City of Canton, Georgia: Saving Time, Money and Headaches

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 turnout 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 of your player.
Make sure you click that blue Ask bubble.
We've carved out about at 10 or 15 minutes towards the tail
end of the presentation to answer your questions.
Make sure you do send those in early and often.
I ask you at this point to make sure you have your pop-up
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That allows you a few things.
One, to respond to a short survey that we're going to
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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.
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, 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 had said, we do encourage you to ask as 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 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 to spending time
talking to us about her experiences.
As a note for all of our participants on this webinar,
we will also send out a written case study that
Camille wrote with us at the end of this webinar.

CAMILLE WEHS: You ready for me, Serena?
SERENA SATYASAI: Oh yes, and let me turn it
over to Camille now.
CAMILLE WEHS: James, can we go ahead?
Thank you.
Good afternoon, everybody.
My name's 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.
Our 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 the position, I will go over with you my
struggles and the problems that we had.
If we can go onto the next.

When I took a look at this position, we had several email
problems. Mobility just not existent, 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 I took over, archiving wasn't necessarily
high on their list. And that's when I got in tough with
Postini, and that's 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, can we go to the next?--

it was affordable.
There was no hardware to go in.
We had messaging, tons of collaboration options, and
there was really no upfront 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 setup 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, then how you, again,
show us 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
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: I think 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 Windows-based solution.
And if you go to a Linux-based solution, you're either a
lover or a hater or 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.
Basically, they 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 up 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--
I've looked through our list of attendees here, we do have
a lot of government focused 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.
When you started--
once you realized 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 that
kind of help you look at some of these solutions, or really,
was it your own doing?
CAMILLE WEHS: It was my own doing.
I had a lot of--
when I started looking around at things internally, a lot of
people never really said that they were getting just
inundated with spam.
And I asked them, I said, do you really get that much?
And there are, on average, probably close
to 100 spams daily.
And that's when I first walked in the door.
And at that point, you know, a lot of people, we don't need
to see that.
And the spam people of America, they're pretty good
at their jobs.
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 the startup to time everything
was decided.
And there was really just, hands down, no
question about it.
I did have a few people go, Gmail, are you serious?
But once they saw the functionality of it, and
actually saw, 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: Stephen is one of our users that's on with us
today, Camille.
Just again, clarifying, how many users do you really have
on your network?
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 BlackBerrys 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.
That would spread out to 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock at night.
I'd wake up, check the server, make sure all services are
still running, make sure the email service was running,
make sure the spam filter was still running.
JAMES HILLIARD: And now, I'm assuming a lot of that time
has been recouped, so that you can devote it to other--
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'm seeing in here.
We'll address a few later, in terms of I guess, in the cost
savings, you just said you 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 no scalability was a big problem
that you had before.
With Google Apps, 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 could 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 task.
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, I think, 137 plus email users.
But you feel that you're getting a real good enterprise
quality service now, for, I've categorized you easily as a
small type business, in comparison to trying to draw
that connection to other users that area on the
line with us today.
CAMILLE WEHS: Absolutely.
What I've done is I've kind of, in a sense, marketed this
to my users as, that think of it as a political office.
Instead of staying here until 8 o'clock at night, simply
upload your spreadsheet, upload your Word document,
into the Google Docs.
Take it home, go ahead and cook dinner, go ahead and pay
your bills, and work on it at home.
So it 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 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 kind of 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, create our 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 use the held within Google Apps and
the mail and the calendar features to find out their own
answer 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: And 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.
I mean it, was really that simple.
CAMILLE WEHS: None of that.
Absolutely none.
I maybe had, out of all my users, three users that I had
to spend a few extra minutes.
And that was just the generation gap.
But overall, I had almost zero training time that I had to
invest in this.
JAMES HILLIARD: Rahl 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 Rahl, thanks for that.
And definitely keep your questions.
Questions in here from Charles, Andre.
We've 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 timeframe?
CAMILLE WEHS: As far as monitoring and reports, I
really didn't have anything to get up to speed on, because
the interface was so easy and so user friendly, you didn't
have to read through a 500 page manual, or call 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: A Linux-based.
JAMES HILLIARD: And again, you were mentioning it wasn't
something that you were a fan of.
So you went out there looking for these other solutions.
And Google Apps is where you ended.
And talk for a moment about these help forums. I know some
people-- it almost had 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 bit about the Google help forums, and how that--
did you use many of the videos and the forums as resources?
Did your end users use a lot of those resources?
CAMILLE WEHS: Every one 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 doc.
And 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
kind of anecdotal and how people were sharing how this
new system was working for them?
CAMILLE WEHS: The first week I did a general walk-through
with all the users in every building.
And I asked them, how's it going, do
you have any questions?
I had no questions.
Everybody was positive.
The only questions I had is, how did you get
rid of all the spam?
JAMES HILLIARD: Magic.
CAMILLE WEHS: Magic.
I just wrinkled my nose.
But that was it.
I mean literally, it was easy from start to go.
And I haven't had anything, any 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 you said--
I thought you had said something in the realm of, you
were getting more spam than actual legit email for most of
your users.
I'm guessing that the average person gets anywhere between
30 and 100 emails a day for kind of smaller organizations.
Obviously, I know folks out there, some of you are going
to 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% spa, inside their inbox daily.
Now they probably get maybe one a year.
JAMES HILLIARD: Wow, 1%?
CAMILLE WEHS: 1%.
JAMES HILLIARD: 1%.
That's 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 you know, right now, I've created four
internal sights that they use, and everybody's sharing docs.
And I mean, I have 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 like, this is just wonderful.
Why didn't we do this sooner?
JAMES HILLIARD: Excellent.
Well, hey, we are getting a ton of questions.
Jason, Kirk, Eugene, Nick, many others.
What I want to do here is to give Camille a quick moment to
do a little kind of wrap up for us here.
Then we are going to bring Serena back on from Google
Apps, share a little inside again, 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
the 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: Well, 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.
But 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 to 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 here, Camille, is Camille's
definitely going to hang on board here.
We're going to talk with Serena for a few moments, and
then really open the floor up for the remainder of the
presentation so we can answer a lot of these questions that
have been coming in. so keep the questions coming in.
And Serena, with that, really let me
bring you back on board.
And I know there's 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, we actually use Google Apps
ourselves to run our worldwide enterprise.
And we have found that it has really helped us transform the
way we do business.
And we hope that it does the same thing for our customers.
What we've 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 offloading a lot of maintenance work that might
be put to better use on other activities.
And then finally, we use Google Apps ourselves, I said,
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 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 had mentioned.
As well, in our collaboration suite, we 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
constant monitoring and filtering capabilities.
So if you want to filter inbound or outbound messages
by specific keywords because you have compliance policies,
or if you have a policy to put a compliance splitter, a legal
disclaimer, or et cetera, on all outbound messages, you can
do so with 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 gigabytes or 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
who are on BlackBerrys or iPhones, 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 Premiere
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 of 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 for migration.
And Camille, maybe later on you could tell folks a little
bit more about what you did for migration, if you did it,
for historical emails.
APIs for integration, and of course, we have the offer
Google App Engine, in case you want to do any custom app
development and 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.

And actually, now I will actually hand it back over to
James and Camille to answer the additional questions that
have come in.
JAMES HILLIARD: And we will absolutely do that.
And 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 about
20, 25 minutes or so.
Questions that we don't get to, and honestly folks, there
that many questions.
I don't know if we'll 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 appropriate questions for Camille, we'll get
over to her as well.
And try and 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 website.
So again, if you want more information,
definitely 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 into a little bit more detail.
His question was, are you concerned about security?
My question is, Camille, why are you not
concerned about me 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's 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
will 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 externally with,
basically, the leading lines 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 had already mentioned.
All of our customers' information is 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 adopt Google Apps because with Google Apps, if
there were any event for any reason where their employees
could not work out of their office locations, well, all
the City of Washington has to do is move their employees to
another location and log in 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--
and perhaps I'll expand this topic a little bit more to
confidentiality as well--
one thing that you should know as a Google Apps Premier
Edition customer, of 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 have 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.
But 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's come up--
I'm picking from Jason, but there were others with it--
the title of our event is, learn how this the city of
Canton saved taxpayers money with Google Apps.
Can you give us any hard dollar amounts 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.
And I'm at two years right now with the Postini archiving.
And it's a simple interface, it's really click and go.
And there was no issues with it.
The reporting functionality, with content management,
everything is 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: Probably about a week.
Trying to dig through everything, sift out the
garbage from the good, basically all the spam and all
the emails that people really just don't need to see, that
are just, you know, offending spam.
JAMES HILLIARD: Let's move back over to, actually,
Serena, a couple questions coming 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 Google Apps 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 wanted to jump over to Sachin
joining us today.
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, or--
JAMES HILLIARD: That was for you, Serena.
SERENA SATYASAI: OK.

I don't know, Camille if you've done this, but a lot of
our customers use the APIs for single sign on, so that they
can use their current corporate directory setup,
whether it's Active Directory, for example, to power their
user identity and to manage work groups through that.
The other things, for example, a pre-built 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 withing
salesforce.com.
Well, 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, say they've joined us a
bit late in 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 just above
the Ask A Question box on your players out there.
Click Email Friend and that's 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 are any financial institutions that
have adopted Google Apps.
SERENA SATYASAI: Yes.
We have a lot of credit unions and commercial banks who have
adopted Google Apps.
And I'd be happy to share that information out with folks.
In terms of Postini, major investment banks who have
adopted Postinin 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, on 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 BlackBerrys in-house, and I also have a
couple iPhones.
Each of them connected, no problem.
Easy to set up.
Those set up on the POP.
And there was no problem with that whatsoever.
JAMES HILLIARD: And Serena, are you seeing more and more
folks that 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 is 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 kind of 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 that you would work out with
our third party technology provider.
JAMES HILLIARD: Lee is on board with us today and he's
just sharing a comment that I use Google Apps for my
BlackBerry and it is great.
So thanks for that, Lee, appreciate it.
Bandwidth.
There are 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 were those additional
costs or issues in terms of bandwidth.
So appreciate that.
Les is on board with us, Camille.
Wants to know if you use Google Video, that video tool
for meetings?
So 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.
We haven't really--
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 is one
questions has come 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 had, record little introductions about themselves
and their 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 a pep talk kind of thing, and share that
easily with your employees.
And then the other way folks have been using Google Videos,
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's 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 kind of the Office format?
CAMILLE WEHS: No, mainly because within Google Docs,
you can save your document in several different formats.
And it also has, you can automatically save it as a PDF
if you choose to as well.
JAMES HILLIARD: Louis, 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 doc repository
per department, and they like to know if there's something
kind of similar within Google Apps.
What he's seen before as an option is 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 the 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
own experience internally, too.
As I said, Google does use Google Apps to run our
business, and we generate a lot of doc share.
So one of the things that we have been doing internally is
actually moving a lot more 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 presentations on a
single site.
So all of that information is easily accessible.
With that said, 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 some questions come up.
Google Docs, you can 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.
And I think, Serena, this is more directed your way.
States 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, ensuring 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 with across the other Google Apps as well.
JAMES HILLIARD: Let's move--
actually, an interesting question here from Chris.
And 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 obviously, 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 wanted to add to that.
We actually get that question a lot.
And we pose 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 seems like is that, because we're
protecting folks from spam volumes, for example, before
they hit your network, it seems like it's not an issue.
Because previously, Camilla, maybe your network was dealing
with a lot of spam.
And now that that's not on your network any more, it
seems like there's certainly enough bandwidth to go around
for the other--
CAMILLE WEHS: Oh, definitely.
SERENA SATYASAI: OK.
I wasn't sure.
Yeah, I'd like to actually do something more scientific
about that.
Because it's certainly a question, but none of our
customers have ever had a problem with it.
JAMES HILLIARD: All right.
Cool.
Hey, Serena, keeping the 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.
And so for example, if Gmail goes down, if it goes down and
we violate our 99.9% uptime guarantee, the we'll actually
refund you 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, we've had--
maybe, Camille, you can talk a little bit more to your uptime
experiences.
CAMILLE WEHS: And if I'm not mistaken, I've been right on
the nose of 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 Ricks' 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--
so 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.
Looks like there's a lot of questions that are coming up
specifically on product questions.
And we will have another webinar tomorrow at 1:00 PM
east coast time, 11:00 AM central, 10:00 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 you 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 thy'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, 2:00 PM east coast, 12:00 noon central, 11:00 AM
west coast. These Google App seminars, you can sign up for
these at our website.
If you go to google.com/a and look for, I think it's 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
pop-up 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 webcasts.
I do want to continue on with a couple more questions before
we wrap things up for the day.
I'm just a quick refresh here and seeing a
couple other questions.
Again, we've 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 to 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: Yeah, absolutely.
And it just depends upon whether they already have it
set up and they just want to continue using it or not.
Though we definitely see customers doing it, and we
support all types of single log on systems.
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 Phillips.
He asked, in using docs, what were we using before and how
did you get the people to stop using the previous tools?
Same with Outlook, same with any other of Office-based
products, once they got used to using it, they pretty much
migrated themselves over, especially with Outlook.
Outlook is its 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 my Microsoft Word,
save it, come back out, go back in.
So to all the [? PAP ?]
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 the 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, 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, then 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.
And I'm sure you'll have some good events coming up.
SERENA SATYASAI: Thank you so much, James.
JAMES HILLIARD: And that really does have kind of 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.