Girl Guides Go Google

Today’s guest post is by Wendy Lewis, CEO of Girl Guides Victoria. The Girl Guides is a global movement, and in Australia, a not-for-profit organisation that supports girls from five years of age, equipping them with skills, confidence and friendships to help them to succeed throughout their lives.


Girl Guides Victoria celebrated its centenary anniversary last year, a significant milestone appreciated by over so many women who have been Girl Guides since 1911. The growth of the organisation continues and today, Girl Guides Victoria has 1,200 members and volunteers, 400 supporters and 5000 girls involved in programs right across the state.

Our centenary has also prompted us to reflect on how to ensure that the next 100 years are just as successful and part of staying relevant and up-to-date means being equipped with the right technology that can future-proof us as we move forward. We wanted to keep our connection to the grassroots of the organisation while still allowing advanced functionality and productivity in our administration. Going Google was the first step in streamlining our operations and creating a more efficient communication platform across the organisation.

So far, we’ve transitioned 100 Girl Guide leaders to Google Apps in locations across our 79 Victorian districts. With an older demographic of volunteers, it was essential that we had a solution that was intuitive to learn and easy to use. After a little bit of instruction we were all using it proficiently and since then discovering a new trick always proves exciting.

We use Google Apps as an email service as well as for sharing and collaborating on documents that help run the organisation across the state. It has transformed the way our geographically disparate organisation can share education programs and essential safety information. For example, we use Google Talk for instant communication. This means that our volunteers are able to access information or contact details for a girl’s family in the event of an emergency, or keep up to date with planned activities and contingency plans instantly. The fact that they can access this information from any of their personal devices like phones and tablets is vital for their roles which are often in the field, literally!

For Girl Guides Victoria, the girls are our top priority, so having the best technology to support what we do seamlessly has been most beneficial for us. We are now looking to expand on our initial success with Google Apps, finding simple and cost effective ways to extend what we do, for example, by offering online learning and promoting the involvement of parents through online portals.

Going Google has given us the tools to strengthen our commitment to push, challenge and grow the girls in our program.

Posted by Wendy Lewis, CEO of Girl Guides Victoria.

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Collaborate and edit anywhere with the updated Google Docs for Android

This is a cross-post from the Official Google Blog

As I was sitting on the ferry commuting to Google’s Sydney office this morning, two thoughts occurred to me. First, Australia is beautiful. If you’ve never been here, you really should visit. And second, it’s amazing how productive I can be with just my Android phone and an Internet connection. I was responding to email, reading news articles and editing documents—just like I do at the office. Only the view was better!

We want to give everyone the chance to be productive no matter where they are, so today we’re releasing a new update to the Google Docs app for Android. We've brought the collaborative experience from Google Docs on the desktop to your Android device. You'll see updates in real time as others type on their computers, tablets and phones, and you can just tap the document to join in.

We also updated the interface to make it easier to work with your documents on the go. For example, you can pinch to zoom and focus on a specific paragraph or see the whole document at a glance. We also added rich text formatting so you can do things like create a quick bullet list, add color to your documents, or just bold something important. Watch the new Google Docs app in action:

If you want to hear about the latest Docs news or send us feedback on the new app, visit Google Docs on Google+.

Gotta run—I’ve got another ferry to catch!

Posted by Vadim Gerasimov, Software Engineer

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Using Gmail, Calendar and Docs without an Internet connection

This is a cross-post from the Gmail blog

The great thing about web apps is that you can access all of your information on the go, and we’ve introduced ways to use Google Apps on a variety of devices like mobile phones and tablets. But it’s inevitable that you’ll occasionally find yourself in situations when you don’t have an Internet connection, like planes, trains and carpools. When we announced Chromebooks at Google I/O 2011, we talked about bringing offline access to our web apps, and now we’re taking our first steps in that direction. Gmail offline will be available today, and offline for Google Calendar and Google Docs will be rolling out over the next week, starting today.



Gmail Offline is a Chrome Web Store app that’s intended for situations when you need to read, respond to, organise and archive email without an internet connection. This HTML5-powered app is based on the Gmail web app for tablets, which was built to function with or without web access. After you install the Gmail Offline app from the Chrome Web Store, you can continue using Gmail when you lose your connection by clicking the Gmail Offline icon on Chrome’s “new tab” page.





Google Calendar and Google Docs let you seamlessly transition between on- and offline modes. When you’re offline in Google Calendar, you can view events from your calendars and RSVP to appointments. With Google Docs you can view documents and spreadsheets when you don’t have a connection. Offline editing isn’t ready yet, but we know it’s important to many of you, and we’re working hard to make it a reality. To get started using Google Calendar or Google Docs offline, just click the gear icon at the top right corner of the web app and select the option for offline access.



IT administrators can deploy Chrome Web Store apps to users en masse by setting up organisational policies for Chrome.



Today’s world doesn’t slow down when you’re offline and it’s a great feeling to be productive from anywhere, on any device, at any time. We’re pushing the boundaries of modern browsers to make this possible, and while we hope that many users will already find today’s offline functionality useful, this is only the beginning. Support for offline document editing and customising the amount of email to be synchronised will be coming in the future. We also look forward to making offline access more widely available when other browsers support advanced functionality (like background pages).

Posted by Benoît de Boursetty, Product Manager

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Docs and Android come together in Sydney

For the past couple of years, a team of engineers in Sydney has been improving and adding new features to Google Docs. Recently, our team started working to enhance the mobile Docs experience, starting with today’s launch of Google Docs for Android. Together with the design team in Tokyo, we crafted a simple user experience to deliver the best of Google Docs to your phone.



This new app will give you another way to collaborate on documents with your friends or colleagues while you're on the go. You can quickly find, create, edit and share documents, and you can open Docs from Gmail without having to enter your login credentials each time.

We were able to work with other members of the local Google Docs team in Sydney to pack extra features into the Android application too. The engineers here were instrumental in creating Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in Google Docs, which converts uploaded images to text. They helped us integrate that functionality into the Android app so that you can take a photo with your phone's camera, then extract the text from that into a new document. This is useful for things like collecting info from a poster or flyer, or making your own changes to a recipe your friend gave you.







The app is currently available in English and works on Android 2.1+ phones. The Sydney team is also working on more features for Google Docs that we can’t wait to share with you.



Cheers!



Posted by David Loxton, Product Manager, Google Docs

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Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in 34 languages

This is a cross-post from the Google Docs Blog.

Last June, we introduced the ability to upload documents into Google Docs using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). OCR analyses images and PDF files, typically produced by a scanner (or the camera of a mobile phone), extracts text and some formatting and allows you to edit the document in Google Docs.

We’ve gotten a lot of feedback on this feature, and one of the biggest requests was to add support for additional languages. Today, we’re happy to announce that we’ve added support for 29 additional character sets, including those used in most European languages, Russian, Chinese Simplified and some other Asian languages. See the upload page for the full list.



How does it work? When uploading your images and PDF files using Google Docs, tell us what language your documents are in:

Hit upload, and we’ll use this information to search for the right characters in your file. As usual, you will get best results with sharp, high-resolution images or PDF files. This update will also result in an improvement in OCR quality for languages that we’ve supported previously (English, French, Italian, German, Spanish). We’ve also made improvements to the way we import formatting from your documents, and are now doing a better job in preserving font and alignment information.

We’ll keep adding languages and at at the same time will continue to improve speed and accuracy for the existing ones. In the meantime, we hope you take advantage of this new way to import your data into Google Docs.

Posted by Jaron Schaeffer, Software Engineer

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