagued with ongoing support requests.

The scale of the light rail project really brings to light how valuable the Chromebooks have become to our organization. At Egan, we take pride in the fact that we’re building something that so many Minnesotans will use. The light rail will bring people together that didn’t have an easy way to connect previously. I like to think Chromebooks have done the same for Egan.

Posted by Peter Hutterer, Content Manager, Österreichische Post AG

Editor's note: Our guest blogger this week is Peter Hutterer, Content Manager at Österreichische Post AG, Austria’s leading logistics and postal service provider.

Österreichische Post AG is the leading logistics and postal service provider in Austria with about 20.000 employees. More than eight million Austrians trust us every day to deliver their letters, advertising materials and packages securely and quickly. As a stock market listed company, we make an important contribution towards maintaining and securing the communication and logistics infrastructure in Austria. We always look to the latest technologies to further enhance the quality of our service, and are convinced that good service is only possible if our customers, employees and partners can find what they are looking for quickly and easily.

That is why we chose to implement the Google Search Appliance 7.0. The recently launched project – first implementing GSA for our website and online shop pages and later using it for our intranet – is expected to be completed by mid-2013. Then, 9,000 employees across Austria will use the GSA, which will allow them to locate internal information and documents, share these with the entire workforce and improve our internal networking.

The personalized intranet search experience enabled by the GSA is another key factor that played a role in the decision to go with Google’s Enterprise Search solution. With the GSA, we can also search within the organisation for experts in different subject areas, and thus tap into the “wisdom of many” across all our locations to execute our work. In addition, while up to now we've been using various search engines within the company, the move to one and intuitive GSA will lower our IT spend.

However, GSA doesn’t just give our employees a fast and easy search experience that yields the most relevant results; our customers also benefit from our implementation of the Google search solution. They are used to finding everything they need extremely fast by searching on Google.at. And now the GSA will give them the same experience on our website, making it easier to navigate the jungle of our diverse service portfolio, including information about package rates, mail forwarding services, e-letters, store locations and more. The GSA helps people find the right information faster and delivers the most relevant results for their queries. What’s more, with the GSA, our IT staff can better analyze customer search queries, which, in turn, lets them design the website to be more user-friendly. But that’s not the end of it: in the future, we will use GSA to better calibrate our service offers to make sure we meet and exceed the needs of our customers.

See what other businesses that use the Google Search Appliance have to say.

Posted by Lisa Davis, CIO, Georgetown University 

Editors note: Today's guest blogger is Lisa Davis, Chief Information Officer at Georgetown University. 

Going Google was an opportunity to reimagine technology’s role at Georgetown and unify our campus by moving to a powerful cloud computing solution that worked no matter where our users were or what device they used. We had calendars, mail, and file storage and sharing tools before, but they were fragmented and in dire need of replacement. Our email system was twelve years old, only allowed 250MB per user, and calendars were not universally adopted or user-friendly. When our 16,000 students started using Google Apps for Education back in 2009, we instantly noticed some dramatic benefits. So we’ve decided to complete the migration by moving everyone over to the same platform. By summer’s end our 20,000 students, staff, and faculty members won’t have to worry about hitting email quota limits, guessing what teammates’ calendars look like, or being frustrated by the technology around them.

While modernizing our technology was one motivation, we also wanted to invest in a long-term vision of moving our university into the 21st century. Doing this in-house would have amounted to a tremendous resource commitment both now and in the future, for a relatively small boost in the end user experience. Google’s tools were an affordable way to provide a sustainable infrastructure for our faculty and staff. 

The process of moving our users to Google was fast, painless, and will ultimately make our users more productive. We were really impressed with our community’s reception to the switch. It helped that about 30% of our staff and faculty already had personal Gmail accounts, but during our outreach events, even people without that exposure were excited to migrate. We did several demonstration events to answer questions, and provided hands on support for those who needed it. 

Working on projects and tasks has become much less painful after switching to Google Apps because instead of dozens of versions attached to dozens of emails, we can all work on one copy at the same time through Google Docs. The Corp, the student-run corporation at Georgetown, uses Google Apps to coordinate schedules, plan events, and manage other aspects of the business. With our 4,000 faculty and staff now using Google Apps as well, we are excited to see the innovative uses the whole campus will find for collaboration, enhancing the education experience, and becoming more productive across campus. 

- Over 93% of Calgarians use the Internet.

- Only 18% of traffic came directly to our home page - 55% of people came from search engines, primarily Google.

- Citizens want to interact with us online, instead of spending time on the phone or in-person - 60% noted better convenience, such as not having to drive to a city facility. Others noted speed and 24/7 availability.

- More than 40% of Calgary citizens said they wanted more services online.



Our public-facing web presence, which has 16,000 pages of content, across 28 business units, with a wide variety of applications, functionality, documents and information for our citizens, handled 9 million visits in 2010. The major drawback was that the information was difficult to find.



Forty-seven percent of Calgary citizens surveyed reported that the incumbent search engine on Calgary.ca did not work well. It required knowledge of city acronyms and terminology, something many citizens, understandably, don’t possess. Our content and our site was cluttered, out-of-date, and difficult to weed through. We struggled with maintenance as individual business units continued to add to our already packed site.



In response, we formed the Web Leadership and Renewal Program in 2007. Among the chief goals was to provide citizens with easy-to-use search and better access to city programs and services. This led us to create an entirely new, search-centric site which was first concepted and tested in November 2009, and finally launched today.



The Google Search Appliance (GSA) is the cornerstone of this new site and our efforts to improve access to services and programs and increase government efficiency. It is linked to a content management system, ESRI for interactive mapping, and to websites such as calgarymayor.ca to provide a holistic, integrated search experience.



Now, citizens can search for everything from YouTube videos on saving water to animal services and permit information, and they can easily serve themselves by finding answers to everyday questions. Calgary.ca is just as easy and effective as searching on Google.com. The search-based concept lets Calgarians type in common keywords or phrases to find what they need, without specific knowledge of city acronyms or terminology.



We can conserve phone and in-person resources for more complex requests and apply valuable government resources more strategically. Citizens benefit from the convenience of finding most of what they need online. They can avoid unnecessary driving and parking fees and have 24/7 access.



Certain search features of the GSA were very important to us. Topping the list were best bets, synonyms, and spelling correction. Related searches and content rating were also vital, as well as the ability to easily promote the relevance of a search result based on its popularity. The Google Search Appliance provided all of these capabilities, plus it had a reputation for being very easy to install and maintain.



Citizens are rapidly adopting search now. Early metrics show that only 4% of visits to the old calgary.ca used the internal search engine. In comparison, 65% of visitors to the new calgary.ca used the the GSA, and the search results page is the second most visited page after the home page.



Ultimately, our job is to provide city services as efficiently as possible. We strive to do more with less. By making the right content easy to retrieve, citizens get the convenience they seek—and we can reduce unnecessary overhead and increase the value and variety of our services and programs.

Since its founding in 1881 by visionary relief coordinator Clara Barton, the American Red Cross has been the nation's premier non-profit emergency response organization. Today, in addition to domestic disaster relief, the American Red Cross offers compassionate services, from help for the needy to educational programs.