City of Canton, GA, on saving money, time and headaches with Google Apps

JAMES HILLIARD: Hello there, everybody My
name is James Hilliard.
I am with TechRepublic, and I want to welcome you to today's
webcast. And thank you for taking time out of
your day to join us.
Really good turn out for this event, which is where we're
going to really learn how the City of Canton, Georgia, saved
taxpayers' money with Google Apps.
Today's webcast is being sponsored by Google.
And in just a moment, I'm going to be turning the call
over to one of the marketing managers within Google Apps.
And that is Serena Satyasai.
And she's going to kind of get us started.
And she's also going to be introducing us to
our featured speaker.
I do want to remind you.
You saw as you were getting in here to the presentation that
we really do encourage questions from you in the
audience today.
Or comments, so you can type those into the lower portion
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Make sure you click that blue Ask bubble.
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You can also download a PDF of today's presentation if you
wish to follow along that way.
With some of the housekeeping out of the way, then what I do
want to do is bring Serena on here.
And we're going to kind of quickly walk through the
agenda, then we'll introduce our featured speaker and guest
today, and then roll on with the presentation.
So Serena, welcome, and let me hand the floor to you.
SERENA SATYASAI: Thank you so much, James.
And thank you all for spending this time of your morning or
your afternoon with us to learn a little bit more about
Google Apps.
We're extremely pleased to have Camille Wehs from the
City of Canton, Georgia, to talk to us about her
experience in selecting and deploying and
managing Google Apps.
This webinar is part of a series of webinars where we're
featuring customers talking about their experiences.
And as James has said, we do encourage you to ask many
questions as you want, since Camille is available live to
answer them.
The agenda for today is to have Camille talk about her
experience and then, at the end, we'll give you a quick
overview of what's included in Google Apps Premier Edition.
And we will have time for my live Q&A at the end.
OK.
Well, Thanks very much to Camille Wehs, who is the IT
director of the City of Canton, Georgia.
The City of Canton actually is one of our earlier adopters of
Google Apps, and as such, they've really blazed a trail
in this new thing called cloud computing.
You can see here a photo that we took from their website.
One of the things that we are extremely pleased about is
that we have a lot of cities and local and county
governments, looking to Google Apps to help power their city
infrastructure.
And we're extremely grateful to Camille just spending this
time talking to us about her experiences.
As a note for all of our participants on this webinar,
we will also send out on a written case study that
Camilla wrote with us at the end of this webinar.

CAMILLE WEHS: You ready for me, Serena?
SERENA SATYASAI: Oh yes, and let me turn
over to Camille now.
CAMILLE WEHS: James, can we go ahead?
Thank you.
Good afternoon, everybody.
My name is Camille Wehs, with the City of Canton.
And what we're going to do is go--
James, if we can go to the next slide real quick?

We're located about 30 miles north of Atlanta.
In 2005, we were the fifth fastest
growing city in the area.
Also, the city provides fire, police, water treatment,
zoning/planning services at seven different locations.
I have roughly 185 employees, and I am the only person in
the IT department.
And I also run the GIS department.
So my time is kind of limited.
When I took over this position, I will go over with
you my struggles and the problems that we had.
If we can go on to the next--

When I took over this position, we had several email
problems. Mobility was just nonexistent, to say the least.
Spam was absolutely horrible.
There was more spam than decent email
coming into the system.
The cost?
I was spending probably close to $10,000 a year plus on spam
filtering and just the general email solution.
And the paper just kept piling up.
And then after I thought about how to relieve this problem, I
started looking around.
And at the time, when I took over, archiving wasn't
necessarily high on their list. And that's when I got in
touch with Postini.
And that when I got in touch with Google.
And I looked at a few other options.
Microsoft was the key one, and then I took a look at Google.
And what I found with Google is that--
James, if we can go to the next?--
it was affordable.
There is no hardware to go in.
We had messaging, tons of collaboration options, and
there was really no up front investment, and it took most
of my work, and placed it outside of me.
So basically all I had to do is set it up.
And on the set up part, it didn't take long at all.
And James, do we have any questions?
JAMES HILLIARD: Well, what I wanted to do is just jump in
here for a moment, Camille, and kind of talk a little bit
about the problems and how you again chose your solution.
You took over, and again, it sounds like it was really a
one person shop.
It was the Camille Show in the IT department.
Were a lot of these problems because of neglect from
previous administrators?
Was it just there was a lot of growth going on in the city at
that time and you weren't able to keep up with the needs?
And how were some of those problems really brought to
your attention as kind of the new person on the block?
CAMILLE WEHS: It was a combination of all the above.
A lot of people prefer one platform over another.
Some people prefer a Linux-based solution, and some
people prefer a Windoww-based solution.
And if you go to a Linux-based solution, you're either a
lover or hater of Linux.
And you're either very functional in it or you're
very OK at it.
And I wasn't a fan of Linux, and I'm typically not.
However, I found that even with the best of Linux that we
were using, their support was nonexistent.
And the mobility part, they couldn't access the email
outside of the network.
They basically had to be in-house to access it.
And it was probably going down on average once a day.
So trying to bring that back out and make sure it stayed up
through the night just became one headache after another.
JAMES HILLIARD: And again, trying to provide services
then to the constituency, you can imagine individuals
feeling maybe not served by their government, and again,
whether someone's coming to us from the government, and I've
looked through our list of attendees here.
We do have a lot of government focus people, but there are
other people in organizations and anyone that's suffering
with that, unreliable email, things going down like that,
you're not able to serve your end users.
And obviously, that's a huge problem.
Once you realize this was a major task and you needed to
do something different, you stated you were really the
person in IT.
Did you get a team around you?
Did you pick some other people from other departments to kind
of help you look at some of these solutions?
Or really was it your own doing?
CAMILLE WEHS: It was my own doing.
When I started looking around and things internally, a lot
of people never really said that they were getting just
inundated with spam.
And I asked them.
you really get that much?
And they're on average probably
close to 100 spam daily.
And that's when I first walked in the door.
And at that point, a lot of people--
we don't need to see that.
And the spam people of America, they're pretty good
at their job.
And at that point, I kind of stepped out and said, all
right, this is going to go.
And it probably took me--
and Serena, correct me if I'm wrong, but maybe a month from
start-up to the time everything was decided.
And there was really just, hands down, no
question about it.
I did have a few people go g-mail?
Are you serious?
But once they saw the functionality of it, and
actually saw that just from a performance standpoint and a
mobility standpoint, it didn't take them any time at all to
get used to it, or to accept the idea.
JAMES HILLIARD: Steven is one of our users
that's on with us today.
Camille, just to get clarified, how many users do
you really have on your network what?
What did you have at this time when you
realized you had a problem?
Has that number changed much from where we are today?
CAMILLE WEHS: For people who use email, I have 136 active
email accounts.
And of those active email accounts, probably close to 20
of them are also mobile accounts with Blackberries and
Motorola Qs and phones of that nature.
JAMES HILLIARD: We'll move on here in a moment.
One last thing I kind of want to get from you at this point,
Camille, is do you have any sense of how much time you
were spending, with all the problems you had before moving
over to Google Apps, how much time you were spending out of
your day, focusing on the mundane email problems and
those little irritants, as opposed to really working on
IT projects that could move the City of Canton forward?
CAMILLE WEHS: On average, probably close to an hour and
a half to two hours a day.
JAMES HILLIARD: Wow.
CAMILLE WEHS: That would spread out to 10:00 at night,
11:00 at night.
I'd wake up, check the server, make sure all services were
still running, make sure the email service was running,
make sure the spam filter was still running.
and
JAMES HILLIARD: Now I'm assuming a lot of that time
has been recouped, so that you could devote to your--
CAMILLE WEHS: All of that time has been recouped.
JAMES HILLIARD: Excellent.
Well, let's do this.
I do want to move forward here.
And there are already a couple questions I've seen in here
we'll address up to you later, in terms of again, some of the
cost savings.
You've just said you've recouped a lot of time.
Let's look at some of these other things that you got back
in terms of the cost savings.
You also said you had no scalability was a big problem
that you had before with Google Apps, and that became a
good option for you.
CAMILLE WEHS: Absolutely.
Specifically, with the email, Calendar, and Chat.
The Chat has become quite the popular feature, because
instead of people picking up the phone, interrupting a
conference call, barging into a meeting, they can simply
chat with the person.
Are you available?
So and so's here to see you.
Do you have a minute?
And it cuts back on a lot of the mundane tasks.
You know, hey, Camille, I don't know how to do this.
Or hey, can you help me with that?
And a simple yes or no, and problem solved.
And the Calendar has also been a big feature.
Because now throughout the organization, people are
starting to share their Calendars.
They know when somebody's busy.
They don't have to call them.
They don't have to send six emails on a reply.
They can automatically know what's going on.

JAMES HILLIARD: Looking at the enterprise quality too, again,
you said 137 plus email users, but you feel that you are
getting a real good enterprise quality service now for--
I'd categorize you easily as a small type business, in
comparison to--
trying to draw that connection to other users that are online
with us today.
CAMILLE WEHS: Absolutely.
What I've done is I've kind of in a sense marketed this to my
users as think of it as a portable office.
Instead of staying here till 8:00 at night, simply upload
your spreadsheet, upload your Word document into their
Google docs, take it home, go ahead and cook dinner, go
ahead and pay your bills, and work on it at home.
So it's saved a lot of time and labor in-house, as well as
stress I would have to add to that as well.
JAMES HILLIARD: And it's one of those things that I know a
lot of people are looking for today.
It's kind of that balance between work and life.
And if you find yourself at the office longer and longer
because you're having technology problems, the
network is not working for you as an employee, that's adding
to your dissatisfaction with work, quality of life, the
balance of life and work.
It sounds like you're able to provide some of that by moving
towards Google Apps from what you had in-house.
I want to move on and talk a little bit about the
implementation and training here.
Why don't you give us the overview here.
And I probably have a question or two about that as you're
going through that.
CAMILLE WEHS: Not a problem.
Basically, there were four steps.
Confirm your domain, creature your accounts, migrate all
your email and turn it on.
And then you deploy your apps.
And it was literally that easy.
And when everyone walked in the next morning, I had
printed out simple instructions, their login
information, how to get there, and I probably had, since
we've switched over to this, maybe three calls on I don't
know how to do this.
And otherwise, they used the Help within Google Apps and
the Mail and the Calendar features to find out their own
answers to their own problems. So their productivity levels
have raised, as well as being able to empower users to learn
things on their own.
JAMES HILLIARD: So in terms of training, then, because I'm
remembering back to some new systems that I got several
years ago when working for a large organization.
And we all got corralled down into those meeting rooms and
we did the two-hour long training, this is how you do
this and all this.
It doesn't sound like you had to do any of that.
CAMILLE WEHS: None of that.
JAMES HILLIARD: It was really that simple.
CAMILLE WEHS: Absolutely none.
I maybe had, out of all my user, three users that I had
to spend a few extra minutes with, and that was a
generation gap.
But overall, I had almost zero training time that I had to
invest into this.
JAMES HILLIARD: Raoul is on board with us today on the
webcast. Wants to know how many users you migrated over.
Was it all those 137 or so?
CAMILLE WEHS: 132.
JAMES HILLIARD: OK.
132.
So Raoul, thanks for that.
Definitely, keep your questions in here from
Charles, Andre.
We got Denise, Milton, Brian as well.
So we're going to try and continue to
pepper in some questions.
Obviously, we're going to use a good amount of time at the
end of the presentation for questions as well.
Training.
Let me ask what you needed to learn, Camille.
Was there a lot that you needed to learn in terms of
monitoring or getting any reports that you wanted?
What was your kind of get up to speed time frame?
CAMILLE WEHS: As far as monitoring and reports, I
really didn't have anything to get up to speed on, because
the interface so easy and so user-friendly, you didn't have
to read through a 500 page manual or call a tech support
that was guaranteed to call you back within 24 hours to
get the information you needed.

JAMES HILLIARD: Looking at our questions here, Denise, Lee,
and Nick all want to know what did you migrate from?
I guess we didn't actually name names.
CAMILLE WEHS: I was using Scalix.
JAMES HILLIARD: Scalix, OK.
CAMILLE WEHS: Linux-based.
JAMES HILLIARD: And again, you were mentioning it wasn't
something that you were a fan of.
CAMILLE WEHS: Nope.
JAMES HILLIARD: And so you went out there looking for
these other solutions, and Google Apps
is where you ended.
In talking for a moment about these Help
forums. I know some people--
it almost has kind of a Linux open source feel.
There's a lot of forums used in the open source community
to share answers with people.
Talk a minute about the Google Help forums. Did you use many
of the videos and the forums as resources?
Did your end users use a lot of those resources.
CAMILLE WEHS: Everyone of my end users used them probably
on a daily basis.
Especially now that they're getting more into the Google
Docs and creating docs and sharing docs.
They've really done well.
And I honestly feel that if you give the users a chance to
learn on their own, and make it easy for them, they learn
on their own and it makes them more productive.
JAMES HILLIARD: Well, let's move on here then, and get a
little more insight into what the users really were saying.
And did you do a formal kind of feedback?
Did you survey people after a period of time?
Or was this just kind of anecdotal and how people were
sharing how this new system was working for them?
CAMILLE WEHS: The first week I said a general walk through
with all the users in every building.
And I asked them how is it going?
Do you have any questions?
I had no questions.
Everybody was positive.
The only questions I headed was how did you get
rid of all the spam?
JAMES HILLIARD: Magic.
CAMILLE WEHS: Magic.
I just twinkled my nose.
But that was it.
I mean literally it was easy from start to go.
And I haven't had anything remotely
problematic with it since.
JAMES HILLIARD: Let's go back and we can talk about a few
more of these bullets if we need to, but I thought you had
said something in the realm of you were getting more spam
than actual legit email from most of your users.
I'm guessing that the average person gets anywhere between
30 and 100 emails a day for smaller organizations.
Obviously, I know folks out there, some of
you gonna say 100?
Hell, I get 400 a day.
But what were you getting?
100 plus spams per individual?
And then you got it down to what number in terms of spam
being under control.
CAMILLE WEHS: On average, the users were getting probably
close to 78% span inside their inbox daily.
Now they probably get maybe one a year.
JAMES HILLIARD: Wow.
1%?
CAMILLE WEHS: 1%.
JAMES HILLIARD: 1%.
That is a huge drop.
And just again, so much more time of
managing the email inbox.
I can remember systems I've been on in the past, where,
again, they were so clouded and junked up that it did take
so much time just to go through and delete everything.
Anything else that you want to share with us in terms of what
the user response was?
CAMILLE WEHS: Other than the fact that they absolutely
loved it and right now, I've created four internal sites
that they use.
And everybody's sharing docs.
I mean, I had users probably from the low 20s to the high
70s in age, and they all get it.
And they all use it.
And they're all just like this is just wonderful.
Why didn't we do this sooner?
JAMES HILLIARD: Excellent.
Hey, we are getting a ton of questions--
Jason, Kirk, Eugene, Nick, many others.
What I want to do here is give Camille a quick moment to do a
kind of wrap up for us here.
Then we are going to bring Serena back on from Google
Apps, share a little insight, again, get into some of the
technology.
That's going to be probably pretty brief.
Because we've got a lot of great questions here that
we're going to spend a majority of the
time talking about.
But let's go ahead and give you a closing moment or two
here, Camille, before we transition over to Serena.
CAMILLE WEHS: In closing, as you guys see on the screen,
between Google and Postini, it saved taxpayers thousands.
And it continues to save, based on just overall
productivity and time.
With everything browser-based, users have complete access
anywhere they're going.
It's a secure login.
I don't worry about the security.
I don't worry about having a backup
archive or manage anything.
It's pretty much taken care of for me.
So if you're looking for a solution, you guys should
seriously think about this.
And Serena?
JAMES HILLIARD: And what we'll do, Camille, is Camille's
definitely going to hang on board here.
We're going to talk with Serena for a few moments, Then
really open the floor up for the remainder of the
presentation.
So we can answer a lot of these questions that
ave been coming in.
So keep the questions coming in.
And Serena, with that, really let me
bring you back in board.
And I know there are some people that are kind of new to
Google Apps.
I want to give them a broad overview of really what it is,
how it works, the concept of cloud computing, and some of
those things as we move forward.
SERENA SATYASAI: OK.
Terrific.
Thanks so much Camille and James.
Let me try to keep my comments brief.
This is Serena again, so we can get back to Camille
answering your questions.
When Google built Google Apps, you know, we actually used
Google Apps ourselves to run our worldwide enterprise.
And we have found that it's really helped us transform the
way we do business.
And we hope that it does the same thing for our customers.
What we found is that employees become more
productive, because there's a return on
information, basically.
It's easier for employees to find and use the information
that they're getting.
And we also hope that we are doing things like saving time,
money, and headaches for people like Camille and other
IT admins, by off-loading a lot of the maintenance work
that might be put to better use on other activities.
And then finally, we use Google Apps ourselves, I said,
and so we are very focused on making sure that we have the
leading edge security and compliance
requirements built in there.
I actually come from the acquisition of a company
called Postini.
And we have bundled in some of the functionality that Postini
provided for content monitoring and filtering and
also for archiving, for example, into the Google Apps
Premier Edition.

What's included in the Google Apps Premier Edition.
Well, it's a suite of tools that focus on messaging.
So Gmail for your email, Google Talk for a chat or
instant messaging function, and a Calendaring function,
all of which Camille has mentioned as well, and our
collaboration suite also included in Google Apps
Premier Edition.
We have what we call Google Sites, which is essentially a
wysiwyg wiki product, so that teams within your company can
collaborate on sharing information or you can even
use Sites to build a public site.
We also have Google Docs which are basically online word
processing and spreadsheet and presentation programs.
And then our latest service that we just added is called
Google Video for Business.
It's sort of like having your own private YouTube for just
people within your domain.
Message filtering and 90-day discovery from Postini include
additional spam filtering capabilities as well as
content monitoring and filtering capabilities.
So if you want to filter inbound or outbound messages
by specific key words, because you have compliance policies,
or if you have a policy to put a compliance footer, a legal
disclaimer, et cetera on all outbound messages, you can do
so with the Postini.
And then 90-day discovery which is archiving for
discovery purposes.
All of this is built on the Google Apps platform, which
provides 365, 24/7 customer support.
We also offer a 99.9% uptime service level agreement, which
means that if we don't hit a 99.9% uptime performance
metric for you or any of your end users, we'll actually pay
you back money.
In the Google Apps Premier Edition of Gmail, you get 25
gigabytes of storage per user account.
That's 25 five gigabytes of storage.
I don't think we've had one customer who's had to delete a
single email message because they've gone
over their inbox quota.
We also offer mobile options in case you have mobile users,
run Blackberries or iPhone, or the Google G1.
And integration APIs if you want to integrate with a
single [? filing ?] system, for example, or any other
internal system you may have. And a partner program that can
help you get Google Apps up and running if you don't want
to do it yourself, for example.
And of course, the option to have no ads
within Gmail, for example.
All of this, we have put into the Google Apps Premier
Edition so that you can give your employees basically the
messaging collaboration tools that they need and hopefully
sleep well at night like Camille.
A couple more things we definitely want you to be
aware of is we do have
cross-platform support for mobile.
We do have tools and services from a migration and Camille,
maybe later on you can tell folks a little bit more about
what you did for migration, if you did it,
or historical emails.
APIs for integration and of course, we offer Google App
engine, in case you want to do any custom app development
hosting on the Google infrastructure.

Some questions have come up about what the
licensing model is.
It's actually very, very simple.
It's $50 per user per year.
That covers everything that's part of the service.
If you want to do the implementation yourself,
that's fine.
But we also have partners who will do that for you
for an extra fee.

The other thing is it's very easy to add or
subtract users as well.
So we try to make this a simple pricing
approach for you.
If you need 100 users this year, It's 100 users times 50,
but if next year your company has grown and you need 50 more
users, it's very simple.
Just add on 50 more users at $50.
We are serving a wide range of businesses every day.
We have people as large as Genentech who did a webinar
with us last month to lots of local and city governments
like the City of Canton and also certainly small
businesses.
We are also heavily adopted in the education space, with many
large universities moving their email
systems to Google Apps.

Now I will actually hand it back over to James and Camille
to answer a few additional questions that have come in.
JAMES HILLIARD: And we will absolutely do that.
We have a ton of questions in our queue here.
I still encourage audience members to submit
questions to us.
We're going to answer as many as we can over the next 20, 25
minutes or so.
Questions that we don't get to, and honestly, folks, if
there are many questions, I don't know will get to
everything, even given the 25 minutes we have, we will be
forwarding all this information over onto Serena
and the team over at Google.
Any any appropriate questions for Camille will get over to
her as well, and trying to answer as many
questions as we can.
So I really do encourage you to keep those
questions coming in.
I'm going to put up on the screen right now just a simple
url which is also linked to, within the related resources
of your player, google.com/a.
That will get you over to the Google Apps web site.
So again, if you want more information,
definitely I can do that.
And what I want to do right now is dive back into that
question queue.
Let's get back over-- it's a question that
came in from Kirk.
And Camille, you addressed it a little bit, but I'd love for
you to go to a little bit more detail.
His question was are you concerned about security?
My question is, Camille, why are you not
concerned about security?
What provides you the ability to really again sleep well at
night, and know that these emails, especially government
related information, is being protected?
CAMILLE WEHS: Serena, would you like to dive a little
deeper into that for these folks?
SERENA SATYASAI: Oh sure, absolutely.
So there are really three ways that we think
about security at Google.
It's really about people, process, and technology.
I'm going to give you a high level overview, but I also
would encourage folks to when we follow-up with you, we can
point you to some resources where we have more detailed
information on our security practices.
We think about security, as I said, in terms of people,
process, and technology.
We've hired internally and we work strongly with basically
the leading minds in security, working on research and
development for technology that protects your
information.
And remember, as I said, Google runs our business on
Google Apps as well.
So we're protecting our information with the same
technology.
We have data centers all over the world that are in unmarked
locations that are protected by physical security measures,
as well as the technology measures
I've already mentioned.
All of our customers' information are stored on
separate data centers that are located geographically
distinct from each other.
So, for example, we have-- some of our customers, such as
Washington city government, Washington DC city government,
recently adopted Google Apps, because with Google Apps, if
there were any event for any reason where their employees
cannot work out of their office locations, well, all
the City of Washington has to do is move their employees to
another location and login to Google Apps and be up and
running, without having to do their own data disaster
recovery and continuity planning.
The other thing that we do in terms of security as well is--
I'll expand this topic a little more to
confidentiality is well--
one thing that you should is that Google Apps Premier
Edition customer course is that this
information belongs to you.
It's yours to do with, if you leave the service, you
certainly take that information with you.
We don't do anything with the information beyond storing it
for your use.
I think Camille, I know that you and I talked about
security in the past and I think some of the times what
customers are kind of interested in hearing you talk
about is what concerns, if any, did you have in adopting
Google Apps.
Was there anything from the city government that you had
to specifically address to get people comfortable with
essentially outsourcing email to a third party?
CAMILLE WEHS: Not particularly because they were already
pretty much outsourcing it already with the Scalix.

By switching over to you guys, it kind of gave them a more
secure feeling that at any time you could pick up that
phone, if you had a problem, and like you said, if there
was a disaster event anywhere, you just simply relocate to
another location and you're up and running.
JAMES HILLIARD: Camille, one of the questions
that have come up--
I'm picking from Jason but there were others with it--
the title of our event is Learn How the City of Canton
Saved Taxpayers Money with Google Apps.
Can you give us any hard dollar amount about how much
money you really were able to save.
CAMILLE WEHS: It was roughly over $10,000 a year.
Easy.
JAMES HILLIARD: OK.
Excellent.
And Jason, do appreciate the question.
Let me ask about one other area which a couple people are
asking about.
They're talking about the Google email archiving, and
just want your overall thoughts.
Did it live up to your expectations?
What can you share, your experience has been, Camille,
with the email archiving?
CAMILLE WEHS: We had an open records request about three
months ago, where I had to pull all the email
correspondence from about eight people,
incoming and outgoing.
And it probably took me about an hour, and I was done from
start to finish.
And it didn't miss a beat.
I archived all of my prior email that was on my Scalix
box, and that's already archived.
That has probably close to two years on it.
I'm at two years right now with the Postini archiving,
and it's a simple interface.
It's really click and go.
There was no issues with it.
The reporting functionality, the content management,
everything, it's just that easy.

SERENA SATYASAI: Camille, it's Serena.
I was wondering if you weren't on Google Apps, and you didn't
have the archiving in there, and you were on your old email
system, and you had that same request, how long do you think
it would have taken you to complete that same search?
CAMILLE WEHS: Search.
Probably about a week, trying to dig through everything,
sift out the garbage from the good, basically all the spam,
all the emails that people really just don't need to see,
that are just offending spam.

JAMES HILLIARD: Let's move back over to-- actually,
Serena, a couple questions come in here from audience
members for you.
Wondering if you can go into a little more description about
the custom app hosting a bit more.
SERENA SATYASAI: Sure.
Google App engine is another service that you can use,
actually whether you're a Go Premier Edition customer or
not, where if you have applications that you need to
develop for your business or your city, you can use the
Google infrastructure to do so.
So that you don't have to go out and buy additional
hardware et cetera.
JAMES HILLIARD: And then I want to jump over to Sachin
joining us today.
He wanted to know if you can give any examples of where
customers have used the integration of other APIs?

SERENA SATYASAI: Is that a question for me?
JAMES HILLIARD: That was for you, Serena.

SERENA SATYASAI: I don't know, Camille, if you've done this,
but a lot of our customers use the APIs for a single sign-on,
so that they can use their current corporate directory
set-up, whether it's active directory, for example, to
power their user identity and manage work
groups through that.
The other thing, for example, a prebuilt API that is
available is with Salesforce.com.
It's a customer relationship management program, where
we've already built-in an integration point so that if
you're in the Salesforce.com application, and you want to
send a customer an email, you can do so using Gmail, and of
course, that thread is archived within
Salesforce.com.
So those are the types of integration that customers are
looking at and using us for.
JAMES HILLIARD: I just want to remind--
a couple audience members have asked-- so they've joined us a
bit late from today's presentation.
And the answer is yes, we have recorded and are recording the
entire presentation today.
So if you did miss anything or you simply want to review
anything that either Camille or Serena has gone over, we'll
be sending out a reminder contact email after the event,
which will bring you back to the on demand version of this
presentation.
Also, at that time, I'm going to encourage you if you get
those emails, forward them on to colleagues that you think
can benefit from the presentation.
You can also click the Email Friend link.
That's just above the Ask a Question box on
your players out there.
Click the Email Friend.
That'll let you invite a colleague to come back, and
again, they'll be able to join the on demand version, so they
can tune in to this information.
Serena, we have a question from Peter out there wants to
know if there any financial institutions that have adopted
Google Apps?
SERENA SATYASAI: Yes.
We have a lot of credit unions and commercial banks who've
adopted Google Apps and I'd be happy to share that
information with folks.
In terms of Postini, major investment banks who have
adopted Postini include Credit Suisse First
Boston and Morgan Stanley.
Lehman Brothers was a major customer of course until they
went out of business this past summer.
But we work with a lot of financial institutions across
our Google enterprise product line.
And then we have smaller commercial banks and credit
unions who are using Google Apps.
JAMES HILLIARD: Camille, looking back in your slide
deck, one of the IT problems that you had was that you
didn't have a whole lot of mobility options.
Milton is asking a question about either iPhone or
Blackberry connectivity.
Let me pose it to you first, Camille.
Are you using any kind of mobility Apps tied to Google
Apps here in email and support for either the
Blackberry or iPhone?
CAMILLE WEHS: Yes.
I have Motorola Qs in-house, and I also have Blackberries
in-house, and I also have a couple iPhones.
Each of them connected.
No problem.
Easy to set up.
They're set up on the POP.
And there was no problem with that whatsoever.
JAMES HILLIARD: And Serena, are you seeing more and more
folks are coming to Google looking for
these mobility options.
I can only assume you are.
SERENA SATYASAI: Yes, absolutely.
Probably almost every one of our customers has some mobile
users and we do support Blackberry, as Camille said.
We also have applications for iPhone and of course as well
for Google's own G1.
One thing that's nice about Google Apps that we're
cross-platform, so, as I mentioned, we can support
various mobile clients.
We also, I should say, work with third party technology
providers as well, who can provide--
if we have any customers who are interested and who are
very wed to a native Blackberry experience, we
don't obviously have the exact same experience, but we do
have a third party technology provider who can provide
probably close to that same experience.
JAMES HILLIARD: Serena, Chris following up
on the mobile access.
Is that included in that $50 per user per year price range?
SERENA SATYASAI: Yes.
The first option that I was talking about is if you want
to get a very close to native Blackberry experience with a
third party technology partner, that would cost a
little extra.
And that would be something you'd work out with our third
party technology provider.
JAMES HILLIARD: Lee is on board with us today.
Needed to share in a comment that I use Google Apps for my
Blackberry and it is great.
So thanks for that, Lee.
Appreciate it.
Bandwidth.
There were a couple folks that came up with a few questions,
Camille, asking did you see any bandwidth costs increase
due to the move from the Scalix that you were on into
using Google Apps?
CAMILLE WEHS: Not at all.
JAMES HILLIARD: And then that answers then a question we had
again from Peter, wondering if there was any total cost of
ownership numbers that we need to know outside of the per
person licensing prices?
And it doesn't sound like there are those additional
costs or issues in terms of bandwidth.
So I appreciate that.
Less is on board with us, Camille.
Wants to know if you use Google Video, that video tool
for meetings.
Let's just start with that.
Do you use that Google Video for any of
your internal meetings?
CAMILLE WEHS: I haven't started that yet.
I just now got most of them using the Google Docs and how
to share documents and the internal Sites.
But we do plan to start using the video.
And if I'm not wrong, Serena, Washington--
they use videos.
Correct?
SERENA SATYASAI: Yeah.
So let me tell folks a little bit more about Google Video.
Let me just say, for one thing it is recorded video.
It's not two-way live streaming.
I think as one of the questions have come up here.
And what we've seen customers use it for, so for example,
the City of Washington DC has one of the more innovative
uses of it.
They needed to recruit job applicants.
And they had their five hiring managers or whomever, however
many they have, record little introductions about themselves
and the departments and the kind of people they were
looking for, and posted those up online for potential job
applicants at a job fair to come look at.
They also use it for internal training, particularly because
they do a lot of preparation in the event of disaster.
Other customers that we work with have used the Google
Video for executive announcements.
So particularly if you're in distributed locations and
distributed locations could mean that you have three
offices but they're not right next to each other.
People can't just come into one conference room.
An executive can record a sales announcement or earnings
announcement or pep talk, and share that
easily with your employees.
And then the other way folks have been using Google Video
is actually very much around training, showing people how
to use things.
Product training with some of our customers is definitely a
big usage of Google Video.
What's nice about Google video is that it's very similar to
YouTube, so it's just really easy to
upload and share videos.
JAMES HILLIARD: Camille, I want to jump into a couple
questions here from the audience
regarding Google Docs.
Jonathan saying by kind of moving towards Google Docs,
have you migrated away from using Microsoft and some of
the Office tools?
CAMILLE WEHS: I'm trying.
Slowly but surely.
The more people that I can get using Google Docs, the more
money I can save by not having to go with more and more
volume licensing.
JAMES HILLIARD: Sure.
Have you noticed then, kind of follow up here with Jonathan,
any compatibility issues in terms of then collaborating
with either outside agencies or whomever that are still
working on the Office format?
CAMILLE WEHS: No.
Mainly because within Google Docs, you can save your
document in several different formats.
And you can automatically save it as a PDF, if you
choose to as well.
JAMES HILLIARD: Lewis, on the same vein, kind of talking
about Docs, wondering how do you manage the doc sharing,
gives you an example.
He actually uses a docs repository per department, and
they like to know if there's something kind of similar
within Google Apps.
What he's seen before is an option that every user can
share all the docs, but not really kind of just within a
small group.
How do you deal with doc management?
CAMILLE WEHS: I haven't got into that yet, only because we
haven't had that much of a need for that yet.
They're not at that point of where there's so many docs out
there being shared right now.
And I'm sure that need will come soon as the year
goes on, I'm sure.
JAMES HILLIARD: Serena, what can you add in terms of maybe
some of the other customers that do have huge amounts of
documents that they're using in terms of docs.
How are you seeing people kind of manage
some of that sharing?
SERENA SATYASAI: Well, actually, I can speak from our
experience internally too.
As I said, Google does use Google Apps to run our
business, and we generate a lot of docs share.
One of the things that we have been doing internally is
actually moving a lot of our doc sharing to a Google Site.
So that, for example, if you have a project team, they
might store their project timeline, they might store
their documentation, they might store some presentations
on a single Site.
So all of that information is easily accessible.
With that, we do know that there are other ways that
people would like to share documents more easily and
we're certainly working on them.
One thing I do want to clarify on Docs as well too.
I've seen questions come up.

You can now import and export Google Docs with Microsoft
Office or, as Camille mentioned, with PDF, so there
shouldn't be any integration issues there.
JAMES HILLIARD: Let me jump over to Paul, who is on board
with us today.
I think, Serena, this is more directed your way.
States and some countries do have strict
regulations on emails.
He says Swiss secrecy laws don't allow for data to leave
the country.
Can Google Apps work within those frameworks insuring the
data is always hosted in a particular country?
SERENA SATYASAI: Yes, so that is a request that we've heard,
and that is something that we can do.
It's something that we built into the Postini applications
from day one.
And that is something that we're rolling out across the
other Google Apps as well.

JAMES HILLIARD: Actually, an interesting
question here from Chris.
Camille, this is going your direction.
Obviously, if you're using Google Apps, it's a software
as a service.
It's working in the cloud.
Did you need to go back, reevaluate any of your network
connectivity to make sure that you were really kind of 99.9%
of the time up in terms of your internet access?
Because obvously, if your internet access went down or
you didn't have some backup plans, again, email then would
be at risk for you.
CAMILLE WEHS: Not particularly, no.
I'm pretty much set to go on that side.
And when I switched over, you know go back to the bandwidth
question, there wasn't any issues and I really didn't
have any problems with that.
JAMES HILLIARD: All right.
SERENA SATYASAI: This is Serena.
I just want to add to that.
We actually get that question a lot, and we posed this to
all of our customers as well.

How did you evaluate bandwidth requirements?
Was there any impact on your network?
And we don't have anything scientific to share with
anyone, but what it seemed like is that because we're
protecting folks from spam volumes for example, before
they hit your network.
It's not an issue.
Previously, Camille, maybe your network was dealing with
a lot of spam, and now that's not on your network anymore,
it seems like there's certainly enough
bandwidth to go around.
CAMILLE WEHS: Oh, definitely.
SERENA SATYASAI: I wasn't sure.
I'd like to actually do something more scientific
about that.
Because it's certainly a question, but none of
customers have ever had a problem with it.
JAMES HILLIARD: RIght.
Serena, keeping a question with you here.
Ricardo wanting to get a little more information about
some of the service level agreements from Google in
terms of for email as well as for collaboration, anything
dealing with Apps and SLAs.
SERENA SATYASAI: OK.
So for the Google Apps Premier Edition, which is the $50 per
user per year edition, there's a 99.9% uptime guarantee.
So, for example, if Gmail goes down, if it goes down and we
violate our 99.9% uptime guarantee, then we'll actually
refund some moneys towards that.
The 99.9% uptime guarantee is there to protect you, in the
event of some sort of catastrophic outage.
With that said, maybe Camille, you can talk a little bit more
to uptime experiences.
CAMILLE WEHS: And if I'm not mistaken, I've been right on
the nose at hitting two years with you guys, and I haven't
had one downtime yet.

JAMES HILLIARD: That's a strong service.
Let's jump over to Rick here.
And maybe, Camille, you experienced this.
If not, Serena can chime in.
But Rick's saying I have a couple users that already have
Gmail accounts and they're already using Google Calendar.
Is it easy to transfer those calendars over to Google Apps,
if his organization was to make that switch?
SERENA SATYASAI: Actually, what's interesting, what's
neat about Google Apps Calendar is that if you have--
a lot of our people do this-- you might have your work
calendar, you might have your team calendar, you might have
a company calendar, and you might
have a personal calendar.
It's very easy to copy over any of those calendars to your
own individual calendar.
It's essentially a copy function.
One thing I am going to say is that today's webinar is really
meant to be focused on Camille and the customer experience.
It looks like there's a lot of questions that are coming out
specifically on product questions.
And we will have another webinar tomorrow at 1:00 pm
East Coast time, 11 am Central, 10 am, West Coast
time, to take you through a very detailed product
demonstration going through email, Chat, Calendar Google
Sites, Google Docs, Google Video.
And we'll also have product specialists on hand to answer
your questions live.
In this format we've been answering the questions across
the whole audience, but we'll have product specialists
online who will chat with you live.
Additionally, for folks who are interested in the City of
Washington DC's experience, they're going to be talking on
Tuesday about how they've used Google Apps but also other
Google products such as Google Maps and YouTube to support
their management strategies of trying to make government more
transparent and more effective.
And you can see the time that they will be speaking on
Tuesday, 2 pm East Coast, 12 noon Central, 11 am West
Coast. These Google Apps seminars, you can sign up for
these at our website if you go to google.com/a and look for
Latest Information on Google Online Seminars.
So if we don't get to your specific product question on
this webinar, you can certainly feel free to join us
tomorrow, and we'll have live product specialists on hand.
JAMES HILLIARD: And Serena, what I'm going to do right now
again, along with the google.com/a, which is pretty
simple to remember, we do have the link over on the right
hand side of the player under the Related Resources, so
folks can click on there, and again look for those events.
Right now, I want to push out and again make sure your popup
blockers are turned off.
Quick survey.
Give us a little feedback on today's presentation.
And we do appreciate that feedback.
We'll use it to continue to work with our clients and
vendors here to keep bringing you good strong webcast. I do
want to continue on with a couple more questions before
we wrap things up for the day.
Just doing a quick refresh here, and seeing a couple
other questions.
Again, we got so many.
And I really do appreciate the audience taking time to drop
these questions in to us.
And then, again, questions that we didn't get to, we will
go back and try and answer offline afterwards.
We talked with Rick about their--
Charles asking, and Camille, are you using and do you have
a single log on for Google Apps and other applications?
CAMILLE WEHS: I haven't switched over to the single
log in yet.
That has been in the plans.
I just haven't got to it yet, to be honest with you.
JAMES HILLIARD: Is that something, Serena, that you
see a lot of folks try to integrate
after a period of time?
SERENA SATYASAI: Yes.
Absolutely.
It just depends upon whether they already have it set up,
and they just want to continue using it, or not.
We definitely see customers doing it, and we support all
types of single sign-on system.
CAMILLE WEHS: I've seen a lot of questions, I'm sorry, but
I've seen a lot of questions regarding people with Outlook,
Microsoft Office, and Apps, and how, for example, Charles
Philips, he asked in using Docs, what were we using
before, and how did you get people to stop
using previous tools?
Same with Outlook, same with any other
office based products.
Once they got used to using it, they pretty migrated
themselves over.
Especially with Outlook.
Outlook is clunky at times.
It's not dependable at times.
And within your Google account, you can access all
your documents, you can access all your Calendar features,
and you don't have to reduce, go back to Microsoft Word,
save it, come back out, go back in.
So to all the people who are talking about that, I think
that if they tried a demo of it to a few of their users out
there, they might actually find that after about a week
or two, they'd really get used to using Google Apps.
SERENA SATYASAI: And one thing that we hear a lot of our
customers say too, exactly the same thing, is that initially
if people are on Outlook, they don't want to
use the Gmail interface.
But then when they realize, for example, that there's that
integrated chat in the Gmail interface, and there's all
these other sort of neat features that they can't get
in Outlook, that's when they start to switch.
JAMES HILLIARD: We're coming close to the top of the hour,
so I do just want to remind the audience that we have
recorded today's entire presentation.
So I encourage you to come back and either review
material or if you joined us late, catch up with us on the
on demand version.
You will all get reminder emails, bringing you back to
that on demand presentation.
And again, click the Email Friend link, so that you can
go ahead and invite colleagues to register and
join us for the event.
We will keep the player open for a couple moments for you
to do a few things.
One, download a copy of the presentation as a PDF, if you
wish, to review any of that.
Also so you can click on the Related Resources that are
over on the right hand side of the player.
Camille, I really do want to thank you for taking time,
sharing the story from the City of Canton in Georgia, and
really giving us some good insights and commentary into
what your experience was like, and how things
have been for you.
I think it was very insightful and really do
appreciate your time.
CAMILLE WEHS: Well, you're more than
welcome, and thank you.
JAMES HILLIARD: And Serena, also appreciate you giving us
an overview of Google Apps, and hopefully a lot of our
audience, again, encourage them to go over to
google.com/a to get more information about Google Apps.
Also, look for some of those other webcasts that Google
will be presenting, one tomorrow, one coming up next
week, so you can get some more information, again some more
case studies as well.
So really encourage you to look towards those for more
information.
And Serena, appreciate your effort on this event.
I'm sure you'll have some good events coming up.
SERENA SATYASAI: Thank you so much, James.
JAMES HILLIARD: And that really does wrap things up for
us today and this presentation, really, for
everybody at Google, as well as the entire
TechRepublic team.
We all do want to take a quick moment to thank you for
joining us on today's webcast. My name is James Hilliard and
we will talk to you down the road.