Build Apps Your Business Needs with App Maker (Cloud Next '18)

Welcome. Everyone to our session. It's, great to see so many of you ready to hear how to build apps that your business needs with AppMakr. There. Are few of us here to cover our topics today, Christian, Schalke our devoted developer, advocate, working, with many of you to get your apps up and running, I'm. Gavin I'm the product manager for the last year and a half for fat maker and, also. With us are two of our many impressive customers. That. Will join me for a panel to showcase the apps they've built, for. Their businesses, with AppMakr, and talk. About the journey they've had. First. And most important, app maker. Launched last month and is, now generally, available. So. We are really happy about that and proud. TechCrunch, and. Others. In the press have covered the launch and after. Quite some time in our early adopter program while collecting a lot of feedback from participating. Customers, and working. Hard to build an enterprise-grade. Product. We're out, we'd. Really like to thank, all of our early adopters for, believing, in the product using, it and providing. Us with lots of feedback and learnings, that was, very valuable so, thank, you a quick. Recap, from, last year for those of you who are here, seeing. Us then at. The last next, app maker has launched is the G suite additional. Service. While. We are still working to ensure that, app, maker meets the high standards, required a 4G suite core service. We. Launched it as an additional service so, more customers. Can take advantage, of the service right now. App. Maker is now available, to all G suite business, and enterprise customers. It's. Also available to G suite for education, customers. We. Announced two significant. Features, with, the general with the launch one. Is that Google Cloud sequel, is now, supported, as a default, database. Automatically. Created for every app maker app. But. You can still bring your own database and. Connect. To it using JDBC. Or a REST API. The. Second feature is the G suite admins, now have oversight, on the.

Activity, And usage, of app maker in their. Companies. Today. We can share some of our usage, numbers. Showing. A steady growth from last year, all. These numbers are a monthly, active so, we have over 1200. Domains, companies, that are actively using app maker every, month with. Over, 3000, apps and, overall. 50,000. Users. We're, also proud to be to. Have active customers across the globe in. Many many countries and you can see them marked, on, this, globe map. Our. Talk today will highlight the basics, of building a business app with app maker, will, then invite our customers, to a panel, which in, which they'll present their apps and experience, for that maker. Following. That we'll share some of our roadmap with you and. Finally. Open the floor to questions from, the audience. Let's. Start with a quick reminder of how to use app maker to build a business app. We. Like to show this in five simple steps, the. First one is to, define your data model and connect. To the data sources this. Is most commonly, done with sheet. We. Recommend Google sheets and. You. Can import, the, whole table structure, into the sequel database that's automatically, created for your app. Once, the data model for the app is defined, you. Can go ahead to the second step and that's designing. Your UI. This. Is when you can use widgets. From the pallet that comes with the product and drag-and-drop. Them to design what your web, pages in the app are going to look like. The, third step is to bind. The. Data to, the UI elements, and trigger. In amp events, this. Is the stage where we actually, construct. The, internal logic of the app and. Define. What are the what. Is the flow inside the app what, happens when different actions are taken by. The users. The. Fourth stage is defining. Roles we'll, see later how different, apps have different, types of users who can do different things in the app. And the. Final stage is when, you preview your app you. Can make changes. And fixes and then publish it in your domain, it's. Then available to all the users who. Are, defined, in it in the domain. At. Google. We are committed to providing our best, available services, and principles with AppMakr. From. Google you get cloud. Sequel, the new Maps API and, material. Design version. 2. We. Will continue, to roll out seamless, integration, of other, Google services, and. This. Is on top of the G, suite. Services. Api's, that. Can be accessed easily from AppMakr today, gmail. Calendar Docs etc. As, an. Open platform you. Can bring your own database, and connect, to any service, accessible, by JDBC. Or a REST API. You. Can customize, your UI with. Adding CSS and HTML, as well as native JavaScript, to. Your app. Finally. We. Are committed to provide admins, with ways to view, and control, usage. Of app maker apps in their. G suite in your G suite domains. Once. Your G suite admin associates, a Google Cloud sequel instance with the domain app maker. Automatically, creates a sequel, database for every app created. It. Is also possible to specify any, other Google Cloud sequel instance, to, be used with, any specific, app maker app. In. Order, to use Google Cloud sequel, your domains need, to have a DCP, account. Using. Sequel, as the app database, provides full manageability, such. As backup, and restore of the database high. Performance, and most. Importantly, for apps you, can easily scale, as the, usage grows by. Upgrading your Google Cloud sequel instance. From. The G suite admin console. G-suit. Administrators, now have visibility, over the apps running in their organization. Including. Owners who. Built the app. Usage. Metrics how, many users are using the apps and, both. Permissions. Expanded. Both whitelisting, means, that. Administrators, will also be able to prevent apps from running, without their prior approval. Now. I'd like to move over to the second part of our talk where.

We'll Take a look at what customers, are building with that maker as. I've. Mentioned earlier we. Already have 1,200, companies, using apps they, built with AppMakr, including. Fortune 500, companies and many educational. Institutions. Globally. Our, customers, typically, build apps to support their line of business we. See this across many verticals, such as retail mobile. Operators, and the, gaming entertainment industry. We're. At maker apps are built to. Make business, processes, work in better ways and. Contribute. To these business business's, success. The. Other type of apps that we see that are very popular in many companies are apps that streamline, operations and. Workflows. And. We'll. Hear more about those, types of apps on in our session on Thursday, so. You're all invited. I'd, now like to invite to far top customers, each, with thousands, of users faculty graphs to come to the stage and showcase some of those apps, please, welcome kathleen, bertha from Veolia france and clear. Spirit to from A to B Financial, Canada. Welcome. A tree and clear. Let's. Start with you Catrin. Tell. Us about Veolia and your role please okay, so. Hello. Everybody. My. Name is Katherine Liddell I've, been walking for, Veolia, for almost, ten years and. Since. Last. Year. I'm the application, transformation. Team leader I will explain a little bit later a, few. Words about Veolia. Viola. Is a global, company, providing. Environmental. Services. Specifically. In. Water. Treatment. Waste. Management, and energy. Services, the. Eighth quarter is based in France in near, Paris. Clio. What. Is ATP do and what did you do there so. My, name is Cleo I'm business analyst, with ATP financial. We are a Canadian financial institute. Based out of the province of Alberta we. Have over 5,000, employees and, last, year we made the transition to G suite as part of an initiative called work reimagined.

And The. Point of that is to, have. A team members reimagine. How they, work and collaborate, with each other with. That we're became early adopters, of app maker which is great timing because everyone, is trying to try to understand. The capability, of G suite and how they can change their, work I was, a product manager for, this initiative and, my job was to promote and educate the, use of app maker and bring myself a development, background to, it. Could. You tell us about business, problems, that you ran into that, you decided to solve with that maker sure. Today I'd like to go through a few, of the apps that our team members have made and they're generally line of business apps, and, workflow. Applications. That we, used. To in our day-to-day process, so, our first use case is a very. Simple one but a very important, one is, managing. A repository, of information or, data that's, not managed by our core software, so, in generally. These starts as fresh sheets which, once. You get to a larger, amount of data once. There's more concurrent users trying, to view and edit the same data set it becomes a bit cumbersome, so, take. This lender limits application. For example so all team members who can approve and grant loans are assigned, a limit which is managed by branch, managers, this, used to be in a spreadsheet which, you, know it's not very intuitive or, easy to use so, if a maker with, very simple tables, and form widgets, we were able to build an, applications. That's. You know holds all these lender them it's in a single source of truth people can search through. Them and with, the row based security features we're able to lock down the add and edit functionalities. To only, the branch managers, and then to, the right people who needs it. Next. Example, is our. Appointment. Booking application, so this is used by our clients. Care, call center and in. General there's about a thousand, calls a month they handle that results, in a client booking an appointment with. A branch, member, and in. The past they, are client, care call center staff will have to first look through the. Personal bankers who would, have the lending limits to suit the customer, needs then the location and, then, finally they go over to the Google Calendar and see what free time slot there is so. This is actually one of our very first proof-of-concept apps and it gave me the opportunity to try using the Google Calendar API and.

With. That along, with data from actually the lending limit app that I just talked about and our, branch directory, data we're. Able to create a single search screen where now all the staff member has to do is select what it's what products. Through customer, needs what branch they're gonna go to and, what date and, it automatically finds all the free time, slots and the right personal, banker that matches, the search criteria and, from, the app they can book the appointment and, that's, done for them. The. Last use case that's very common, in our business is workflow, which I'm sure many, people encounter, and, so. How do we effectively, and efficiently move, work in information, from one, team to another. And in, the past this involves. A lot of email. Of attachments. Or spreadsheets, or documents, of information. So. This loner view is a great example it, used to be in a spreadsheet and, the. Reviews. Are actually done by a team who answers a series, of questions, and there are actually hundreds, of possible, responses in comments based on what they have answered and so. You can imagine with the spreadsheet this is actually very hard to maintain and, there's AB scripting, in the past to help them manage it a bit better but it's. Still not the best solution so, they approached me and asked what can we do better and I said app maker is definitely, a great solution for you so, with, it they built an interface that's easier. To use to manage and do their questionnaire. In. Addition, there is a step, after the review to. Email, all this out to. The, back, to the lenders and the managers, for review which, used to be a PDF that have to generate now, with app scripting, that email. Goes, out automatically, the app automatically. Picks out what reviews, are ready to be sent send, them out mark never sent and that's. All they have to do and in. Addition, the, data is actually fed into data studio where now they can have meaningful reporting. And live a live. Dashboard, of what's going on yeah, there is a last app, that's, my favorite. So. The, this is also another workflow example, and it's a very you a common use case and I actually use this as an. Education. Use case for when I train people and this. Is our foreign. Curtiss. Sale scenario. Where our frontline. Team member, takes a request from a customer, they enter some information and, our back-end banking, operations, team fulfills it again. Email, spreadsheets. That's. Been done a long time not very efficient, so with this app which is still in development and. We're hoping to launch it soon their. User can just come in enter, their request they can track it and the, nice thing of that maker we can add things, like life exchange, rates. Fetching. So it, reads off our live ATB, website, you get the right rates at the right time and again removing, that manual step away from our. Team. Members so you can actually do more work. Efficiently, Thank. You Clio, let's, hear from Catrin about what we all have been doing with AppMakr, yes. Okay I will, have to give you a bit of context, about project. Viola, I launched, one year ago, it's. A big, company project, to accelerate, the digital, digital transformation. Of the area and it's, called SATA watt for secure, anytime, anywhere, any device. So. It. Means that you will, access your work environment, from. A simple internet access at, any time from anywhere for, example when. You are at home or, traveling. Web. Browser in. Via we have chosen to use Chromebooks. That. Means that if we can do it with the Chromebooks, we can do it with any, device. Another. Core of SATA, waad is to, improve, team working and collaboration. It, was already, done with G, suite viola, is on G's with tools, for. Five years of about. And. Finally, security. Because. If. You have your data on, your PC. Of course, you have some risk you can you, go PC can be stolen, you can have a run somewhere you can have, a crash if. Your data are on, the cloud on Google cloud they are safe in. Security, and you won't have to to. Use antivirus. Azure patch. Management. So. It is better also, for security. Main. Part of the, challenge. Of SATA WOD was to have all the application. Accessible. Through. Internet of course and. This. Is where we, created the application transformation. Teams this is because a large, part of the applications, where, user. Applications. Based on Microsoft. Office, program, a lot, of Excel, files with VBA, or access. Programs. And we, had to find a. Team. Dedicated, to, redevelop. These applications, very close to the users to, understand, their needs their constraints their cases. And. It, was key for the adoption of the project. So. Are, you going to tell us about one of the apps that you built yes, so. The application. Is an. Application made. By people. From the technical, and Department of, Veolia. They.

Are Engineers. From. The via the water treatment. And they. Have developed a new, sludge. Treatment process. Which, is called ELISA and the. Application, Ollie's. Detect. If the plant is eligible. To, this new process, and. Measures. How. Much savings they can do with the new process so, in the video we will launch, trust after we will see one of the engineers, on here he. Will present, the application after, and before. You. Jo-jo. Cassava guru, to, trial a Texan Tek performance, Muallim. Development. Education, new consultants. And moons and DTP, a solution. Paddle application. Please allow, only is sequence. In a new velocity concern, on a discus una. Moneda. Payments, at well technology the. Us on te vamos, a develop a, louisiana. He permit determination. Supposedly, to no illusion don't, have Eclipse at Awad news of transformation. We shall listen. For. My Excel awake killer, soon equilibria on, application, web server technology, will burn up meet you. Let. Us we shall do replicas only satellite, is Joseph, Excel. User. Table see the, case, for. Determining. Possibilities. While. On the capacity. Office. On residual, blue, shell determines. The. New an application. Services. At. Macau, -. Out, of us PG wh e the. Body well facility. I don't, expose, our legs. Putin. Welcomes idea of deep Alan Williams. Occasionally. Is she. So nice numbers. To take home the money needs to disappear too, soon. Toto is origines. Moonship. Will, share what accident. In quito. By. His own kiddin even valid one miss hotel. General. Supremacy. Data a. Well. The different informational. Most. Recently, in South Asia. Pacific. One about the power satellites, and dimensions, of Education. The, protection selamat a, conditional. Universe. Functionality. A possible, easy so, the, Poinsettia word item to note on experience, the capricious capitalization. So to explain about. This. Is one example of, what. We have done we. Have other business. Applications, that we redeveloped. In app maker for example, another one the, ways eco cool you can calculate, and, measure the savings, of cooling. Towers. Decisions. Domain of the energy services can, you tell us what was the reaction of your users, to the sadly, I've. Seen jean-pierre, was very. Happy. With his new application. And. I will insist on what he highlighted, for, example, the sharing. It's a really, more easy to to. To. Share the application now before, they had on. Excel files they had to make. A copy of the excel file unscented, byte email it was really heavy. The. Second point is the protection, of the know-how, of the business. It. Was complicated. To do with the, excel file with password. And it's. Not possible with Google sheet because if you are on editor, of the Google sheet you, you can you can copy, users know how, the. Last point was about. I, don't. Remember, from, here come back. Well. Anyway, another. Thing here which is important, with maker is that those, people in. They. Like developing. Their own application, by themself, they used to do it with Excel. And VBA so, they say they. Are happy to other makers so that they can continue to develop, by themselves, as their autonomous, on this oh. Yeah. What were your main challenges, when developing apps with that maker. So. The main challenge is. How. To educate and train our, very, large non-technical. User raise to using, out maker to, solve their problems so in general people, once, they know the ability sign makers next question is how. Did I do this and, so. We. Followed that solver to following a crown you, know the ad maker does make it very easy for someone to make, apps and, build apps but, in general, we started off with, you. Know doing some events like YouTube lives an, in-person workshop, to really walk them through the, different steps and I. Created tools and resources such, as videos and documentation. I, even created a five-step framework, which is a little different from your five step, it's. Define. Define your scope design, your application, build it test it and then deploy and iterate and so. With that you know giving them a framework to get. Whoever wants to build apps to get started and then finally, we built that community, of you, know other app makers, so other other, people who were more.

Well-versed. In app scripting, or at making, to, come together to help beginners and, you know if I answering questions, sharing their success story, and so forth and in, general you know with our work reimagine, initiative, you know we have this we. Have this ongoing cultural chef of being coming to the bank having, everyone increase, their digital proficiency. So. In general that's a great thing, for, this, maker. Learning, because people are eager to learn and people are eager to change so, once, you have people of your mindset it just helps get, over that learning, hurdle a lot better one, thing I really liked in both of your apps is that they're branded, as if there are your company, ass so what's, that a big challenge to get through ah. No. Not. For us anyway we're. Proud about ran. In. Failure I can tell I can tell for every. Entities, because some of them maybe we'll have another strategy, but. For. The corporate entities we will keep. Philosophy. Of citizen. Developers, at that. Means, people. Not, not on not. Mandatory IT will, develop and run their own application, so. Administrator. Will have very. Few super to do on this but. It doesn't mean that was there will be alone, some. People in this room are very involved, in the community to, to, share some. Best practices, to share some templates, with, graffiti. Failure, graphic, shuttle. To. Be to give best. Practices, and differs in them on, transferring. Questions, so. We in the community we already have more than 100, members and, it's still growing and. During. The satellite program, we we, trained more than 70, people so there, are a lot of people. Who are, in. Autonomous, to to. Build their own application, and we. Already have about. 50, projects, using cloud SQL so. China's. On our new strategies to have clear, visibility of, who, is using what because, we. Are working with you Google, to improve, this it's not completely, clear and currently, to, have this visibility, so I hope it will be improved, later. What's, next for you is that maker how do you see your use cases and initiatives, evolve okay. Well. For the application, transformation. Team we still have some application, to redevelop, in app maker. But. There is not only application. Transformation. So satellite project, has. Been launched for. Other entities, in Veolia, other countries, so, they will have to redevelop, their own applications. And probably, they will use at maker because there was a great interesting, app maker and, through. The community, we also see that some people are interested in developing new application, in, app maker so I guess, the. Usage of a maker is going to grow in Veolia, maybe, we will talk about this next yeah. Yeah. What's happening next, today TV with that maker. So. The learning continues, we're, still got quite a bit of momentum actually. Last month we ran an ad maker challenge where we. Had 56, team members came, in for, a day. Tackle. On a couple of business problems using app makers and, their scale ranges from beginners, to experts and, as. You know as the knowledge, grows we'll. Be tackling more and more difficult, problem, we still have things. That are still in like Excel an Access database that, we'd like to get onto the cloud and on G suite and yeah. So that community, will be, a big part of driving, that and I. Know you, know like just last week a group was thinking. About getting an app develop, and they're talking things like what, if we throw another app, maker challenge type thing and invite people to just come and tackle. Our business problems so I'm. Sure we'll just continue churning, out access, needed so, last question to both of you like do you have any a good piece of advice to our audience here, what. To do with that maker in their companies, yeah, for sure so. I, think the, biggest learning is, a, maker, it's. Still a local, development, it's local but there's no coding required so, there's a bit, of hurdle, that beginners. Have to go through so, having, that support for, these beginners, to, get them through that really, helps, and. But. Then with that also, once. They know what's possible sometimes, you almost have to teach them to scale back your scope a little sometimes because, they're, like wow you, can do all this can I do that now but you know with, AdvoCare you want to build things fast you want to build things quick and you know get them out test them and so first so you don't wanna you.

Know Be you, want team. Member to be kind of stuck and trying to do a lot of things you, know the, point is to get it out sooner get some other apps out there make, a big impact, and then incrementally build, more so, I think you know just kind of teaching the entire software. Development, and agile mindset and, you. Know continuing, to grow is kind, of a helpful, way. To get, people going. Advice. Yes, I have the same one of course because, there really it's easy to develop, with app maker you can really. Build fast and deploy fast and fail fast and success, fast and, also, I will have another. Advice, because. It's still a young, solution, we don't. Have a lot of visibility of. Statistics. For example so. I would advise people to stay. To. Use app maker for non. Complex, or moderately, complex or lightweight lightweight. Development. And if they have strategic. Or complex. Development. To do they. Should still use, IT. Teams, and support, with the sellers on simulators. Thank. You to our two panelists. Before. We head to our Q&A I want, to give you a preview of what the app maker team is working on. First. We know that it takes too long to preview, and publish apps, and. To initially load bigger apps we. Will expedite, these flows and also. Reduce our prompts, where possible. Next. We know that many of you and Veolia included, would like to build apps that run on any device in, the same way that you build apps for desktop. While. We work on introducing, responsive, app design in mobile specific, widgets we, will provide responsive. Samples, to import and support. Viewport, editing in canvas, breakpoints. In the interim. We've. Heard from many of you that you would like to make apps built by app maker available, to users who don't have a discrete business seat. And. Even to use apps such as helpdesk. Data entry, to, collect input from. Users that don't, even have a G suite seen at all in your domain so, we are looking at ways to achieve that and we'll. Update you, know in the next few quarters when we reach. A decision around this. We. Are exploring, ways to assist, in identifying app. Gaps in your company, for example. Analyzing. Repetitive, use of a sheet and. Proposing. To build an app based, on the sheet with appropriate, data models, in UI design, to choose from. This. Approach will ultimately bring to creating more useful, apps. More easily and faster, and it. Will leave more, time for, some developers, to work on more complex app maker apps that. Potentially, may use AI and, other services, that will be available.

2018-07-26 17:02

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