Google Data » Ellen Petry Leanse

New imagery for Google Earth Pro

Ellen Petry Leanse — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 17:38:00 +0000

We're pleased to announce the release of new imagery data across the globe within Google Earth Pro.

International coverage is a key feature in this release, including parts of Mexico, Argentina, South Africa, India, and China, to name a few. See the crowds gathering for an soccer match in Johannesburg, or marvel at the rapidly-changing Shanghai skyline.

The United States imagery updates feature key urban sites, such as Boston, San Francisco, El Paso, Des Moines, and Portland, Maine. With the release of exclusive data layers in Google Earth Pro 5.2, professionals can leverage the new imagery with exclusive access to parcel outlines, traffic counts, and demographic data.

Blue car icons offer users historical traffic counts for thousands of locations across the United States, dating back to the 1960’s in some locations. Civil engineers in El Paso can leverage the new imagery in addition to analyze traffic counts to determine the best location for a new stop sign.

Parcel data is also available for most urban areas. With the new imagery, a realtor in, say, San Francisco can use parcel data to spec out a property site, determine parcel zoning, market value and parcel number.

The new imagery and exclusive data layers make Google Earth Pro the right choice for industry professionals looking to leverage state-of-the-art imagery with compelling data analysis.

To learn more about the new Google Earth data layers, check out this Google Lat Long blog post.

Posted by Coleman Rusnock, Google Earth Pro team

Upgrade your users’ knowledge with Google Apps Tips and Tricks

Ellen Petry Leanse — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 17:21:00 +0000

As a Google Apps trainer, I’ve spent more than two years working with Google Apps customers on deployments, researching how they use resources provided by Google or from our professional training partners.

I always learn a lot from “Go Live” week – the first days of deployment, when users start to discover Apps’ features and capabilities. But for me, the real “aha” comes a month or so later, when users are familiar enough with Apps that they want to dive in and do more. I often see people beginning to seek out and share power tips and tricks for using Apps around that time.

To help with that sharing, we’re announcing a new addition to the Google Apps Deployment Site: a center for Google Apps Tricks and Tips. This center contains a collection of ideas and suggestions that that users can try to take their Apps use to the next level. The first collection of tips focuses on Gmail, but insights on using Docs and other features are in the works.

View this image in detail here.

The tips are short, easy to understand, and incorporate step-by-step graphics to walk the user through the tip. They’re designed to encourage users to discover features of Google Apps they may not have known existed, and to educate them when new functionality is incorporated into the products.

We’ve made it easy for Google Apps administrators to use these resources. Our Tips and Tricks Getting Started Guide walks you through the process of incorporating the tips and tricks in your training site. (If you haven’t created a launch or training site, check out our support site templates for an easy way to get started.)

Give Google Apps Tips and Tricks a try and watch how quickly your users become more collaborative, productive, and proficient as they incorporate the newly learned features into their daily routine.

Posted by Gary Giurbino, Google Enterprise Training team

Supporting the U.S. Navy’s humanitarian mission with Google Apps

Ellen Petry Leanse — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 19:05:00 +0000

Editor’s Note: We’ve invited U.S. Navy Captain Douglas Wied to share the story of how Google Apps is being used to improve coordination in disaster relief efforts. Captain Wied currently leads the Navy’s effort to develop and foster Non-Classified data sharing among the U.S. and its many international partners focused on improving regional maritime security.

The United States Navy’s Maritime Domain Awareness program focuses on improving maritime security around the world. As part of this initiative, the U.S. collaborates with international governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to increase maritime security capabilities in different regions in order to prevent threats like piracy and terrorism, as well as to respond to natural disasters.

Sharing information is critical to maritime security. And most of this information is public – or sensitive but unclassified, as the government calls it. In summer 2008, we began InRelief to improve our collaboration capabilities using Google Apps. InRelief supports the Navy’s humanitarian assistance and disaster relief mission. We use email, chat, shared documents, calendars, sites, and other Google applications to support our information sharing needs.

Previously, on U.S. Navy ships, the unclassified network was a U.S. network only, so NGOs or foreign governments could not access it. We set up a Non-Classified Enclave (NCE) as a way to give our partners access. The NCE is a network of virtualized servers located in Miami, Florida that provide secure connectivity. InRelief is basically a cloud-based implementation of NCE.

Our team saw several advantages to building InRelief on Google Apps, including security, scalability, reliability, and other powerful features we didn’t have to build ourselves. As part of the military, gaining familiarity the security controls of Google Apps was of critical importance. Our security team met with Google’s team and went through in detail how Google implements security. We came away with the understanding that Google Apps is very secure. The fact we’re hosted on a FISMA-certified environment allows our team increased flexibility and assurance when collaborating and sharing unclassified but sensitive content and documents.

In the event of a major crisis when we would need a lot of accounts for a short period of time, Google Apps lets us scale easily to as many users as necessary. We can turn them off again when we no longer need them. That’s a tremendous asset. It would be really tough – and not cost-effective – to resource a system ourselves that could scale up and down like this.

As for reliability, with Google Apps data is replicated in multiple data centers, so we can be assured we’ll have access to our data. Having a single point of failure is a constant challenge with other systems. Particularly when dealing with disasters, knowing the system will be available is a big plus.

Some of the built-in features of Google Apps were critical to our needs. For example, real-time collaborative editing of documents, spreadsheets and presentations supports crisis response planning efforts using multiple personnel who are geographically dispersed. Also, real-time translation in chat can be extremely helpful when we’re trying to coordinate efforts with a coalition of people who speak multiple languages.

Another issue we are always concerned about is the training requirements new tools impose on our users. With InRelief, we can give an account to a foreign government representative or NGO and it doesn’t take much time for them to get started. Earlier this year, we put Google Apps to test in coordinating a response to the Haiti earthquake. When the Haiti effort kicked off, our team was dispersed. We used the Google collaboration tools – email, chat and shared documents – to get things moving. Even the remote team members could review and contribute to the team’s work. Half the people in the group hadn’t used Apps before our efforts got underway – they just did it, with no learning curve. Our team is currently using the same capabilities to support relief efforts for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster.

Finally, the concern for developing cost-effective solutions that maximize the benefits of tax dollars spent, our overall costs were hundreds of thousands versus millions of dollars; a significant savings when compared to what we spend to host traditional stovepipe type systems requiring network connectivity, software, hardware, system administrators, information assurance testing, and certification & accreditation.

With InRelief.org, we have a collaborative environment easily accessible with a secure and reliable infrastructure that allows us to respond rapidly to crisis.

– Captain Douglas C. Wied, Assistant Program Manager

Non-Classified Enclave, U.S. Navy

Posted by Dan Israel, Google Enterprise team

Google Apps for Government

Ellen Petry Leanse — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 18:35:00 +0000

Last September, we announced our intent to create a Google Apps environment dedicated to our government customers, and to complete United States government security certification for Google Apps. Today, we’re delivering on both.

Today, we’re pleased to introduce a new edition of Google Apps designed specifically for the needs of U.S. government entities. It’s called – appropriately enough – Google Apps for Government. This new edition is available now to federal, state and local governments in the United States.

Google Apps is also the first suite of cloud computing applications to receive Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) certification from the U.S. government. With this federal government certification of our security controls, government agencies can use our cloud services with confidence.

A wide range of U.S. government customers are already taking advantage of Google Apps, from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Berkeley Lab to the U.S. Navy’s InRelief program, to the City of Los Angeles, to smaller governments across the country like Panama City, Florida and the City of Wooster, Ohio.

You can learn more about how U.S. Government customers can benefit from this new edition in today’s Official Google Blog post.

– Kripa Krishnan, Technical Program Manager, Google Apps for Government

Posted by Dan Israel, Google Enterprise team

Berkeley Lab is going Google

Ellen Petry Leanse — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 18:00:00 +0000

Editor’s note: Today’s guest author is Dr. Rosio Alvarez, Chief Information Officer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Dr. Alvarez serves the computational needs of scientists that carry out over $0.7B of sponsored research in quantitative biology; nanoscience; new energy systems and environmental solutions; and the use of integrated computing as a tool for discovery. She is also overseeing Berkeley Lab’s move to Google Apps.

Ernest Lawrence, the Nobel Prize winning physicist, is often credited as being the father of “team science.” He understood that some of the most important and difficult problems in science required bringing together experts from across disciplines to work on experiments that they couldn’t possibly execute individually. That legacy is the foundation of work at Berkeley Lab. Today, we’re excited to be bringing the next generation of tools to support team science to the Laboratory, including Google Apps.

Berkeley Lab is a member of the National Laboratory system supported by the U.S. Department of Energy through its Office of Science. It is managed by the University of California (UC) and is conducts unclassified research across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Berkeley Lab employs approximately 4,000 scientists, engineers, support staff and students. Eleven Berkeley Lab researchers have won the Nobel Prize. Fifty-seven Lab scientists are members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), one of the highest honors for a scientist in the United States.

Switching to Google Apps supports a number of important Berkeley Lab goals:

Sustainability We now utilize the Google data centers that power Google Apps, which are are among the most efficient in the world, instead of operating our own servers;
Efficiency Berkeley Lab is going Google reduces internal infrastructure costs and allows us to recover data center and personnel capacity;
Collaboration It provides new tools and platforms for improving scientific collaboration, including real-time document sharing and support for easily including collaborators from around the world as full participants in our work.

Berkeley Lab is in the midst of the first production rollout of Google Apps in the Department of Energy. We have moved over 4,000 people to the Google Mail service to date and an expected total of 5,000 accounts by the end of summer 2010. We have already rolled out Google Docs and Google Sites Lab-wide to improve collaboration capabilities for our staff. A transition to Google Calendar is planned in the coming months, as well.

If you want to learn more, we’ve even set up a public site to tell the world about this project. Or you can watch this video:

It’s been really gratifying to watch the adoption of Google Sites and Docs at the Lab. These two applications extend the reach of the Lab's existing collaboration systems by offering new features and easier inclusion of external collaborators.

Smaller research projects with a few dozen collaborators often struggle with building the infrastructure to effectively share information; Google Apps makes it easy for them to deploy the services they need with no help from IT folks.

Since we’ve integrated Google Apps with the Lab's Identity Management System, our users have a seamless experience. And all our users benefit from the extensive resources that Google has dedicated to keeping the Google Apps system -- and our data -- secure.

The Lab expects to realize financial savings as a result of the transition. The final numbers are not available yet, but the estimates range in the area of $1.5M-$2M savings over the next five years in hardware, software and labor costs. Cost avoidance, increased functionality and resiliency were all important factors in the decision to migrate. Above all, we’re empowering our researchers to share, collaborate, and build teams like never before. We think Ernest Lawrence would be pleased.

Dr. Rosio Alvarez, Chief Information Officer

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Posted by Dan Israel, Google Enterprise team

Google Search Appliance now supports OpenSearch, enabling searching directly from browsers or Windows 7 clients

Ellen Petry Leanse — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 15:00:00 +0000

People should have the power to conduct searches from everywhere. This is why we provide users with numerous options beyond Google.com, such as typing in a search query directly in the address bar in Google Chrome, or through Google Toolbar, or Google Desktop.

However, when it comes to searching information on their corporate intranet, most users’ choices are limited. Corporate users typically have to go to a special URL or open up a special portal application to search their intranet. To alleviate this limitation, we have integrated the Google Search Appliance with the OpenSearch protocol. OpenSearch is a collection of simple formats for the sharing of search results. So for instance, integrating with OpenSearch enables accessing the Google Search Appliance directly from the browser:

Or, as shown below, you can search directly from Windows Explorer within Windows 7:

Ultimately, we are trying to provide as many options as possible to the end user. And by supporting OpenSearch, these options will increase as more platforms connect with OpenSearch.

You can immediately download this feature on Enterprise Labs, or learn more about it in our technical documentation.

Posted by Alexander Kerschhofer, Google Search Appliance team

Global collaboration for artists, courtesy of Google Apps

Ellen Petry Leanse — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 14:04:00 +0000

Editor's Note: Continuing our “Going Google Everywhere” series, we’re pleased to welcome guest blogger Itamar Kubovy, Executive Director of Pilobolus, an innovative modern dance company that has gone Google. Itamar has been producing, writing and directing theater, dance and film since 1985 in Europe and the US. He joined Pilobolus at the beginning of 2004 as the company's first Executive Director. Last week, Pilobolus opened its 23rd summer season at the Joyce Theater in New York City, premiering new works and showcasing beloved classics. Learn more about other organizations that have gone Google on our community map.

Pilobolus is a small company with 50 people strewn all over the world at any one time. We perform 200 shows in 30 or 40 different countries each year and have two different dance companies, so each week we have people moving around the world for performances and educational activities. There are a lot of logistics and moving parts that keepPilobolus going.

We moved to Google Apps Premier Edition because we needed enterprise-level collaboration tools, without the high cost and maintenance. Most of us have iPhones and we keep track of 20 to 30 Google Calendars at a time. We also use Google Docs to manage our travel arrangements. Before moving to Google Apps, we would print out piles of travel itineraries that constantly kept changing. We estimate we are saving about 12,000 pieces of paper a year with Google Docs, if you consider that each dancer had about 10 pages of printed travel instructions for each venue!

So much of the information we need to share is visual – rehearsals, performances, and such. It used to be difficult to share visual information when performances were kept on videotape. There was typically just one tape floating around, and if we wanted to share it with a choreographer or other dancers somewhere else, itwasn’t easy. Now, we upload all of our performances onto Google Video for business , part of the Google Apps Premier Edition suite. We have found that there is a lot more discussion happening, and we’ve been able to collaborate in real-time with choreographers and artists all around the world.

In one instance, we worked with a couple in Tel Aviv who was helping us choreograph a new dance. The woman of the couple was due to have a baby any second and couldn’t travel. From a studio in Florida, we were able to collaborate together with the team in Tel Aviv using video streams of the rehearsal over Google Video. The power of Google Video for business for global collaboration is dramatically changing the way we work together and collaborate. It's so important in terms of communicating what went right or wrong, pinpointing a weak link in the performance, communicating changes to the choreography, or in asking questions of choreographers located in different places around the world.

Video is a great collaboration tool when it comes to rich media – it’s the way we bring together a team that is spread all over the world.Google's tools have definitely made it easier to put our best foot forward!

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps Marketing

Q2’10 spam & virus trends from Postini

Ellen Petry Leanse — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 16:06:00 +0000

Editor's note: The spam data cited in this post is drawn from the network of Google email security and archiving services, powered by Postini, which processes more than 3 billion email messages per day in the course of providing email security to more than 50,000 businesses and 18 million business users.

Spam and virus volumes this year have continued their upward trend. Q2’10 has seen a sharp 16% increase in spam volume over Q1’10. Virus traffic has moderately increased 3% increase this quarter, however Q2’10 virus was 260% higher than Q2’09. These trends tell us that the spammers are still extremely active, and their botnets produce high levels of spam and virus traffic.

By the by numbers
Spam volume shot up 16% from Q1’10 to Q2’10. Overall, however spam levels are down 15% from Q2’09.

Virus volume grew quickly at the beginning of the quarter, shooting up 90% from March to April, but then quickly dropped off. We saw only a modest 3% uptick from Q1’10 to Q2’10 at the aggregate level. Compared to Q2’09, this represents a 260% increase.

One interesting trend we noticed is size of individual spam messages rising 35% from Q1’10. This points to the fact that spammers are sending more image-based spam, as well as viruses as attachments.

New methods of attack
We have also seen a recent surge in obfuscated (hidden) JavaScript attacks. These messages are a hybrid between virus and spam messages. The messages are designed to look like Non Delivery Report (NDR) messages, which are legitimate messages, however they contained hidden JavaScript which in some cases tried to do things the user may not have been aware of.

In some cases, the message may have forwarded the user's browser to a pharma site or tried to download something unexpected, which is more virus-like. Since the messages contained classic JavaScript which generates code, the messages could change themselves and take multiple forms, making them challenging to identify.

Fortunately, our spam traps were receiving these messages early, providing our engineers with advanced warning which allowed us to write manual filters and escalate to our anti-virus partners quickly. In addition to this, we updated our Postini Anti-Spam Engine (PASE) to recognize the obfuscated JavaScript and capture the messages based on the underlying code to ensure accuracy.

The classics
Although they’ve added a few new tricks to their bag, spammers continue to exploit tried and true techniques, including:

• False Social Networking Messages
Social networks continue to be one of the most frequently spoofed domains for the purpose of spreading phishing scams and virus downloaders. These messages do not actually come from social networks but look similar to legitimate social networks messages. Such messages often contain links to external websites which contain malicious content and/or attempt to harvest user login information. The Postini Anti-Spam Engine is very good at detecting such messages, but users should always be cautious when handling messages from popular social networking sites.

• Current events
As always, spammers continue to spoof major news stories, and this quarter, we saw an increase in spam involving the World Cup. Here is one example of a virus downloader that our spam filters caught:

• Shipping scams
The shipping scam is a favorite of spammers. This quarter we saw a more wide spread outbreak of messages claiming to be from major shipping companies because spammers get a higher success rate with these type of scams. The subject for the message made it look like an invoice and the message body contained random text such as news stories that did not look particularly "spammy." Each message had an attached zip file that presumably was intended to contain some sort of virus payload; however, the data was corrupt and did not pose any actual threat.

Stay safe from phishing scams
With the global economy continuing to lag, we have seen a continued upswing in “friend-in-need” phishing attempts, where hackers break into the email account of unsuspecting users and then hand-type a message to send to the victim’s email contacts.

The most common message told a story of the person being mugged while traveling abroad and requesting money to be sent to them in order to help them get home. The hacker is preying on the generosity of the victims friends in the hopes that one or more of them will send money to them. These messages can be difficult for spam filters to identify since they are hand typed and not sent in bulk. It goes without saying, but be wary of emails requesting money – regardless of the sender.

In response to these outbreaks, our engineers have released several updated filters to combat new spam waves.

Conclusion
Spam volume fluctuates in the short term, but overall, for the last 3 quarters spam volume has been relatively flat. Spammers continue to exploit techniques that have proven results, but as we have seen with obfuscated JavaScript attacks spammers are always experimenting with new techniques to stay ahead of security measures. Google Postini Services customers are protected from the brunt of these increases in spam volume.

For more information on how Google’s security and archiving services can help your business stay safe and compliant, please visit www.google.com/postini.

Posted by Adam Hollman and Gopal Shah, Google Postini Services team

Preparing for emergencies with Google Earth Enterprise

Ellen Petry Leanse — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 15:07:00 +0000

Editor’s Note: Brant Mitchell is Associate Deputy Director of the State of Louisiana Department of Homeland Security. The state of Louisiana Department of Homeland Security is a Google Earth Enterprise customer that leverages Google Earth Enterprise for emergency preparedness and now becomes the first Google Earth Enterprise customer to create a Google Earth Enterprise globe specifically for the public.

For the last three years the State of Louisiana has provided our first responder community a secured access to Federal, State and local geospatial data and high resolution imagery of Louisiana through a Google Earth Enterprise client. In preparation of hurricane season, Louisiana is pleased to announce that we have launched the first public version of a Google Earth Enterprise platform.

Louisiana Earth was released as part of the state's "Get a Game Plan" campaign, to assist citizens in creating evacuation plans by providing access to all of the states evacuation routes, sheltering points historical hazard data and other information that is essential during an evacuation such as locations of and available occupancy of hotels, gas stations, pharmacies, grocery stores, veterinary clinics and banks.

Louisiana Earth will also serve as a mechanism to relay critical data during disasters to help inform the public on the status of response and recovery efforts. Using the Deepwater Horizon Rig incident as an example, there is existing data that Louisiana is making available which includes the latest oil sightings from aerial observations, oyster bed closures, as well as critical environmental data such as bird nesting areas.

During hurricanes and other natural disasters, Louisiana will be able to provide information such as the location of points of distribution (PODs), food stamp offices, unemployment claims offices, disaster recovery centers as well as the status of parishes' power outages as an example.

Finally, while the primary purpose is to utilize Louisiana Earth as a mechanism to provide critical data during emergencies, it will also be utilized to promote Louisiana. We will constantly be adding data that the public can use to take advantage of the many activities and events, such as festivals, that are available in Louisiana.

Louisiana Earth already has information on all of the state parks which consists of lodging accommodations, hiking trails, and camping sites. Historical data and cultural events will also be included and will continue to be updated.

To access Louisiana Earth, go to laearth.la.gov.

Posted by Natasha Wyatt, Google Earth and Maps team

BlueSpace and Google Earth Enterprise: taking visualization to the skies

Ellen Petry Leanse — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 14:00:00 +0000

Editor's Note: Justin Marston is the CEO of BlueSpace, an enterprise software company focused on the defense and intelligence communities. BlueSpace has built a next generation command and control application using their security middleware and Google Earth Enterprise. They are currently showcasing it as part of the Coalition Warrior Interoperability Demonstration (an international "war game" exercise) with support from a government agency. The BlueSpace app showcases just how far you can take Google Earth Enterprise as a visualization environment.

Geospatial visualization of multiple streams of data has been critical to the defense and intelligence communities for a long time. Whether it’s showing aircraft flying around, soldiers taking a hill or different types of intelligence – seeing it on a map has been key to understanding a conflict.

In the second World War, the allies used maps with little models to show units, and moved them with poles to update their locations. With modern radar and GPS systems, things are a bit more sophisticated, but much of the mapping functionality has lagged behind. Many of the currently deployed command and control (C2) systems use flat, two-color vector maps with triangles showing units.

Visualization of AWACS plane in Google Earth

BlueSpace and AWACS

Before BlueSpace engaged them, AWACS was already actively working with 3D visualization. AWACS is the US Air Force Airborne Warning and Control System: a forward deployed radar platform (the planes with big spinning discs on top). The vision of the AWACS program has been to move away from a black screen with green triangles on it, and move towards a more visually rich C2 environment for operators that can show the terrain in which they are working.

How has BlueSpace helped? Well, we have focused on two problems – high quality, real-time visualizations and creating a Unified Operating Picture.

High Quality, Real-time Visualizations

The first problem is creating a much more "real" view of the battle theater, with 3D models moving around in real-time based on input data feeds giving latitude and longitude references for units. Our design goal was to create something more like a real-time video game using Google Earth's richness of graphics and capabilities.

BlueSpace is demonstrating its Multi-Level Security Command and Control (MLS C2) application at 5 different locations for the Coalition Warrior Interoperability Demonstration (CWID), a joint exercise between the US, UK, Canada, Australia and NATO (among others) to help find and prove technologies and systems that can help better orchestrate coalition warfare. For the exercise, BlueSpace worked with its partners to model around 100 units including aircraft, ground units and boats and of these units move around in real-time based on data feeds being fed to the application.

You can take a look at some of the interface, captured from Google Earth in this unclassified video: http://www.bluespace.com/mlsc2.html

A Unified Operating Picture

Wars used to be fought by relatively small numbers of allies, with each nation focused on a particular theater. As warfare has evolved over the last two decades, the reach of aircraft, missiles, satellites etc. have blurred lines between the different services and often between nations.

MLS C2 User Interface using Google Earth Enterprise

for geospatial visualization of ground, air and sea units

Right now, the NATO configuration of the AWACS planes can have up to 14 different screens on each AWACS aircraft – one for the US aircraft, one for the British, one for the Canadian, one for the German, etc. So when something new comes up on radar, operators may have to look at up to 14 screens to figure out what is going on.

BlueSpace has taken these separate pictures and consolidated them into a single Unified Operating Picture (UOP) that spans all the different networks, providing one Google Earth environment, with all the units in that environment, no matter which nation or service they serve. This means an operator on an AWACS plane only has to look at one screen to see what is happening – a vast improvement.

Google Earth's extensive capabilities allow an operator to fully utilize this unified operating picture to see terrain, roads, etc. in their relation to the plotted units. In addition, Google Earth's full camera controls provide the viewing flexibility necessary to interact with those units.

BlueSpace and Google

We see a great future for Google Earth Enterprise in our C2 system. Being able to see the helicopter, visually recognize its type immediately and see which mountains are next to it when the pilot calls in, “I’m taking fire from the ridge on the left” makes a big difference in a real fight. Doing all of that across many different security domains in a Unified Operating Picture that spans multiple networks – that’s a game changing capability.

Posted by Natasha Wyatt, Google Earth Enterprise team

Going Google: a webinar with Brown University

Ellen Petry Leanse — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 14:04:00 +0000

UPDATE, 07/14/2010: Please note that we have postponed this webinar until Wednesday, August 18. Please register here to confirm your participation in this event. Thank you and we look forward to sharing Brown University's experience deploying Google Apps.

A few weeks ago, we announced that Brown University has gone Google for all students, staff, and faculty on campus. If you’re interested in learning more about why they made this decision, we encourage you to register for the upcoming EDUCAUSE Live! Webcast – part of the Spotlight on Cloud Computing Series – that features Michael Pickett, the Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Brown discussing this decision.

In this free, hour-long web seminar “Google Apps at Brown,” you’ll learn how Brown deployed Google Apps to its 6,000 students and why they’ve decided to extend the service to include faculty and staff as well. Register here to tune in for more information about how these decisions were made, the options they considered, lessons they learned, and successes to date.

Google Apps for Students and Staff at Brown University

Wednesday July 14, 2010

1:00 p.m. EDT / 10:00 a.m. PDT

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Google Apps EDU team

Vektrex on switching to Gmail to cut spam and IT costs

Ellen Petry Leanse — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 19:19:00 +0000

Editor's note: Continuing our “Going Google Everywhere” series, we’ve invited Jeff Hulett, Founder and CTO of Vektrex, an electronics company that produces LED and laser power sources and reliability test systems. Located in San Diego, California, Vektrex makes products to help companies develop energy-saving LED illumination. Learn more about other organizations that have gone Google on our community map.

Spam was killing our server

Vektrex had been successfully hosting its own email using Microsoft’s Exchange Server for years. It had always been pretty simple: our IT person, Mike, occasionally did updates to our Microsoft Exchange server, and our dozen or so employees used Outlook to access their accounts.

Then, a while back, the job became much tougher. With several longstanding email addresses, we started to receive a lot of spam. My account started getting one or two spam emails per minute – and our CEO received many times that amount. Mike tried various programs to filter the spam, but each was eventually overwhelmed. We suffered with monthly email outages that lasted a few hours – or even days – despite Mike’s all-nighters. After a lot of discussion, we finally decided that we would try moving our email to external hosting at our next outage. We chose Gmail because it seemed like a good fit for the size of our company. The conversion to Gmail itself was very simple and fast; we were able to move our accounts quickly and easily. Initially we stayed with Outlook as our client and we used the IMAP interface with local caching. As time passed, we found most users choosing the native Gmail web interface, so eventually we moved the whole company to it.

Gmail can display folders

After moving to Gmail’s interface, we had to learn the differences between Outlook and Gmail. The main difference in the beginning was the way that emails are displayed, sorted and archived. Gmail offers labels instead of folders. Labels give you the ability to "tag" one email with several key words and Gmail provides ways to move/archive tagged messages in folders, providing functionality that makes everything more familiar and useful to our users.

The last remaining issue was email access on our cell phones and PDAs. To optimize functionality with our business accounts that include our own domain name, we moved initially to Palm Treos and then to HTC Androids, which worked flawlessly with Gmail's business accounts.

Converting is work but Gmail is worth it

When we started the conversion, IT staffers were a little reluctant to abandon the independence and control we felt we had with our own server. But we overcame our reluctance and the end result was worth it. I see only a few spam emails per week, and we haven't had a significant outage in over a year.

Vektrex employees are re-focused on our core products – reliability test systems for LEDs – rather than on keeping things up and running. The switch has saved roughly $500 per month in IT labor. It was also more economical than a hardware spam filter costing at least $1,000 up front, $350 in yearly fees, and an unknown amount to administer. Even Mike is happy. He finally got some well-earned time off - and the chance to drive his 1970 Volkswagen beetle in a 1,000-mile off road race through the Baja desert!

Vektrex IT Administrator Mike Zavos takes a vacation

after switching the company to GMail

Posted by Serena Satyasai, the Google Apps team

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Collaboration and Teamwork with Google Apps. Rypple goes Google.

Ellen Petry Leanse — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 23:51:00 +0000

Editor's note: Today's guest blogger is Jay Goldman, Head of Marketing for Rypple, a lightweight, social service for continuous feedback and collaboration. Rypple helps managers and their teams achieve goals faster with a simpler way to stay on track, recognize achievements, give useful feedback, and get people talking. Rypple has Gone Google from top to bottom — helping them to grow rapidly.

Rypple is all about teamwork and collaboration, so having an internal teamwork and collaboration platform is essential to our success. We're a small but growing start-up with a geographically diverse team spread across North America, from San Francisco to Toronto. Staying lean and agile is a key part of our DNA, giving us a strong preference for lightweight and simple solutions, so there was no way we were going to choose a solution that didn't allow us to live it in our infrastructure. Google Apps was the clear choice.

We'd Gone Google even before we'd written a line of code on our own application. Setting up our Gmail, Docs, Calendar, and Sites was one of the first things we did at Rypple. Our team exists online, constantly connected through laptops and mobile devices. All roads lead seamlessly back to Apps, where we easily exchange emails, share information, and collaborate in the cloud.

Our customers use Rypple to improve communication and stay on track, so it's no surprise that we're big fans of Google Talk, our inter-office chat medium of choice. Chatting over IM saves us countless trips across the office, making sure we stay focused on building great software. Our knowledge base lives in a Google Site, keeping our team up to speed on the latest developments, marketing strategies, and collateral. On-boarding new employees - a constant concern for a growing start-up - is as simple as logging in to the Apps admin panel and making a few quick clicks.

Our Googley-ness goes even deeper than our choice in email and calendering tools. Google Analytics and Website Optimizer are essential elements of our marketing strategy and significant enablers of our data-driven approach. Their tabs are always open in Chrome, giving us a view into what's happening on our website and how our sales and marketing funnel is performing. And we keep the top of that funnel full thanks to Google AdWords, which drives a considerable portion of our daily traffic.

All of that makes us a cutting edge tech start-up with an infrastructure that helps power our growth. Our love affair with Google goes even one step further: the entire Rypple application is built on Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Our development team loves how GWT gives them the tools to build quickly and easily stick to our agile roots. Our customers love how we're able to push a new release packed with features and enhancements every week.

Launching a start-up used to be a really expensive proposition. You needed teams of developers and expensive servers, not to mention all the foosball tables, basketball hoops, and scooters. Here at Rypple, we're proud to be a different kind of start-up, focused on customers, products, and our business model. We're at the vanguard of a new generation: lightweight, agile, and living on the cloud — and we couldn't do it without Google.

Posted by Ashley Chandler, Google Apps Team

Because Time is Money: Leveraging Google Apps Open Standards and Google Calendar

Ellen Petry Leanse — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 14:43:00 +0000

Editor's note: Continuing our “Going Google Everywhere” series, we’ve invited Stijn Van Vreckem, Founder and Managing Director of XAOP, a small Belgium-based software development company specializing in content integration, to talk about a quick and easy way his company has utilized APIs with Google Apps Premier Edition. XAOP builds software solutions, information integration products and related services for the life sciences industry.

Learn more about other organizations that have gone Google on our community map.

Filling in timesheets is a task that needs to be performed monthly or weekly in most service-oriented organizations. For years, I used to write everything down in my notebook to keep track of things.

Because the XAOP team has grown to seven people in the last year – who are usually working in small teams of two or three developers – it became more and more difficult to manage the billing for different projects. It was time to look for a better, more transparent solution to keep track of everyone's time.

After some internal discussions, we introduced a timesheet process based on Google Calendar. We created a calendar in our Google Apps Premier environment for each billable project we want to track. These calendars are shared with the team members working on the project.

Each team member registers his or her activities by simply putting them on the correct project calendar. As a result, everybody on the team can see who is working on which task in the project. At the end of the month, all invoices are created based on the activities of the project calendar.

Users track their time using project calendars in Google Apps.

Now, generating timesheet reports and invoices for clients is easy. Here’s how it works:

A background Ruby application connects each Google Calendar with the Google Data API to collect the activities.

The Ruby application then generates a monthly PDF report of the project calendars.

These reports provide a detailed overview of the activities for each person in the project.

The main disadvantage is that we need a lot of calendars, so cleanup is sometimes necessary. We also wish we could see who created which event so we could more easily manage larger projects. For example, you can see who created an event via the tooltip when you rollover it with the mouse, but this becomes difficult to read easily when more than 3 users fill in the timeslot on the same calendar. Therefore we implemented a convention on some projects to start the title with a person's initials.

But there are many advantages. We now have a lightweight timesheet application that lets everyone fill in their calendars when they have the time. The Google Calendar user interface is very simple and accessible for everybody. Freelancers or other external people working on XAOP projects can be added to the calendar of the project without complexity. This is a web-based solution that can be used via a PC or a mobile phone.

Today, XAOP team members don’t need to keep track of the projects. They only need to keep their calendars up to date. Invoices are now generated automatically and we can provide transparent reporting on each hour of work.

XAOP recently invested in new mobile phones and our time management solution worked without any changes. Because these HTC devices (Hero and Magic) integrate seamlessly with Google Apps, we can fill in our timesheets from anywhere.

Posted by Serena Satyasai, the Google Apps team

Do you have an informative and fun Google Apps story to share? Please submit it here.

Google Commerce Search lands in Oz

Ellen Petry Leanse — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 23:08:00 +0000

As we just announced on the Google Australia blog, Google Commerce Search is extending its availability beyond the U.S. and U.K. to include Aussie retailers. With this launch, Australian e-commerce sites will be able to respond to the growing proportion of shoppers who turn to the web to research and purchase products – and unfortunately often have a hard time finding what they’re looking for.

Launching today at the Online Retailer Conference & Expo in Sydney, Google Commerce Search can now bring the same speed, relevancy, and ease of use that retailers like Smart Furniture in the U.S. and Chemist Direct in the U.K. have chosen for their sites.

If you’re an e-commerce company in Australia and won’t be attending the conference in Sydney this week, you can learn more by visiting the website or contacting us here.

Posted by Anna Bishop, Google Commerce Search team

109-year-old mechanical contracting company "goes Google"

Ellen Petry Leanse — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 22:20:00 +0000

Editor’s note: Today’s guest bloggers are Aaron McCarthy, IT Director for Limbach Facility Services, Cristine Leifheit, Team Lead. McCarthy and Leifheit recently spearheaded the move to Google Apps for Limbach’s 500 employees. A mechanical contractor founded in 1901, Limbach Facility Services switched from Lotus Notes®/Domino® to "go Google" and gain 25GB mailboxes and built-in disaster recovery capabilities at no extra charge.

Aaron McCarthy holds 13 years of IT experience, 7 of which are with Limbach Facility Services. He has a Bachelor in MIS from Oakland University (Rochester, MI) and a Master in Business Information Technology from Walsh College (Troy, MI). Cristine Leifheit, PHR has worked with the Human Resources Department of Limbach for the past 11 years. She served as the Communications Team Leader throughout the selection and implementation of Google Apps alongside the Limbach Corporate IT Department.

Aaron and Cristine will be joined by Google Apps partner Cloud Sherpas on a live webcast on Thursday July 8, 2010 at 2:00 p.m. EDT / 11:00 a.m. PDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT. Register today.

At Limbach, we had a Lotus Notes/Domino system and, despite it being a recent version, the Notes system was hampering the innovation of our 500 employees. As a construction company, we have a workforce that is typically non-tech savvy. We are constantly learning what is required to bridge their needs while providing the advanced tools required to improve the way we do business.

We formed a “2012 Committee” comprised of non-technical staff from nine branches to better set up the company for the future. Part of their job was to re-evaluate our email system. When a new hire and recent college graduate on the committee suggested moving to Google Apps, management initially scoffed.

We did a line-by-line comparison of Google Apps, Microsoft® Exchange, and Lotus Notes and were quickly convinced of the value of Google Apps. We could get 25GB mailboxes—eliminating the constant strain on our small IT staff of four to meet ongoing requests for larger mailboxes. We also got built-in disaster recovery capabilities at no additional charge. Google’s mail capabilities were unmatched, but then we considered that Google Apps also provides great collaboration tools.

We did a small pilot with committee members and then a broader one with 50 users that helped us understand our full deployment requirements. The pilots were a wise move, and they helped us transition to Google Apps smoothly. Things moved quickly; we were able to decommission two servers just two months after deployment.

Today, we use the full suite of Google Apps tools, including Google Sites for our intranet. Google Apps has also become a platform for innovation. One safety manager used Google video chat to broadcast a helicopter lift of an HVAC system onto a roof to staff members at a branch office. We also added a cloud-based workflow tool from the Google Apps Marketplace.

It’s been a positive experience for us and we’d be happy to share out insights. Please join us for an interactive webinar!

Getting 25GB Inboxes and Built-in Disaster Recovery with Google Apps
Thursday, July 8, 2010
2:00 p.m. EDT / 11:00 a.m. PDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT

Posted by Serena Satyasai, the Google Apps team

Find customer stories and research product information on our resource sites for current users of Microsoft® Exchange and Lotus Notes®/Domino®.

Riley Chartered Accountants "goes Google"

Ellen Petry Leanse — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 18:23:00 +0000

Editor’s note: For this week’s guest blog post, we head to Plymouth, England to hear from Jon Stacey, a partner at Riley Chartered Accountants, an eighteen strong firm of Chartered Accountants. Riley offers accounting, tax and business development services to clients throughout the UK.

Riley have been enthusiastic adopters of cloud computing for a couple of years now. As a UK firm of Chartered Accountants based in Plymouth, England we have been technology driven since the business started in 1981. Our ability to communicate as a team and with our customers is paramount and the recording and storing of what we do in the most efficient and accessible format is critical.

Our office systems were previously almost totally reliant on Lotus Notes, which we’d started using in 1998. However, over the years we started to see deficiencies that began to hinder business -- challenging technical management issues, the clunkiness of the user-interface even after major updates, and access issues. These problems were especially noticeable because the quality of the personal email systems we had all started to use at home had surpassed that of the system we were using at work.

Finally, changes in our key team forced us to look properly at other solutions and we settled on migrating our e-mail, calendars and instant messaging to Google in August 2009. The migration was handled painlessly by Glo-Networks and we moved the majority of our communication IT to web-browser access without a hitch.

That first step was a revelation. Not only was our information now accessible from anywhere in the world, from any computer or device with an Internet connection, the move massively freed up resources of people (and cash) and removed the restrictions on our thinking about IT. We still have certain legacy databases on Lotus Notes but have started to wind these down as more content is now cloud based. We found that Google Apps allowed us to store all of our templates for letters, spreadsheets and many of our management tools too.

Google Docs has become our go-to source for new files, collaboration and systems development. This morning I spent half an hour collaborating on an internal project with two of my partners - one of them was in another office, another at home while I was at my desk talking to them both on the phone. The speed of decision making is enhanced by the ability to see what others are doing as they amend and delete cells within a spreadsheet or words in a proposal letter. And then there’s Chat with video chat - something which we didn’t take much notice of while we were assessing Apps, but which is becoming more and more useful as we build our team.

Using Google Sites, we have developed a dashboard for the Riley team and easy-to-create websites within minutes. The simple interface, clean design and ability to pick up on templates designed by both the Google team and other businesses mean that someone, somewhere has often done some of the hard work for you.

More recently, we’ve started to use Google Apps Marketplace to drive the development and integration of our CRM requirements, mail and contacts. This is an on-going process and we are currently evaluating a number of solutions for this need - something which all the providers have made extremely easy.

We have also been able to dispense with the office-based back-up solution which was the bane of many of our lives. There have also been no problems with software updates – I’m sure that they exist but they happen painlessly when we don’t notice or incrementally as the developers finish a feature. We don’t have to buy an upgrade path or worry about compatibility – it just happens.

Posted by Ashley Chandler, The Google Enterprise Team

DLT Solutions practices what they preach by installing the Google Search Appliance in minutes

Ellen Petry Leanse — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 23:09:00 +0000

Editor's Note: We're pleased to welcome Jim Helou, Vice President of the Google division at DLT Solutions, a Google Enterprise Partner. Jim and his team provide leading enterprise solutions, such as the Google Search Appliance, to the Public Sector.

The DLT team understands the principle of service and works with their Public Sector customers to determine the best product fit, necessary services & training, post-implementation support and procurement options to fulfill their mission.

"Practice what you preach." We’ve all heard that saying, right? At DLT Solutions, we’re a modern day example of the age-old adage. DLT Solutions, a value-added reseller of information technology products to federal, state and local government, recently partnered with Google to bring their innovative products to the public sector marketplace. Among Google’s business solutions is the Google Search Appliance 6.0. We at DLT figured what better way to preach the gospel of Google than to be users ourselves.

DLT Solutions recently installed the Google Search Appliance (GSA) for searching the DLT intranet. We chronicled the installation of the Search Appliance 6.0 by two DLT Web developers at our headquarters outside of Washington D.C in a two-part real time video, now available to view at www.DLT.com/GSA.

(That's Part One, above; you can also view the Part Two on the DLT YouTube channel.)

The video is a timed demonstration of how fast and easy Google’s latest version of the Search Appliance is to install. In less than 20 minutes we had taken the Google Search Appliance out of the box, installed, and configured the Search Appliance for our intranet file search. Your own deployment time may take longer depending on how many data sources you're searching and how many files you need to crawl. The point, however, is just how easy it is – one server, two network cables, and a power cord. No army of consultants necessary.

Looking back, search results in the pre-GSA days were…sloppy. Nowadays, with the GSA, the customizable search criteria makes for a more personal internal search experience. Employees can find the information they need faster allowing them to focus on more mission-critical tasks.

DLT uses Google’s search solution for not only our intranet, but also our public website. The Search Appliance’s relevant search results in the recognizable Google format has allowed our government users to get the information they need while increasing the number of qualified prospects for DLT.

We confidently tell our customers how easy the Google Search Appliance is to install and use. We know. We’ve done it.

Posted by Dan Israel, Product Marketing Manager, Google Enterprise

Share Your Gone Google Story

Ellen Petry Leanse — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 17:37:00 +0000

Earlier this month we launched the Go Google cloud calculator, and we’re excited that so many of you have already taken a few minutes to discover how Google Apps can benefit your organization. Many of you have shared the results of your calculations and added your organization to our community map – and we’ve loved your enthusiasm about the time and money that can be saved by going Google.

As a token of our appreciation, we’re giving away limited-edition Gone Google tote bags (made from material recycled from our billboards) to people who share their Gone Google stories.

Just tell us how your company has gone Google, and include a link to your poster from the cloud calculator in this form. (Hint: when you create your Gone Google poster, you can just copy and paste the unique URL of the PDF.) We’ll send you a tote bag and may even highlight your story on the Google Enterprise blog.

*And our lawyers ask us to tell you that in sharing your story, you are giving Google permission to use it for marketing purposes, and the "giveaway offer is void where prohibited and valid only while supplies last" — so hurry!

Posted by Ashley Chandler, Google Enterprise team

Brown University has gone Google

Ellen Petry Leanse — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 15:50:00 +0000

From time to time we invite guests to blog about initiatives of interest, and are very pleased to have Geoff Greene join us here. Geoff is the Director of IT Support Services at Brown University, and here he shares an update on their campus-wide migration to Google Apps for Education for all students, staff and faculty. - Ed.

About a year ago we put our 6,000 undergraduate students on Google Apps. The results were phenomenal: people were happy, they were productive, they were excited...and then some people got jealous. Our faculty and staff members started coming to us asking “When do we get to go Google?” Turns out they also wanted access to the same tools to better connect and engage with students and with each other.

We thought about it for a bit and realized that they had a point. So we decided to bring the entire Brown University community together—faculty, staff, medical and grad students—with a common set of tools: Google Apps for Education. This summer, our Computing & Information Services team is in the process of migrating everyone to our new GoogleApps@Brown system. The positive experience our undergrads have had using the Apps suite helped our Provost David Kertzer decide that the change would bring significant benefits and cost savings to the university as a whole. In fact, we predict this change could save us somewhere around $1 million each year.

Our students were really the ones that led us down the Google path. They knew these tools would work because they already used them in their non-school lives. We also decided to go this direction because of the functionalities that we believe will bring our university together, namely tools like collaborative documents, better email (with nearly 30 times the storage space we had with our previous system!) and video chat.

The icing on the cake is that we signed a zero dollar contract for all these top-notch tools. But it’s not just about saving money—it’s also about investing in our university’s future. Google Apps helps us work better together, and we can feel the excitement building on campus as a result. Here’s a little glimpse:

Since some faculty and staff members aren’t as familiar with the new tools just yet, we also hosted a “roadshow” to spread the word and gear up training sessions tailored for each campus group or department. Our training efforts are robust (you can check it out at training.brown.edu) and we have Google Guides—enthusiastic staff and student volunteers—helping their peers with the transition. We feel confident that once people start using these tools together, they’ll never look back.

Posted by Geoff Greene, Brown University Computing & Information Services

Summer school is in session with Google Apps Teacher Training

Ellen Petry Leanse — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 15:25:00 +0000

Teachers and students may already be enjoying their summer vacations, but the Google Apps for Education team is going back to school for the annual ISTE conference in Denver, Colorado this week. We’re excited to talk with educators about the latest ways that Google Apps empowers teachers to teach – and schools to save money.

We're also excited to share the news that the states of Colorado and Iowa have made Google Apps available to their public schools, joining Oregon in leading the movement to Google Apps for education.

One of the things that we value most about working with educators is their commitment to always improving the tools and practices they use when they teach. Teachers often ask us about resources that support the use of Google Apps in the classroom. Today, we’re announcing a full spectrum of training solutions that schools can use to develop and enhance their use of Google Apps – regardless of their size or budget.

These Google Apps for Education training solutions encompass three components: a free online training center, a set of qualification exams for teachers, and a Certified Trainer and Partner program.

Schools wanting a “self service” approach to mastering Google Apps can now find a comprehensive set of resources on using Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and more in our new online Google Apps Education Training Center. This free online center is designed to take a new user of Google Apps – even someone with no Apps experience – and guide them step-by-step to understanding and proficiency.

Schools can take this proficiency one step further with a set of exams that let educators or trainers prove their mastery of Google Apps – a key step in becoming a Google Apps Certified Trainer or Partner. These exams are based 100% on the content in the training center, so everything that’s needed to pass the test is available online. Exams are administered by an independent third party training organization and can be purchased directly from our new training center.

These training solutions also support schools with the training and professional development resources they need to enhance their teachers’ use of Google Apps as a teaching tool. The new Google Apps for Education Certified Trainer and Partner program provides a formal structure for certifying individuals and partners who lead workshops or trainings about Apps, and provides schools with an easy way to find the best partners in their area.

We’ll be talking more about this program at ISTE, but if you’re not there, take a look at the site to see what it can offer you and your school.

We have one more piece of good news for educators everywhere: we’re extending our offer to provide Google Message Security (GMS) at no charge to schools who sign up with Apps through the end of this year. Primary and secondary schools that add the GMS service to their domain before December 31, 2010 will be able to take advantage of GMS’s custom email filters, policy management, and enhanced security controls.

If you’re at ISTE this year, stop by the Google booth #2536 and take a seat in our teaching theater to learn more about Google Apps from our team and some of our Google Certified Teachers.

You can also join us tonight at our Google Block Party and hear from Executive Directory of SIPA John Conley about how Colorado schools are moving to Google Apps.

Posted by Dana Nguyen, Product Marketing Manager, Google Apps Education

Webinar: Accounting & Finance applications from the Google Apps Marketplace

Ellen Petry Leanse — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 17:07:00 +0000

If you’re running your business on Google Apps, you’ve seen how the cloud can make messaging and collaboration faster, more efficient, and less expensive. The Google Apps Marketplace enables those same cloud benefits for all of your business apps, from CRM and project management to marketing and graphics.

Next Tuesday, June 29, we’re hosting a free webinar to showcase three Accounting & Finance apps from the Google Apps Marketplace -- MyERP.com, FreshBooks and Bill.com. You’ll learn about the key features of these apps, how Google Apps customers are already using them, and how you can easily get them for your business. Please join us!

Simplifying business operations with Accounting & Finance applications from Google Apps Marketplace
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
9:00 a.m. PDT / 12:00 p.m. EDT / 5:00 p.m. GMT
Register here

Posted by Chris Kelly, Google Apps Marketplace team

Security First: Google at the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit

Ellen Petry Leanse — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 19:30:00 +0000

This week the Google Enterprise team is excited to be participating in the Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit. From today through Wednesday, IT and business executives responsible for information security, risk management, compliance, and business continuity management will gather to discuss new technologies and strategies to better secure their organizations and reduce risk.

We're particularly excited to be joined by Chet Loveland of MWV and Brian Bolt from Boise State University for a panel on security and cloud computing. They discussed why their organizations chose Google Apps, and the steps Google takes to protect the security and privacy of their data.

On Tuesday, we’ll be presenting a review of Google Apps security and reliability, building on the content in our recently published Apps security white paper.

If you'll be at the conference, please join us for a session or stop by our booth to learn more about Google’s solutions for cloud security. If you’re not going to be at the conference, you can find lots of information on Google Apps here.

Posted by Adam Swidler, Sr. Manager – Google Enterprise

The City of Los Angeles on Going Google

Ellen Petry Leanse — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 15:10:00 +0000

Editor's note: Today's guest blogger is Kevin Crawford, Assistant General Manager for the City of Los Angeles Information Technology Agency. Kevin was part of a team of technology executives that chose Google Apps six months ago to support the city's 30,000+ employees and 44 different departments, from police and fire to transportation and more. In the past, Kevin has served as CIO of Sound Transit, senior manager of IT infrastructure at Port of Seattle, and support manager at Weyerhauser. Kevin shares his thoughts about how the US's second largest city has gone Google in perhaps one of the most-watched technology deployments in recent memory. This post is a follow-up to the initial blog post on the City of LA from Randi Levin, CTO.

Kevin will speak at a live webcast this Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 2:00 PM (EDT) | 11:00 AM (PDT) Register today.

The City of Los Angeles currently faces a $400 million deficit, but from a technology standpoint, we still have to provide advanced tools to 30,000+ employees and 44 different departments – technology is vital to the inner workings of the city. Running a city of this size requires people to work together, from designing and operating public facilities to policing the streets.

At the city’s Information Technology Agency (ITA), we are responsible for managing all of the City's enterprise applications – including email. Up until about six months ago, we had an aging, on-premise email system. Our Novell Groupwise system didn't work on some mobile devices and we had to enforce inbox space quotas that City employees found limiting.

In addition to providing better collaboration tools and remote access, we also needed archiving and disaster recovery capabilities to safeguard information. Disaster recovery precautions are especially important in this part of the world where earthquakes are not a question of if, but when.

We looked at 15 different proposals and went through extensive due diligence, finally gaining the City Council's unanimous buy-in with a 12-0 vote in favor of a proposal from Google and CSC. We found that Google Apps provided the richest, most cost-effective and efficient communication solutions. That was six months ago. Since then, we've worked with CSC to implement Google Apps City-wide.

By ITA estimates, Google Apps is saving Los Angeles $5.5 million over five years by allowing us to shift resources currently dedicated to email to other purposes. For example, moving to Google has freed up nearly 100 servers that were previously used for our existing email system, which in turn – an unanticipated benefit – is lowering our electricity bills by hundreds of thousands over five years. Los Angeles found Google's system availability of 99.9% and service levels for response in the event of an issue to be equivalent – if not better – to what we could provide ourselves. In short, this decision to go Google helps us safeguard information and get the most out of the city's IT budget.

Because we are such a large government organization, people are eager to hear how our deployment is going. We also built a Google Site to help us easily provide updates on the process and gather input from our user base. We'd be pleased to discuss the progress we've made in the six months since we unanimously decided to go to Google Apps. Please join me for an interactive webinar!

Posted by Serena Satyasai, The Google Apps Team

Do you have an informative and fun Google Apps story to share? Please submit it here.

Not yet a year old, Google Commerce Search turns “2.0”

Ellen Petry Leanse — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 15:00:00 +0000

As we just announced on the Official Google Blog, today we’re launching Google Commerce Search 2.0 for online retailers in the United States and United Kingdom. With the new release, we’re offering both greater control and customization for retailers and a better experience for online shoppers.

The e-commerce industry is changing rapidly, and we’re responding quickly to meet retailer’s changing needs. Just seven months after our initial launch we’re adding a host of features to help retailers provide the best possible shopping experience on their sites.

Enhanced merchant customization: With the full merchandising dashboard, Google Commerce Search 2.0 gives e-merchants more control over promotions, ranking rules and filtering customization—and no custom coding means that marketers and merchandisers can do all of this themselves.
Simple promotion set-up and management: New intuitive retailer controls like time-based promotions, custom filtering of results, and simple ranking rules mean retailers can “set it and forget it” using the new ranking wizards.
Better browsing and navigation: No matter how advanced the search function, some shoppers will always visit your site looking to browse and discover new products. People can now shop by browsing your site as well as searching directly for products.
Evolved shopper experience: One of the most popular features on Google.com but rarely found on retail websites, “as-you-type suggestions” help sites become more user-friendly and fast. Now, with query autocompletion retailers can offer common queries to shoppers in real time, as they type, without any custom coding.
Search quality improvements: Google Commerce Search continues to build on the speed and end-user innovation featured in the first release. Because it’s hosted in the Google cloud, search results are returned to shoppers in less than a second. Spelling and stemming dictionaries and new custom synonyms mean that shopping on a retail site can be as easy and accurate as searching on Google.com.

Each of these improvements can make an impact on the usability and success of your online store, but collectively they have real ROI potential. Because more and more consumers are turning to the web to both research and complete purchases, eliminating frustration and improving site usability can lead to major advances in both online and offline channels.

For example, Google Commerce Search customer Discount Office Items is seeing immediate ROI. “When we saw how fast we could recoup our spending and start making more money due to better, faster search, the decision to implement Google Commerce Search was clear. Since deployment, visitor volumes and revenue have jumped 6.4%. Search is now one of the strongest elements of our site – all with less load on our servers and less time spent on maintenance for the IT staff,” says Tim Horton, Co-Founder and CEO.

Finally, we’re also making the benefits of Google Commerce Search 2.0 available to a wider range of retailers by introducing a pricing model that starts at $25k/year. For details on how Google Commerce Search can help your business, contact us.

To learn more, sign up for our upcoming webinar hosted by Chain Store Age (details below). You’ll hear from Nitin Mangtani, Senior Product Manager, in conversation with Google Commerce Search customers about how these new features can help bring your e-commerce site to the next level.

Google Commerce Search: Delivering Search Innovations to Retailers and Shoppers
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
1:00 p.m. EDT / 10:00 a.m. PDT / 5:00 p.m. GMT

Posted by Carl Evankovich, Software Engineer

Earth Pro 5.2 launched: the data you need, at your fingertips

Ellen Petry Leanse — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 14:43:00 +0000

Around the world, thousands of customers count on Google Earth Pro to help them get their work done. From visualizing complicated layers generated by GIS software to leveraging movie-making tools for site selection, engineering project visualization, and much more, Google Earth Pro enables businesses, government agencies, and educators to bring their geographic data to life.

Yet customers want more, with easy access to relevant data layers being a common request. In the past, users had to invest considerable time and resources to find data such as demographic, traffic counts, and land parcel information. Other customers struggled with processing large, complicated layers.

We’re happy to announce the launch of Google Earth Pro 5.2, which makes it much easier to find and access the data you need to make smart business decisions.

Google Earth Pro 5.2 includes:

a set of exclusive layers designed to make everything easier from site selection to business intelligence analysis
enhanced capabilities to process and visualize large geospatial data files

Point. Click. Start analyzing.

Earth Pro now includes three new productivity-enhancing layers:

U.S. Demographics: includes demographic data on 2010 and projected 2015 income, age, education, etc. at the state, county, tract, and block group level. For income and age, you can view beautifully color-coded layers enabling you to quickly zero in on target markets and cross-reference with your own layers. The data is presented in both tabular and pie chart format and is licensed from Claritas.

U.S. Parcel data: provides critical parcel and building information for both commercial and residential parcels. This includes APN (assessor’s parcel number), use codes, and zoning data to help you make the right business decisions. Even more exciting, you can get more details, such as sales history, by purchasing the corresponding DataQuick detailed report (sample), linked from each parcel info window.
U.S. Daily Traffic Counts: reports the historical average number of cars that have passed through an intersection in the US. Make sure your new development, store, or advertisement will get the right amount of visibility with data from MPSI.

In addition to the included layers, Earth Pro 5.2 also makes processing your own complex layers easier. With new built-in “regionation” functionality, Earth Pro can now ingest and display large KMLs with speed and ease. Vector “regionation” automatically optimizes your data by intelligently loading points as you zoom in to the globe. Super image overlays enable your layers to include larger images by optimizing the resolution of images as you zoom in.

To purchase Google Earth Pro, visit our online store or sign up for a 7-day free trial. We hope you enjoy these new features.

Posted by Daniel Chu, Product Manager, Enterprise Maps/Earth

Konica Minolta has Gone Google

Ellen Petry Leanse — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 20:20:00 +0000

Editor's note: Today's guest blogger is Cathy Lilli, Director of Infrastructure Services for Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A. (Konica Minolta). Konica Minolta Business Solutions is a leader in advanced imaging and networking technologies for the desktop to the print shop. Cathy's team recently spearheaded the company's switch to Google Apps. Today, the team reports that Google Apps not only provides email, but also integrates collaboration, security, and spam blocking – all while freeing the entire IT department to spend more time on forward-looking enterprise initiatives.

Cathleen Lilli serves as Director of Enterprise Infrastructure Services where she leads the corporate teams responsible for Data Center Operations, Network Services (Data and Voice), Client Services (Help Desk and Desktop Support), and Messaging & Security. Christopher Henry serves as Manager, Messaging and IT Security, where he is responsible for the management of the corporate messaging group as well as the Coordination of all IT security activities.

Cathy will be joined by Chris Henry, Manager of Messaging and IT Security on a live webcast this Thursday, June 17, 2010 2:00 p.m. EDT / 11:00 a.m. PDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT. Register today.

At Konica Minolta, we had an aging Lotus Notes®/Domino® messaging environment along with other messaging platforms in the mix supporting 6,000-plus users across all of our U.S. locations, and it was time to make a change. Our users were dabbling in Microsoft SharePoint®, and they were adopting their own instant messaging tools. We wanted to make collaboration tools available to everyone by default. And we wanted an easy way to keep the business moving forward with future innovations.

On the IT front, we no longer wanted to spend a significant amount of time on constant tactical chores like server updates, storage management and patching. The on-premise environment was too cumbersome to maintain and was pulling away our focus from strategic initiatives that would provide more business value. We also had to find an easier way to integrate multiple corporate acquisitions (we had just acquired Danka and had to merge 2,000 users on multiple messaging platforms into our infrastructure).

We already had positive experiences with cloud-based solutions such as Postini for anti-virus/anti-spam protection, ADP for payroll, and a CRM. Our main goals from the outset were to:

Better meet our user requirements, especially regarding ease of use and collaboration
Simplify IT management
More easily integrate acquisitions

With Google Apps, we saw that we could get a powerful, low maintenance- and complexity-free email solution plus innovative collaboration tools that would have cost extra in Microsoft® Exchange or Lotus Notes®/Domino®. But, we had to convince our parent company that Google Apps was the right choice since they were on a Microsoft® Exchange environment. We had many discussions and we did a lot of due diligence, particularly around Google's security expertise and policies.

We created a requirements document, and we talked to several large enterprise customers of Google Apps. At the time, we were completing the Danka merger and it involved shutting down a data center, so things in IT were pretty hectic. Despite these complicating factors, the switch to Google Apps went smoothly and with almost no complications. Today, Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A. Inc. has benefited significantly. We can:

Provide not just email, but also collaboration, security, and spam-blocking all in one solution
Deliver genuine, bottom-line value to the business, driven by continuous innovations from Google
More easily integrate new acquisitions like Danka
Align our activities to help drive Konica Minolta's business forward

We did not make this decision lightly and the IT team had many internal discussions about our role going forward in a cloud environment. Staff questioned, if we're not responsible for the servers on a maintenance basis – what will happen to our jobs?. But I can tell you, on top of owning messaging, we still have other apps to manage and run the data center - in other words, we have plenty to keep us busy. From our point of view, we couldn't be happier that we made the decision to migrate to Google Apps.

It has been so rewarding to move from an internal infrastructure for messaging that was cumbersome and challenging to support – one that was not getting us anywhere in terms of having a forward-looking impact on the business – to one that allows us to start delving into strategic initiatives.

Whether you need to integrate acquisitions or deliver more value from enterprise IT, we have a lot of perspective and lessons learned that we'd be pleased to share with you. Join us for this live webcast:

Konica Minolta on transforming Enterprise IT through Cloud Computing

http://webcasts.techrepublic.com.com/abstract.aspx?docid=1825337

Thursday, June 17, 2010

2:00 p.m. EDT / 11:00 a.m. PDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT

Posted by Serena Satyasai, the Google Apps team

Find customer stories and research product information on our resource sites for current users of Microsoft® Exchange and Lotus Notes®/Domino®.

An update on encrypted web search in schools

Ellen Petry Leanse — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 15:59:00 +0000

Update, June 25, 2010: Less than two weeks ago, we announced here that we would be moving our encrypted search service to a new hostname in order to better serve our school partners and their users. Today, we moved encrypted search from https://www.google.com to https://encrypted.google.com. The site functions in the same way. However, if school network administrators decide to block encrypted searches on https://encrypted.google.com, the blocking will no longer affect Google authenticated services like Google Apps for Education.

We are continuing to explore longer-term options such that we could return encrypted search to https://www.google.com without introducing issues with school content filters.

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We recently launched a beta version of encrypted (SSL) search at https://www.google.com to prevent people from intercepting our users’ search terms and results. However, because encrypted search creates an obscured channel between a user’s computer and Google, users who go to https://www.google.com can bypass some schools’ content filters. This can make it hard for schools to stop students from accessing adult content.

One option is for schools to use our SafeSearch lock feature, which is designed to help keep adult content out of our search results. But given how many computers some institutions have this is proving impractical in many cases. So to prevent students from bypassing their filters, some schools are blocking encrypted search. However, a side effect of this action is that it also blocks other services hosted at Google’s secure URL, including Google Apps for Education, and many of our other services which require authentication to keep information safe.

We’re working hard to address this issue as quickly as possible and in a few weeks we will move encrypted search to a new hostname – so schools can limit access to SSL search without disrupting other Google services, like Google Apps for Education. Longer term, we are exploring other options like moving authentication to its own hostname so that we can return encrypted search to https://www.google.com.

Safety and security matter to Google, and we are committed to working with our partners in education so that we help keep students safe and secure on the Internet.

Posted by Dave Girouard, President, Google Enterprise

“If you work at Hiatus, you’ve gone Google!”

Ellen Petry Leanse — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 18:26:00 +0000

Editor’s note: Continuing our “Going Google Everywhere” series, we’ve invited Sheila Garrison and Kristin Heaton-Peabody, co-founders of Hiatus Spa + Retreat, to explain how Google Apps helped them launch and grow their socially conscious spa in Dallas, Texas. Learn more about other organizations that have gone Google on our community map.

Pictured: Hiatus Spa + Retreat co-founders Kristin Heaton-Peabody and Sheila Garrison

Our business, Hiatus Spa + Retreat, was born out of necessity. As professionals who worked entirely unreasonable hours, and habitual spa users, we were left with few options that fulfilled our needs for an escape to renew body and mind without breaking our wallets. And as serial entrepreneurs, it didn’t take us long to recognize a significant need in the marketplace for a superlative spa experience at a reasonable price. With that in mind, our core mission was firmly set: to make the world a better place, one spa service at a time.

We started writing the business plan in 2006, which took us nearly a year to perfect, then we started looking at Dallas real estate. We started using Google Apps in fall 2007, before we opened; with founders based in both Dallas and Laguna Beach, California, Docs was essential to helping us finalize details such as our initial spa menu (we wished we’d had Docs when we wrote the business plan!). In December 2007 we opened the doors to Hiatus, a full-service day spa featuring a monthly membership and affordable pricing -- the first of its kind in the United States.

We now have our entire team of 30 using Google Apps. Google Apps is perfectly reflective of who we are as founders: it’s all about transparency, efficiency and environmental consciousness. That’s the way we run our lives and business. Google Apps empowers us to work more effectively than previously imaginable (and we spent more than 15 years working in the technology sector!). Through Google Docs, our ability to sit-down, as a company—in multiple cities—and collaborate on one single document, real-time, has become essential.

I simply can’t imagine going backward. With a team spread across several states (including lawyers and consultants in Chicago), we can work on shared Docs across multiple time zones without missing a beat. Employees can access our employee handbook and other spa documents we use daily, plus we keep our on-call schedule in Google Calendar. If you work at Hiatus, you’ve gone Google!

As our business has grown (we enjoyed 83% growth in 2009 and are on track for a 60% increase in 2010, in an otherwise complicated economy), Google Apps has consistently proved invaluable. With the limitations of traditional inbox mail storage, our team had difficulty storing important documents and retrieving them in a real-time fashion. With Apps, we can de-clutter inboxes and provide consistent up-to-date information via Google Docs.

As any entrepreneur knows, organizational “betterments” happen on a daily basis. The business is always a work in progress, and you can’t rely on the notion that your team always has the latest and greatest information. Hosting our critical documents in the cloud also appeals to our eco-conscious sensibilities -- can you imagine how many trees are being saved on a daily basis from not re-printing employee manuals?

We’re also finding new uses from Docs as we grow, from managing construction and budgeting for our expansion into the space next door to event planning for our screening of “Tapped”, as a fundraiser for the Global Greengrants Fund and the Gulf Restoration Network. We’re still working ridiculous hours, but Google Apps helps us be as efficient as possible -- and now at least we have a sanctuary to find our center.

Find out how going Google can help your organization with the Cloud Calculator.

Posted by Colleen Horan, Google Enterprise team

Goble & Associates advances customer-centric approach with Google Apps

Ellen Petry Leanse — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Editor’s Note: We launched our Google Apps community map in March 2010, and have since received thousands of Gone Google stories from organizations around the world. We’ll be showcasing some of these stories in a new series of blog posts, Going Google Everywhere.

Today we welcome Mark Goble, COO of Goble & Associates, an integrated marketing agency servicing the healthcare industry. Has your company “Gone Google” and interested in sharing your story? Add your marker to the map!

Goble & Associates is a 27 year old global marketing agency with clients in the medical device, diagnostic, and pharmaceutical businesses. Our commitment to collaboration and communication has been the cornerstone of our success, with client relationships that average over eight years, which is rare in our business. As our agency has doubled in size over the past four years, our IT resources were increasingly consumed with managing our outdated systems, and we needed solutions that would enable us to continue to deliver the same levels of customer service that our clients had come to expect.

Our IT challenges were considerable. Our expansion to nearly 100 employees – including offices in Chicago and San Diego, plus mobile workers – had left us without a central calendaring system, and our in-house email support was costly and time consuming to maintain. When we added mobile access by rolling out iPhones to more than 20 employees, we realized our infrastructure was unable to support mobile solutions, and we knew it was time for a change.

Enter Google Apps. We migrated to Apps in early 2009, and have subsequently converted an additional organization we acquired. The results have exceeded our expectations. Six months after going Google, we saw an 80% reduction in IT issues related to email, while saving more than 23% in hardware costs. Additionally, we estimate our mobile efficiency has increased more than ten-fold.

While our initial pain points were focused on email and calendaring, we’ve experienced huge benefits from Docs and Sites. Docs has become the centerpiece of our daily communications regarding project status, and we’re actively using Google Sites to help manage our business, including a company-wide start page with integrated calendar and Twitter feed:

We’ve also found ways to utilize Sites to assist in our continued focus to be the best partner to our clients. We recently developed a Site to provide a potential client insight into our immersion and research process, which was instrumental in helping us prepare to win this business. Going Google has also reinvigorated our client-centric focus, as our IT team now has the resource to assist our development team in building new client solutions.

Using cloud-based solution like Google Apps has greatly enhanced our business operations; so much so that we’ve extended our cloud computing initiative to include Google Apps Marketplace providers such as TripIt. We eagerly await the adoption of new technologies like Google Wave that will continue to place Goble & Associates at the forefront of the technology and communications curve.

Posted by Colleen Horan, Google Enterprise team

Demonstrating the Flexibility of Web Apps

Ellen Petry Leanse — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 15:08:00 +0000

Editor's Note: Pedro Mar is director of Método DeRose Matosinhos Uni-Yoga school in Portugal. Método DeRose provides more than 65 students personalized exercise routines based on an intimate knowledge of each student's needs, as well as healthy eating choices, social activities and creative ways to improve all aspects of his or her life.

When Mar and his team were looking for software to help manage their three year-old business, they needed something as accomodating and personal as the services they provide. Already happy using the Google Apps suite, they turned to the Google Apps Marketplace, and found that they were able to design a solution that perfectly met their needs with BatchBook CRM, which not only met all of their needs for a CRM system, but easily integrated with Google tools and other Marketplace apps they were already using.

Here, Mar shares some insights into the business benefits he has seen since using the Google Apps Marketplace.

Diogo Toledo, Joana Santos and Pedro Mar from Método DeRose Matosinhos

I run an independent yoga school that is part of Uni-Yôga (www.uni-yoga.org), a worldwide network of approximately 150 schools. My business needed a solid customer relationship management (CRM) software program, mainly to keep track of former, current and potential students, but also to provide a good workflow. I was looking for a program that gave me the freedom to customize the data in a way that worked best for my business and suited its needs.

A friend and student of mine recommended searching the Google Apps Marketplace for a CRM software application. I tried several trial versions of some of the solutions offered there and eventually decided on BatchBook. After viewing the tutorial videos offered on the BatchBlue website, I knew I could customize the software to suit all our needs. After using BatchBook for more than two months, I can see the progress we've achieved.

Getting personal with our customers

All of our services are tailored to our clients' health profiles, so it very important that we have the most accurate information about each individual. Since creating our BatchBook account, we have customized the contact information to track things beyond name and address. These include everything we need to know about potential new students; things we learn during our time with our students, such as their birthdays, classes they've taken and experience levels; how often we are communicating with all of our contacts.

We sync BatchBook with our company Gmail app to keep every customer's information updated. We can also track our products and services--like books and workshops --as well as create lists that are important to our business. This all means we can provide better customer service, making our clientele happier and enjoy better, longer relationships with our students.

A workflow that bends to our needs

The to-do template in BatchBook is an amazing feature. Using the template we are able to enter a student’s information upon enrollment. From there we can easily create a scheduled list of tasks for each student to complete up to two years into the future. We use Google Apps to manage several calendars, and we can follow all of the BatchBook to dos right in Google Calendar. This is great for tracking students and their overall progress through our program as we help them achieve one level after another. All of our academic programs, marketing programs, and operational programs are also tracked in the to-do templates, so we are sure not to miss a thing.

Finding the right marketing balance

Our best and most cost effective marketing strategy is communicating, communicating, communicating. We track every e-mail, phone call, cell phone message, class, note, student referral and recommendation in BatchBook. By doing so, we are constantly connected with our network of people. We even use the Rapportive integration with BatchBook and Gmail to obtain social network information we need about a customer right within an e-mail message. It's genius.

We also take advantage of MailChimp's integration with Google Apps and BatchBook to allow different team members to send e-mail newsletters to different groups. Each of the different departments within the school can create their own lists from our list of contacts, and reach out with personalized details about upcoming events, special parties or birthday wishes.

Within one month of using BatchBook our number of students has grown by 10%. We are now managing more than 1,000 contacts in the software and with BatchBlue, we can turn more propects into engaged students. Once we create a file on a prospective student within BatchBlue, we never lose track of him or her. That is a huge value to us.

Previously, we simply had too many other things to worry about. With only four to five instructors at the school, we would easily lose track of a potential student or forget something like a birthday, which is unforgivable in our school's culture of appreciation, attention and trust.

Other programs we tried in the past did not support the rich interaction we have with our students or the workflow that helps us stay on top of the important details like BatchBook, Gmail and Google Calendars does. Using BatchBook, we can now closely monitor our relationship with each student and each lead.

Clearly, BatchBook has made a positive difference in how we run our business. Since using the program, we have improved the quality of our outreach to potential clients, and we have registered new students more easily. With the assistance of the customized to-do templates, integrated with our Google Calendars, we are reminded regularly when to send an email or reach out through another method of communication to a prospective student.

Our success using Google Apps and BatchBook has led me to encourage other schools within the network to do the same. By duplicating our system and taking advantage of our efforts, they can implement the practices into their own business and see firsthand the results we have experienced.

Posted by Chris Kelly, Google Apps Partners team

Brady Corp. Goes Google – the best-in-class in the cloud

Ellen Petry Leanse — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 13:52:00 +0000

Editor's note: We're excited to announce that Brady Corporation, a $1.2 billion international manufacturer and marketer of complete solutions that identify and protect premises, products, and people, has gone Google with 7,800 employees across 90-plus locations.

Today we welcome a trio of guest bloggers from Brady's IT team – Steve Hasbrook, Luke Leonhard, and Matt Vandenbush – to share some of their experiences from managing Brady's "Big Bang" migration to Google Apps. All three are cloud veterans with years of experience in supporting users in the manufacturing industry, and they'll be discussing Brady's deployment in more detail and answering your questions on a live webcast later this week.

Brady Corporation's IT team will speak at a live webcast on Thursday, June 10, 2010 at 2:00 p.m. EDT, 11:00 a.m. PDT, or 6:00 p.m. GMT. Register today.

We went live on Google Apps a few months ago, and since then, we've seen a series of new features in Google Apps. That kind of innovation would have taken years on our previous platform. Google Apps is nimble and agile, and it fits with our need to support a dispersed, global manufacturing operation.

When we told our power users we were going to Google Apps, the reaction from most of them was "That's great!" The majority are using web-based applications at home already – and they expect the same in the office environment. The transition to cloud-based applications is a bit tougher for people weaned on client software, but people who've grown up in the web era expect the latest, greatest, most agile tools.

Think about it: nobody calls Amazon if the home page changes. Shopping carts are different from site to site, but people intuitively know how to use them. It's the whole trend of consumer technologies influencing corporate technologies, and for Brady Corp., it's a great thing for many reasons:

Cloud computing makes it easy to support 90+ locations through a central IT organization
We can integrate acquisitions with ease
We get collaboration functions like chat and document sharing
Our costs are lower, yet we have more advanced tools

We went with a “Big Bang” rollout for our 6,000+ users, and it’s been a great success. We chose Google Apps for cost savings over other solutions, but more importantly because we believe it's the strongest platform to take advantage of future advancements on the Internet.

We would be happy to tell you why we chose Google Apps over other cloud solutions, and why the cloud makes so much sense for a local IT staff supporting regional operations. We also can share tips for a successful Big Bang rollout. Please join us for our upcoming webinar:

Choosing Google Apps as the Best-in-Class Cloud Solution
Thursday, June 10, 2010
2:00 p.m. EDT / 11:00 a.m. PDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT

Posted by Serena Satyasai, the Google Apps team

Find customer stories and research product information on our resource sites for current users of Microsoft® Exchange and Lotus Notes®/Domino.

Security First: Protecting your data with Google Apps

Ellen Petry Leanse — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 16:03:00 +0000

For most companies, trying to keep ahead of new security threats every day feels like gripping a handful of sand. No matter how hard you tighten and squeeze, some still manages to slip through your fingers. IT departments often face these challenges alone despite parallel responsibilities to support other core operational functions. As thousands of businesses discover every day, companies and organizations can depend on the technical expertise of Google to help them better manage their security needs when they sign up for Google Apps.

Feeling comfortable storing data in the cloud involves trusting a cloud services provider and the practices and policies they have in place. In today's ultra-connected, web-capable world, understanding how data will be protected is ultimately more meaningful than knowing it is physically located in one data center or another. We know that our customers expect us to be transparent, and we work hard to do just that. For example, earlier this year we disclosed a cyber attack against Google and at least twenty other large companies from a variety of industries.

As a next step toward increased transparency, today we're releasing a new Google Apps security white paper to help customers learn more about the security practices, policies, and technology that support Google Apps. We are always improving and evolving the security of our systems, and we work every day to help protect against new threats.

Google Apps offers a strong and extensive security infrastructure to support these and other benefits:

Our data centers are protected by advanced physical security controls, and access to information is monitored at multiple levels.
We store customer data in fragments across multiple servers and across multiple data centers to both enhance reliability and provide greater security than can be achieved by storing all data on a single server. When only fragments are kept in any one place, the chance that a possible physical or computer-based compromise could result in the loss of meaningful information is greatly reduced.
We perform software patching rapidly across identical server stacks to help keep users updated with the latest patches. This significantly reduces the deployment workload for IT administrators.
Administrators can set fine-grained access controls for documents, calendars, and other types of information commonly stored in the cloud.
Operations at vast scale can help detect security threats across the web early and prepare appropriate defenses.
System redundancy involves data replication across disparate data centers for availability and disaster recovery.
We have strong teams of security professionals dedicated to protecting customer data.

Visit this new page to learn more about security and privacy protections for schools.

We appreciate feedback as we continue to work hard to earn and maintain the trust that is placed in us.

Posted by: Eran Feigenbaum, Director of Security, Google Enterprise

Introducing the Go Google cloud calculator

Ellen Petry Leanse — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 16:34:00 +0000

People often ask us what it really means to go Google – how it will impact their business and productivity? What are the actual savings? To answer some of those questions, we’ve built a little tool we’re calling the Go Google cloud calculator that lets you explore your potential savings in an easy-to-understand way.

Once you find out your results, the tool can also create a custom URL, presentation PDF, spreadsheet or even a poster that you can share with other decision makers within your business as you discuss going Google.

Find out more in today’s Official Google Blog post, and check out the cloud calculator at www.gonegoogle.com.

Posted by Vivian Leung, the Google Apps team

Sharing the stories of America’s small businesses

Ellen Petry Leanse — Fri, 28 May 2010 19:05:00 +0000

Editor's note: This is our fifth and final post in a series celebrating National Small Business Week. Previous posts highlighted small businesses (Revenue Spark, Smart Furniture, and Free Range Studios) that have adopted Google Apps, and tips for using Gmail at work. Today, we’ll hear the story of one more entrepreneur and discuss how you can share your own.

Among many things, Vinny Lingham is an entrepreneur, CEO, search engine marketer, and recipient of numerous business related awards including the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leader (2009), the Top ICT Young Entrepreneur in Africa (2006), and the Endeavor High Impact Entrepreneur (2006). Currently, Vinny is serving as the CEO of Yola.com – a San Francisco based startup company that offers easy-to-use, browser based website creation software for over 3 million users worldwide.

Yola became a Google Apps customer as soon as it was formed more than 3 years ago. Today, with a distributed workforce of over 60 people globally, Yola is using Google Apps for everything from email to document collaboration resulting in tremendous savings and increased productivity.

According to Vinny, “The founders of Yola knew the company’s potential and wanted a scalable and cost effective solution that could grow with their business. Google Apps made it easy to be up and running within minutes and was a fast and low-maintenance solution that fit the needs of a growing company.”

Vinny and his team at Yola are among millions of entrepreneurs and small businesses that are having a positive impact on our economy; this week we celebrated their contributions. In addition to Vinny, we selected a few other organizations, shared their stories, and showcased ways that they take advantage of Google Apps. Now it’s your turn.

Learn how to share your story by visiting the AdWords Blog where you can find tools that teams at Google created to help small businesses succeed. Included are steps on how to create a “Search Story” that walks through your journey as a small business, then share it with us and the world. We’re looking forward to seeing what you create!

Posted by Michelle Lisowski, the Google Apps team

Free Range Studios: Helping progressive organizations, one doc at a time

Ellen Petry Leanse — Thu, 27 May 2010 22:14:00 +0000

Editor's Note:This is the fourth post in a series celebrating National Small Business Week. Previous posts highlighted small businesses (Revenue Spark and Smart Furniture) that have adopted Google Apps and tips for using Gmail at work. Today, we’ll look at how Google Docs is helping a small business manage its extensive project portfolio and internal operations.

Free Range Studios is a creative agency that has helped hundreds of progressive organizations communicate their messages around social change. If you ask the team, divided between offices in Washington, D.C. and Berkeley, California, Free Range is “Creativity with a Conscience.” This applies to the types of stories they tell and how they tell them, whether it’s through an eco-friendly print ad or a web movie.

At any given time, Free Range is managing projects for multiple non-profits and socially responsible companies. For a small business to create at this scale, collaboration is key. Google Docs is helping Free Range be more nimble, work more efficiently, and remove location barriers.

Free Range switched to Google Apps in 2007; at about the same time, they began to change their approach to staffing projects from office-based to project-based. A single project can now have contributors from either office, in addition to freelancers or clients who can potentially be located anywhere. With real-time collaboration in Google Docs, all these groups can contribute to an idea as though they’re working side-by-side.

Google Docs is also improving office efficiency. Pete Hamm, Operations Manager, decided to use online forms, created in Google Spreadsheets, to manage tedious tasks that would otherwise take valuable time away from projects. For example, when submitting vacation requests, employees can now fill out a form that automatically populates into a spreadsheet where Pete can take action immediately.

According to Pete Hamm, “Google Docs makes spreadsheets, presentations, and word processing an afterthought - which is what good business tools are supposed to do. Just like email and smart phones, Google Docs facilitates collaboration, instead of hindering it, allowing us to focus on our mission.”

Posted by Michelle Lisowski, the Google Apps team

Gmail tips for businesses, big or small

Ellen Petry Leanse — Wed, 26 May 2010 18:00:00 +0000

Editor's note: This is the third post in a series to celebrate National Small Business Week. Previous posts highlighted two businesses (Revenue Spark and Smart Furniture) that have adopted Google Apps to help run IT more efficiently. We’ll now turn to ways that individual tools within the Google Apps suite are being used by small businesses everywhere.

Many businesses that use Gmail tell us it has fundamentally changed the way they manage email and communicate on a daily basis. They’re not alone ‒ since Gmail launched 6 years ago, it has become one of the most popular email applications in the world. However, we find that even avid Gmail users may not know about all the rich features and functionality that can help them work smarter.

To get every business up to speed, we posted some tips on today’s Gmail Blog for getting the most out of Gmail at work. Take a look, try them out, and feel free to share them with your colleagues.

Posted by Michelle Lisowski, the Google Apps team

Google at Gov 2.0

Ellen Petry Leanse — Tue, 25 May 2010 21:10:00 +0000

The Google Enterprise team is excited to be taking part in this week's Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington, DC. From today through Thursday, the Gov 2.0 Expo brings together government and industry leaders from across the nation to discuss transformative technologies that can help support the mission of governments everywhere.

We're particularly excited that Dave Girouard, president of Google Enterprise, and Randi Levin, the Chief Technology Officer for the City of Los Angeles, will be sharing the stage for this event’s keynote. Titled "Cloud Computing Services: Finding a Solution for Over Budget, Understaffed Agencies,” this conversation, moderated by conference chair Tim O'Reilly, will explore Los Angeles’ decision to move to the cloud and adopt Google Apps – and what’s happened since.

If you’ll be at Gov 2.0, watch for Dave and Randi on the main stage at 8:50 a.m. EDT. Afterwards, stop by the Google booth to learn more about how Google Apps is helping government agencies of all sizes provide secure, modern collaboration tools to their employees, while at the same time allowing them to realize significant cost savings.

If you can't be at Gov 2.0 in person, we invite you to tune in live to Dave and Randi's presentation on the Gov 2.0 site (note: online registration required). Watch this space for more about Google Apps and the work we're doing with our government customers.

Posted by Dan Israel, Public Sector Marketing Manager, Google Enterprise

Saluting Revenue Spark and National Small Business Week

Ellen Petry Leanse — Tue, 25 May 2010 17:45:00 +0000

Editor's Note: This is the second post in a series celebrating National Small Business Week. Our first post highlighted an entrepreneur who has founded two companies and is a strong believer in the power of Google Apps. Today we’ll meet another entrepreneur that is an avid supporter of the benefits of cloud computing.

Steve Messere is an entrepreneur and businessman who has added to the growing count of small businesses that are helping move America forward. Aside from running his own company, Steve is actively involved in promoting "sustainable capitalism" as a new form of profit-seeking business, combining traditional shareholder value with a “cradle-to-cradle” approach to environment impact, renewable energy, and energy efficiency.

When Steve founded Revenue Spark – a business that helps green technology companies to take their product to market – he already saw the value of cloud computing. He knew that it was the technology needed to propel his own business forward, and adopted Google Apps from the onset.

For Steve, “anytime, anywhere” access is critical, and this requires business tools that are platform independent and available through a browser on either laptop or mobile devices. With Google Apps, Steve and his employees can be productive no matter where they are – at home, on the road, or in the office.

Steve’s plan is to use cloud-based tools like Google Apps to achieve a virtual status – one that allows him to recruit talent from across the country and grow faster than he could if he had to acquire physical space in the real world. He’s already off and running.

Revenue Spark is adding clients and new employees around the US and is on its first tour of Europe, looking to bring clients online with its service. Steve is also planning to open an office in New Zealand that will rely entirely on cloud computing as a vital connection to other Revenue Spark teams and shared information tools.

In Steve’s words, "Cloud computing not only makes it possible for Revenue Spark to enable our teams to be the 'best at their best' but it fits our company's overall global mission of being a leader in sustainable business practices."

Posted by Michelle Lisowski, the Google Apps team

Shortening sales cycles with SlideRocket and the Apps Marketplace

Ellen Petry Leanse — Tue, 25 May 2010 15:59:00 +0000

Editor’s Note: Rob Salvatore is CEO of Tongal, a cloud-based entertainment company. Tongal facilitates creativity in the cloud by crowdsourcing video content through Internet-based collaborations. The company marries its professional network of content creators to businesses that need video content. Tongal’s focus is on video advertising, music video, instructional video, and brand integrated short films. Customers include the New York Knicks and Kiva.org.

Our business is built on collaboration, and we wouldn’t be able to do this without the power of cloud computing. On average, each project at Tongal involves more than twenty separate contributors.

Thanks to Google Apps and SlideRocket – an integrated presentation app available on the Google Apps Marketplace – we’re no longer prisoners of desktop software and we're able to easily work across time zones and oceans.

Efficient & effective communications

For months we struggled with effective ways to share our high-definition video content. We’re dealing with very large files and it’s critical for us to exhibit and present our work online, not to mention the need to maintain the integrity and quality of the video. The combination of Google and SlideRocket made it possible for both us and our community to create, manage and share video files with a few simple clicks.

When users submit video content to a Tongal collaboration, Google converts it ad hoc. So, we're free of heavy conversion software licensing agreements and only pay for what we use, when we use it.

After the Tongal community and platform complete the video product, SlideRocket helps us show it off. We can easily embed the finished video product into our presentations without worrying about diminished video quality or file size.

SlideRocket has eliminated the need for us to burn videos and presentations to disks in order to send our content to customers and prospects. Plus, SlideRocket’s platform generates unique URLs for each presentation that we can immediately send to prospects via email without worrying about file size.

100% accurate, integrated information

Another benefit of working in the cloud is that we've linked our Google Docs and information from Google Analytics directly into our presentations, ensuring our slides are accurate and up-to-date every time the presentation is viewed. When we make a change to our Google Spreadsheet, that change is immediately reflected in our SlideRocket presentation. This saves us a lot of “busy work” updating our marketing presentations. As a start-up, every employee and each hour is important, and any application that saves us time and effort is invaluable.

Insight and analytics lead to shorter sales cycles

Not only did SlideRocket solve our technical issues, it also brought insight and intelligence about our customer’s behavior through the statistics and analytics that we would not be able to get with any other application. This has significantly shortened our sales cycle, and help us target our efforts.

For example, if one potential customer spends a lot of time on a slide about cost, we know that might be an issue for them. If another spends time on a slide that showcases a particular video, we know that their interest is truly piqued. If they spend no time at all – well, we can take a hint...

The viewership statistics and analytics that SlideRocket provides for each presentation have a direct effect on the success of our business. We’re gaining valuable insight into our customers’ experience with the content we’ve developed. Not to mention the fact that we can secure our presentations with password protection, especially if we’re dealing with sensitive content. SlideRocket is the only presentation solution out there that offers this kind of intelligence and control.

Posted by Chris Kelly, the Google Apps Partner team

Getting public opinion on the cloud

Ellen Petry Leanse — Mon, 24 May 2010 20:26:00 +0000

We’ve seen quite a few state and local governments make the switch to Google Apps in recent months. Cities from Orlando to Los Angeles, state agencies in Kansas and New Mexico, and an ever-increasing number of counties across the country have all gone Google. These agencies have found making the move to Google a great way to cut costs ⚊ a top priority in these days of budget shortfalls ⚊ and to gain capabilities like seamless collaboration, “anywhere” access, and other benefits of cloud computing.

We were curious to find out what people across the country think about their local government’s adoption of new technologies, so we asked the Clarus Research Group, a non-partisan survey research firm based in DC, to poll 1,000 U.S. voters nationally to get their opinion on government technology issues.

The results are out today, and they show that 92% of U.S. voters believe “public agencies should make better use of new technologies to cut government spending and improve efficiency.”

That’s certainly how we feel here at Google, and we’re glad that a clear majority of polled voters also appreciate the need to invest in 21st century technology in the public sector.

The results also show people think email is a great place to start. When given a list of different technologies that could make a difference, three-quarters of those polled thought that “quicker and more efficient email systems” would make government workers more productive. Google email is fast and reliable ⚊ providing 99.9% uptime, and access from any computer or mobile device to allow government employees to be productive anytime, anywhere.

Government employees everywhere are getting more efficiency for less money with Google Apps. Bigger email inboxes and collaboration tools like video chat and shared documents are just a few of the tools within Apps that can make public employees more productive and collaborative.

Government IT staffs benefit from Google’s expert security team and processes, best-in-class disaster recovery at no additional cost, and a dramatic reduction in time and dollars spent maintaining and patching software & hardware. That is time and money that can be dedicated to more strategic priorities.

If you work for a local government agency, we’d like to hear from you. If you’re an interested citizen who’s part of the 92%, then ask your elected officials to take a serious look at new ways of computing that can cut costs while increasing capabilities. You can even point them to this website. You’ll be doing your part to equip your local officials with better tools to do their jobs, while saving (your) taxpayer dollars. It’s a win-win.

Posted by Dan Israel, Public Sector Marketing Manager, Google Enterprise

A week to celebrate Small Business

Ellen Petry Leanse — Mon, 24 May 2010 19:29:00 +0000

This week we’re joining others throughout the country to celebrate National Small Business Week, declared by the President of the United States to recognize the impact of small businesses on America’s economic well-being.

We hear great stories every day about how Google Apps is helping small businesses compete and grow. So, to honor the millions of small businesses across America, we’re kicking off a week-long blog series to share their stories. We’ll highlight some of the outstanding entrepreneurs and small businesses that we’ve worked with over the past few years, how Google Apps has helped them grow, and examples of ways small businesses are using tools in the Google Apps suite.

To start, we’d like to share a story showcasing Stephen Culp, Founder and Chairman of Smart Furniture and CEO of Delegator. Read Stephen's post on the Official Google Blog to see how his business is using Google Apps – and stay tuned for more small business news throughout the week.

Posted by Michelle Lisowski, the Google Apps team

Thriving in the New World of Enterprise IT

Ellen Petry Leanse — Mon, 24 May 2010 17:10:00 +0000

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is notable technology expert and futurist Geoffrey Moore. He is an author, consultant, and venture capital partner, with a background in English literature. He is the author of Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, The Gorilla Game (with co-authors Tom Kippola and Paul Johnson), and most recently Living on the Fault Line, which deals with a set of management or investor challenges posed by fast-changing, technology-enabled markets.

Geoffrey is a frequent contributor to business periodicals and a speaker at industry conferences. He is also a venture partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, providing strategy advice and consulting services across MDV's entire portfolio of early-stage investments.
Please join Geoffrey this week at a live webcast this Thursday, May 27, at 2:00 p.m. EDT, 12:00 noon CDT, or 11:00 a.m. PDT. Register today.

Tectonic shifts are occurring in today’s enterprise IT environment, powered by mega-forces such as globalization and commoditization—and also driven by consumer technologies like social networking, video, and mobile devices. In enterprise IT, static databases and servers no longer suffice, and it really makes no sense to build another data center.

So what’s next? How do you thrive in the brave new world of enterprise IT?

Many enterprises are holding their own by consolidating, virtualizing, and attempting to do more with less. But over the next few years, enterprise IT will have to adapt more dramatically, and do so quickly and nimbly. Whether dealing with huge volumes of transactions in a business-to-consumer environment or handling lower-volume, more complex operations in a business-to-business situation, enterprise IT professionals must understand that consumer technologies are now in the driver’s seat.

Fortunately, there are many insights and tools you can use to guide your infrastructure in the right direction. By making shifts in your IT strategies, you have the opportunity to increase profit margins while providing advanced services and systems that are truly user-centric, beneficial to the business and more secure than ever.

Join me in a lively discussion to share insights and actionable tips about how to turn your IT challenges into competitive advantages and thrive in an era of disruptive yet ultimately beneficial technology change.

Geoffrey Moore

Geoffrey Moore on the New Face of Enterprise IT
Thursday, May 27, 2010
11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT

Posted by Serena Satyasai, the Google Apps team

Do you have an informative and fun Google Apps story to share? Please submit it here.

Customizing Maps API Premier – your way

Ellen Petry Leanse — Thu, 20 May 2010 23:16:00 +0000

Customers often tell us how much their users love Google Maps. They love the friendly blue of the oceans, the easy-to-read labels of cities, and the solid yellow of the roads. But maybe you’re a rebel – someone who wants the roads to look YOUR way. Or perhaps your corporate branding clashes with the standard version of cities and streets. You’d love to change the colors on the map, or adjust the details your customers see.

If that’s you, we have good news. With today’s launch of Maps API Premier Styled Maps, you’ll be able to do all of that and more. An easy-to-customize hierarchical structure lets you easily turn on and off the transit stations, change the colors of the maps to match your corporate identity, work with details, and more. Enjoy!

Click here to learn more about using Maps API Premier.

Daniel Chu, Product Manager, Google Enterprise Maps/Earth

Google Maps API Premier: Directions for the rest of us

Ellen Petry Leanse — Wed, 19 May 2010 21:22:00 +0000

Businesses rely on Google’s accurate routing engine to bring customers from their homes to company stores, from company headquarters to customer sites, and more. This is important on any platform, including mobile devices, and within increasingly-complex uses of map data.

But sometimes, technology has gotten in the way of the right user experience. No more. With today’s announcement, Google is delivering the most requested Maps API feature: a Directions web service. This new addition lets you couple the Static Maps API with the Directions API, letting users both visualize and get route directions through a simple HTTP interface.

Driving, walking, and biking directions are all included so regardless of your mode of transport, Google Maps API Premier has you covered!

Look for another blog post tomorrow with more exciting launches at Google I/O. Click here to learn more about using Maps API Premier.

Posted by Daniel Chu, Product Manager, Google Enterprise Maps/Earth

Announcing Autocompletions for Google Site Search

Ellen Petry Leanse — Wed, 19 May 2010 20:37:00 +0000

One of our most popular feature requests has been to add autocompletion of queries to Google Site Search. In recent months, many top websites have begun to provide search suggestions as you type, an innovative feature users are coming to expect as part of a quality search experience. Today, we announced at Google I/O that you can now enable query autocompletions for your search engine.

Travelocity.com is one of the first Google Site Search customers to implement autocompletions on their website. By doing so, they have provided an easy way for Travelocity users to explore and discover new destinations by suggesting the most popular queries based on the first few letters the user inputs.

To turn this feature on, please check the "Enable autocompletions" option in the Basics tab of your search engine. It may take several hours to start seeing autocompletions once you enabled them in the control panel.

For more information about how to turn on autocompletions for your Google Site Search engine, see our autocompletions Help Page.

Autocompletion is compatible with other new Google Site Search features including themes and mobile search capabilities – which can significantly enhance your users’ mobile experience. As with all Google Site Search features, every new development is rolled out free of charge for all customers.

You can learn more about these and other exciting new features by joining an upcoming webinar:

Google Site Search: 10 New Features to Put to Work on Your Site

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

10:00 a.m. PDT, 1:00 p.m. EDT, GMT 06:00

Posted by Clay Maffett, Enterprise Search team

Buy or build, with more choice for your business

Ellen Petry Leanse — Wed, 19 May 2010 16:10:00 +0000

Google Apps is built for the web, with open standards and APIs that enable our customers to extend and integrate Google’s expanding suite of web-based applications with other services – whether those services are offered by software vendors through the Google Apps Marketplace or built by their own IT departments. Today, we’re excited about two important developments: Google App Engine for Business now enables customers to deploy their own internal apps on Google’s cloud infrastructure, and our collaboration with VMware on cloud portability gives enterprises the ability to build apps using familiar tools and deploy them to their cloud of choice or to on-premise infrastructure.

With Google App Engine for Business, companies can build and host applications on Google’s scalable cloud infrastructure. New enterprise-level capabilities include centralized administration, premium developer support, a 99.9% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA), simple and predictable monthly pricing, and – coming later this year – access to premium features like cloud-based SQL and SSL. Read our post on the Google Code blog to learn more and sign-up for a preview.

To make it easier for businesses to build cloud-based apps and to give them more deployment choices, we're working with VMware, an industry leader in virtualization. Businesses can now build applications in a familiar development environment that they can easily deploy to Google App Engine, a VMware environment (in-house vSphere infrastructure, a choice of vCloud hosting partners, or VMforce), or other infrastructure such as Amazon EC2. This development environment also allows developers to more easily create data presentation widgets that run on all devices, from phones to tablets to desktops.

By enabling portability between on-premise and multiple cloud environments – including enterprise-ready App Engine for Business – we’re giving our customers more flexibility and making it easier for them to move to the cloud.

Posted by Matthew Glotzbach, Director of Product Management, Google Enterprise

Mobile strategy gets better with Google Maps API Premier v3

Ellen Petry Leanse — Wed, 19 May 2010 15:50:00 +0000

I’m delighted to announce the launch of Google Maps API Premier v3 today, which includes the functionality you’ve put to use in v2 plus new features that Premier partners have requested, including:

Support for mobile browsers such as Android and iPhone
Optimized routing
Support for custom Street View imagery

Support for mobile browsers

We started last year completely rebuilding the Maps API in order to dramatically increase performance, especially on mobile browsers. With the proliferation of mobile platforms and operating systems, it’s become more complicated to build web applications and sites that are relatively browser/OS agnostic. Yet the pressure to have apps and sites work on mobile has only grown stronger. Development teams have needed expertise in Java, Objective C, and other languages, and have often needed to retrofit existing code to new standards. No more! With Maps API Premier v3, the same JavaScript that works in Chrome, Firefox, and IE now works in the Android mobile browser and the iPhone mobile browser.

Optimized Routing

With the boom in geolocation and asset and fleet tracking, it’s clear that knowing the optimal route – right now – can make a huge difference in your business’ costs. Now you can take advantage of Google’s always up-to-date map data to find the best routes. Google Maps API Premier now can optimize the waypoints to give you the fastest route, saving you miles, wear and tear, and fuel. This is an easy way to move beyond distance matrices – and to stay a bit greener, too.

Custom Street View Imagery

Street View, one of the most popular and distinctive features of Google Maps, has long been useful for our Maps API Premier customers and partners, giving users the detail and feel of a location that no other type of imagery can. Now Maps API Premier customers can use their own imagery, whether it’s of their hotel rooms, houses for sale, or ski slopes, giving users this helpful perspective even in places beyond the Google Maps Street View car or trike routes.

Look for another blog post tomorrow with more exciting launches at Google I/O for Maps API Premier. Click here to learn more about using Maps API Premier.

Posted by Daniel Chu, Product Manager, Google Enterprise Maps/Earth

Transforming a Print Shop with FreshBooks and Google Apps

Ellen Petry Leanse — Fri, 14 May 2010 18:07:00 +0000

Editor's Note: Sunir Shah is Chief Handshaker with FreshBooks, the leader in online billing and bookkeeping. Available in the Google Apps Marketplace, FreshBooks is an essential tool helping small and medium-sized companies manage their needs 100% online, providing invoicing, estimates, time tracking, reporting and other business functions.

Roy Potterill and Natasha Taljaard are two of the lead creative wizards at Inner City Ink, a Johannesburg-based print shop producing high-quality screen printing and merchandise, including T-shirts, caps, stickers, posters, buttons, flyers, hoodies and just about anything else you can print on. Inner City Ink take pride in being able to print pretty much anything their clients want on whatever they want, supplying creatives, retail clothing labels, the music industry, event companies and more.

Sunir Shah: Running a business is hard enough; people shouldn't have to deal with complex systems to do their billing and bookkeeping. That's why we built FreshBooks – to help small businesses and teams everywhere get paid, painlessly, so they can focus on what they love to do.

Right from the start, FreshBooks has always been a cloud-based app and we're big believers in the value of the cloud for small businesses. Having all your business data available online, from anywhere, is a huge thing for small teams.

The Google Apps Marketplace is a great step forward in our view – it helps millions of businesses find new online tools, and provides a simple way to connect all these tools together. We're really happy to have been part of the Google Apps Marketplace from the beginning and we've already heard from customers like Inner City Ink about how it's making a real difference in their business.

Roy Potteril: We've got a reputation at Inner City Ink for innovation and doing things differently that extends beyond the originality of our design and printing work all the to how way we work with clients.

We've been in growth mode for a while, but with the World Cup coming up this summer, and word getting out about our work, our business just exploded. Suddenly, we've got t-shirt and custom printing orders coming out our ears. Before we found Freshbooks, we were always scrambling under pressure and bound to one PC at the office, with stacks of paperwork lying everywhere. With the sudden increase in work it was bedlam.

Natasha Taljaard: We were taking orders and handling all the print jobs we could during the day, then plowing through quotes and invoices every night, or whenever we could get to the office. As an on-the-go group, living on our cellphones, being tied to the one PC in the office we used to write up quotes and bills was killing us. Freshbooks was our ticket out of the madness.

RP: I've been pushing for ways to scale our business and help us work better for a while. Web technology is the key to transforming a business like this. I was already a Google Apps convert – doing everything I could through Gmail, Google Talk and their other web apps. The access anywhere model just makes sense with the way my life works. When I found out about FreshBooks through the Google Apps Marketplace, it seemed like a no-brainer.

Now the whole team can quickly get into any info we need, wherever we are, and we're not worrying about seeing the most up-to-date version of a quote. Better still, we don't have piles of paperwork all lying around everywhere and we look way more professional when we can produce that all-important first quote in next to no time.

With everything in the cloud, we're doing 100% more quotes a day. In the first two months of using Freshbooks we had an increase in turnover of over 30% per month. We're now able to cut out 50% of the workload because of the speed at which we can do quotes and invoices.

At the same time, we’re able to finish our work a lot quicker, and spend more time on follow-ups and marketing. We're always on the same page and connected, so we have more time to spend on the important things – talking to clients and selling, not spending the day stuck behind the computer.

NT: One of our biggest corporate clients was so impressed with this whole setup, their financial manager called in his associates to come and check out the way we're working. That makes us look great. You might not think web technology could have such a big impact on an old-school business like screen-printing, but we're only just scratching the surface here - this is going to be huge.

I had this dream of being able to enjoy a glass of wine on the stoep of a farm on the West Coast, while still being plugged into what's going on back in Johannesburg. I think she's still a bit stunned that she can do exactly that now that I've set her up with FreshBooks and Google Apps.

Posted by Chris Kelly, Google Apps Marketplace team

Google Apps at America’s Small Business Summit

Ellen Petry Leanse — Fri, 14 May 2010 15:39:00 +0000

As we announced in February, next week we’ll be traveling to Washington D.C. to participate in America’s Small Business Summit, hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. On Tuesday, May 18, Google is hosting a breakout session where we’ll continue the discussion we kicked off this week on the ChamberPost blog. We'll also talk about the technology trends that are impacting today’s small business.

Joining us will be a panel of Google Apps customers, including one Google Apps Authorized Reseller, who will share their experiences about how they’ve put the power of the web to work for their business. You’ll hear directly from:

Stephen Culp, Founder and Chairman, Smart Furniture
Pete Hamm, Operations Manager, Free Range Studios
Jim McNelis, Principal, Dito
Steve Messere, Founder and CEO, Revenue Spark

The full Summit agenda is packed with valuable perspectives and interesting discussion topics to help support your business. We hope you’ll join us – and if you do, please stop by our booth and say hello.

P.S. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is offering a special one-day rate to attend the event. Check it out.

Posted by Shaluinn Fullove, Google Apps team

Switching Channels: Making the Transition from Microsoft to Google

Ellen Petry Leanse — Thu, 13 May 2010 15:18:00 +0000

Editor’s Note: Ed Laczynski is Founder and CTO of LTech, a member of the Google Authorized Reseller Program. We asked Ed to share his experiences and successes with program and why he believes that the cloud is where companies need to be.

In 2005, LTech was a local systems integrator and development shop with a focus on Microsoft solutions. Satisfied with the Microsoft technology platform at the time but crowded out by a sea of competition and frustrated by a lack of innovation, we were introduced to Google through a Google Search Appliance integration for a customer.

We learned about Google Apps and started working with the platform in 2007 to provide deployment and migration services for clients. So when the Google Apps Reseller Program was announced in 2009, LTech already had an experienced team in place and a Single Sign-On product developed specifically for Google Apps customers.

The Microsoft Partner Program was and is a great program for developers in terms of providing SDKs and IDEs, but it was difficult to navigate and even more difficult for us to get support and build a true partnership. The Google Enterprise Program however, was easy to navigate and make connections. I am sure being early to the program helped, but Google gave us the support and confidence we needed to invest and build a successful reselling business. Google provided detailed training which allowed our technicians and developers to learn the platform and build out our delivery teams.

By mid-2008, we decided to stop actively offering Microsoft-based collaboration solutions to customers. This was a big move for us, and a bit scary, but the Microsoft platform wasn’t evolving at the pace our customers demanded. The Microsoft Partner Program didn’t foster the same type of opportunity as Google for a start-up company like ours. Our Google Apps business was taking off and we haven’t looked back. We have grown to a multi-million dollar business with dozens of cloud technologists and a national footprint, helping to pave the way for business adoption of cloud.

The Cloud Transition Opportunity

We are investing in the cloud because it is the future of business technology. This is one of those rare transitional moments in technology – near unlimited computing power is being made available to both experts and non-experts alike. Whole technology ecosystems and industries will be transformed by it. Just look at what leaders like Google, Amazon, and Salesforce have accomplished in a few short years – and the investments they've made.

Source: LTech 2010

At LTech, we’re seeing certain industries adopt Google Apps faster than others. We are responding to this by developing vertically focused solutions. For example, our Google Apps for Real Estate program bundles Google Apps, Agent Website Templates, and Tungle.me calendar sharing.

Why are these businesses adopting Google Apps? It’s widely known that Google Apps is more cost effective compared to on-premise software, our customers are also taking advantage of the rapid innovation pace for productivity gains and business transformation.

Google Apps isn't just email. Products like Google Sites and Google Docs can deliver spontaneous collaboration capabilities for employees that were never connected before. For example, the new Google Docs interface takes real time collaboration to the next level by allowing you to see other people’s changes character-by-character as they type. No need to send attachments back and forth, and it is web-standards and mobile friendly. That sort of innovation is key to enterprise adoption of cloud platforms.

The Google Apps Partner Program

While I can't reveal exact numbers, the positive growth of Google Apps sales in our business is exciting and keeping us charged up about the opportunity ahead as a leading Google Apps Reseller and Google Enterprise Partner.

Source: LTech 2010

The Google Authorized Reseller Program has helped us grow from a small systems integrator to a leader in cloud products and services. We've built a great relationship with Google that is mutually beneficial, and we get support when and where we need it. In particular, the Google Apps developer relations team at Google has been instrumental in helping us to build enterprise quality products like Power Panel for Google Apps and Single Sign On. The documentation and API support available is fantastic, and the community and ecosystem around the Google Apps suite is strong.

Ed Laczynski

Founder and CTO, LTech

Posted by Pat Spears, Google Apps Reseller Team

Three tips for start-ups considering Google Apps

Ellen Petry Leanse — Mon, 10 May 2010 16:05:00 +0000

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Silicon Valley veteran Andy Bechtolsheim. While at Stanford University, Bechtolsheim devised a powerful computer (which he called a workstation) because he was tired of waiting for computer time on the central university system. Vinod Khosla and Scott McNealy approached him to market his invention and start Sun – derived from “Stanford University Network.” Sun Microsystems quickly became a success, with a market capitalization by 2003 of $11.5 billion. Today, Andy is Chairman of Arista Networks, a company that delivers networking solutions for large data centers and high-performance computing environments.

Andy will be speaking on a live webcast this Thursday, May 13, at 11:00 a.m. PDT, where he will also field questions from the audience.

If you are an entrepreneur or you are part of a growing start-up, then you're no doubt laser-focused on developing and marketing something game-changing. From experience, I know that you can’t afford to siphon off resources toward anything that’s not core to the business.

When we founded Arista Networks, we did not really want to buy our own servers for internal IT tasks such as hosting email. And we didn’t want to worry about data back-ups or remote access. We initially used a small, hosted email provider, but something went wrong every week. More than two years ago, we switched to Google Apps for all of our communication needs, and we have not had any problems since.

Our experience with Google Apps is very good. Email works great --- in particular the search function plus the integrated chat, and there is no SPAM. We get back-ups and world-wide remote access managed by Google. Document sharing is very useful. Basically everything just works as you would expect, and we don't have to worry about anything. We don't need a system administrator, even with a headcount of more than a hundred people.

My advice to every start-up is to use Google Apps. It saves you from having huge headaches, it is very inexpensive, and just a better system. We also use some other cloud services such as Salesforce.com for customer relationship management, Netsuite for our database and Amazon to host our website. Cloud computing works great for us. I would never buy another server to bring these functions in-house.

I would be happy to relay my experiences with Google Apps here at Arista and share three tips with you on:

How to use cloud computing to focus on your core competency
Ways to help employees increase productivity in a rapid growth environment
How to recharge your business approach through constant innovations in Google Apps

Please join us for this LIVE event:

May 13, 2010
11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT

Posted by Serena Satyasai, the Google Apps team

Do you have an informative and fun Google Apps story to share? Please submit it here.

Schools are (almost) out for the summer…and in for Apps

Ellen Petry Leanse — Fri, 07 May 2010 20:13:00 +0000

Editor's Note: Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog.

With school almost out for summer, things are hitting a frenzied end-of-year pace in classrooms; and life is similarly fast-paced for the Google’s Apps for Education team as we work with the schools adopting Google Apps in increasing numbers. Today we’ve reached another milestone — 8 million students, faculty and staff around the world have gone Google. To put this in perspective, the U.S. has about 16 million college students total. This new milestone has been keeping us especially busy since it comes less than 60 days after we announced 7 million active users.

It’s pretty cool to see adoption growing even as the school year wraps up, because it means more freshmen get to come to campus and dive into using Google Apps for email and collaboration next fall. Some of the new schools in this bunch are Morehouse, University of Rhode Island, University of Nevada Las Vegas, the Metropolitan State College of Denver and North Carolina State University. These colleges and universities join thousands of others that have gone Google, some of which you can see on this map. According to the Campus Computing survey, more than 80 percent of schools in the U.S. have moved to cloud computing or are considering it, and of those almost 60 percent choose Google Apps, so these new schools have plenty of company.

With this kind of growth, we expect a lot of quick change. Some schools choose Apps for students (UC Davis), and some migrate their faculty and staff, either with or after student deployments (like Boise State University). Some schools deploy for alumni (like Notre Dame) and some pilot Apps rollouts with their graduate schools (like Howard University). We always support pilots as they help schools check out how their productivity, or even server costs, can change with group collaboration and web-based tools and often lead to broader deployments down the line. Universities (like Googlers!) are experts at trying a lot of things and sticking with what works for them. As Apps for Edu heads toward its fourth birthday we expect we’ll see schools continue to develop personalized plans for piloting, deployment and of course, use. One cool example is from Temple University, which designated April Google Apps month and built a Google site to help students and faculty learn more about the tools and get their feedback.

Often schools will find that something that works for them, and continue to build from there. For example, after Vanderbilt University successfully deployed Google Apps for their students, they decided they wanted to improve search on their site, too — so they also rolled out Google Site Search. To hear more from Vanderbilt about how and why they did this, tune in to our webinar on Wednesday, May 12 (you can register here). Google Apps and search tools helped Vandy save $750,000 annually, and the student population is all about collaborating in the cloud: the student government takes meeting notes on Docs and also shares a campus-wide activity calendar. That’s Commodore efficiency at its best.

Even though our summer break won’t necessarily consist of exotic travel, summer school, or pool-side relaxation, we’ll keep busy working with schools as they deploy Google Apps. So, if you’ve done something neat at your school to “go Google”, we’d love to hear about it.

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Apps Edu Team

Google Apps Marketplace highlights – 5/7/2010

Ellen Petry Leanse — Fri, 07 May 2010 01:02:00 +0000

Editor's note: This is the second in a series of posts on new apps in the Google Apps Marketplace that have caught our eye here at Google. We’ll do this every couple weeks or so. Look for the label "marketplace highlights" and subscribe to the series.

Businesses that use Google Apps not only get access to Google's applications, they also get easy access to some of the best business apps on the web through the Google Apps Marketplace. These Marketplace apps are easy to try and buy, and integrate with Google Apps "out of the box", making it even easier for businesses to run more of their systems in the cloud. You can learn more about the Marketplace and watch a short video on how it works here.

Checkfront - Online Booking

Checkfront is a powerful booking platform that allows businesses to manage their inventories online, centralize reservations, and process payments.
Easily integrated into popular CMS products
Multi-currency, multi-gateway payment processing
Fully managed, secure Saas solution

LucidChart - Collaborative Diagramming
LucidChart provides collaborative online diagramming without the need for Flash, Silverlight, or any other
browser plugin. Draw flow charts, org charts, wireframes, site maps,
and more.
Easy, slick user interface
Seamless, real-time collaboration
No Flash plugin required

GQueues - Task Management

A full-featured task manager for Google Apps with tagging,assignments, recurring tasks, reminders, calendar integration,subtasks, mobile access and real-time collaboration.

BatchBook - Social CRM

BatchBook is a lightweight but powerful CRM that allows you to easily organize contacts, monitor social networks and track leads and deals.

Integrates with other small business web apps
Tracks contacts, communications and tasks
Highly customizable; custom fields and reporting

VerticalResponse - Email Marketing

Create, send and track email campaigns, direct mail postcards and online surveys -- no technical expertise required! Take a 30-day test drive and send 200 emails for free.

Create & send marketing messages in minutes
Build mailing lists using your Google contacts
Get real-time stats & Google Analytics tracking

Posted by Chris Kelly, Google Apps Marketplace team

Webinar: Improving operational efficiency with Google Apps and Smartsheet

Ellen Petry Leanse — Wed, 05 May 2010 21:31:00 +0000

Last week, we shared the story of how LiquidConcrete has used Google Apps and Smartsheet, a Google Apps Marketplace app, to move customer and project management to the cloud, and significantly increased the efficiency of their manufacturing operation.

Next Tuesday, May 11, LiquidConcrete and Smartsheet will be joining us for a free webinar to discuss their story. The webinar will focus on extending Google Apps and running more of your business in the cloud with integrated apps from the Google Apps Marketplace. Please join us!

Increasing operational efficiency with Google Apps and Smartsheet

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT / 7:00 p.m. GMT

Posted by Chris Kelly, Google Apps Marketplace team

“Springing” into a new shopping season with Google

Ellen Petry Leanse — Tue, 04 May 2010 17:57:00 +0000

It’s that time of year again. Brick-and-mortar stores are clearing out the sweaters and snow-mobiles and revamping window displays with sandals and scuba gear. We know that online retailers are painstakingly updating their virtual window space as well and (perhaps even more importantly) are thinking hard about how new technologies can bring a fresh edge to their website – and the bottom line.

To kick off the season, Google hosted “search summits” for more than 200 retailers in our London and New York offices last month. These summits allowed retailers to share their top priorities and concerns from a technology and business standpoint, and provided an opportunity for Google Product Managers, Engineers, Partner Managers, and customers to trade best practices in the industry.

We want to share the learnings with people who weren’t able to attend, so we’re extending an invitation to a live webcast on Friday, May 14 presented by Nitin Mangtani, Senior Product Manager for Google Commerce Search. We’ll cover all the basics of what makes good search on e-commerce sites, how improving search speed and usability can help improve customer satisfaction and increase sales, and how top online retailers have made the switch.

Join us to learn more – and bring your questions!

Google Commerce Search – Basics & Beyond

Friday, May 14, 2010

10:00 a.m. PDT / 1:00 p.m. EDT / GMT 06:00

Posted by Anna Bishop, Enterprise Search Marketing team

"Made-to-order” results with Google Site Search

Ellen Petry Leanse — Mon, 03 May 2010 15:39:00 +0000

Recently, we showed you how Google Site Search Themes can help you customize the look and feel of your website’s search engine with just a few clicks. We know it’s just as important to be able to quickly and easily modify the format of search results so they appear exactly as you’d like.

With Google Site Search's new data rendering features, you can enable the return of search results in whatever format you’d like. You can control the size and position of images, personalize the attributes that are shown, insert lines of metadata into search results, and much more.

You can find more about the technical implementation details on the Google AJAX API blog, and can add Google Site Search to your website by visiting google.com/sitesearch.

Posted by David Gibson and Nicholas Weininger, Software Engineers

Adobe Community Help and Google Site Search: Making search come alive in CS5

Ellen Petry Leanse — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 19:03:00 +0000

Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Mark Nichoson, Product Manager at Adobe Community Help.

Back in 2008, Adobe began to use the power of Google Site Search to “plug the whole community brain trust right into the Creative Suite,” as we liked to say.

Now with the launch of Adobe® Creative Suite 5, we’ve taken that brain trust to a whole new level with the introduction of our new Community Help application. It’s an Adobe AIR®-based companion that’s automatically installed as part of any new Adobe CS5 product.

Launched directly from the Help menu of any CS5 product, the Community Help application enables customers to:

find fast answers with powerful new search options that let them focus results to just Adobe content, community content, developer resources, or even code samples
download core Adobe Help and language reference content for offline viewing (thanks to the Adobe AIR runtime)
see what the community thinks is the best, most valuable content via ratings and comments
share their expertise with others and find out what experts have to say about using their favorite Adobe product

Google Site Search: integration and innovation

Under the hood of the Community Help app lies our Google Site Search engine. This search engine searches across about 3000 sites – content such as product Help, language references, Tech Notes, Developer Connection articles, and Adobe TV videos as well as the best online content from the Adobe community. Content is chosen by experts at Adobe and in the design and developer communities, meaning customers find the answers they need faster.

Thanks to the robust Google Site Search APIs, the development team was not only able to easily integrate search results but also create unique innovations such as our new Code Search functionality. Formerly known as Blueprint, this new search option allows Adobe Flash® and Flex developers to search for relevant code samples so that they can write better code, faster.

A new definition of Help

By combining the best community content with the definitive reference that customers traditionally expect from Adobe, Community Help allows us to expand the definition what help means. Now users can tap into an entire ecosystem of content — one that can dynamically adjust to changing user needs and provide a much richer set of resources over the lifetime of the product.

Community Help can also be used as a standalone application. To give it a try, you can download it from adobe.com.

Mark Nichoson, Product Manager at Adobe Community Help

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If you’d like to learn more about what Google Site Search can do for your website, join us for this upcoming webinar:

Google Site Search: an introduction

Thursday, May 13, 2010

11:00 a.m. PDT, 2:00 p.m. EDT, GMT 07:00

Update to Google Maps in Canada

Ellen Petry Leanse — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 17:57:00 +0000

The data that powers API features like the map tiles, geocoding, and driving directions has been updated in Canada! The new base map in Canada will have expanded features such as more detailed water bodies, university campuses, postal code coverage, and a shorter feedback cycle for Maps updates – all leading to better, more accurate maps for employees and customers.

Along with this update we've launched the popular "Report a Problem" feature that's used in the United States to our Canadian users, too. It's recommended that you re-geocode all of your data to take advantage of the update.

Learn more about the Google Maps API Premier at google.com/enterprise/maps.

Posted by Dan Chu, Product Manager, Google Enterprise team

Editor's note: Updated the post to say postal codes instead of zip codes. Thanks to our sharp-eyed readers for catching that!

Manufacturing in the Cloud with Google Apps and Smartsheet

Ellen Petry Leanse — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 21:02:00 +0000

Editor's Note: Tom Hippensteel is the Vice President for LiquidConcrete, a medium-sized Seattle-based manufacturer of high-performance concrete coatings and flooring systems for industrial and transportation markets. LiquidConcrete relies on Google Apps for email, calendar, and document collaboration, and on Smartsheet, an integrated app from the Google Apps Marketplace, for online project management, general work management, and team collaboration.

Smartsheet's integration with Google Apps enables businesses to transform the work they routinely track in spreadsheets into a complete solution for managing business operations. Smartsheet currently offers three versions in the Google Apps Marketplace: online project management, sales pipeline management, and crowdsourcing.

Below, Tom explains a bit about LiquidConcrete and the steps they took to get the entire business – from the front office to the warehouse – to operate in the cloud.

To learn more about LiquidConcrete's success with Google Apps and Smartsheet, please join us for a webinar on Tuesday, May 11 at 11:00 a.m. PDT.

We win business because we have great products, and because we run a lean operation that differentiates on quick turnaround of custom jobs with high levels of customer service. Everything about our operation is focused on efficiency, so we’re always looking for software solutions that fit that model. We’ve had successes and setbacks in getting our operations into the cloud in a way that works for all of our employees. We needed tools that "just work the way that we work."

We use Quickbooks for accounting and have had great success with Google Apps for email and calendar, but had trouble finding a tool that combined the ease of use, power and flexibility we needed to manage the rest of our operations. We tried various CRM, ERP and manufacturing solutions but they made us work in a certain way and were difficult to use – people just went back to how they were doing it before.

Then we found Smartsheet, a cloud-based project management tool. It was already integrated with Google Apps, and as we began deploying it more broadly, made Google Docs much more useful. Smartsheet and Google Apps are the only tools that have been readily adopted across our whole company, all the way out to the guys on the warehouse floor.

Here’s how we use them:

Project & task management We started tracking various projects and shared task lists in Smartsheet. User adoption was not a problem and the ability to launch Smartsheet from Gmail (the first app we open every morning) might sound simple, but it was a big win. Most of us check into Smartsheet dozens of times per day and we all have it added to the first screen on our iPhones.

Order-to-ship process We then realized that Smartsheet and Gmail could help with our order entry and shipping process. It was easy to set up and quickly adopted by reps on the phones with customers as well as people in the factory and at the warehouse. Here's our new streamlined process:

1. New orders are entered in a Smartsheet with the packing slip attached to the order and special instructions added as discussion notes

2. The people at the warehouse are automatically notified by Smartsheet (via Gmail on their iPhone) that a new order needs to be shipped

3. They access Smartsheet from their email, download the packing slip and prep the order

4. Once the order is shipped, they fill out the "tracking number" field for that order in Smartsheet and change the dropdown status from "waiting" to "shipped"

5. The right people receive a Smartsheet notification that a new order has been shipped with the tracking number available

Inventory tracking We also track raw and finished goods inventory in Smartsheet, giving salespeople instant access to the latest information online or via their iPhone.

Sales pipeline We have recently started using Smartsheet to manage the sales pipeline. It's been great to have all of our client projects and potential leads tracked in one place with their relevant documents attached to their record. We have instant status updates, forecast amounts and recent call notes at our fingertips and use reminders to make sure follow up happens.

Specification document management Since we are able to easily attach Google Docs to our Smartsheets, we decided to go forward with converting hundreds of specification documents into Google Docs. Google Docs gives us collaborative writing and review to get the specifications right, and Smartsheet organizes them conveniently right inside the project workflow. Accessing files directly from our sales, inventory and order processing sheets has been a big productivity win.

Smartsheet and Google Apps are changing the way our company communicates. Our CEO loves it because he gets an update on order status or a key customer in real time. Our reps love it because they can quickly pull up an order while on the phone with a customer and give an instant answer without waiting for someone at the warehouse to call them back. This saves us a tremendous amount of time.

The two keys for us are ease of use and the flexibility, and we've yet to come across a type of work that can't be managed in Smartsheet and Google Apps. We also love that it's a fraction of the cost of many of the other solutions we've looked at and we don't have to hire expensive consultants to customize it.

Bottom line is that we serve our customers better than bigger competitors because we're nimble and agile, and we feel the same way about Smartsheet and Google Apps.

Tom Hippensteel, VP, LiquidConcrete

Join Tom and the Smartsheet team for a webinar to learn more about this customer success story. This online discussion will include a question and answer session.

Improving operational efficiency with Google Apps and Smartsheet

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT

You can watch it at work here:

To learn more about Smartsheet's experience selling their app in the Google Apps Marketplace, please read their post on the Google Apps Developer Blog. To learn even more about Smartsheet, check out their Google Apps Marketplace listing.

Posted by Chris Kelly, Google Apps Marketplace team