Transitioning to Hybrid Environment with Chrome Browser
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It’s been quite a year. In general, and for work. Just the other day, I read a new study from Pew Research that shows 71% of people are currently working from home, and 50% of employees say they want to continue working from home at least three days a week. That’s more than half of people wanting to be remote over half the time!
As we’ve been navigating our own return to the office here at Google, one thing has become more clear than ever: the browser is no longer just a portal to the internet—it’s one of the most critical components of our tech stack. And we know we’re not alone in this. As our organization, and other organizations of all sizes, transition to a more hybrid way of working, it’s absolutely key to have a modern browser that’s built to support both admins and end users.
The good news is, Chrome is made for this! Literally. It’s purpose-built for flexible work—and as the future unfolds and businesses’ needs continue to evolve, we’re committed to making sure our browser is even easier to manage, even more secure, and even more helpful, so all of us can be more productive.
What’s next for Chrome
As we design and build Chrome to be a stronger asset for the enterprise, we are focused on these key areas:
- Simple management
- Modernized security
- Productivity enhancements
- Helpful integrations
We’ve already made great strides in all four areas, with more exciting releases to come soon. Let’s take a closer look at what’s new and available right now, what to look forward to, and how each feature is equipping Chrome browser-based businesses (and their users) for what’s next.
When it comes to simple management there have been a lot of exciting developments—Chrome Browser Cloud Management is built for this new hybrid reality, giving IT teams the advantage of powerful and flexible management capabilities both in the cloud and on premises, so they always have the visibility and insights they need to make more informed decisions, quickly.
With recent new releases admins can:
- Track all versions of Chrome from one place. Our new daily version report allows IT teams to see all versions, including minor versions, in a single report to support compliance and make it easier to see and manage their entire deployment.
- Report on apps and extensions across the organization. A new Apps & Usage report provides helpful visibility into all installed extensions, Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), Chrome apps, and Android apps. You can see versions and permissions for each individual app and even force install or block, right from the report.
- Remotely troubleshoot and clear browser data. This is one of my favorites because not only is it incredibly helpful, it was created from customer requests! Admins (and a lot of service desk employees) told us how useful it would be if they could clear an end user’s browsing data, cookies, and cache remotely – and our team made it happen.
- Extension management improvements. Coming this summer: extension request workflow will empower admins to change the behavior of Chrome Web Store so that end users request extensions and admins then approve or deny the installations from a centralized list in Admin Console. Another new release is extension details, where admins can now find out exactly what extensions are installed where, who makes them, what resources they’re using, and all other extension-related details – also right from the Admin console.
Of all of our priorities, modernized security often feels most urgent. In a recent security report, 65% of US and UK employees said they received a phishing email during the remote working period initiated by COVID-19. Further, a study by the Ponemon Institute found that 41% of responding organizations had dealt with an attack involving the compromise of employees’ passwords, costing an average of $267,408 per organization. Between the regular emergence of new threats and the increase in targeted mobile attacks, our new ways of working definitely demand a fresh approach to security.
- BeyondCorp Enterprise, our new modern zero trust solution, enables secure access to critical apps and services with integrated threat and data protection, all delivered through Chrome browser, was introduced in January 2021. Its agentless approach simplifies the admin and end-user experience. We also just launched BeyondCorp Enterprise protected profiles to help organizations protect their extended workforce, including contractors, frontline workers, and anyone working from home who needs to securely access corporate resources from shared or unmanaged devices.
To learn more about Google’s approach to modernizing security, tune into the Wall Street Journal’s Advancing Security in the New Business Environment event tomorrow from 10:35 am – 10:55 am EST, with very own Parisa Tabriz (Head of Chrome Engineering, Product Management and UX) and Phil Venables (CISO of Google Cloud).
When it comes to productivity enhancements, I’m proud to share that we’re consistently releasing features that support users no matter where they’re working. Now that the browser is where so much of our day-to-day work happens, it’s more important than ever before to build in new ways to save time and work together while apart.
Recently released productivity-boosting features include:
- A faster way to take action right from the address bar. Chrome Actions is a feature we launched last year, where you can simply type in commands such as “clear browsing data ” or “open incognito window”and get down to business in just a few clicks. We’re excited to announce new Chrome Actions are now available through our beta channel! Try one of these actions to check it out: “ Run Chrome safety check,” “Create doc,” and “Manage Google Account.”
- Link directly to highlighted text. If you like to share snippets and quotes from articles or websites with your colleagues, you’re in luck. Now, instead of sharing the URL link from the address bar, you can take advantage of the new “link to highlight” feature in Chrome to point to the specific content. Simply choose the content you want to share, right click, select “Copy link to highlight,” and then send the link – to the exact part of the page you want people to see. It’s available for desktop and Android now, and coming soon for iOS.
- Decreased Chrome CPU usage. This means more battery life, less heat coming off of your device, and less fan noise. 🎉 🙌🏻
- And there’s more! To explore additional productivity features, check out this blog post.
Our final area of focus is all about giving Chrome customers more choice with helpful integrations. We’re actively partnering with best-of-breed organizations to bring integrations —and your favorite tools— into Chrome, to create a more seamless and productive experience across the board. Stay tuned on this as we’ll have more to share later this year. In the meantime, hear from our Modern Computing Alliance partners, such as Box, HP, RingCentral, Okta and VMware, as they explore many of the most important questions about returning to the office.
We’re constantly thinking about how we can help people and organizations adapt and thrive as they begin to return to the office. See below for three events from the team that cover how to make the transition to hybrid easier for your team, be sure to check them out.
Modernizing Your Approach to Security session at the Wall Street Journal’s Advancing Security in the New Business Environment event
- Tomorrow June 2, 2021
- 10:35 – 10:55 AM EST
- Register here
Chrome Insider: Browser tips & tricks for IT admins
- June 10, 2021
- 10:00 AM – 11:15 PT
- Register here
A Year of Connecting Brand and Consumers with Google’s Business Messages
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Last June, in the early months of the pandemic, we expanded Business Messages to support all kinds of businesses, from pharmacies and grocery stores to airlines and luxury brands. Then, in December, we announced the ability for small businesses to use the Google Maps app to message with their customers. We knew people would find messaging directly with businesses from Google Search and Maps helpful, but we didn’t know just how valuable it would turn out to be.
Consumers are increasingly eager to use messaging to connect with brands, and businesses across all industries are now building innovative messaging experiences to address that growing need. The demand from consumers is reflected in recent data:
- 45% of users have spent more time on messaging services because of the pandemic
- 85% of consumers would like to message brands directly, up from 65% in 2019
Being able to message a business directly has never been more important. For me personally, there’s nothing more fulfilling than using technology to help people in the moments that matter. After the release of initial COVID-19 vaccines in late 2020, online searches for vaccines reached an all-time high. To help people searching for vaccine eligibility, availability, and appointment booking, Albertsons Companies’ banner pharmacies—like Albertsons, Safeway, and Vons—made this information easily accessible through Google Search and Maps via the “chat” button. This gave people the information they needed, when they needed it.
To be more helpful in moments like these, over the last year, we’ve made Business Messages available globally, in more than 70 languages, and we’ve seen more than 30,000 brands and 200 partners come on board. Major brands like Carrefour, Walmart, and Woolworths have invested in Business Messages to help serve their consumers in new and meaningful ways.
Expanding the conversation between consumers and brands
The retail sector has undergone a transformation since the start of the pandemic. As a result, we know it is critical for digital services to integrate with physical stores. We were able to do just that with Google’s Business Messages, which has been instrumental in helping better serve our customers across 1200+ stores in Europe.
Thomas Rudelle
Global Digital Marketing Director, Carrefour
There were major shifts in consumer behavior during the pandemic, from the way people found and purchased products to the ways they interacted with businesses. Not only did we see higher demand for direct contact with brands, but retail searches also surged. At the end of 2020, retail searches grew at a rate that was more than three times higher than the same period in 2019 (based on Google internal data).
As Business Messages has become more widespread, brands are able to boost both responsiveness and customer satisfaction using the service. Levi’s, for example, surpassed 85% customer satisfaction scores using Business Messages and they discovered that the service drove 30x more store-related questions than web chat.
Many brands have also digitized what were traditionally in-store experiences, especially in high-consideration categories like jewelry. For example, Signet brought its virtual jewelry consultant to Business Messages, offering customers advice and answering queries in a way that’s convenient but still feels personal.We started using Google’s Business Messages pretty early on, and continue to transform and improve our experience. The ability to let customers know whether a product is in stock, and its precise location, is critical to offering a connected and frictionless shopper experience. Of course it also helps reduce the workload on our store and customer hub teams.
Nick Eshkenazi
Chief Digital Technology Officer, Woolworths
As a working mother, these sorts of innovations have made a direct impact in my own life. I find it very helpful to be able to ask—and get real-time answers to—everyday questions using Business Messages, ranging from store hours and product availability to order status and how to make returns. One of my favorite features is the ability to know, in real time, what store wait times are like, and the exact location of the product I’m looking for, saving me precious time when I visit the store.
Business Messages helps people do more with their time in other ways as well. Earlier this year I’d been meaning to change my insurance plan, but kept pushing it off because I didn’t want to get on a phone call. I can now message Geico to update my policy through the agent pretty effortlessly. Similarly, in India, Vi customers can use 24×7 real-time customer service to chat with their AI powered virtual assistant VIC, integrated with Google’s Business Messages, to check billing information, activate packs, add recharges and payments, check balances, and much more—and it all happens seamlessly.
Building a full suite of messaging products
We’re investing in building a full suite of messaging products that enable seamless conversational commerce to drive business results. As Business Messages continues to support brands in establishing their messaging presence on Google, we’re also experimenting with other ways to help them increase their reach and engagement on Search and Display. To accelerate on the digital front, we recently integrated AdLingo, a project built within Area 120, Google’s in-house incubator. This will enable brands to easily transform ads into AI powered, personalized conversations at scale.
For more information on how you can activate Business Messages, please reach us via the contact form on the Business Messages website. Merchants can also read and respond to messages via Google My Business or on the Google Maps app.
Precarious to Precision: How Dainik Bhaskar Corp Transitioned Its Business in a Time of Great Change
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About DB Corp
DB Corp is India’s largest newspaper publisher delivering 62 editions in four languages and selling about 6 million copies per day. The business also has an extensive online and mobile presence.
Headquartered in Bhopal, India, and listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange, DB Corp is India’s largest newspaper group. DB Corp publishes 62 editions in four languages and sells about 6 million newspaper copies per day. Beyond newspapers, DB Corp operates 29 radio stations, 13 portals and two mobile apps.
Like the media industry in general, DB Corp is having to adapt to readers’ increasing preference for accessing news content online – particularly on mobile devices.
However, online advertising is yet to fill the gap left by the leakage of advertising revenues from print. Further disruption occurred when the Indian Government’s implemented a demonetization program in November 2016 that prompted a sharp surge in e-commerce transactions and online banking.
Facing a tsunami of change, DB Corp is developing and executing new strategies to engage consumers and build revenues.
These plans include evolving from an IT-supported business to an IT-enabled company, and finally to an IT-led business that complements its newspapers with online news and updates throughout the day.
DB Corp is building e-commerce properties that leverage its print brands and is moving to increase advertising across its mobile services.
Furthermore, the business is looking to capture information about readers and customers to tailor its publications and services more closely to their needs.
Expertise in Managing Large Data Volumes Behind GCP Selection
However, DB Corp’s on-premises infrastructure and traditional applications could not deliver the flexibility and agility needed to support the transition to real-time news delivery.
In late 2015, DB Corp started evaluating public and private cloud services, including cloud-based application suites and platform-as-a-service offerings. This process led the business to deploy G-Suite and start working with Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
“We selected GCP due to Google’s experience in delivering cloud services, and because nobody else manages data volumes of the magnitude that they do,” says R D Bhatnagar, Chief Technology Officer, DB Corp.
“We were also impressed by the fact GCP had a local team with the skills and expertise to educate us about how best to use its products.”
DB Corp is migrating its websites and key applications to GCP. The business is also upgrading its network to remove bandwidth restrictions that could impede the value provided by GCP services.
The scale and scope of DB Corp’s G Suite and GCP projects has required the business to engage four partners and access technical expertise and support from Google itself. Technical and business experts from the platform as a service provider are providing monthly updates and training sessions with various groups within the organisation, including user communities and the board of directors.
The Google projects at DB Corp are driving a sharp increase in the speed, agility and performance of the business.
“As a senior leader within the organisation, I see the key benefits of GCP and other technologies being lower cost; greater efficiency; and improved business continuity,” says Bhatnagar.
“For example, the current data center team can be redeployed to other initiatives as the technical experts at GCP will be undertaking most of the management and maintenance tasks.”
DB Corp is already making business and financial performance data available in real time from a single source, enabling business teams to make sound, consistent decisions about digital strategies and other key activities. These teams may also address issues or problems before they compromise the quality of content and services provided to consumers.
Deploying Chrome for Meetings across various offices has enabled teams to communicate and collaborate effectively in real time, breaking down geographic barriers, ensuring each member is on the same page and ensuring the business transformation proceeds smoothly.
Sales teams are using Google Forms and Google Sheets to centralize and control tasks such as sales forecasting, reducing the time required to complete reports and updates from up to a week to two hours.
Furthermore, various teams are using calendars to improve organization and productivity. For example, editorial teams are using calendars to track Indian holidays and festivals and deliver relevant content to readers.
Reporters are also using Google Cloud Speech API and Google Cloud Translation API services to capture and document interviews and source material for articles at accuracy rates of 95 percent for Hindi alone.
Accelerate Developer Productivity with Google Workspace
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The software development process requires complex, cross-functional collaboration while continuously improving products and services. Our customers who build software say that they value Google Workspace for its ability to drive innovation and collaboration throughout the entire software development life cycle. Developers can hold standups and scrums in Google Chat, Meet, and Spaces, create and collaborate on requirements documentation in Google Docs and Sheets, build team presentations in Google Slides, and manage their focus time and availability with Google Calendar.
Development teams also use many other tools to get work done, like tracking issues and tasks in Atlassian’s Jira, managing workloads with Asana, and incident management in PagerDuty. One of the benefits of Google Workspace is that it’s an open platform tailored to improve the performance of your tools by seamlessly integrating them together. We’re constantly expanding our ecosystem and improving Google Workspace, giving you the power to push your software development even further.
Make software development more agile
Google Workspace gives you real-time visibility into project progress and decisions to help you ship quality code fast and stay connected with your stakeholders, all without switching tools and tabs. By leveraging applications from our partners, you can pull valuable information out of silos, making collaborating on requirements, code reviews, bug triage, deployment updates, and monitoring operations easy for the whole team. This allows your teams to stay focused on their priorities while keeping everyone aligned, ensuring collaborators are always in the loop.
Plan and execute together
When combined with integrations, Google Workspace makes the software development planning process more collaborative and efficient. For example, many organizations use Asana—a leading work management platform—to coordinate and manage everything from daily tasks to cross-functional strategic initiatives. To make the experience more seamless, Asana built integrations so users can always have access to their tasks and projects with Google Drive, Gmail, and Chat. With these integrations for Google Workspace, you can turn your conversations into action and create new tasks in Asana—all without leaving Google Workspace.
“We’ve seen exceptional, heavy adoption of tasks being created from within the Gmail add-on. Our customers and community have also shown very strong interest in future development work, which is something we’ll continue to prioritize.” Strand Sylvester, Product Manager, Asana
To date, users have installed the Asana for Gmail add-on over 2.5 million times, as well as over 3.8 million installs of the Asana for Google Workspace add-on for Google Drive.
Start coding quickly
Google Workspace makes it easy for product managers, UX designers, and engineers to agree on what they’re building and why. By bringing all stakeholders, decisions, and requirements into one place—whether it’s a Gmail or Google Chat conversation, or a document in Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides—Google Workspace removes friction, helping your teams finalize product specifications and get started right away.
Integrations like GitHub for Google Chat make the entire development process fit easily into a developer’s workflow. With this integration, teams can quickly push new commits, make pull requests, do code reviews, and provide real-time feedback that improves the quality of their code—all from Google Chat.
Speed up testing
Integrations like Jira for Google Chat accelerate the entire QA process in the development workflow. The app acts as a team member in the conversation, sending new issues and contextual updates as they are reported to improve the quality of your code and keep everyone informed on your Jira projects.
Ship code faster
Developers use Jenkins—a popular open-source continuous integration and continuous delivery tool—to build and test products continuously. Along with other cloud-native tools, Jenkins supports strong DevOps practices by letting you continuously integrate changes into the software build.
With Jenkins for Google Chat, development and operations teams can connect into their Jenkins pipeline and stay up to date by receiving software build notifications directly in Google Chat.
Proactively monitor your services
Improving the customer experience requires capturing and monitoring data sources to improve application and infrastructure observability. Google Workspace supports DevOps teams and organizations by helping stakeholders collaborate and troubleshoot more effectively. When you integrate Datadog with Google Chat, monitoring data becomes part of your team’s discussion, and you can efficiently collaborate to resolve issues as soon as they arise.
The integration makes it easy to start a discussion with all the relevant teams by sharing a snapshot of a graph in any of your Chat spaces. When an alert notification is triggered, it allows you to notify each Chat space independently, precisely targeting your communication to the right teams.
Improve service reliability
Orchestrating business-wide responses to interruptions is a cross-functional effort. When revenue and brand reputation depends on customer satisfaction, it’s important to proactively manage service-impacting events. Google Workspace supports response teams by ensuring that urgent alerts reach the right people by providing teams with a central space to discover incidents, find the root cause, and resolve them quickly.
PagerDuty for Google Chat empowers developers, DevOps, IT operations, and business leaders to prevent and resolve business-impacting incidents for an exceptional customer experience—all from Google Chat. See and share details with link previews, and perform actions by creating or updating incidents. By keeping all conversations in a central space, new responders can get up to speed and solve issues faster without interrupting others.
Accelerate developer productivity
Integrating your DevOps tools with Google Workspace allows your development teams to centralize their work, stay focused on what’s important—like managing their work—build code quickly, ship quality products, and communicate better during service impacting incidents. For more apps and solutions that help centralize your work so you and your teams can connect, create, and get things done, check out Google Workspace Marketplace, where you’ll find more than 5,300 public applications that integrate directly into Google Workspace.
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On-Demand Webinar: 3 Ways Collaboration Transforms How Your Company Works
A majority of your employees and teams spend 38% of their time unsuccessfully searching and recreating content, according to IDC.
They also spend 20% of their time looking for information, according to McKinsey. That’s 58% of time lost in unproductive tasks that could have been spent coming up with the next big innovative idea that actually impacts business.
Now you know why there are no new ideas, no new innovations, no room for business to grow. Savvy organizations like Nielsen, Whirlpool, and Colgate-Palmolive have had enough of that and are embracing the cloud to collaborate in real-time and transform how their companies work.
The only way to achieve business growth and beat competition is to invest less time in unproductive tasks—like looking for information—and more time innovating with intelligent systems that provide your teams with information they need without even having to look for it: The ability to search smart, find fast, collaborate in real-time, and build new ideas quickly. Embracing Artificial Intelligence enabled-cloud collaboration platforms is one way to get there.
In this webinar, Allen Yang, Product Manager, Google Cloud, talks about how big corporations are turning to the power of the cloud to enable real-time collaboration, faster decision making, smarter and more productive employees and teams, and embracing a new way of working.
Discovery’s Massive Workspace Migration Fuels Innovation and Collaboration
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In the past two decades, Discovery has moved from a purely cable business based in the U.S. to a global media and entertainment powerhouse. Like many other businesses in the industry, we’ve had to adjust to the unique shifts in people’s behaviors and preferences, almost all of which result from the rise in streaming.
We have always been consumer-obsessed at Discovery, with a corporate culture built on the desire to entertain and inspire people of all ages and backgrounds with exceptional content. As we’ve grown, we have also learned just how important it is to be staff-obsessed, giving our employees the best possible experiences so they can continue to innovate and deliver the world-class content our customers expect.
In 2019, we decided one way to fuel innovation and collaboration among employees was to bring in Google Workspace. Selected for its intuitive, easy-to-use, and constantly evolving tools, Google Workspace enables teams to seamlessly create, connect, and collaborate anywhere, anytime.
Given the scope of our ambitions, and recognizing the challenges of migrating 16,500 global employees to a new collaboration solution, we worked with Google Cloud premier partner SADA to get the job done.
Change management amid a massive migration
We began the move to Google Workspace by migrating our document storage system from a legacy cloud provider to Google Drive. This included 86 million items amounting to about two petabytes of data migrated with minimal disruptions. A few months later we completed our move to Google Workspace by migrating 1.2 million calendar invites and 20,800 mail accounts, including thousands of collaborative inboxes and delegated accounts.
In addition to the technical support and Google Workspace expertise that SADA provided, they also partnered with our project team on the change management strategy. Despite challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, our training team and SADA were able to offer outstanding educational opportunities to assist our workforce in the transition and to get the most out of Google Workspace. This included collaborating on over 240 global webinars in seven languages.
Discovering the power of transformative tools
Discovery has many types of end users, from finance professionals and marketing teams to producers and content developers. The fact that Google Workspace has been well-received across the company is a testament to the power of the solution.
Many of our teams have taken advantage of collaborative Gmail accounts and shared drives, providing them with a centralized location to seamlessly communicate and work together on team-focused projects. Our internal communications team is especially happy with the real-time collaborative editing experience within Docs as they work on company-wide emails, announcements, and other projects.
These collaboration tools have allowed us to stay agile amid global lockdowns and will continue to do so as we adapt to a more flexible working environment.
The value of partnership
While we were comfortable with our legacy collaboration suite, one of the biggest benefits of switching to Google Workspace has been Google Cloud’s and SADA’s partnership. They provide us with regular updates on product roadmaps, upcoming features, and more.
This is just the beginning as we plan to grow, deliver new content, and lead the media and entertainment industry with the help of these two great partners and their solutions.
To learn more about Discovery’s journey with Google Workspace, read the full case study.
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