Posted by Vidya Nagarajan, Senior Product Manager, Chrome & Android, Google for Work & Education 

Editor's note: To learn more about managing intelligent Chrome devices, join our Chrome product team for a Hangout on Air on Thursday, November 19th at 10AM PST.

More and more businesses across the globe are using DIY-service models and integrated mobile, digital signage and kiosk technology to personalize their customer experience.

While the customer experience is enhanced, the administration experience needs to stay simple. That’s why we developed the web-based Chrome Device Management Console, which allows business owners to remotely manage their fleet of devices across all their storefronts. "We tried many different solutions, using Google for signage was the easiest to push, control and manage throughout the enterprise,” said Alan Mariotti, Vice President of Technology and Security at Chico’s. In fact, IDC found that Chrome customers they spoke to averaged a three-year ROI of 319% for Chrome devices when used in kiosk mode, with an investment break-even time of approximately 4.8 months.

Today we’re introducing a more streamlined console just for digital signs and kiosks called Single App Chrome Device Management (Single App CDM), priced at $24 per device per year. Single App CDM offers ongoing reporting that monitors the health of your kiosks and signage at all times. You’ll get alerts if a device goes down and can remotely reboot the device without dispatching a technician. You can also get live updates about system usage and capture screen grabs to see exactly what viewers see.

Single App CDM can be used with a variety of Chrome devices – like the ASUS Chromebit, which is available for purchase today – to share relevant content quickly and simply, with the flexibility and security to seamlessly integrate into a broad spectrum of signage configurations. For example, the menu boards at a coffee shop or cafe could be powered by Chrome devices like the Chromebox, Chromebase and Chromebit, running a Chrome Kiosk app that displays relevant, dynamic content. Combined with our rich partner ecosystem of Chrome Kiosk apps from StratosMedia, Telemetry, Arreya, SignageLive, Wondersign, Nutrislice, Chrome Sign builder and many others, we have a solution to support any scenario.

To learn more about how other organizations are using Chrome OS to deliver signage, check out this new IDC white paper.

Posted by Hiroshi Lockheimer, SVP Android, Chrome OS and Chromecast

(Cross-posted on the Google Chrome Blog.)

Over the last few days, there’s been some confusion about the future of Chrome OS and Chromebooks based on speculation that Chrome OS will be folded into Android. While we’ve been working on ways to bring together the best of both operating systems, there's no plan to phase out Chrome OS.

With the launch of Chrome OS six years ago, we set out to make computers better—faster, simpler and more secure—for everyone. We’ve since seen that vision come to life in classrooms, offices and homes around the world. In fact, every school day, 30,000 new Chromebooks are activated in U.S. classrooms—that’s more than all other education devices combined. And more than 2 million teachers and students in more than 150 countries have the Share to Classroom Chrome extension, which launched in September and gets students onto the same webpage, instantly. Meanwhile, companies such as Netflix, Sanmina, Starbucks and of course Google, are using Chromebooks given the ease of deployment, the ability to easily integrate with existing technologies, and a security model that protects users at all levels, from hardware to user data. (Chromebooks are so secure you don’t need antivirus software!) IT administrators can manage tens of thousands of Chromebooks through a single web console, making them ideal for both classrooms and the workplace.

For everyday use, we’re proud that Chromebooks are continually listed as a best-selling laptop computer on Amazon.com. In an effort to make computing even more accessible, earlier this year we introduced the first $149 Chromebook—a fast, affordable laptop. And in the next couple weeks the Asus Chromebit will be available—an $85 device that turns any display into a computer so you can replace your old desktop with an affordable computer the size of a candy bar, or let businesses transform a billboard into a smart digital sign.

This year we've also worked to redefine the different forms Chrome OS can take, introduced the first designated Chromebook for Work, and brought more of your favorite Android apps to your Chromebook via Apps Runtime on Chrome (a.k.a. ARC). But there’s more to do. We have plans to release even more features for Chrome OS, such as a new media player, a visual refresh based on Material Design, improved performance, and of course, a continued focus on security. With our regular six-week software cycle and guaranteed auto-updates for five years, Chromebooks keep getting better over time. Finally, stay on the lookout for dozens of new Chromebooks in 2016.

Posted by Douglas Grgas, General Manager of IT/Infrastructure, Converga

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Douglas Grgas at Converga, a business process outsourcing company based in Australia, providing digital mailroom, document processing and a variety of other managed services. Converga introduced Chromebooks to ensure better availability of internal services for remote employees, as well as a new platform for office staff.

When employees are based in many different locations, whether it’s at corporate offices or customer sites, it’s important to make all employees feel connected to headquarters. As a company with over 1,300 resources at more than 150 customer locations, we’ve addressed this challenge firsthand by providing employees with technology to stay in touch. Many of our employees spend the majority of their time at our customers’ offices providing managed services, such as operating mailrooms or converting paper documents to digital versions.

To bridge the gap between off-site and on-site communications, account managers visited customer sites regularly to communicate with remote employees, and our CEO carried out a roadshow, where he talked about company performance, new customer wins and progress on global objectives, but off-site employees still felt disconnected from central operations on a day-to-day basis.

Our biggest ongoing challenge with keeping employees connected while at customer sites was having to rely on customers’ devices and networks. Often employees couldn’t access email and the Internet, which resulted in being disconnected from corporate communications and reduced productivity. We wanted everyone to feel connected and productive wherever they were, and to have access to technology that simplified their activities.

We chose Chrome for Converga because of its simplicity of use and seamless remote management. We liked that Chromebooks are sleek and lightweight like a tablet, but have a keyboard for easy data entry.

Beyond the device, the central Chrome Device Management service allows easy deployment and controls, device security, network connectivity and integrated apps across Converga’s fleet of Chromebooks, all with the additional benefit of leveraging Google’s Support services.

Also, since Chromebooks integrate with Citrix XenApp, which virtually delivers existing apps through the Chrome Browser, we don’t have to repurchase or rewrite existing applications.

Converga has deployed Chromebooks at 50 customer sites across Australia and New Zealand during the past year. We’ve also deployed numerous devices, many utilizing the Citrix XenApp, at our corporate offices.

Now more than 500 employees have a two-way channel to communicate with headquarters, using a reliable and standard operating environment, which IT can manage remotely. Employees can quickly search for information using Chrome, record notes in Google Docs and communicate with employees at other sites via Hangouts and Google+, all accessible via a simple to use, remotely managed, lightweight device.

Chromebooks are the foundation that helps our employees connect with each other and senior management. We use our company Google Site, which acts as our intranet, to do everything from feature employees of the month to communicate company perks and share performance metrics. Employees also use the intranet to share updates about customer sites, so the rest of the business can stay connected. For example, around Christmas, our employees post pictures of how their customers have decorated for the holidays. Each time an employee does something related to the Converga tree, a tree that represents our company values, he or she is asked to share the activity with the rest of the community.

Introducing Chromebooks has supported our goal of making all employees, regardless of their location, feel united. As we continue to introduce new technologies, our employees are more engaged in their work and empowered to share their stories with one another.

Posted by Ashley Sprague, Director of IT, Netflix

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Ashley Sprague, Director of IT at Netflix, where over 65 million members go to stream their favorite movies, shows and more. Netflix was recently featured at Chrome Live to share how they’ve brought their call center into the cloud — powered solely by Chrome devices and Chrome management. To learn more about Netflix’s approach to work, check out this recording of Chrome Live.

If you’re binge-watching the newest season of “Orange Is the New Black” on Netflix and the streaming video falters just as the ladies of Litchfield launch into a new scheme, we want to troubleshoot for you. If you have questions about your monthly plan, we’d like to answer those too. Whatever your question or challenge, the Netflix Salt Lake City call center reps can provide fast answers. Now that Chromeboxes, Chromebooks and Chrome management are the backbone of our call center, we can focus on helping customers instead of managing software and hardware from multiple vendors. By bringing our contact center to the cloud with the help of Chrome, adding reps and managing hardware and software is easier than ever — and we’ve broken free of the traditional call center model.

Netflix’s call center is growing steadily, and we’re expecting to increase the number of reps. Legacy hardware didn’t give us much flexibility to add new reps or bring in new equipment when we had breakdowns. Swapping in new workstations demanded that we reconfigured the devices, so we had to keep an extra row of workstations just for reps to use when their desktops didn’t work. We maintained more hardware on the call center floor than we needed — taking up space, costing money, and requiring more time and IT resources to manage. The call center is hundreds of miles away from our IT home base, so a cloud-based management solution made sense.

We’re already using Google Apps for Work at Netflix, so it made sense to think about how Google could help reduce the call center’s dependence on outdated technology while allowing us to grow as needed. At the heart of our new call center is Chrome management, which gives us a one-stop shop for maintaining Chrome devices used by reps and call center managers.

Our reps are using Chromeboxes at their workstations, while supervisors use Chromebooks to manage Chrome and the call center. We can add reps in Chrome management in just a few seconds, and they instantly have access to their email, calendars, and Hangouts — everything they need to start working. We can apply policies to groups of reps with just a few clicks, which is a big time-saver.

Switching out a device requires nothing more than handing a rep a new Chrome device and telling them to plug it in. You hear a lot of overly optimistic claims about “plug and play” in the technology world, but with Chrome devices, it’s all true. One of our call center managers says it takes longer to get a Chromebook out of the box than it does to set it up — and I believe it.

Our call center reps love having every application right at their fingertips as soon as they sign in to Chrome. We can tell they’re happy because the number of trouble tickets has dropped noticeably, another way we’re saving time on the IT side. When reps can get straight to work without worrying about the technology they’re using, they can spend more time on giving customers great service — so when people call with questions about streaming the new season of “Orange Is the New Black,” we’re ready.

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Director of Product Management, Chrome for Work

Today at Chrome Live, we showed how Chrome continues to make the way we work faster, simpler and more secure, while businesses like Netflix, Pinterest and Chico’s shared how Chrome for Work is bringing innovation to their workplaces.

We also announced new Chrome products and features that make it simpler to bring Chrome to work, including:

• Chromebook integration with Box for more ways to bring your files to the cloud: Now, you can seamlessly access your Box documents from a Chromebook, just as you would access your local documents. This means that with your Chromebook, you’ll have access to even more applications, no matter where you are.

• Bringing face-to-face meetings to larger rooms: Last year, we launched Chromebox for meetings so you can have face-to-face conversations with colleagues in remote offices and still feel like you’re in the same room. Today, we announced a new version of Chromebox for meetings that powers meeting rooms fitting up to twenty people. The hardware in the bundle includes a Chromebox powered by Dell, Asus, and HP, a pan tilt zoom camera, and more; just bring your own display. From huddle rooms to large conference rooms, you can now affordably bring video meetings to more office spaces.

• Improvements to Chrome management for Chrome-dedicated devices: A few weeks ago, we announced over a dozen Chrome partners in the digital signage space. We’ve also improved ongoing reporting to monitor the health of your kiosks and signage at all times. You’ll get alerts from Chrome management if a screen goes down and can remotely reboot the device to get it back online without dispatching a technician. You can also get live updates about system usage and capture screen grabs to see exactly what viewers see.

• Bringing Chrome management pricing flexibility to more places: We’re adding pricing flexibility to Chromebook management at a subscription fee of $50/year and announcing availability in seven new countries: Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, India, UK and France.

If you weren’t able to attend the live session, you can still watch the event on demand. Feel free to share your thoughts, impressions and questions using #chromelive15 on social media.

Posted by Vidya Nagarajan, Product Manager, Chrome for Work

(Cross-posted on the Google for Education Blog.)

Editor's note: Chromeboxes help businesses and schools update employees and students with timely information and create a sense of community. To learn more about using Chromebox for digital signage and how it can help your business or school work smarter, join Chrome Live on April 22.

Schools and universities across the country use digital signage to share announcements, news and schedules. Chromeboxes give students waiting in dorm lobbies for friends or standing in the cafeteria line for lunch the opportunity to learn about campus events on the go. And digital signage apps for Chrome built by Rise Vision, one of our content partners, power many of these digital experiences that go beyond traditional campus fliers.

Here are three ways academic institutions are using Chromeboxes for digital signage to better engage and inform students:

Personalizing content at Siena College

Siena College, a private liberal arts college in Loudonville, New York, prizes its close-knit community of 3,000 students. In this intimate class setting, individual departments manage their own content featured on Chromeboxes for display. IT and display managers don’t have to be involved in day-to-day content updates, and each department is nimble and flexible with their content. For example, the Student Senate features content from the athletics and academic departments on several of its screens and those departments directly update their content to ensure it’s relevant and timely.

Cutting IT costs and time at University of Toronto Mississauga

The University of Toronto Mississauga uses its 25 digital signage displays to profile professors, highlight research projects and market events to their more than 12,600 undergraduate students. Their previous display technology required extensive IT time to configure and update. Since Chromeboxes automatically update with new features and security fixes, IT can spend time on other tasks. Chromeboxes have also freed up the University’s budget, since they’re much more affordable than their previous display equipment, which cost $1,300.

Reducing power use at Manor Independent School District

The 20 digital signage displays in the Manor Independent School District notify the 8,000 K-12 students about announcements, lunchroom menus, upcoming events and recent posts from a live Twitter feed. Previously, the schools relied on netbooks to power their screens, which consumed a lot of power, were noisy and crashed often. Chromeboxes, which don’t have fans or spinning hard drives, were a natural fit as the district sought more eco-friendly display solutions.

As universities and school districts continue improving their digital display technology, they’re finding better ways to deliver informative and entertaining content to teachers and current and prospective students. Join Chrome Live to learn how to use Chromebox for digital signage at your school.

Posted by Casey Le, Product Marketing Manager, Chrome for Work

Chrome was a big bet when it was introduced six years ago and has since grown to provide a simpler, speedier and safer web for more than 750 million users around the world. Today, Chrome is an integrated hardware and software solution for work that meets the challenges of and innovates upon traditional platforms.

Join us online April 22nd at 10:00am PDT at Chrome Live, our first-ever online event, to hear from Googlers, technical experts and our customers about how Chrome is meeting the needs of a more mobile, social and cloud-oriented workplace. At Chrome Live, you’ll:

• Have a front-row seat to two keynotes from:

• Amit Singh, President of Google for Work, who’ll share how Chrome for Work is part of the transformational agenda of many businesses today. He’ll also be announcing a number of new products coming to the Chrome for Work family.

• Rajen Sheth, Director of Product Management for Chrome for Work, who’ll discuss how devices have revolutionized the way we work. He’ll also uncover a few pathways of our top-secret roadmap and may have a few surprises in store.

• Learn how the web, meeting technology and digital displays are being reimagined with Chrome for Work product managers Saswat Panigrahi and Vidya Nagarajan

• See live deployment and management demos by Chrome team experts

• Hear from IT leaders at Netflix, Pinterest and Chico’s about integrating devices with the cloud and enabling IT admins at top companies to streamline day-to-day operations

• Get a sneak peek at the team’s plans to continue innovating and addressing new needs in the market

To be a part of Chrome Live, all you need is a comfortable seat, an Internet connection and a computer, tablet or phone; pants are optional but recommended. You’ll be able to interact with Google experts and ask questions.

Register now to learn all this and more at the first Chrome Live event on Wednesday, April 22nd at 10:00am PDT. And even if you can’t attend on the scheduled dates, be sure to register to stay up to date on all things Chrome. Feel free to share your thoughts, impressions and questions using #chromelive15 on social media.

Posted by Andrew Jessett, IT manager at Xero

Editor's note: It’s been just over a year since we launched Chromebox for meetings, and to celebrate the milestone we’re sharing stories about our customers and their approaches to business, culture and productivity that are bringing them success. In today’s post, online accounting software provider Xero tells how it manages to keep its startup-like efficiency, innovation and feel while expanding globally. To learn more about Chromebox for meetings, join us online at Chrome Live on April 22 and see how companies scale face-to-face meetings across the globe.

Xero was started by several developers nine years ago in an apartment above a coffee shop in Wellington, New Zealand. Today, we have more than 1,000 employees in 15 cities across the U.S., U.K., Australia and New Zealand and provide online accounting software to more than 400,000 global customers. With more than 200 percent five-year average sales growth as of June 2014, our biggest challenge now is managing the fast-paced growth while maintaining our nimble, tech-forward startup culture.

We like to keep work in small groups and move quickly. Our teams work closely on projects even when they’re located in different offices around the world. And since we like to stay on the cutting edge of technology, we’re using Google Apps, which allows us to stay coordinated and productive.

Our pain point in IT was finding a way for teams in different cities and offices to meet and collaborate at the same time. We used a variety of video conferencing technologies, including PCs, HDMI/VGA and projectors. They were difficult to set up, meetings were delayed and productivity suffered. As we continued to grow, this struggle intensified, and we realized that we needed to find a solution fast. We needed to streamline our meeting room setups and get the most out of Hangouts. When we heard about Chromebox for meetings, we jumped at the chance to try it out.

We started with six Chromebox for meetings units. Today, we have nearly a hundred. They’re in every meeting room. We use them for room-to-room conferencing and all hands meetings. The global team uses them to connect every two weeks and the CEO addresses the entire company via Hangout on Air.

Chromebox for meetings allow us to keep things simple. There’s very little infrastructure or wireless connections needed on our side, so no cables necessary. Setup is fast and the integration with Gmail makes joining Hangouts as easy as clicking a button. It’s easy to share documents and work on them together. Then there’s the cost savings. Instead of spending between $40,000 and $60,000 on a video conferencing system, we spent one-tenth of that on a Chromebox and a display.

We may be a larger company now, but we still want to move and act quickly. No matter how large we become, our values align with those of fresh innovative companies that respond rapidly to market demand, customer needs and competition. Thanks to Chromebox for meetings, we can keep the startup feel and agility while growing at breakneck speed.

Posted by Vidya Nagarajan, Product Manager, Chrome for Work

Editor's note: Chrome offers secure, customizable and easily manageable devices and apps for today’s business. Join us for Chrome Live, April 22-24, to learn how web-based solutions can help maximize your company’s productivity. Register here.

Since last year’s Digital Signage Expo and the introduction of Chrome’s single app kiosk mode, many customers and developers have built digital signage applications on Chromeboxes. Chromeboxes are secure, easy to manage and cost effective, making them ideal to display content and engage customers in any location. Chicos chose Chrome to manage and display content on over 5000 screens across more than 1500 stores.

We’ve done more with the Chrome platform to make signage even easier, adding new features that make it seamless to plan signage content and manage device health. Today, we’re announcing these capabilities:

• The Chrome Sign Builder helps you create intelligent digital signs that are easy to build, schedule and deploy. You can add and manage content for any number of screens, and schedule that content to run when needed, across many screens at different times of day. A great example of this in action: displaying breakfast, lunch and dinner menus at various restaurant locations across multiple time zones.

• The Chrome App Builder makes it easy to build third-party kiosk apps. You can set up applications to eliminate the “first-run” configuration process and rapidly deploy across multiple screens. We have several third party partners who've built solutions for signage including Stratos, Rise, Arreya, Wondersign, Four Winds Interactive, Scala, and Industry Weapon; and we're adding more to this ecosystem.

• Ongoing reporting monitors the health of your kiosks and signage at all times. You’ll get alerts from Chrome device management if a screen goes down, and can remotely reboot the device to get it back online without dispatching a technician. You can also get live updates about system usage and capture screen grabs to see exactly what viewers see.

In addition, today AOPEN announced three new commercial Chrome OS devices that will add more durability to digital signage. By working with AOPEN, we can offer more rugged hardware equipped to handle harsh conditions — like a hot and greasy back-of-house line at a restaurant.

If you’d like to learn more about these new devices and management features, visit us at the Digital Signage Expo in booth 2218 to see them in action or online. You can also register now for Chrome Live, a digital conference we’re hosting April 22-24.

Posted by Henrik Poulsen, Deputy CIO, Arbejdernes Landsbank

Editor's note: Today’s post comes from Henrik Poulsen at Arbejdernes Landsbank, a full service retail bank in Denmark. Arbejdernes Landsbank recently introduced Chromebooks to help customers become more digitally savvy.

Many people open their mailboxes to find dozens of envelopes from financial institutions with information they can easily find online. As a retail bank, most of our customers are used to receiving bank statements and loan documents via snail mail, but that’s about to change. At the end of 2014, the Danish Government mandated that all citizens receive mail from the public sector online. At Arbejdernes Landsbank, we’re helping our customers adapt to a new era of digital banking in 2015.

Before we started prioritizing this digital service, customers struggled to access their online information when they visited a branch location. They had to bring their own devices since using the bank’s devices could expose customer data to security issues. Customers brought different devices with varying network settings, so often our employees spent time dealing with technical computer issues, rather than helping the customer. This was not just time-consuming, but resulted in poor customer service and security issues. Keeping data secure in the financial industry isn’t an option; it’s a requirement.

We introduced Chromebooks in January 2015 because they’re secure and easy to use. In each of our 70 branches, we have a Chromebook set up as a kiosk for customers to log onto our website and access income and loan documents, digitally sign customer agreements and refer to electronic statements. We can create a setting so the data one customer accesses is completely wiped before the next customer uses the device. Customers feel comfortable disclosing sensitive information using the Chromebooks because they know their information is safe. Setup for each device requires about two minutes of our IT team’s time, and the device can be managed remotely.

Chromebooks help our customers become more digitally savvy while streamlining time-intensive processes, like completing and mailing in paperwork. When a customer needs to access their income information for a loan, they can pull it up online while at the branch, rather than going home and mailing it. Instead of waiting for the next teller, customers help themselves using the Chromebook. Employees spend their time helping customers who need immediate attention, which allows us to deliver higher quality service.

Introducing Chromebooks has helped us keep sensitive information secure while providing peace of mind for our customers and familiarizing them with digital banking — all without placing a burden on our IT resources. As we pioneer new digital technologies, we look forward to serving as an educational resource for our customers and making it easier for them to manage their finances anytime and anywhere.

Posted by Eric Singleton, CIO, and Alan Mariotti, VP of Technology and Security, Chico's

Editor's note: Today’s post comes from Eric Singleton, CIO, and Alan Mariotti, Vice President of Technology and Security, of Chico’s, a specialty retailer of branded clothing and accessories through its brands: Chico's, White House | Black Market, Soma Intimates, and Boston Proper. Chico’s has 1,500 stores as well as catalogues and e-commerce websites for each of its brands.

Imagine running into your favorite clothing store in Chicago during a snowstorm and seeing a colorful digital display of cozy sweaters. Or you’re shopping in San Francisco for an outfit for a company party and the store’s display screens show cocktail dresses on sale. At Chico’s FAS stores, we will be using Chromeboxes to personalize the shopping experience by tailoring our digital signage to the city, the store, and even the specific department.

We’ve had our Chico’s Digital Retail Theater strategy in the works for some time, with plans to bring personalized content up to 5,000 screens at about 1,500 stores. I wanted to control displays down to each individual screen and swap new content as needed, without burdening our IT department or maintaining complex hardware at each store. After reviewing and sketching out a range of approaches for solving this challenging problem, we settled on Chromebox. Alan Mariotti, our VP of Technology and Security, praised the technology for its simplicity, low cost, and scalable performance. The easier a digital signage system is to install and use, the faster we can push out unique and relevant content to screens – an imperative in retail, where merchandise and promotions always change.

Chromeboxes as a signage solution met all of our tests for affordability and ease of management. Since they’re cost-effective, we can afford to outfit more of our stores with more displays. Since they’re small, they don’t take up valuable space in stores and they are unobtrusive. With more screens, we have more places where we can tailor content that resonates with each store’s customers.

We launched our first 10 Chrome-powered screens at our redesigned White House | Black Market store in Santa Monica, California, with content management software from Rise Vision deployed by Uniguest, both of whom are Google partners. We’re testing the sales impact of changing merchandise content on the fly, compared to traditional retail channels like catalogues and print advertising. We’ll also see if shoppers respond to and interact with catalogue content that appears on store screens.

We’re also looking to Chrome to bring promotions to customers in minutes — a huge leap ahead from the printing process. The lead time for printed posters can be as long as 10 days due to the lengthy cycle of designing, printing, and delivering to stores. Not only is physical printing at this pace incredibly expensive, but we can’t react as quickly with print as we can with instant digital if new products and sales hit the stores on short notice. Chromebox for signage will eventually almost eliminate these printing and distribution costs, while shortening the time needed to bring relevant shopping news to our customers.

The impact of our Digital Retail Theater strategy with Chrome goes far beyond screens with pretty pictures. When customers come to one of our stores, we want to immerse customers in the Chico’s FAS shopping experience – sharing with them the perfect jacket for her first day at a new job, the winter coat that transforms her look, or the dream dress that makes her evening magical.

Posted by Barry Toole, ‎Voice and Convergence Manager, MWV

Editor's note: Today Avaya is announcing its Avaya Agent for Chrome, a new solution that delivers a web-based contact center application through the simplicity and speed of Chromebooks. Our guest blogger is Barry Toole at MWV (MeadWestVaco), a global leader in packaging solutions. MWV is using Avaya Agent for Chrome to streamline contact center operations for their customer service teams. Please note: this blog post content was updated on December 16, 2014 to include requested changes from MWV and Avaya.

What do perfume dispensers, frozen pizzas, and six pack beverage carriers have in common? Packaging. At MWV, we help shape consumers' experiences with products through packaging for food, beverage, tobacco, beauty and personal care, healthcare, and home and garden markets around the world. We’re everywhere our customers are – operating facilities in 30 countries and marketing our products on every continent. The global nature of our business means that many of our interactions with customers happen over the phone, and we need to make sure we’re offering the best possible experience.

We’ve been using Google Apps for our business since 2009 and recently simplified our IT environment by introducing 500 Chromebooks across the company. Employees love that Chromebooks boot up in seconds, eliminating the long reboot cycles we experienced with our old PCs. We’ve been an Avaya customer for more than 40 years and see them as the leader in contact center software. When we got the call that they were producing a contact center application for Chromebooks, we jumped at the opportunity. We knew the migration to the Avaya Agent for Chrome would be seamless because everyone here is already familiar with the Chrome browser; we easily got up and running.

We introduced the new solution to agents in our customer contact center, who take high-value orders, and employees in our logistics group, who coordinate the delivery of raw materials and finished goods. Both groups need an easy-to-use, fast solution that lets them work from anywhere. The Avaya Agent for Chrome eliminates the need to download software, saving time for end users and IT.

The Avaya Agent for Chrome also supports employee mobility. Agents can now work from home on their Chromebooks with full Avaya contact center functionality. In the event of a snowstorm or network interruption, we can move our operations to any site that has Wi-Fi. Employees no longer need a physical phone and can simply and securely carry out their jobs using only their Chromebook. As a result we’re saving costs on additional hardware.

Moving to Chromebooks has helped prepare us for a future that demands fast action and flexible ways of working. We plan to expand the Avaya Agent for Chrome solution to all MWV employees who directly interact with customers — in total, about 100 people in the contact center and logistics groups. As we scale our business to better serve our customers, we look forward to this solution growing with us without adding extra cost or complexity.

Posted by Cyrus Mistry, Senior Product Manager

(Cross-posted on the Google for Education blog.)

We've tried to make managing Chromebooks for an entire district as easy as managing just a few. But when managing hundreds or thousands of Chromebooks, you may want to know about changes that are coming before they go to all your users. With the Chrome Beta Channel, you can do that easily. When you place devices on the Chrome Beta channel, you’ll be able to see what changes are coming weeks before they’re rolled out to all Chromebooks.

To make the most effective use of the Chrome Beta Channel, we recommend you place at least five percent of your organization's devices on the Beta channel. This allows you to become familiar with new features before they appear on the Stable Channel and prepare faculty and students for any interface changes. You’ll also have insight into specific problems that might affect your school and provide feedback to our team.

Enable the Chrome Beta Channel using the Release Channel setting in your Admin Console. With this setting you can assign devices to the Beta Channel by organizational unit, making it easy to control who in your organization will see these updates. Chrome Beta Channel is now at your service to help you protect and prepare your school.

Posted by Saswat Panigrahi, Product Manager, Chrome for Work

Editor's note: To learn more about the new features and pricing options available with Chromebooks for Work, join our Chrome for Work product team for a Hangout on Air on Wednesday, October 29th.

After an office flood displaced 40 workers from a regional site, Just Eat, a UK-based online food ordering company, found a simple way to work through the disruption. The company delivered dozens of Chromebooks overnight to its headquarters and configured them by the time workers came in the next morning.

The story highlights some of the key reasons why a growing number of companies are adopting Chromebooks: they offer easy manageability and heightened security as well as speed and simplicity for IT and end users. Companies such as Woolworths, Auberge Resorts and Chapters Health have equipped their workers with devices in a matter of days thanks to Chromebooks’ simple cloud-based architecture.

Today, we’re taking a big step toward making it even easier for companies to select Chromebooks as their device of choice by announcing features specifically focused on improving identity, manageability, virtualization, performance and pricing:

Simplified and enhanced identity: Single sign-on, a popular customer request, lets you log in with the same credentials and identity provider that you use in the rest of your organization. This feature uses the universal SAML standard and works with most of the major identity providers including CA SiteMinder, Microsoft AD FS, Okta, Ping Identity, SecureAuth, and SimpleSAMLphp. We’re also adding multiple sign-in, which allows you to securely and quickly switch between work and personal accounts on your Chromebook.

Improved certificate management for wireless networks: Businesses, schools and government institutions can now easily provision Chromebooks with client certificates to access 802.1X EAP-TLS wireless networks and mutual TLS protected web resources. Using the Admin Console, IT admins can pre-configure their secure networks, push certificate management extensions and pre-select certificates to be used with certain websites and networks. Partners such as Aruba Networks, Cloudpath Networks and Aerohive Networks have already integrated this functionality.

Expanded Chrome management for any device: Getting new workers or contractors provisioned with web apps on Chrome is now easier than ever. With the Admin Console, IT administrators can push a list of bookmarks and many other settings to signed-in workers on all platforms including mobile devices.

Improved virtualization options: We’ve worked with virtualization partners like Citrix and VMware to expand the boundaries of what’s possible on Chromebooks. Recently, Citrix released a new Citrix Receiver optimized for Chromebooks, which provides more direct integration with Chromebooks and enables new features including seamless integration with Google Cloud Print; cut-and-paste between local and virtualized applications; better audio and video playback; improved license and application usage monitoring; and protection from end-to-end SSL connections.

Rich graphics experiences: Chromebooks are perfect for web applications and they can support rich graphics and powerful 3-D applications. Google recently teamed with Nvidia and VMware and announced at VMWorld technology to speed the delivery of graphics-heavy virtualized applications to Chromebooks, allowing you to seamlessly run 3-D modeling and simulation applications often associated with heavier hardware.

More flexibility on pricing: Starting today, customers can purchase all of these advanced features, management, and support through a new annual subscription option of $50 per device per year. This new pricing option is available first in the US and Canada, with more regions to follow. We’re also supporting licensing portability, which means if you lose or replace a Chromebook you can easily apply your existing license to a new device.

These new features and options reflect our commitment to making Chromebooks an everyday business tool that both IT admins and users can rely on over the years to come.