Property management, powered by Chromeboxes

Posted by Louis Gouletas, Chief Information Officer and Chief Marketing Officer of National Rental Services

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is National Rental Services’ (NRS) CIO/CMO, Louis Gouletas, who worked with Newmind Group to deploy Chromeboxes at NRS offices. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

When my partner and I acquired NRS, a property management service company based in Chicago and Orlando, we knew we wanted a simple and cost-effective IT environment. In the past, I experienced the pain and expense of running physical servers and time-consuming networks. I also had to deal with crashes and viruses. I wanted to have more time to add value to the business instead of dealing with day-to-day IT hassles.

We decided to turn our IT infrastructure over to experts. We accelerated our move into the cloud with Google, and partnered with Newmind Group, a managed IT and cloud services provider, to help with our transition. We were especially excited about our new customer kiosks, based on Chromeboxes running Managed Public Sessions, that we’ve installed in each of our offices. We’ve set up several Google devices in each office that allow potential renters to peruse properties complete with floor plans, HD photos, videos and 3D panoramas we create using Google Photo Sphere. If renters want to tour a property in person, the system is linked to our Google Calendars, so they can schedule a viewing on the spot with an agent.

Renters can also start the application process, submit a maintenance request or pay their rent using our kiosks. We manage over 1,000 bank transactions each month, so security is very important to us. We’ve enabled Managed Public Sessions mode via the Chrome Management Console, which allows us to whitelist and blacklist sites and automatically wipes all of a users data at the end of their session.

Internally, with Chrome for Business and Google Apps, we have virtually everything we need to maintain company productivity, from managing billing using Google Sheets to holding virtual company meetings via Google Hangouts on a weekly basis.

At NRS, one person is now able to accomplish the work of what previously required multiple IT personnel, and we are able to offer both our property owners and renters better service at more competitive prices. We plan to use our Chromeboxes, Chromebooks, and Nexus devices to maximize productivity for our staff as we continue our progress toward a 100% cloud-based company.

Celebrating entrepreneurship with Chrome business apps

Posted by Bonny Lau, Product Manager, Chrome for Business and Education

Editor's note: As part of our series focused on celebrating National Small Business Week, we are featuring stories, tools and resources that can help small businesses grow and innovate.

American entrepreneurs have good reason to celebrate this week -- it’s National Small Business Week. Entrepreneurs all over the world, like you, have a knack for wearing many hats, being scrappy and spotting new opportunities. And the tools you use should be intuitive, scale quickly and easily, and offer ubiquitous accessibility.

Luckily, many business web apps today are perfect for small and growing businesses. Accounting apps are intuitive enough to be used by someone without a CPA. Managing customers comes with pricing that scales as your business grows. And your social media management and email campaign tools can work with each other via clever APIs. Best of all, you and your team can use these web apps anywhere, from any computer.

In honor of National Small Business Week, we’re featuring a curated list of some of our favorite business apps and extensions from the Chrome Web Store. The Gmail and Google Drive Chrome apps let you access your mail and documents even when you’re offline. And with Chrome extensions like HootSuite’s Hootlet and Zendesk Activity Stream, you can monitor your social media stream and your customer service issues at the same time, because -- well, that’s just what entrepreneurs do every day.

You need tools that work just as hard as you do. Thanks to the web, it’s easier than ever to discover the apps that fit your specific needs. If you’re on the lookout for new ways to simplify, manage, or grow your business, check out these business apps from the Chrome Web Store. And if your team isn’t on Chrome already, learn more about the security, speed and manageability of Chrome for Business.

Retiring Chrome Frame

Posted by Robert Shield, Google Chrome Engineer

(Cross-posted on the Chromium Blog)

The main goal of the Chromium project has always been to help unlock the potential of the open web.  We work closely with the industry to standardize, implement and evangelize web technologies that help enable completely new types of experiences, and push the leading edge of the web platform forward.

But in 2009, many people were using browsers that lagged behind the leading edge. In order to reach the broadest base of users, developers often had to either build multiple versions of their applications or not use the new capabilities at all. We created Chrome Frame — a secure plug-in that brings a modern engine to old versions of Internet Explorer — to allow developers to bring better experiences to more users, even those who were unable to move to a more capable browser.

Today, most people are using modern browsers that support the majority of the latest web technologies. Better yet, the usage of legacy browsers is declining significantly and newer browsers stay up to date automatically, which means the leading edge has become mainstream.

Given these factors we’ve decided to retire Chrome Frame, and will cease support and updates for the product in January 2014. If you are a developer with an app that points users to Chrome Frame, please prompt visitors to upgrade to a modern browser. You can learn more about these changes in our FAQ.

If you’re an IT administrator you can give your employees the full capabilities of a modern browser today, even if you depend on older technology to run certain web apps. Check out Chrome for Business coupled with Legacy Browser Support, which allows employees to switch seamlessly between Chrome and another browser. Chrome is secure, stable and speedy, and runs on all major desktop and mobile OSs. IT admins can also configure 100+ policies to make Chrome fit their needs.

It’s unusual to build something and hope it eventually makes itself obsolete, but in this case we see the retirement of Chrome Frame as evidence of just how far the web has come.