Posted by Alan Wrafter, Head of Partner Marketing, Google for Work and Education



At its core, work is about people coming together to fuse ideas, perspectives and passions into broader, rounder visions. It’s about connecting in that sweet spot between inspiration and launch. To achieve this, we have many partners – our teammates – that work together with us every day. To honor our partners and our shared focus to provide more for our customers on every level, we hosted TeamWork 2015. 800 Premier Partners and 200 Googlers joined live with hundreds more tuning in via livestream, for three days of thought leadership, networking, knowledge sharing and, well, teamwork.

Investing in our teammates
At TeamWork this year, we took the time to share our vision for 2015 and beyond, shaped by the real-time input of our partners.

In December we launched the Google for Work and Education Partner Program, designed to help our partners better innovate across the Google for Work and Education suite of products and platforms. At the summit, we shared full details about this new program and heard directly from partners about what they need to grow in the future.

We also shared the news about Android for Work – a new and better way to work on the powerful mobile devices that we carry with us wherever we go, and a vast opportunity for our partners to develop and deliver innovative IT solutions to their customers.

Celebrating our teammates
Our partners work every day to make sure customers get the most out of the technology and services they use. They’re thought leaders who solve real problems and drive the market forward. We closed out TeamWork by awarding our 2014 Partners of the Year.

We look forward to the work that we’ll continue to do with our partners this year to provide greater tools, services and access for our customers.

Check out what partners are saying about this year’s summit by searching #TeamWork2015 via G+ and Twitter. Go team!

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Posted by Kevin Mathers, Country Sales Director, Google UK and former Army Captain

I was fourteen when I knew I wanted to join the Army. I was a cadet at school, in the cold and wet Lake District hills. I revelled in the fun of confronting and overcoming seemingly impossible challenges and hardships with my mates. I loved being part of something; a team, a mission. To me, the Army was something to be part of. Something to believe in.

I served for five years with the Highland Fusiliers, a British Army infantry regiment, after university. What I cherish most from my time in the military is how my character developed from repeatedly having to achieve goals, against the odds, with some of the best teams I could imagine. I remember leading five young Glaswegian soldiers across the glaciers of the Karakoram mountains in Pakistan, and watching as their courage and resolve grew with every icy step. Then, later, I saw them become leaders of teams on operations. It was soldiers like those that taught me leadership is about serving a team, not running a team.

This is just one of many lessons that ex-servicemen and women learn from the military that make them great entrepreneurs. In addition to recognizing the power of a team, they’re taught to plan and act with imperfect information and limited resources. They prepare for every scenario, but know how to react quickly and logically to sudden obstacles. And they learn to do it all while under extreme pressure and often in dire circumstances — skills that become priceless qualities for entrepreneurs in fast-moving business environments.



Now, thanks to development in cloud technology and web-based tools, it’s easier than ever for ex-military personnel to pursue entrepreneurship. They don’t need a physical office to bring a team together; with video conferencing and collaborative tools, they can work with colleagues from all over the world as if they’re in a room together. Having a website means no longer needing an expensive storefront or being limited to customers within driving distance, and online advertising makes it possible to find the clients who are looking for exactly what you offer. Starting a business now costs a fraction of what it used to, with even more tools available to get your idea off the ground.

So, in honour of Armed Forces Day in the United Kingdom, we’re celebrating those leaders in service who became leaders in British business. We’re highlighting people like Andy McNab, the best-selling author and entrepreneur who joined the military at 16 with the literacy of an 11-year old. Or Tom Bodkin, who spent six years in the Parachute Regiment before starting a fast-growing company that leads treks to remote places around the world. And to encourage ex-servicemen and women to pursue their passions as entrepreneurs, we’re offering discounts on Google Apps, Google AdWords and Google Cloud Platform, and providing business training from our Digital Garage in Leeds.

To all those who have served and continue to serve in so many ways, thank you for your dedication and courage. With greatest respect and gratitude, I salute you and your families this Armed Forces Day.

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Posted by Addy Osmani, Staff Developer Platform Engineer

Back in 2014, Google published the material design specification with a goal to provide guidelines for good design and beautiful UI across all device form factors. Today we are releasing our first effort to bring this to websites using vanilla CSS, HTML and JavaScript. We’re calling it Material Design Lite (MDL).

MDL makes it easy to add a material design look and feel to your websites. The “Lite” part of MDL comes from several key design goals: MDL has few dependencies, making it easy to install and use. It is framework-agnostic, meaning MDL can be used with any of the rapidly changing landscape of front-end tool chains. MDL has a low overhead in terms of code size (~27KB gzipped), and a narrow focus—enabling material design styling for websites.

Get started now and give it a spin or try one of our examples on CodePen.

MDL is a complimentary implementation to the Paper elements built with Polymer. The Paper elements are fully encapsulated components that can be used individually or composed together to create a material design-style site, and support more advanced user interaction. That said, MDL can be used alongside the Polymer element counterparts.

Out-of-the-box Templates

MDL optimises for websites heavy on content such as marketing pages, text articles and blogs. Weve built responsive templates to show the broadness of sites that can be created using MDL that can be downloaded from our Templates page. We hope these inspire you to build great looking sites.

Blogs:

Text-heavy content sites:

Dashboards:

Standalone articles:

and more.

Technical details and browser support

MDL includes a rich set of components, including material design buttons, text-fields, tooltips, spinners and many more. It also include a responsive grid and breakpoints that adhere to the new material design adaptive UI guidelines.

The MDL sources are written in Sass using BEM. While we hope youll use our theme customizer or pre-built CSS, you can also download the MDL sources from GitHub and build your own version. The easiest way to use MDL is by referencing our CDN, but you can also download the CSS or import MDL via npm or Bower.

The complete MDL experience works in all modern evergreen browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Edge) and Safari, but gracefully degrades to CSS-only in browsers like IE9 that don’t pass our Cutting-the-mustard test. Our browser compatibility matrix has the most up to date information on the browsers MDL officially supports.

More questions?

Weve been working with the designers evolving material design to build in additional thinking for the web. This includes working on solutions for responsive templates, high-performance typography and missing components like badges. MDL is spec compliant for today and provides guidance on aspects of the spec that are still being evolved. As with the material design spec itself, your feedback and questions will help us evolve MDL, and in turn, how material design works on the web.

We’re sure you have plenty of questions and we have tried to cover some of them in our FAQ. Feel free to hit us up on GitHub or Stack Overflow if you have more. :)

Wrapping up

MDL is built on the core technologies of the web you already know and use every day—CSS, HTML and JS. By adopting MDL into your projects, you gain access to an authoritative and highly curated implementation of material design for the web. We can’t wait to see the beautiful, modern, responsive websites you’re going to build with Material Design Lite.

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Posted by Bálint Miklós, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted on the Gmail Blog.)

With the holidays approaching and emails coming in at a furious pace, we can all use a little help. Inbox is already on hand assisting you with the next step, organizing your trips, and even suggesting reminders.

But when youre checking email on the go, it can be cumbersome and time-consuming to reply to all or even some of them. What if there was a way for your inbox to guess which emails can be answered with a short reply, prepare a few responses on your behalf and present them to you, one tap away?

Well, starting later this week, Inbox will do just that with Smart Reply.

Smart Reply suggests up to three responses based on the emails you get. For those emails that only need a quick response, it can take care of the thinking and save precious time spent typing. And for those emails that require a bit more thought, it gives you a jump start so you can respond right away.

Theres actually a lot going on behind the scenes to make Smart Reply work. Inbox uses machine learning to recognize emails that need responses and to generate the natural language responses on the fly. If youre interested in how Smart Reply works, including how researchers got machine learning to work on a data set that they never saw, you can read more about it on the Google Research Blog.

And much like how Inbox gets better when you report spam, the responses you choose (or dont choose!) help improve future suggestions. For example, when Smart Reply was tested at Google, a common suggestion in the workplace was "I love you." Thanks to Googler feedback, Smart Reply is now SFW :)

Smart Reply will be rolling out later this week on both Google Play and the App Store in English. If youve got a lot of emails on your plate, nows a great time to try Inbox and get through them faster than ever.

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Internet Explorer 8 or Internet Explorer 9 show "An add on for this website failed to run" across the top of a web page, then tells you to check "Security Settings".

You check the security settings and try all combinations, but the darn message still appears!

IE8 and IE9 are very poor browsers. Microsoft technicians drink coffee all day long and generally dont know what the public wants, or ignores users complaints.

There is a simple solution that Microsoft clearly doesnt know about. Perhaps they do know and want to leave customers in a state of frustration.

SOLUTION

Go to "Tools", "Internet Options", "Security", "Restricted sites", "sites".

Cursor down until you find "doubleclick.net".

Remove it. Click "Close". Click "Okay".


It is done. You will have no more problems.

Installing Adobe Macromedia Shockwave Player for Mozilla Firefox
Installing Adobe Macromedia Shockwave Player for Internet Explorer
Installing Macromedia Adobe Flash Player for Internet Explorer
Installing Macromedia Adobe Flash Player for Mozilla Firefox
Installing a Program to Run SWF Files
Disabling UAC for a Program

★

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