How to Simplify Business Processes with G Suite (Cloud Next '19)

Thank. You for being here today, we're here to talk to you about how G, suite can help improve your business processes. My, name is ado Xia Ezra and I am a product manager on, G Suite and I'm here with my colleague Christian, today from AppMakr so thank, you again for joining us. So. It's, Thursday, at next and, by now I'm sure we've all heard a lot of great things about how G suite can, help improve our business processes, so yes. We know G suite causes, a cultural, shift in the way companies work and it's. Loaded, with a lot of technical, capabilities. To bring your company to the next level and help, you get more dynamic, and innovative, but. That's, a lot of words what does this actually mean. Practically. For your employees, who are using these tools every day. So. The answer to this lies in what we're here to talk about today and we've, identified three. Groups of processes or business processes, that most companies like, yours engage. In and we're gonna talk through each each of these so. The first is a, group of simple. Everyday, processes, that a lot of your employees might engage in on a day-to-day basis, so. This could be getting. Data from the right database or creating simple sheets and slides for. Daily reports, now. A second. Smaller, group, involves. Some processes, that become more formulated, so they, get done enough times that. Your employees, decide. To make them standardized, over time so, examples, of these include you know filling out HR information or, filing, customer, feedback, to the right database. And. Finally. There's, that there are those few but, very critical. Processes that might involve, a lot, of customization, and. We're going to talk about these as well and how app maker can, help you get some of these processes done and an example of that could be say. A proprietary. Supply, chain management system, and we're, going to talk through each of these and give you examples, of how G, suite and the GSP tools available today can help you streamline. And, simplify all. These processes. So, first we'll take a look at how Docs sheets and slides can. Help you with those simple everyday processes, and we'll, talk about forms, and how they help you fulfill those, more formulated. Standardized. Processes, that your company might have and then finally. We'll talk about how app maker can help you build out those more customized, powerful. Processes. So. We start with the first, section. So. If you're familiar with Docs sheets and slides and. I'm sure a lot of people in this room are you probably, know that these, products. Are loaded, with a myriad of features, that help, you improve the day you were the way you work daily. At your company so. We're going to go through a common. Enterprise. User flow to see, how this works in real life a. Common. Process that a lot of companies can, identify with, is around, budgeting. And financial. Planning and this. Is something that we're going to explore and we'll, take a look at how dark, a Google Docs Google sheets, and Google slides can, help you complete a complete. Financial budgeting. Process. And to, do this I would, like to introduce you to NECA. Soneca, is the CFO, of solar Mora Corp and she's. Leading the financial, planning process, for this year and she's. Going to do all this using, Google, sheets to build out the numbers and then use the numbers from sheets to, power her final reports and Docs and final. Presentation and, slides so, let's get started. So. Lekha needs to get, estimates, from her regions, ten, different plants for production volume and material, costs along, with a lot of other of her company's data that lives in that live in various different external, surfaces, with. All this input with all these inputs you get an aggregated, summary, and like I mentioned before she, used the charts from, the summary to power a final. Document. That she shares with upper, management as. Well as the final presentation, that goes with that. So. Luckily for NECA this is not the first time that her company has done this, financial planning process, so she visits. Her companies ten Sheetz, template gallery, district. Customers, have. Their own internal template, galleries, in Google, Docs sheets and slides and, forms, and these. Galleries allow. Users, to upload templates, that they feel should. Be shared with the entire company but, in addition to this there, are also admin, settings in, case you want to restrict, who. Needs. To share who can share templates, to this gallery or what kinds of templates, they can share for, example we've, seen customers with.

Slides Template, templates, to enforce company branding, Docs. Templates, for budgeting sheets, templates, for all sorry Docs templates for, purchase. Orders and sheets. Templates, for budget and amongst other things and these are just a few examples of. The many that exists today. So. Solemn, aura has a rich, template, for their annual planning. And sheets and soneca. Uses, this template, for. The for this year's process, and she, chooses to do this in sheets because of all the powerful features that exist in that product that, will make that. Will help her complete, the task at hand. So. First like I mentioned before NECA needs to get the numbers from the reps from each of a company's ten, different plans which. Sheets NECA and all her collaborators. Can always. Keep working on the same file, the one a one canonical version, of a file which. Is shared vary, an, accessible, link so, what this does is it eliminates, the, need for users. Or collaborators, to have to check in and out of file while they're working on it and, in addition to this there's. A version history, that appears on the file so. You can go in there for example and see who made any. Changes, and when, those changes were made and something, that we're really excited about, it, next this year we actually announced yesterday was the ability to go into individual. Cells and see, the version history in those cells themselves. So. In addition, to the. Collaboration. And the version history there. Are also various. Features that allow, for data, protection so. For example in this case NECA, wants all the plant managers, to be able to see all, the information in the attack entire spreadsheet but. She also doesn't want the wrong manager, changing, a tab that doesn't belong to them so she sets a. Set. Of a range, of cells and assigned, those to each manager, so that they can update what be essentially what belongs to them without, tampering with other people's work and she can also set in a sharing settings to ensure that the document, or the sheets the spreadsheet doesn't get shared out to the wrong people within or outside the company. So. After. Necker shares the file the, plant managers, start coming in to present, or to enter. All that requested, information multiple. Plant, managers can update the same spreadsheet at the same time with no latency, so, that means everything. They enter in the document, or in the spreadsheet, appears. In real time which, is a huge advantage that we have over, a lot of our competitors. The. Plant managers, in addition to entering their numbers in the spreadsheet can also leave, comments, and assign. Action, items and each other within the same document so. What, this essentially, does is it changes, this document, into a conversation a true. Living document, if you will where people can collaborate at the, same time well. Regardless. Of where they might be located geographically, from each other. So. In addition, to the inputs, that NECA gets from her, plant managers, she, also needs to import. Some, data from, her companies or the systems like the CRM, and the ERP systems so we're going to walk through a couple of these extra super powers that make sheets, even more valuable for your company.

So. First of all we talk about si P we've. Heard from a lot of different companies that si. P contains, the bulk of their company data so, it's essentially, the, lifeblood. Of their business, sheets. Now allows you to seamlessly export. Your data from si P into, sheets and once, you do that it allows, you to now use, those spreadsheet. Actions. Or simple spreadsheet actions, or. Tools. That you might be familiar with you know such as asking. Insights, or. Getting, insights by asking questions in plain English or conducting. Analysis, using, those, familiar spreadsheet, tools that you use all the time. So. Something. That we're really excited. And from. The feedback we've gotten a lot of people a lot of our customers and users are really excited about that we announced this year at next is connected. Sheets so. Connected, sheets lets you connect, connect, and access your data. From bigquery. Directly. Through Google sheets and here's. Why this is amazing. This. Means that you can now import. Like. Tons, of data massive. Amounts of data directly. From bigquery we're. Talking potentially, billions of rows of data directly. Into Google sheets and perform. The same actions, that you perform on any other, spreadsheet, simple. Spreadsheet as you would if, you created it on sheet so for example you could take imagine taking a billion rows of data and bringing them into Google sheets and creating a pivot, table or a chart, and that's really powerful so. It used to be much. Of this power was. Only something, it's something that a select, few had so the trend data analysts, who, the, companies now the businesses, had to rely on to be able to get that. Those data insights, when they needed to make business data. Different driven decisions, but, with this integration, between. Sheets and bigquery. Anyone. Who can use a spreadsheet now has that power of the data analysts, on this at their fingertips. And. Finally. We, have Google, Google, sheets add-on, which is a data, connector, for Salesforce. So. This allows you similar, to what we talked about in bigquery it allows you bring or export, all your data from Salesforce, directly. Into the sheets to, be able to perform those kinds of analysis, on them as well and in, addition to that you can make changes to the data and then, send it back to Salesforce, so it becomes an essentially, a round trip of data that you're making so, Google. And Salesforce, is, a key strategic. Partner, of G suite and we're, working to continually, bring you more and more of these kinds of features in, the future so now stay tuned for that. So. Google is a is about democratizing, data, it's, says as much, in our vision statement and. These, kinds of integrations, allows, sheets to more seamlessly. Interact with. Their company's data wherever it might be and, we all know that your company's, data is only as valuable as what you can do with it so we want to be able to allow you to do more with that so please after this, and after this talk feel free to when you go back to you into your companies, or to your businesses, feel free to try out these integrations, and try, out these tools and see what kind of benefits, they can bring to you and your business. So. Let's check back in with NECA. Google. Sheets is even more powerful when you factor in a tool like macros, which helps, which helps users. Skip repetitive work, since. NECA is often, working with numbers reported from individual, plants she's, developed, a set of macros, for. Actions that she commonly takes on this kind of data for. Example one of her macros, helps, clean up the data from plans to standardize. Everything and, make the data that. Already for dashboarding. And sheets. Today you can combine the. Macros, with all the other benefits or you can run macros, online and this. Is just another benefit, of Google sheets being a cloud, native. Platform. So. Now that NECA, has gathered all the data the templates, or the spreadsheets. Dashboard. Tab is now, ready for use so. The whole time when the plant managers were entering all their data and all the respective, tabs the dashboards. Were automatically, get an updated, so. At. The end of basically. At the end of the day when all the data entered. Necklace can sleepy simply, go into the dashboard the. Dashboard tab, and see all the various different options for the dashboards, that she wants to be able to use to, either present, like I said in the final document or, the final slides, presentation, but. You know what happens, next is even more powerful I'm going to talk about that, so.

In The past whenever. You would copy, a, dashboard, from, a spreadsheet onto. A document. Or whatever, other external, surface you'd, have to manually keep track of whatever, data would change on the, spreadsheet. Today in Google sheets what, you can do is simply copy that data from sheets into, your Docs or slides and when you change that underlying data in sheets you, don't have to manually keep up with anything you simply click on an update button that automatically, appears, in all those charts wherever they might live so, what this does is it helps save a lot of time and it, helps eliminate the, the, or reduce. The, risk of having errors or, compromising. Data integrity when you copy data from one place to another so. Now. That Necker has finished creating the final budget report, she, needs to get it approved by a few colleagues before. Adopting, gee suite she would have to download these, reports, or these documents, onto a PDF, and then, use, an external, or a third-party, tool to, have them approved by the right people but. Today with. Document-centric. Workflows. We have integrated, in Docs and, G suite she, can do all of this within G suite so, in addition to so I was talking about how she would have to download this to a PDF so imagine, having a document, downloaded, approved, and then you find out later or, she finds that it finds out later that something needed to change so, that means she would have to go back make. That make those changes redownload. Them and have them re-- approved but today in G Suites you can do all of that within G suite without having to rely on any other third-party tools again, this saves time and ensures. That everything, she's working on lives in the same workspace. So. Now after the file is approved it, stays locked and everyone, who sees the file now knows that, it's. Been approved and it can be changed unless they, get the approval to change that file again and. With. This the annual, budgeting process, for Necker and her team, at sole AmeriCorps, is complete. So. This was just this was an example of how a finance. Process which. Happens in companies of all sizes and, across all industries, are, able to benefit, from the tools that we have in, G, suite but. This, financed flow is actually not hypothetical, I mean this is based on real-life stories, that we hear from a lot from a lot of our customers all around the world and we, have an example here, Gordan food services, one. Of the largest, major. Food, service delivery. Distributors, and. Supply they note that G suite is now basically. Part of the a of everyday lives and they've actually adopted. Sheets. As the, default, spreadsheet, too so, real life companies, and including. Top companies and across all industries, are benefiting every day from, switching over to G suite. So. Again, with all these powerful collaboration, features we want you to be able to go, back to your companies try. Out some of the things that we've talked about today and see, all the benefits that G, suite she, go. Google Docs sheets and slides can bring to your business. So. We'll move on to the second category which. Is those more. Stronger. Processes, and, those. Processes, that require, more. Repetitiveness. And. Now. That we've seen an example of what Jesus we can do in finance, I would like to use the opportunity to focus on another. Vertical that, all companies can relate to and that's human resources I mean, we all want to hire people and. We all want the right people working for us so Google. Forms is an example of one of those other tools that, allows you to do this better so. To, illustrate how, forms, can help streamline processes, at your company like I said we, take a look at human resources and I'll start with using. Google human, Google's, human resources department, is an example so, we have a mantra which. Is. Find. Them keep them or find them keep them and grow them so, essentially what this means is we want to find the right talent we. Want to be able to keep onto. That right, that talent when we find them and we also want to grow them in their role because. As they grow they have to help the company grow as well and I'm sure a lot of companies can relate to this however. Whatever, size you are or whatever industry you're in so. Your. HR department probably. Has, several. Multiple processes, including, you know recruitment, selecting, hiring, training. In duct induction. And evaluation.

Amongst Other things so, these are some of the things that forms. Is able, to help you accomplish and, we'll take a look at an example of that today. So. We'll start with one of the earlier steps in the process which is finding. Talent so. We. See a lot of companies today you create, in simple google forms to, manage, applications. Or, job applications, to, their companies so now you can create a form to gather to collect, information. From, prospective job, applicants, as well as prospective, clients, and customers as well in. Addition to this it, also, gives you the ability to attach, or to have attachments. In that. Guha in that Google Form so, for example for, a job application for instance you can have someone attach a document which. Can be their resume, or cover letter or if. Say, you're the director and you're casting, for the next Avengers movie you can have people upload, their audition. Videos today, a Google Form, so. Far, upload, is one of those things that was, a result of direct user feedback, so this is something that we often tried to do with, with. Google or g3 products, is listen to our customers and learn, from that feedback, feedback we're getting from them to it to attempt to improve that or. Continue. Improving the products that we provide to our customers so. Another. Thing or, another feature that came, about as a, direct result of customer. Feedback was. Themes so. Inform Google Forms today your company can customize. The theme of their form to, match company branding, and this could be in the, colors or the fonts or whatever else or the background image that you want to have and. Again this is something that a lot of a company lot of our customers requested, but because they wanted this to look like not, just an external, product. But, something that's part of their company Brandon as well. So. Once, companies, have found the right candidate, we, see we often see HR teams use, Google Forms to prepare a great onboarding, experience so. You can use it for instance for, everything. - maybe manage everything from equipment. Requests. To, training. Requests to, also managing desk set, up processes, as well so, Google Forms allows teams to quickly, collect the data provide, and they showed that new employees, can hit the ground running when they start and at. This point I'm going to demonstrate something. That we we. Prioritize, on a lot of our products, and forms included and that's using machine learning to. Predict, user entries, so, I'm going to switch over to my demo machine. Alright. So here. We have a form that I've created called new high orientation. And this. Is actually a form that we're going to send out to, candidates. That have successfully, gone through the interview process and they're about to start so. Some of the questions that we might want to ask things. Like what. They. Will. You be, joining us. For. The. Orientation. It's, alright let me just add another question here I think I already used that one we let's see. There. We go what they will. You. Be joining us. For. The, orientation. So. As you can see forms. Correctly. Predicts, what. The answer, options will be based. On the kind of questions that you answered and I'll, just take a look at another example, say, Oh. What. Is the, best. Way. To. To. Contact you. So. As you can see it, provides. The answer options for. That as well and again, these are just a few example, or a few examples, of all the kinds of things that were able to do using machine learning and forms, and something, else I'd like to show you at this point because I know we talked about going. Through the hiring process, and the, onboarding, but also another thing, or another capability.

That Google, Forms can give you today is the ability to manage the. Ongoing, growth of your employee so things like certifications. And training so, there's actually, also a quiz. Functionality. In here so for example I can, turn this into a quiz, by. Simply clicking this and I, have all the options there of. You, know what kind of results I want if. If. They can see missed questions correct, answers point values so basically, you can customize, this to. Whatever way you want depending on what your cost what your company, needs are so, we can switch back to the presentation now. All right so I just talked about certifications. And assessments, and again this is yet another way, that forms, can provide value, to your company. Another. Thing that you can use Google Forms for is collecting, feedback from your employees, and. One. Something. That a lot of g3 customers, today take advantage, of is the, chrome kiosk mode, in Google Forms and this, allows you to have a basically, feedback. Collection. Portal. In public. Areas so, that employees, can go in there and provide feedback on anything, from, say, what kind of food or how they think the food in the cafe is or any, improvements, they might want to make around the water cooler amongst, a host, of other things and in addition to that you can also use Google Forms, to collect, feedback from your customers so this is not something that's just valuable, for processes, within your company but, also something that you can use to get input. From your from your customers and other third parties as well. So. G, suite and Google, add-ons, help. Also. Are another, powerful, aspect, of G suite that, help. Provide. Even more value to you so we have a lot of host of add-ons, that provide. Additional capabilities. Beyond what's actually built into the product, themselves, so at this point I'd like to highlight one of those its, called higher, for G suite which, essentially.

Helps, You manage, your hiring process more so if you're, a company that's growing significantly, and, you do a lot of hiring you may want to consider this, it's. A full applicant, tracking solution, that's natively built into G suite so, what this means is that it gives you the best of both worlds on. The one hand you can continue using all the G suite tools that you're already familiar with that your company is using for your hiring process today but. Higher by G suite also gives you the ability to manage, all the. All the hiring related, data and information, on. In, the same surface so basically all the different stakeholders, or all the contributors to that hiring process will have one, central, place available where, they can manage everything that goes into that and this is just one, example of, many, add-ons. That exist on G Street today, and as you can see on the screen we have a few more examples specific. To forms but if you click on the hamburger menu on forms, you, can see a host of others and again. There's. No limit to you know what you can do with G's we today. We're. Always, continuing. To build ways that, enterprises. Can use forms, and other G suite products to streamline, their processes better, so. We recently launched. A pilot program, that'll. Help include, their, help create, a multi-step. Workflow, and improve approval, processes inside. Of forms so. If you're if you're interested interested, in learning about this pilot. Feel, free to make a note of the URL that you see on the screen and you, know go ahead and sign up let, us know what you think and we always value customer feedback and we're always looking for ways to to. Improve and it also gives, it gives you the ability to see how you can, benefit, from yet. Another cool. Feature, of our products so. At, this point I'm going to end, and. I will invite Christian my colleague to talk about app maker. Yeah. This is where the, last part of the talk where I'm going to talk about essentially. How to customize, your processes. Also. Just to introduce myself I'm going to be spending a fair amount of time talking about Google, app maker and that's been kind of my passion for the last few years as I was its. First p.m. and help transition, it from a 20%, project back to actually, into a product, so I'll have some fun with that stuff as well and then we actually have even one of our customers, come up and talk about NAB maker so, in general you've seen what it does provided. A lot of really powerful technology. Where it's just out of the box it gives you great functionality, so what I'm gonna focus on today at least just for this part is to kind of touch, that last part where if you want to essentially, customize. Your. Applications. Your your whatever you're building and you always have the ability of, utilizing tool call that maker so. What, does that Maker it's. A low code application development, environment, that empowers a, wider. Audience a broader set, of folks to be able to build their own business. Applications, and so, we typically talk, about knowledge workers, or people who have some amount, of technical.

Understanding Not. Doesn't, necessarily need to be a lot but they have some understanding of how to work maybe, with some, databases or, there. You know centrally good with data or there also have a hand, in a little bit of more modern. Technologies, HTML. Javascript essentially. Web technologies, so people. Who have that kind of background and essentially. Have a day job where they're trying to work with data and they're working also with in G suite they'll find essentially, a very, powerful tool at their fingertips with that banker. So. Tap maker I would say the three main things the the main value proposition, that I think ur provides is that first. Off it, focuses, on the data it gives you the ability to structure. Tailor, the. Setup the data that you need to work with so it has a built in declarative. Data modeling editor so, you don't have to write a lot of code and you're not writing like a lot of like schema. Development, things like that you essentially can tap into existing, data sources and have that generate the structure of your data. Secondly, the. User, interface, is very key, for, a lot of the business, apps that people are looking for and they don't want to have to dive in to just, really, get, down deep, HTML, and CSS. And, things like that so what ethnic, it provides it's like a nice visual, design, environment, where you can drag and drop UI. Artifacts. Or widgets, and, essentially data bind them back to your to your back-end databases, so, that's all worked out pretty nicely and so people really enjoy that nice elevated. Way, to build apps without having to dig. Deep in the code but. On, the third part if you do want to have precisely. You know coded, logic, you do have that ability so you can do either a customized logic that will work within the browser so, essentially if you want to have specific UI manipulations. Occur you, can do that you, can also even tap in third-party JavaScript, libraries so jQuery, or d3 or really, whatever app, javascript. Libraries you want you can easily, integrate those into an, app make your application, and then on the server so when you build your app it's, actually sending the the application, bundle. Up to the Apps Script runtime, server and then, that code, itself can execute, and interact. With any Apps Script service so this, is very common where if you want to build an application that might say create, documents, on the fly generate. Calendar events or send emails that's, all at your fingertips with the server-side logic that, you have available within, app maker so. How, do you go about using app maker well first off as, I mentioned you can define your data models so I'll show a demo in a second where you can just point to a spreadsheet and have that generate for you secondly, you go through and design the UI just, drag and drop and. Data binding and maybe some final customizations, and then, when you're ready to press, that well you can preview it to get, your own working, version ready and then you can publish it and send it out to your your, you, know in your department, folks you can actually go through and pick, and choose who can access your application. You can define the roles such as admins, or basic, users or what have you you can even associate, those roles to Google Groups so that way people who join certain groups can be part, of those roles that are accessing your application, so, pretty, pretty straightforward, so let me just jump right into. Giving. You how many people have not seen at maker before, ok, good so this will be a first first. Demo. For you guys, so. If you switch over to the demo machine. Basically what we're looking at is the environment on the left side we have our three main components data, so this is what we, start with and then we have our UI so we have a set of pages and, this is actually a template, that I start.

Off With where I, utilize. One of these application, templates in this case I chose the starter, app template, which is just. Give me kind of like the the little menu. Or the header and then a little menu bar on the left and then if I want to I could do some scripts so that's where I can you customize further but, for this simple one I'm going to create a simple task database. So. I'll click Next, I'll type in. What's. The name of the the actual data model. Yeah. Select, a Google spreadsheet. So. I pop open the drive, picker I select. The sheet it, scans it it looks good I'll go ahead and click Next and then at this point it's assigning, the data types based off of what type of data is in the spreadsheet so it says oh this looks like a boolean this looks like you know data, dates, and numbers and so forth so I'll go ahead and click create and. So. Now I'm just taking the structure of the spreadsheet and transforming, it into a data, model and there's also a cloud, sequel, back-end so before, before. This was set up our. Admin, had actually set up a default cloud sequel instance that all ethnic, are apps can then work, with so it's a very convenient feature if I wanted to I could go back and define my own cloud sequel instance and then this application, would talk to that particular instance, so I can go in and, maybe. Do some customizations. Like maybe I want, priority. To be only a set of, 4, values, 1 2 3 4 I'll, click done and that's, basically it my data model is good to go I can. Now start to build, out the UI so. In this case I'll. Pop open the widget palette and I'll. Say let's put a form. And. This form will be an insert, form, and. I can just pick and choose what fields I want to show in the insert form so. I turn off the ones I don't need and I'll click finish and about. A being there's my form. And let's. Drag another item on here let's just drag a table. And. The, table will reside, below. And maybe, I want to make the fields editable. Click. Next and then I'll have the other options for pagination. Sorting, etc, click, finish and there, we have a table and maybe if I want to I can even set the spacing above the table to. Give myself a little bit of separation. And. So yeah that's basically it so it's pretty, straightforward. I could. Do one other customization. But kind, of makes the the, app a little easier to use we have this widget called a user picker this. User picker, taps. Into the directory, model which is set up what with your local LDAP. Or directory service and so I'll click create to, actually create, this directory, model specifically. For this purpose so now I have access read, access to all of these different fields here so if I want to make it like in a simple HR lookup I could do that actually we have a template for that which some, people are using for across their entire organizations. So, anyway, I built this out I go, back to my page that I'm editing. I'm, gonna replace the, the original owner with, this new one so let me just data bind it so. I quickly set, this to owner and, now, I can just grab this other one and toss it away and now. My app is good to go I click preview what, it's doing is taking the application, sending it off to the runtime environment which is the Apps Script server, and. Now, I can say oh let's go ahead and. Type. In a few characters I. Just. Grabbed my name, get. Myself like a task, to do and. Set. A priority. I'll. Select a date, I'll. Click Submit and then, the edit record, is inserted, in there so this is just a real quick simple, snapshot, of what you could do I'm, just previewing also so I just have like this little preview. Console, once I publish it you'll see the actual application, without the little page. Chooser and the little log window at the bottom so. That's. It for that demo, let me go ahead and switch back to the slides. And. It'll come back and I'll I'll do one final demo at. The end of the talk as well. So. I'd like to shift gears just slightly, and talk about some of our customers. Out there so. Has actually been out in the public for, about two years or so two and half years where we had like an early trusted tester program and, then, we had an early adopter program and we've learned a lot we've had a lot of customers come and, they participate, with us we've, had hackathons, workshops, and they gave us their feedback and then we continue to evolve the product based on their feedback and then they've gotten to the point where they've actually built out some pretty cool successful, solutions, and so I'd like to take just a few minutes to kind of step into some of these success.

Stories So. First off Nielsen, is one of our early adopters and they've been really great in providing, feedback they. Actually built a really cool directory. Lookup. Application, it's not even this one but it's like this application, that was based off of some of the stuff I just showed you but. More importantly more, recently, I guess they've had this efj, wrap I'm sorry this is a fields. Manual. Application. Where they essentially, support. A lot of folks out in the field who are doing a lot of. Assessments. And stuff and then they can put that data back into the central database so it basically gave like what, was originally, a very manual. Process the, ability to have like a much better, sophisticated. UI and it gave them a way. To tap in to a lot of their other G suite products. So they can like create you know calendar sheets, entries and things like that with this, centralized. System, that they set up. So. Overall they're they're their IT folks the marina, has been very happy with us and she likes the fact that they were able to replace, this cumbersome process with a nice mobile-friendly. App that they were able to do work with, state. Of Colorado this is another very cool customer. They this, is the governor's, office of IT they've. Been with us in the early days and they started, off by starting, to replace some of their manual processes, they literally had like old Excel, spreadsheets, or even paper-based, processes, and so, once their director of IT started, to work with that maker and he was involved in my trusted tester he started to digitize, a lot of these processes and so they, were able to create the application. And use. That application for handling, things like the funding requests, and bonuses. And such to, the point where it was you know relatively. Straightforward, and a lot more smooth processes, so the UI is not you know super fancy but it got it needed to be done and he was able to build it with rather quickly, so. They had their whole team there they're actually very engaged, I just did a workshop with them two weeks ago and they had their, he had about, 50 people join up and just starting to get their hands more. Involved, in at maker so they can capitalize. On their G suite investment, so, lilo Santos he was kind of our first guy he was able to essentially jump on and start building some really cool stuff and so he had some some, nice things to say about us there. Hollando. This is the more recent customer that we had in Germany, they, had, a more, sophisticated UI that's some pretty cool things that they were able to use at maker for, essentially. Workforce management so, they managed to build, out a nice UI that, handled their working, hours their vacation. Sick leaves providing. Reporting. So the overall users like 200, people were able to access this and their managers and group, leads as well find. It very valuable and so the overall investment. On their side was pretty, trivial I mean they they, had some folks that are more technically, astute and, they'd capitalize, on what AppMakr was able to provide them so they didn't really have to spend too much time building. Out the UI they just focused on the key, you. Know logic behind the scenes there and they were able to get this put, together relatively. Quickly. And. So yeah Ryan lot has been our main guy that we've been in touch with you know so they were able to build a really cool flexible, and scalable solution, that that was able to give, them like a lot of savings and time and cost, and. That. Finally we have Seagate, and for, this I'd like to invite John, Sousa and he's, gonna just give us a real quick overview of what they've been able to do with AppMakr, at sea right thanks, Christian. So. Welcome everybody I wanted, to review, our employee profile, application, now this application, is, our. One-stop shop for all employee information. It's, used by 22,000.

Employees And, has, about 3,000. To 5,000. Hits per day. We. Are a workday, shop and I, don't know about you but workday isn't the most user-friendly environment, out. There to both, find users, update, your own records and so what we ended up doing several years ago was build this app and we. Originally built it on with, a ton of servers, to try to keep it scalable devtest. Prod environments, and early. Last year or probably, December 2017. We, were told hey all those servers that you're using we're gonna get rid of them and so. Go figure out where to put the where to put this application, and so we we quickly looked around an app maker was really the the, one location to, put this application, in now, what you'll see here is from a employee. Perspective for. The end user perspective it's. A really, simple app, UI. We're, on the right you, can see the. User hierarchy, you can basically navigate, through it there's hover cards you can find information fairly, quickly about end users now, from my, record perspective. I can go in there really quickly and update my phone, number my just. Basically, my, mail stop, office. Number now, that, would have taken forever back in workday because I never do it over there and I it's I'm always fumbling around so. Very, straightforward, in here this. Application, was written in about a month by one of my developers, who really had no app maker experience, before, he had a very little, Apps. Script experience, but really none over, on the app maker side, it. Replaced an application, that yeah believe it or not with 17 servers was costing, probably. About ten thousand dollars per year to. Run and now basically, it's costing, pretty. Much zero I think about forty dollars if we really, start to nitpick at the at the cost for the default database and it. Leverages AP is built. On App Engine which actually connects back in the workday connects on to on-premise, systems that, leverages, cloud sequel, over, on the GCP side and and. Leverages, the Google directory API so for example that my picture up there on the on the Left is it. Was pulled directly from from. The G suite side, so. That's. That's. Pretty much the the application that we were able to build cool, very. Cool, and. So. Finally we were able to, move. To app maker we're able to eliminate the dependence on on pretty, expensive on-premise, servers regardless. That they were VMs, or or, actual, physical Hardware we, were able to simplify the environment, development. And deployment processes, couldn't, be any simpler you can basically start to developing. You, can actually push out a. Pre. Development pre, deployment aversion. And. Test. That out hit, publish immediately publish out to the end users and the, the. Improvement. In application, availability, has been phenomenal this, hasn't gone down in a year-and-a-half and. Whereas. The old system, regardless, of the number of servers we had was constantly going down for one reason or another well, thank, you very much all right thank you. So. I'd like to wrap it up pretty. Quickly with a little demo I don't know if you caught my earlier talk. Yesterday but I, like, to do a little bit of similar stuff but actually show you visually, what we do so I built this demo just to kind of demonstrate, a little bit of the art of the possible, so.

It's An app maker app that I built that's mobile friendly so you basically, use it on your phone and the idea is that it allows, you to digitize, like, your business cards or really any paper documents, that you want so you can pull it up with your phone someone shows your business card you take a snapshot it, goes against the cloud vision API calls. The essentially the the text conversion sends. Back a JSON stream, to your to the app maker app and then it gives you a preview and then you have the option of creating a doc and then once you create the doc you have that text saved in the Google Doc it also does other things it logs the the information so it builds up your own registry. Of contacts, and things like that so it's pretty pretty, cool and this is just scratching the surface so. I'll switch over to this demo machine. And. I'll. Show you more or less what, you're gonna see here so this is the app I built notice that I actually have I'm utilizing one of the the. New features where I can kind of give like a nice viewport for the application, and I'll. Talk about how it works in a second but let me just do a quick run-through. Of the app so, once, the app pops up in the preview window you'll. Be able to see that it's you know it's using a camera, hello everyone so then I can snap. A photo. This. Is Kobe's kind of funny because like when, I snapped the photo. You. Got to make sure I did my fingers not covering it yeah that's good enough. There. We go so that's good enough, so. Grab the text I was moving it so it may not be a hundred perfect, but I'll, create the doc. And. Once it creates a doc I have. The stuff, ready to go right there all right so, so, pretty pretty straightforward, stuff actually let. Me just briefly, show you how it works or how it was put together so, what I did was I essentially, used some html5. Video. Canvas, tags I have, a little bit of code, here actually. This is probably the most complex part of it to, operate. In an html5 camera. To grab an image so, when the button is clicked it, actually goes through and snaps. A shot there I take, it I convert it to base64. It just makes it easier to send upstream to cloud. Vision API I could also save that image in Google storage if I wanted to that's, a pretty common. Technique. So, then there's a vision API call. Here and actually. Actually. Resides over here or, I get, ready to call to, the server to call my my. Actual, make, the actual call to the cloud API so and that, is where I have this a bit of code here and I'm not I'm not going live to the line but you probably get the idea I'm setting, up I'm building a request, I'm I'm.

Sending, Up the image I'm specifying. In, the the options, that I want it to be a document, text detection. And. Then. Once the data comes back I process, it and I. Update. The UI so the show response right here comes back I say, oh okay here's the text that came back from the API and then, also if, you recall I had this dialog here where, I could click on this and actually create the doc and when, I click on that a little. Bit of code, here that creates, the document, for me it also sends an email out so. Pretty straightforward, stuff and I thought for just a final demo what. I'm going to do is, oh by the way it sends off the email so that was my last email, let, me clear that up. Just. To kind of wrap this up one thing that I'd like to do is. Run. It in the mobile mode so, if I take this. Is actually an old business card when I first joined Google, and, I was in Japan for, a bit and I actually have a Japanese version of a business card on the backside so I'll take a picture of my Japanese, side. Of the business card. So. Once I fire up the app here. So. Now I have the app running right there let's. Go through too, much shadow, I. Think. That's good enough so I'll click create dock, and. Then, if we look over here on the demo machine Dada. I have a new dock ready I. Click. On that and. Just. For fun I was. Kind of shaking it but. If. You can read it you can see what it says but I'll translate it for you so it's, pretty close shark, not quite exact but anyway that's my last, name and my title, and stuff like that so just for fun I just wanted to show you a bit of the art, of the possible with integrations. With GCP, with vision API this, is literally just scratching the surface I have other examples where your sentiment analysis and whatever but I figured it might be kind of fun to show this just to wrap it up so next. Slide please. How. About go back to slides here so, what's coming so what. We're doing without maker in general, the next few quarters just to simplify the development. So. Making. It more approachable to our knowledge worker base so people we have a lot of different customers and companies out there that are now, looking to engage their, knowledge workers and so they're running their hackathons, their workshops, and we're, working to make app maker more approachable to them so, offering, more tutorials, more samples more videos more just fun stuff to kind of get people engaged. We also are changing the product so that it will assist you in building the apps so notice when I drag and drop a form and a table it generated that stuff we want to take a few steps further and make it such that when you're in sheets, for example it can say hey this looks like it could be an app you want to create an app from this and then boom you will have an app generated, for you so that's our stated goal for. Some of these more fun, assistive, creation features we, also have you know better mobile responsive. Web app development I showed you a little bit but we want to make that a lot easier. Streamlining. The migrations, from sheets and legacy tech as well as just you know touching into better. Access to cloud api's, and, then finally we want to put. Out our story for G suite marketplace, published so if you want to take your apps and publish it to your domain or even to the external world we want to make that all set, up so it's very easy to do so that's our direction and. If. You want to try it out feel free to check.

Out The main marketing page and then you can learn more about Google app maker.

2019-04-15 20:12

Other news