Schools in India get the "App"titude

In a recent post, we expressed our delight about all the global growth we're seeing lately for Google Apps Education Edition. The increased adoption of schools moving to Apps has been particularly significant in India, especially as a result of our recent Got the "App"titude Challenge. This competition encouraged students, faculty members, and alumni from engineering and management schools throughout India to move their institutions to Google Apps.

The challenge created quite a stir, attracting more than 6,000 teams consisting of students, faculty, and alumni since its launch in August. Each team worked with their own IT staff to identify challenges and limitations with their existing email and collaboration systems, and then – working with a Google representative – demonstrated the ways in which Google Apps could mitigate these issues.

As a result of the challenge, more than 100 colleges across India are now in the process of implementing Apps on their campuses. Some of these schools include Jaypee Business School, National Institute of Technology - Calicut, Zakir Husain College of Engineering & Technology, and Aligarh Muslim University.

The performance of each team was evaluated by measuring product usage after their deployment. We'd like to extend our congratulations to the XL CONNECT team from Xavier Labour Relations Institute (XLRI) - Jamshedpur, who won the challenge by demonstrating the highest usage of Google Apps products. This team ran a pilot and implemented Google Apps within less than a month from the day they secured approval from their college's decision makers. They also conducted marketing campaigns to inspire students to find innovative ways to use Google Apps tools. Chintan Agarwal, secretary of the Systems Society at XLRI says, "Considering the need for a networked manager and the high reliability and usability of Google Apps, we have rolled-out Apps services for all XLers, including international students at Singapore and Dubai."

Below is a map of all the schools across India who will be rolling out Apps on campus after participating in the challenge. We look forward to continuing to fill up the map as more schools across the globe get the "App"titude.

Posted by Gagandeep Singh and Jolly Ngemu, Google Apps India team