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Google has teamed up with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to provide a customized job search engine for returning military veterans on the National Resource Directory (NRD) website. Starting today, veterans can use the site to search over 500,000 job openings nationwide.

The site uses Google's custom search engine technology, looking for Schema.org's JobPosting markup across job listing sites to identify jobs committed to veterans. Employers only have to add the JobPosting markup to their site to be crawled and listed in the NRD. Supporting organizations can also add the search box widget to their websites.

One of the most interesting aspects of Web technology and social media nowadays is how it's being deployed by non-techies. Recently I had the chance to connect with the U.S. Army to find out how it is using the Web. Blogging, Twitter, Facebook, online video and more is currently in operation at U.S. Army HQ.

I spoke to Suzanne Nagel, Digital Chief, U.S. Army Accessions Command, who walked me through how the Web is being used for recruitment and community. We started off by discussing a blog called Army Strong Stories, which enables people to hear authentic stories from U.S. Army soldiers.

The United States Army has more than 700,000 desktops that currently run on Windows XP operating systems and use Office 2003 software. Despite a Windows 7 release just around the corner and rumblings about Office 2010, the Army announced that it will upgrade to Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 by the end of this year. Large corporations and government agencies are typically slow to adopt new technologies and software, mostly because of security, hardware and training issues.