Posts

Showing posts from November, 2020

Anyone can be an app developer with AppSheet

Image
Businesses use custom apps for a variety of critical needs like creating and tracking workflows, boosting productivity, and identifying key growth opportunities. Design and development, however, is often a highly resource-intensive process, putting custom apps out of reach for many organizations. To create custom apps, companies must either hire software engineers or outsource to third-party agencies—both of which are very expensive and time-consuming. A typical app can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and take six months or longer to design and develop. App creation can also overwhelm technical teams, leading to software bottlenecks, delayed projects, and missed opportunities. As such, many IT decision makers are now looking for ways to streamline custom app creation and reduce their dependence on developers. In a recent study, 61 percent of C-level executives claimed that access to developer talent is a threat to the success of their business—higher than capital constraints, be

Accelerating the Retail Experience with No-Code Automation - AppSheet

Image
Time is of the essence in retail, where customer demands rapidly change, competition is fierce, and disruption is constant — making automation a necessity for any retail business to survive and thrive. This is especially true during the COVID-19 pandemic. Retail has had to re-invent the shopping experience in stores, implement curb-side pick-up, and pivot to online sales models. Based on changing government guidelines, retail outlets have had to change processes and employee protocol. According to McKinsey & Company , automatable activities account for nearly 40 percent of retailers’ time, and experts estimate that automation will add approximately $24.6 billion in value to the retail industry by 2025. While the challenges of digital transformation and applying automation technologies to business processes can seem daunting and out of reach for businesses without an army of engineers, that’s not the case with Google Cloud’s AppSheet. AppSheet combines the power of artificial intel

It’s not DNS: Ensuring high availability in a hybrid cloud environment

Image
  Our customers have multi-faceted requirements around DNS forwarding, especially if they have multiple VPCs that connect to multiple on-prem locations. As we discussed in an earlier blog post, we recommend that customers utilize a hub-and-spoke model, which helps get around reverse routing challenges due to the usage of the Google DNS proxy range. But in some configurations, this approach can introduce a single point of failure (SPOF) within the hub network, and if there are connectivity issues within your deployment, it could cause an outage in all your VPC networks. In this post, we’ll discuss some redundancy mechanisms you can employ to ensure that Cloud DNS is always available to handle your DNS requests. Figure 1.1 - A non-redundant hub and spoke DNS architecture Adding redundancy to the hub-and-spoke model If you need a redundant hub-and-spoke model, consider a model where the DNS-forwarding VPC network spans multiple Google Cloud regions, and where each region has a separate pa

Bringing breakout rooms in Google Meet to Google Workspace and G-suite customers

Image
Organizers of meetings can now divide participants into several smaller groups during video calls in Google meet. Participants can then join the original discussion easily after the small group discussions.  This feature which was highly requested is available to Google Workspace; Essentials, Business standard, Business plus, Enterprise essentials, Enterprise standard, Enterprise plus as well as G-suite Business and Enterprise for education customers. Organizers can allow increased participation by dividing the participants into simultaneous small groups for group or departmental discussions and educators can divide students into groups for project discussions. The moderators can dive between breakout rooms to monitor and engage in the discussions.  Participants will be randomly assigned to equal groups or the moderators can manually move the participants to groups. Participants with a Google account can join the video call through the web or the Google meet app.  These breakout rooms

Rooms in Google Chat to be unthreaded to give greater flexibility

Image
  This change will help all of you to have an easy conversation & it allows for greater flexibility when it comes to communication. With this update later this month, unless you turn on threading, conversations can not use threads when you build a new room. Note that after it's built, you can not alter whether a room is threaded or unthreaded. In comparison, unlike in threaded rooms, you can turn history on and off in unthreaded rooms. In the Admin console, a room history setting is available that helps administrators to determine the default history setting for rooms within their company that accept the move. Note that your existing rooms will not change.   For admins this feature will be available by default. Admins can set a room history setting for unthreaded rooms & for end users, unthreaded rooms will now be the default. You can switch on threaded replies when creating the room. Availability Workspace Essentials, Business Starter, Business Standard, Business Plus

Four ways to generate value from your APIs

Image
  It’s been 20 years since  Jerry Maguire  hit movie theaters in 1996, and yet one line from the movie still resonates like no other. The constant banter between the agent, Jerry Maguire (Tom Cruise) and budding professional football player Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr.) is fun, if not bombastic, with one central theme that Tidwell not only enthusiastically expresses but also insists Maguire express as well: “Show me the money.” Tidwell’s passion for football was far outweighed by his passion to become rich; indeed, one of the movie’s themes is that only once he got past playing for the money could he achieve the level of play required to drive real value to his team, his team’s owners, and ultimately himself. What does this have to do with API management? Digital product owners tend to follow a similar path: the knee-jerk reaction is that the easiest way to drive value from APIs is to charge for them. While this may be the easiest thing to do, more often than not, API value is best ex

View your personal and work calendars together on Google Calendar with Android 11 work profile

  What’s changing? In Google Calendar, when you’re using a work profile on a device with Android 11 and up, you can now see your personal and work calendars together. Who’s impacted? Admins and end users Why you’d use it? Android work profile makes it easy to separate your work and personal data on the same device. When it comes to your calendar events, however, it’s useful to be able to manage both work and personal events in a single place. That’s why we’ve added support for viewing your personal calendars in your work Calendar app. We’ve leveraged a new secure mechanism provided by Android 11 to continue to store personal and work calendar data separately with the same work profile privacy protection. Additional details Both admins and users must enable this feature before the experience will become available on a user’s work Calendar app. Once enabled, you’ll be able to view your personal calendars alongside your work calendars in the work Calendar app, and quickly switch back to y

Accept knocks in bulk in Google Meet

Image
In Google Meet, you can now acknowledge all pending knocks in bulk. It greatly reduces distractions during the video call by allowing participants or learners at once. Note that  only the meeting organizer may see requests to attend a meeting or accept them. For end users this feature will be available by default. Available to Essentials, Business Starter, Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education, Enterprise for Education, and Nonprofits customers and users with personal Google Accounts.  

Healthcare gets more productive with new industry-specific AI tools

Image
  COVID-19 shined a light on the heroic efforts of front-line healthcare workers. But it also highlighted some of the challenges around managing healthcare data and interpreting unstructured digital text. For healthcare professionals, the process of reviewing and writing medical documents is incredibly labor-intensive. And the lack of intelligent, easy-to-use tools to assist with the unique requirements of medical documentation creates data capturing errors, a diminished patient-doctor experience, and physician burnout.  Today, we are excited to launch in public preview a suite of fully-managed AI tools designed to help with these challenges: Healthcare Natural Language API and AutoML Entity Extraction for Healthcare. These tools assist healthcare professionals with the review and analysis of medical documents in a repeatable, scalable way. We hope this technology will help reduce workforce burnout and increase healthcare productivity, both in the back-office and in clinical practice.