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.

Creating a secure-by-default experience based on robust defenses has always been a core design principle for Gmail. That’s why we’ve established a strong baseline of security in Gmail, with built-in protections to help automatically filter out potentially malicious messages. While these defenses help keep Gmail users safe, email functions as part of a large, complex, interconnected ecosystem that we continually invest in and work to protect. After first announcing Gmail’s Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) pilot last year, today we’re announcing that over the coming weeks we’re rolling out Gmail’s general support of BIMI, an industry standard that aims to drive adoption of strong sender authentication for the entire email ecosystem. BIMI provides email recipients and email security systems increased confidence in the source of emails, and enables senders to provide their audience with a more immersive experience.

“Bank of America has a wide range of security measures in place to support our customers, and we constantly evolve our program to deliver best in class protection. Part of this effort is our partnership with Google on BIMI, which provides an easy way to validate if correspondence is from us.” — Bank of America

BIMI enables organizations that authenticate their emails using Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC)—a standard for providing strong sender authentication that allows security systems to perform better filtering, separating legitimate messages from potentially spoofed ones—to validate ownership of their logos and securely transmit them to Google. BIMI is designed to be easy: for organizations with DMARC in place, validated logos display on authenticated emails from their domains and subdomains.

Here’s how it works: Organizations who authenticate their emails using Sender Policy Framework (SPF) or Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) and deploy DMARC can provide their validated trademarked logos to Google via a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC). BIMI leverages Mark Verifying Authorities, like Certification Authorities, to verify logo ownership and provide proof of verification in a VMC. Once these authenticated emails pass our other anti-abuse checks, Gmail will start displaying the logo in the existing avatar slot.  

“Gmail’s support of BIMI is a win for email authentication, brand trust, and consumers alike. BIMI gives organizations the opportunity to provide their customers with a more immersive email experience, strengthening email sender authentication across the entire email ecosystem.” — Seth Blank, Chair of the AuthIndicators Working Group

This is just the start for BIMI. The standard expects to expand support across logo types and validators. For logo validation, BIMI is starting by supporting the validation of trademarked logos, since they are a common target of impersonation. Today, Entrust and DigiCert support BIMI as Certification Authorities, and in the future the BIMI working group expects this list of supporting validation authorities to expand further. To learn more about BIMI and see the latest news, visit the working group’s website.

To take advantage of BIMI, ensure that your organization has adopted DMARC, and that you have validated your logo with a VMC. For Gmail users, no action is required. We’re proud to be one of the leading members in both establishing and supporting the BIMI standard and will continue to support efforts that contribute to security for the entire email ecosystem.

At Cardinal Group, we have four distinct lines of business, each of which are critical to our overall company performance: real estate investment, third-party property management, construction management, and marketing.

As the VP of IT and Data, one of my top priorities is giving each of our team members across these teams the tools they need to be productive, while also ensuring all of our company’s data is safe, secure, and properly managed. And with a variety of different business units, it’s critical that our team members are able to collaborate effectively across teams. We rely heavily on Google Drive and G Suite to help us accomplish these goals.

Prior to partnering with Google, we relied on a legacy content storage and management solution. Our team members found this tool cumbersome and unintuitive—finding the right file at the right time was very difficult, and it was challenging to collaborate and share content effectively across the various teams within our company.

We also struggled with document ownership and version control. One team would start working on a contract, and then share it with a collaborator over email, who would then share it with a third collaborator, and so on. It was never clear which version of the document was the most up to date, who owned it, and who should be working on it. Our team members relied on these tools every day to get their jobs done, and the subpar experience was impacting productivity and morale. 

Moving toward a more collaborative company culture

We began to explore various solutions to these problems, and quickly realized that Google’s approach to productivity was most closely aligned with Cardinal Group’s desire to build a more collaborative and innovative culture. We worked closely with Cloudbakers, a Google partner, to migrate all of our existing content and data to Drive.

And most of our team members were already familiar with Drive and found it very intuitive and easy to use, so change management was minimal and we were quickly up and running. 

With Drive, it’s easy for our team members to quickly find and access the files they need at that moment, which saves them valuable time and increases productivity across our teams. Live, real-time collaboration across Drive and our other G Suite apps is a huge selling point for us.

For example, if we’re building a marketing plan, our onsite, marketing, and operations teams can all work simultaneously on the same plan, which saves us a ton of time and also eliminates version control and ownership issues. We’re also moving towards a “work from anywhere” model, and Drive is a huge enabler of this transition, with team members able to easily access and collaborate on files, whether they’re working in our main office, at home, or at a customer’s community. 

Fewer support tickets lets IT spend time on more impactful projects

Since we started working with Google a few years ago, our company has grown significantly, from 800 to 1,400 team members. During this tremendous growth, the number of productivity-related support tickets we see has remained flat; this translates to a 43% decline in the number of support tickets per team member. As a result, our team members can spend more time being productive and my IT team can focus less on resolving support tickets and more on creating business value for Cardinal Group and our team members. 

Moving to Google Drive and G Suite has been a big part of our journey towards being a more collaborative and innovative company. We’re looking forward to continuing this partnership with Google and we’re excited to see what’s next!

The Google Maps Platform Android SDK supports extensions for reactive programming, which helps you write code to handle asynchronous operations.

Write reactive and responsive mapping applications with Google Maps Platform

In mobile apps, asynchronous events can happen at any point in time: user touch events, waiting for network calls to complete, or receiving push notifications, to name a few. As an app developer, accounting for these events and composing them with other asynchronous events can be challenging. Reactive programming is an alternative to passing callbacks for different events and helps simplify the process of working with asynchronous events. In reactive programming, events are modeled as a stream, emitting items over time.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=1TmJvOZfBVQ%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26

There are two libraries you can use to write reactive code: Kotlin Flows and RxJava. The next two videos show you how to use each one.

Writing reactive and responsive mapping applications using Kotlin

If you’re a Kotlin developer looking to use Coroutines and Flows, the KTX library allows you to use Kotlin Flows to receive events. The Maps KTX library includes extension functions that return Kotlin Flow objects, so you can listen to events in a reactive manner. Unlike suspending functions, which return a single value, Kotlin Flows can return several values over time. For example, you can use a Flow to receive camera event changes over time. To get started using Kotlin Flows in your app, include the Maps KTX library in the dependencies section in your build.gradle file.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Cotx1ZmEYg8%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26

Creating reactive maps on Android with RxJava

Integrate Google Maps Platform SDKs with popular Android library RxJava. RxJava is the Java implementation of Reactive Extensions, which is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs using observable sequences. One thing RxJava does is allows you to convert callback-based asynchronous code into a chain of transformations. Learn how this works and the other ways you can use RxJava in the third video in this series.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=AgGE7fAMrdA%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26

​​We hope you learn more about reactive programming concepts to help you build responsive and reactive mobile apps in this three-part YouTube series. Have ideas for helpful videos you’d like to see on our channel? Leave a comment on any of our videos. And don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel for the latest updates, tutorials, customer stories, and more.

For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.

Organizations are pressed with the need to engage, retain, and upskill employees with many positions staying fully or partially remote as the pandemic continues. The Center for Digital Government (CDG) reports that 74% of state and local governments believe they will continue hybrid operations for the long-term. This transition is the latest in a long list of reasons agencies are looking for solutions to help train their workforce digitally. Some have found Google Classroom to be the perfect solution.

The State of Iowa knew about the advantages of digital classrooms even before the pandemic. They were already successfully using Google Classroom for in-person training, making the transition to digital seamless when the state closed down. Jessica Van Heuveln, a Google support specialist for the State of Iowa CIO’s Office, says the switch to digital doesn’t deprive workers of hands-on training. “You can use Google Classroom for many different environments, so if you’re doing self-taught, in-person or virtual training, it’s going to work with all those approaches.”

The logistics of a digital classroom

Iowa uses Google Classroom to onboard and upskill employees as well as train volunteers. When the pandemic shifted the state’s workforce to 70% working from home, they needed a  platform that could not only handle a vast range of topics and teaching styles to support remote workers but also scale to meet their demand. Van Heuveln notes that Google Classroom was particularly helpful for handling compliance training, especially with its integration with Google Meet. These trainings often require an entire sector of the workforce to attend a single class with more than 100 attendees, according to Van Heuveln. The logistics of these larger sessions cuts down on the number of total sessions the state needs to host. Iowa also found that employees were less apprehensive about learning when they could do it from the comfort of their own homes.

Iowa follows a train-the-trainer model to train employees expected to instruct using Google Classroom. Trainers working in departments across the state learn to use Google Classroom to create and host virtual learning experiences specific to their own departments. 

Collaborative classrooms made simple

Google Classroom meets many needs for Iowa, such as setting up training, managing attendance, reviewing uploaded coursework, and communicating with attendees. Both course attendees and trainers have everything they need in one place, and robust engagement tools help attendees stay focused while giving trainers the feedback they need from their lessons. Built-in survey options let trainers gauge attendee knowledge, and the chat function ensures no one ever misses a question. The reporting dashboard gives trainers access to analytics to track engagement and attendance, providing insights that can improve future training sessions.

Google Classroom also makes it easier to ensure attendees stay on board throughout the training program. Coursework can be uploaded directly into Google Classroom, and training sessions can be recorded and archived. This feature allows employees to work at their own pace or lets them catch up when a scheduling conflict means they might miss a session.

The enterprise version of Google Classroom Iowa uses interfaces with other Google Workspace tools such as Google Meet, Google Calendar, Google Drive, and Gmail, which streamlines training and leads to more collaboration between employees and trainers. It can also interface with applications from other providers, further boosting its utility as an effective virtual classroom. Google Drive stores training materials securely. Lastly, Google Classroom enterprise comes with 24/7 support to make sure agencies always have everything they need for success.

Helping employees be better prepared to serve

Google Classroom can be a powerful part of any training program, whether it be digital or in-person. Building virtual connections empowers organizations to deliver better experiences. Google Classroom is helping the State of Iowa accomplish this for their constituents. Designed to scale and be accessible from anywhere, the platform helps public employees better serve the public. Virtual training strategies are essential for agencies that are looking to grow their workforce and build employee skill levels. The most important thing, however, is that training programs enable employees to further your agency’s mission. To learn more about Google Classroom and see more solutions designed with government in mind, check out the Google Cloud for government page.