Google Data » Hicham Alaoui

MS Autotech drives decision-making and communications with Google Apps

Hicham Alaoui — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 08:55:00 +0000

Posted by Lee Tae Kyu, CEO of MS Autotech

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Lee Tae Kyu, CEO of MS Autotech, which specializes in car-body parts for auto manufacturers such as Hyundai Motor Co., Kia Motors and Daimler-Benz. In 2011, the company had revenues of approximately 500 billion KRW, and anticipates revenues in 2012 of between 600 and 700 billion KRW. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

My company, MS Autotech is based in Korea, but the auto-makers we supply with parts include not only Korean manufacturers such as Hyundai and Kia, but also non-Korean companies such as Daimler-Benz. We have 900 employees in Korea, 1,000 employees in India and we’re building a presence in Brazil. All of this means we’re a global company and we need a global communications and collaboration system that just works.

When we began our search for a global solution, we were looking for an easy-to-use, standardized communication and collaboration system that would allow us to upgrade seamlessly over time, and around the world. After examining Google’s offering from an IT perspective, it took us less than a week to choose the Google Apps solution. At the time, our users had very limited IT resources, and expanding our old email system was an extremely slow process. We really needed to make a new investment that would make a difference quickly.

Making the switch to Google Apps couldn’t have been easier. We worked with Netkiller, a Google Apps reseller, to help us get up to speed with Google Apps. We’ve found that Google Apps for Business is the optimal solution for our growing needs. We love that it’s cloud-based, so we don’t have to worry about upgrading software on individual PCs.

Now that we’ve moved to Google Apps, we’ve been spared the ongoing cost and resource demands of hardware management, and we no longer worry about things like hardware capacity or storage limits with 25GB of email storage for every employee. As a result, our IT strategy team has been able to change its focus to the fundamental work of planning and leading our technology services. After seeing this kind of innovation at work within our company, we know that we made the right choice with Google.

From our employees’ perspective, Google Apps is very responsive; we can easily check email and access docs from anywhere. We can even use smartphones to review and edit documents. We’re making the most of other Google Apps features as well, including Google Talk (in Gmail), which we use for videoconferencing. Likewise, we’re using Google Calendar for its collaborative features, like the ability to input your schedule and share it with others.

Perhaps the most valuable outcome is that we can now collaborate horizontally rather than in vertical silos, making it easier for different groups to work together toward shared goals. Now we can quickly work across international borders, which helps us do things like reach immediate decisions with our assistant manager in Brazil. It empowers us all to make decisions, together, in real time.

I’m happy to say that we’ve gone Google so that we can save time, make decisions faster, communicate and collaborate more effectively, and be more flexible as we grow. Going with Google Apps is helping us become the best in the industry.

Collaboration “on-the-go” in Singapore with Google Apps

Hicham Alaoui — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Posted by Patrick Liew, CEO, HSR

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Patrick Liew, CEO of HSR Property Group, the leading real estate company in Singapore, with more than 2,000 agents. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Any large real estate company like HSR has to respond quickly to customer requests and market changes to stay competitive. Our agents are constantly out of their offices and showing properties. Their main access to email is via their tablets and smartphones. This isn’t really surprising, since smartphone use in Singapore is more than three times the global average.

Because mobility is so critical in our industry, it was important for us to find a solution that enabled access from any device. Our old email system also caused a lot of storage and performance bottlenecks. We wanted quicker, simpler access and easier ways to collaborate with each other and our clients. Google Apps was a good fit for our IT priorities and our business. From an IT-management perspective, Google Apps was intuitive for our users, scalable, and easy to manage.

Google Apps has helped HSR improve information flow and collaboration, leading to better engagement with our agents. We now use Google Sites to create intranets that provide our widely scattered agents with information on pipelines, co-broker opportunities, and training. Dashboards on these sites help us gauge each team's performance. Google Sites also allows us to share floor plans, maps, pricing, availability, and other real estate data, both internally and with clients. Google Docs serves as a company memo and lets colleagues update each other quickly on events, listings, and other important information. We track training sessions with Google Calendar, and share training content and attendance records with Google Docs.

We love Google Apps’ security features and cloud-based delivery, too. If an agent loses a phone in the morning, the data can be wiped remotely, and then—since contact information and other data are stored in the cloud—the agent can be up and running on another phone by noon. New government regulations also require real estate agents in Singapore to retain originals or copies of certain documents for at least three years. Google Apps provides simple archiving, and we now handle data retention through Google Postini.

Everyone at HSR is synchronized these days with Google Apps. We run our entire business using it, from selling to after-sales service. There’s no doubt—collaboration has never been made easier.

Viocorp broadcasts clear signal for growth with Google Apps

Hicham Alaoui — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 05:00:00 +0000

Posted by Ian Gardiner, CEO of Viocorp

(Cross-posted on the Google Australia Blog)

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Ian Gardiner, CEO of Viocorp, a leading provider of digital broadcast video solutions in Asia Pacific. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Viocorp has provided digital broadcast video solutions to local and global corporations, governments, and media companies since 2002. The video webcasts we host, such as the Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race or World Youth Day, often attract millions of viewers worldwide. We manage the back-end infrastructure to encode and deliver video of these events online, giving businesses an easy way to publish these digital media webcasts. Our customers don’t have to install anything on their end. They just buy a username and password and we deliver our services through the web browser.

Prior to Google Apps, we used a legacy on-premise solution to support our communication needs. Exchange had several shortcomings which became especially obvious as our business started to expand. Employees working from home and on the road had frequent problems with mobile email access and with synchronization of email across multiple devices. Our IT staff spent hundreds of hours each year managing and maintaining our email server when they could have been improving our video software solutions.

As a company that provides its services entirely online, we saw Google Apps for Business as a natural fit. Deployment was very easy and there were no major issues since Google Apps supports user choice, enabling us to have a gradual transition. Initially most of our users chose to maintain Microsoft Outlook as their email client, but today, given the option between Gmail or Microsoft Outlook, 90 percent of our employees choose Gmail.

We’ve also adopted Google Calendar to set up meetings and reserve shared resources such as conference rooms. Google Talk and Google Docs let us create, share, and collaborate faster than ever, moving projects forward as teams connected by real time information. Most importantly, Google Apps lets our employees work from anywhere with any smartphone or web-enabled tablet. When I’m in transit to client meetings, I can use my phone to email, chat, or even review my presentation in Google Docs. And every month we get new features that support innovation and efficiency within the company—at no extra cost.

Compared with our previous solution, managing Google Apps is incredibly easy. We think moving to Google Apps saves Viocorp well over 200 hours (approx. 5 weeks) of IT work annually, with no drawbacks in service or uptime. Although we definitely saved money by switching to Google Apps, the real value for us goes far beyond reduced costs. The question was, will Google Apps allow us to work more effectively? And when we ask our employees, the answer is “yes, without a doubt”.

New service activity graphs in the Google Apps control panel

Hicham Alaoui — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 17:58:00 +0000

The control panel is an integrated place for administrators to manage all their Google Apps services. You can manage user accounts and email lists, customize sharing capabilities within applications, turn services on and off, manage mobile device policies and more. Last week, we added new service activity graphs so Google Apps administrators can see at-a-glance how their users are accessing Google Apps. This information can help customers evaluate the success of Google Apps deployments and scale internal support resources efficiently.

The activity graphs display information about the number of active users in your organization as measured by login activity. We display trend lines showing user activity for the prior 1-, 7- and 30-day periods for Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Google Sites.

To view the graphs for your organization, click “View Usage and Reports” under the “Advanced Tools” tab of the Google Apps control panel. We’ll have more service activity data options to share with administrators soon, but in the meantime, you can check out the Reporting API for even more granular data on Google Apps activity within your organization.

Posted by Jaideep Mirchandani, Google Apps Product Manager, and Ashish Kumar, Google Apps Engineer

Webinar: Recent innovations in Gmail

Hicham Alaoui — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 17:56:00 +0000

The email inbox has become the hub for most people’s business day, and in the last few months we've launched a number of innovations in Gmail that make workers more productive, from Priority Inbox to Unthreaded View.

Join us for a live webinar this Wednesday, October 6 with Google Apps Product Manager Rajen Sheth to learn more about how Gmail can help you focus on messages that matter. You'll get an overview of recent innovations in Gmail, see a demo of Priority Inbox and unthreaded view, and learn about our migration tools that make it easy for your school or business to make the switch to to Google Apps. Please join us!

Wednesday, October 6th, 2010
10 a.m. PDT / 1 p.m. EDT / 6 p.m. GMT
On-demand webinar

Posted by Maureen Bradford, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Document revision history, in-cell dropdown, and more new features in Google Apps

Hicham Alaoui — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 19:00:00 +0000

Over the last few weeks, we launched some exciting new updates that make it even easier for business users to create and collaborate on to Google Sites, Google documents, and Google spreadsheets.

In Google documents, we launched a new revision history interface which lets you easily see what changes have been made to a document. Changes are color-coded based on each collaborator, so it’s clear who did what. You can click on a time stamp in the right column to see what changes were made at a given time, or use the arrow keys to quickly scan through many revisions. To learn more about revisions history, see the Google Docs blog.

We’ve also made it easier to anticipate the changes other real-time co-editors are about to make in Google documents. Text that another editor is selecting is highlighted, so you’ll know if someone may be about to delete or drag that block of text.

In addition we’ve recently added six new web fonts in Google documents: Droid Serif, Droid Sans, Calibri, Cambria, Corsiva, and Consolas. These web fonts are stored in the cloud rather than on your particular computer, so you aren’t limited to the set of common fonts that most people have installed on their computers.

In Google Spreadsheets, we’ve improved the import function with more options for your imported data. For example, when importing a .csv file, you can create a whole new spreadsheet, append data to the current sheet, add a new sheet to your existing spreadsheet or even replace your entire spreadsheet with the data you’re uploading. We also added a preview pane so you can see how the imported data will look in your spreadsheet.

Google spreadsheets also now has in-cell dropdown and data validation. This makes it easy to constrain the values of an individual cell to a specific range or list, reducing unnecessary typing and data entry errors. For example, if you are planning a business trip, you can limit the options in the travel destination column to only allow a certain set of city names.

You can create dropdown options in individual cells through the data validation tool, which lets you pull data from a range of cells in your sheet or by creating a custom list. For more information on data validation and in-cell dropdowns in Google spreadsheets, head to the Google Docs blog.

Lastly, Google spreadsheets now offers new printing options including selection printing, which lets you print a highlighted area in your spreadsheet, and the option to not print the cell gridlines if you want to save on ink.

Organizing your site’s hierarchy of pages is an important part of using Google Sites. To make it faster and easier to change the structure of your site, now you can drag and drop pages to change the hierarchy.

As with all updates in Google Apps, users get access to new features each time they open their browsers, and improvements roll out to customers with no need for administrators to manage patches or install software. Stay tuned for more updates to Google Docs and Google Sites.

Posted by Ronald Ho, Google Docs Product Manager

New OAuth support for Google Apps APIs

Hicham Alaoui — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Google Apps is designed to provide a secure and reliable platform for your data. Until today, Google Apps administrators had to sign requests for calls to Google Apps APIs using their username and password (this is called ClientLogin Authorization).

Yet sharing passwords across sites can pose security risks. Furthering our commitment to make the cloud more secure for our users, today we are pleased to announce support for OAuth authorization on Google Apps APIs.

There are several advantages to using OAuth instead of the username/password model:

OAuth is more secure: OAuth tokens can be scoped and set to expire by a certain date, making them more secure than using the ClientLogin mechanism.
OAuth is customizable: Using OAuth, you can create tokens that scripts may only use to access data of a particular scope when calling Google Apps APIs. For instance, a token set to call the Email Migration API would not be able to use your login credentials to access the Google Apps Provisioning API.
OAuth is an open standard: OAuth is an open source standard, making it a familiar choice for developers to work with.

The Google Apps APIs that support the OAuth signing mechanism are:

1. Provisioning API
2. Email Migration API
3. Admin Settings API
4. Calendar Resource API
5. Email Settings API
6. Audit API

OAuth support for Google Apps APIs is another step towards making Google Apps the most secure, reliable cloud based computing environment for organizations. To learn more about OAuth support and other administrative capacities launched in Google Apps this quarter, join us for a live webinar on Wednesday, September 29th at 9am PT / 12pm EST / 5pm GMT.

Administrators for Google Apps Premier, Education, and Government Editions can use OAuth authorization for Google Apps APIs starting today.For more information about the OAuth standard, visit http://oauth.net.

Posted by Ankur Jain, Software Engineer

Email overload? Try Priority Inbox

Hicham Alaoui — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 03:40:00 +0000

Information overload is a reality of the modern workplace. The average corporate worker sends and receives more than 150 messages per day¹, an email deluge of varying importance: key project updates from colleagues, requests from higher-ups, appointment reminders, and automated mail that’s often much less important. With so much information to process, simply figuring out what needs to be be read and what needs a reply takes up a lot of time. Today, we’re excited to introduce Priority Inbox Beta in Gmail, an experimental new way of reducing information overload.

Priority Inbox is a new view of your inbox that automatically helps you focus on your most important messages. Gmail has always kept spam messages out of your inbox, and now we’ve improved Gmail’s filter to help you see the emails that matter faster without requiring you to set up complex rules.

Here’s how it works: Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred,” and “Everything else”:

Messages are automatically categorized as they arrive in your inbox. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). And as you use Gmail, it will get better. You can improve the ranking in Priority Inbox by clicking the buttons at the top of the inbox to mark conversations as important or not important.

As a result, your inbox is better organized, and you can spend your time addressing your most important emails right away. When we tested Priority Inbox at Google, we found that people spent 6% less time on email after enabling this feature. This translates to a week’s worth of time saved each year for information workers who typically spend 13 hours per week on email today!²

Luke Leonhard, Web Services Manager for Brady Corporation, says “Like many of our users, I get over a hundred messages each day. Priority Inbox saves me time by displaying emails in order of importance, letting me process them more efficiently than before. The time I save can then be spent on new projects that add value to Brady rather than managing my inbox.”

Over the next week, we’ll be rolling out Priority Inbox settings to users in organizations with the “Enable pre-release features” option selected in the Google Apps control panel.

Helping users manage lots of information has always been a core goal of Gmail, and we’re excited to see how Priority Inbox helps users in organizations mitigate information overload and get to important messages faster.

Posted by Doug Aberdeen, Software Engineer

1. “Email Statistics Report, 2009-2013”, The Radicati Group, Inc, 2009

2. “Hidden Costs of Information Work in the Enterprise Exposed in New IDC Progress Report”, IDC, 2009

Building your web presence with Google Sites and Google Places

Hicham Alaoui — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:30:00 +0000

Google Sites makes creating a website as simple as editing a document. With dozens of site templates and new features like horizontal navigation or global footers, you can easily create a site for your team or project and share it with your colleagues, your entire organization, or the world.

We've also seen small and medium sized businesses use Google Sites as a fast and convenient way to build their official web site. Combined with Google Places, Google Sites is a great way for small businesses to start building their presence on the web. To learn more, see our blog post on the Google SMB Blog or go straight to the Getting Started Guide for Google Sites and Google Places.

Posted by Lisa Ding, Google Sites Team

New features in Google Docs and Google Sites

Hicham Alaoui — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Google’s multi-tenant infrastructure allows us to launch new features to our customers seamlessly, and with over 50 launches in first half of this year alone, the pace of innovation in Google Apps continues to accelerate.

Today we keep up the innovation with several new updates in Google Sites and Google Docs. We’ve improved Google Sites with several highly-requested features including horizontal navigation, global footers, and a new section for deleted items.

Horizontal navigation enables site owners to easily add links across the top of their sites.

Site owners can also add a global footer that displays across all pages on a site, and we added a new section for deleted items in sites, making it easier to get to deleted pages and attachments.

We’ve also added quick links to open Google Docs that are embedded in a site, making it easier for collaborators to open embedded documents.

For more information on these new features in Google Sites, check out the Google Docs blog.

In addition to these updates to Google Sites, this week we also launched several improvements in Google Docs:

Typing links just got a little faster in Google documents. Now when you type something that we recognize as a web address, it will automatically become a link.
We’ve also added a few more page sizes for your documents. So if you’ve been craving an Executive sized page (7.25” x 10.5”), you’re in luck. For more information on autolinks and page sizes, head to the Google Docs blog.

Correct spelling is an essential part of document creation, and to that end we’ve added spellcheck to Google spreadsheets. For more information on spelling checker in spreadsheets, visit the Google Docs blog.

As with all updates on Google Apps, users can get new features just by refreshing their browsers, and improvements roll out to customers with no need for administrators to manage patches or install software.

Stay tuned for more updates to Google Docs and Google Sites.

Posted by Scott Johnston, Google Apps Product Manager

Search across your docs, sites and email with the Gmail “Apps Search” lab

Hicham Alaoui — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 18:00:00 +0000

Gmail makes it easy to find emails really fast with Google-powered search for your inbox. This works well when you know you’re looking for an email, but if you have information in documents and sites too, you may have to search several places with the same query to find what you’re looking for.

Today we’re making it easier to search across more of your data with the new “Apps Search” lab in Gmail. Once the lab is enabled, the “Search Mail” button in Gmail will say “Search Mail and Docs” instead. When you run a search in Gmail, your search results will include matching documents and sites in addition to results from your email.

We also offer “Did you mean?” suggestions when it looks like you’ve misspelled a word:

This is a Labs launch, so to get started, click ‘Settings’ within Gmail, then the ‘Labs’ tab, and enable ‘Apps Search’. Standard Edition users can follow these instructions immediately, while Premier and Education Edition users will first need their domain administrators to enable Gmail Labs from the Google Apps control panel. For more information on Gmail labs for Google Apps, see the Help Center.

Posted by Bram Moolenaar, Software Engineer

As the world turns to FIFA, FIFA.com turns to Google

Hicham Alaoui — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 21:00:00 +0000

We’re right in the middle of football fever worldwide and as the number of competing teams dwindles, the interest is only growing. Of course, many of these eyeballs around the world are turning to FIFA.com to get the latest scores, updates, and analysis.

Given the traffic flowing through FIFA.com, FIFA understands the importance of search on their website. Indeed, according to a recent independent Forrester Research, Inc. report, a 2008 survey found that “70 percent of online users stated that “ease of search” is the most important factor influencing how they select news resources”. ¹ For this reason, FIFA has chosen the Google Search Appliance to power search on their website.

With the Google Search Appliance, FIFA.com is able to provide a user-centric, universal search experience across all types of content—news, statistics, images and videos. For instance, when you type in “Messi,” you first see a box at the top showing “player statistics,” followed by FIFA news results in order of relevance, then images and videos specifically pertaining to Messi.

Additionally, features like “Did you mean” direct people to the right results. For instance, if you type in “mesi,” FIFA.com will ask you if you meant “Messi.” Or if you type in a country name, say “Argentina,” the top result will be a link to a country-specific page.

By focusing on the user, FIFA.com offers their fans a compelling experience, with search as a core element. And we’re happy to play a small role in helping millions of fans around the world keep up to date on their favorite sport.

¹ Site Search Best Practices: Methods for Creating a Positive Search Experience, Forrester Research, Inc., March 5 2010.

Posted by Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager, Enterprise Search

Rapid innovation powered by the cloud – another reason to Go Google

Hicham Alaoui — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 19:10:00 +0000

The web is the epicenter of innovation, and Google’s multi-tenant infrastructure lets us push improvements to our customers seamlessly, enabling businesses that have Gone Google to move beyond the slow, multi-year innovation cycles typical of legacy technologies.

Users automatically get new features just by refreshing their browsers, and improvements roll out to organizations without patches or hardware upgrades to manage. Rapid innovation powered by the cloud also has another advantage over traditional technology cycles: users adapt to a continuous stream of manageable improvements better than they tolerate large, disruptive changes in the tools they use every day.

Last week I hosted a webinar to spotlight some of the more than 50 improvements and new features we’ve brought to Google Apps just in the last 6 months. You can watch the replay below or watch it on YouTube:

We’re excited about what’s in store for Google Apps. We’re always making our products better based on feedback from millions of users, and to keep up with the latest features, you can subscribe to the Google Apps Updates RSS feed, or sign up for email alerts.

Posted by Hicham Alaoui, Google Apps Marketing Manager

A Shift Towards Custom Application Development

Hicham Alaoui — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 19:00:00 +0000

Editor's Note: With the launch of the Google Apps Marketplace in March 2010, many members of our Authorized Reseller Program are taking full and immediate advantage of the benefits the Marketplace provides – new apps for their customers and a new channel for resellers to sell their own customized apps to Google Apps users. We asked Julia Rivard, VP-Communications for Canadian-based SheepdogInc.ca, to talk about her experiences as a Google Apps reseller and now a vendor within the Google Apps Marketplace.

SheepDogInc.ca, founded by Shawn Wilkie and Brandon Kolybaba, recognized early on the strengths and functionality associated with the Google Apps suite of communication and collaboration tools. In 2007, we began working with Google to become an authorized Google Apps reseller, allowing our team to bring Google Apps migration expertise to organizations in Canada and across North America. Based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, our team has migrated many organizations which were formerly utilizing a mishmash of tools to the unified, cloud computing platform created by Google Apps.

SheepDogInc.ca's position as an authorized Google Apps reseller accelerated our move towards custom application development in the cloud. The launch of the Google Apps Marketplace enabled us to create applications in the cloud specifically catered towards the needs expressed by our clients. For example, our team developed an application on Google App Engine for the 2009 World Canoe Championship that delivered race results to millions of global followers as well as a medal counting application for the Canadian Olympic Committee that delivered updates to Olympic athletes on their mobile devices at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. Focused on enhancing and improving existing business processes, SheepDogInc.ca recently launched our custom application, gTrax in the Marketplace.

gTrax

gTrax is a time tracking business tool that enables employees to track their work, facilitates intuitive reporting functionality, and integrates the user's Google Calender with the time-tracking application.

The application is aimed at organizations looking for a simple and user-friendly process of drilling down and analyzing time management and internal activities, and helps identify and allocate internal resources to projects which facilitates accurate time budgeting. Complete integration with Google Calender means that gTrax utilizes entries from the employee's calender thereby reducing the need for repeat data entry and decreasing the overhead associated with other time-tracking systems.

The developers at SheepDogInc.ca have been working tirelessly to develop a user-friendly mobile interface for gTrax. The app is now fully accessible on both the Android and iPhone platforms allowing users to conveniently access gTrax from their mobile device. Since all data is securely stored in the Google cloud, it is accessible anytime and anywhere.

Our relationship with Google as an authorized reseller has allowed us to deploy the Google Apps suite in numerous organizations across North America and the addition of the Google Apps Marketplace has created new and exciting opportunities for SheepDogInc.ca. With our development team focused on creating applications on Google App Engine, we now build both fully customized apps for specific client's business needs, as well as packaged apps for a larger audience of users through the Marketplace.

Posted by Pat Spears, Google Apps Reseller Team

Powering document search and management using Google Apps Script

Hicham Alaoui — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 19:49:00 +0000

Editor's Note: We're pleased to welcome back James Ferreira who previously wrote about adopting Google Apps. James is the Chief Information Officer for the Office of the New Mexico Attorney General, providing IT services to the largest law office in the state. Mr. Ferreira is tasked with the responsibility of facilitating the communication between the public and nearly 200 office staff, including attorneys. Additionally, Mr. Ferreira has served as a member on many committees including the NM Information and Technology committee, NM Technical Counsel, and the Department of Information and Technology Project Review Committee.

The New Mexico State Attorney General’s office maintains data sets containing hundreds of thousands of documents relating to ongoing trials, cases, investigations and lawsuits. Like many state and federal agencies, a significant problem we face in public sector document management is keeping track of the relevance of individual documents within large data sets. Client-side document management systems can help but are very expensive and often lack the flexibility required by a large state agency. Unlike cloud-based offerings, client-side solutions are not designed to let people collaborate easily, so adding important meta-data to a data set is often a complex and frustrating undertaking that can’t easily be split or shared by large teams. Nor can you easily access your work outside the office, since files stay on your local corporate network.

The New Mexico State Attorney General switched to Google Apps Premier Edition for email and documents last year, and a few months ago we started thinking about using Google Apps Script to help us automate parts of our document management system. Google Apps Scripts comes free with Google Apps Premier Edition, so there is no cost involved to build on this platform, making good fiscal sense for any cost-conscious government agency.

After spending just a few days to build scripts, we built a developmental App to search data sets and return a list of results to a spreadsheet. From the spreadsheet, users can then enter additional meta-data to describe documents. In addition, users can organize and group documents on related topics by selecting choices from custom-made menus powered by scripts.

By using the new UI App service in Google Apps Script, we were also able to extend the functionality of this App to mobile platforms like Android without needing to deploy an application to each device.

And since the entire data chain runs on Google servers through secure SSL connections, the risk of in-transit data attacks is minimized - a significant benefit given the sensitive nature of the legal documents in our data set.

We are seeing a fundamental shift in information sharing. It is no longer enough to have a place to store files, we also need to build the semantics of our documents to create relevance for a wider audience. Rather than cumbersome client-side software, cloud-based tools like Google Apps Script make it easier to share and collaborate on document management through an inexpensive, secure, and extensible platform.

James Ferreira, CIO, Office of the New Mexico Attorney General

Editor's Note: For more examples of how organizations are using Apps Script, head on to the Google Apps Script Blog.

Posted by Hicham Alaoui, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Introducing multi-domain support in Google Apps

Hicham Alaoui — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Thousands of organizations deploy Google Apps every day, and a challenge for some large businesses has been migrating employees on multiple domains. Until now, companies that ran into this issue could either set up other domains as domain aliases or set up different Google Apps accounts for each domain, neither of which was an ideal solution. Now there’s a better way: multi-domain support in Google Apps.

Multi-domain support is a new admin control that allows organizations with two or more domains on Google Apps to manage them from a single control panel. Users belonging to different domains within an organization keep their domain-specific email address but can see coworkers from other domains in the organization’s global address book. It’s also easy for users to share across domains in Google Docs, Sites and the rest of Google Apps. Matt Vandenbush, director of IT strategy and architecture at Brady Corporation, says, "Multi-domain support in Google Apps lets us administer our entire organization from one central place. Considering that we have users on 88 different domains, this is a big time-saver for our IT department, and it lets employees from different parts of our organization share information much more seamlessly than before.”

This feature is available now to Premier and Education edition users at no additional charge. To learn more about multi-domain support on Google Apps, please visit our Help Center or join us for a live webinar on Tuesday, July 13th at 9am PST / 12pm EST / 5pm GMT.

Posted by Will Smit, Software Engineer, Google Apps

New sharing settings in Google Docs

Hicham Alaoui — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 17:30:00 +0000

Google Docs is designed for collaboration from the ground up. You've always been able to share documents with individuals and groups, and today we're making it even easier to share and control access to your files across your organization.

The new features include the ability to:

Easily apply sharing settings to a doc – Google Docs can now be identified as:

Private: Private docs are accessible only to people or groups you’ve explicitly invited to the file. Anyone trying to access the file will have to sign in to verify that they have access to the file.

People at your organization with the link: Docs set to this option are accessible to anyone inside the domain who knows the URL of the file. If you also select the ‘Allow anyone to edit’ option, anyone with the URL will be able to view and edit your file. This option allows you to easily copy and paste the file’s link into chat, email and calendar invites.

People at your organization can find and access: Docs set to this option will be indexed by Google Docs search and may be opened by anyone in your organization.

If your Google Apps administrator allows sharing outside of your organization, you will also be able to make a file Public on the web or available to Anyone with the link (no sign in required). Administrators can also control the default visibility setting from the control panel.

Quickly see who has access to your docs – The visibility options for your docs now appear next to every file in your Google Docs list and next to the title within any doc. You can see the full list of editors and viewers by clicking on the visibility information next to the doc title or on the ‘Share’ button.

Reset a file’s URL with one click – For files that can be accessed by anyone with the link, you can reset the file’s URL at anytime, which helps you better control who has access to your files.

Gavin Haslam, Google Apps technical lead at Rentokil Initial, says, "The new sharing settings make it easier to share information across our organization, and will save us huge amounts of time when rolled out across our 35,000 users on Google Apps."

We hope you enjoy these new features, which are rolling out over the coming week. Stay tuned for more updates soon! To learn more about the new Docs sharing settings and many more recent launches on Google Apps, check out our on-demand webinar.

Posted by Shimrit Ben-Yair, Product Manager

See collaboration in action on Google Docs

Hicham Alaoui — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 20:20:00 +0000

Collaboration is at the heart of the modern workspace, yet many businesses still run cumbersome client-side software that makes it unnecessarily difficult to work together. With Google Docs, coworkers can collaborate in real-time on documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and drawings. Instead of creating a document, sending it as an attachment, receiving multiple revisions, and then having to merge edits, with Google Docs everyone can work on the same version at the same time.

If you've never tried our web-based documents, spreadsheets and presentations, now you can instantly take a test drive at docs.google.com/demo. No need to download any software or even sign in -- just start editing right in your browser. Better yet, you can share the unique link provided with others to try out real-time collaboration together.

Google Docs is designed to help people be more productive than ever before. But don’t take our word for it, take Google Docs for a spin and let us know what you think. To learn more about how Google Docs make your teams more efficient, visit google.com/apps/docs.

Posted by Scott Johnston, Product Manager, Google Apps

Over 2 billion email messages migrated to Google Apps

Hicham Alaoui — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 18:29:00 +0000

While the majority of Google Apps customers choose to “go Google” quickly without transferring old data from their previous IT environment, some companies are reluctant to step into the future without bringing along emails, calendar entries and contacts from the past. To that end we’ve released several data migration utilities, including Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Outlook®, which we announced last week.

These tools have helped unshackle thousands of organizations from their previous technology solutions. Our customers have migrated more than 2 billion email messages to Google Apps, and in the past 2 months alone, more than 14 million calendar events and 6 million contacts (not counting domain-wide address lists) were migrated to Google Apps from Microsoft Exchange® and Lotus Notes®.

It’s been some time since several of our migration utilities launched, so we thought we’d summarize our data migration options here.

Migrating from Microsoft® Exchange and Microsoft Outlook®:

Google Apps Migration for Microsoft® Exchange is a server-side tool that migrates your company's email, calendar and contact data from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps. This tool works for Microsoft Exchange 2003 and 2007, and both on-premises and hosted Exchange.
Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Outlook® is an end-user tool that moves email, calendar and contact data from Microsoft Outlook profiles, PST files and Microsoft Exchange accounts to Google Apps. This tool works with Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007, on-premise and hosted Exchange, as well as legacy PST files saved on users’ machines.

Migrating from Lotus Notes:

Google Apps Migration for Lotus Notes® is a server-side tool that migrates mail, calendar, contacts, and group information from your Lotus Notes accounts to Google Apps.

Migrating from other email systems:

IMAP mail migration tool enables domain administrators to transfer the existing contents of users' mailboxes from an IMAP server to Google Apps. This tool supports email migration for archives hosted on Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, Cyrus IMAP Server, Courier-IMAP, and Dovecot.
The Google Apps Email Migration API allows administrators and users of Google Apps to migrate mail from legacy email systems into their domain's hosted Gmail accounts. This API can be used by custom email migration applications.

Migrating documents to Google Apps:

The Google Documents List Data API can be used for bulk migration of word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and PDFs to Google Docs.

In addition to the tools listed above, customized data migration solutions are available from partners listed in the Google Apps Marketplace.

For more information about migrating from common legacy solutions to Google Apps, see our resource pages for IT managers looking to switch from Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange.

Posted by Hicham Alaoui, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Putting email in context with Gmail contextual gadgets

Hicham Alaoui — Tue, 18 May 2010 19:00:00 +0000

Since launching the Google Apps Marketplace in March, Google Apps administrators have deployed integrated third party apps to more than one million users, and today we're excited to build on this momentum with the launch of a new Gmail API that lets Marketplace apps present relevant information to users right in Gmail, when they’re reading a message.

Contextual gadgets in Gmail – like YouTube, Google Docs and Picasa previews – intelligently display relevant information from other systems as you read your email, so you can be more efficient without leaving your inbox.

Starting today, third party developers can build Gmail contextual gadgets and distribute them in the Google Apps Marketplace. These gadgets can display information from social networks, business services, web applications and other systems, and users can interact with that data right within Gmail. Contextual gadgets are yet another example how the power of the web can outpace traditional business technology.

Several new contextual gadget integrations for Gmail are available to Google Apps customers in the Apps Marketplace today:

AwayFind lets you mark certain contacts or message topics as ‘Urgent’ and then alerts you via phone, SMS or IM when relevant messages arrive.
Kwaga displays social network profiles and lists recent email exchanges with people you correspond with.
Gist brings together information from across the web about people you’re corresponding with, providing rich person and company profiles, news and updates.
Pixetell detects email links to video messages created with Pixetell’s video software and lets you preview, comment on, and share those videos without leaving your inbox.
Smartsheet lets you access and update entries in Smartsheet’s sales pipeline and project management tool.
Xobni, Rapportive, Manymoon, Newmind Group, and BillFLO have also launched their own contextual gadget integrations.

Like any other application in the Google Apps Marketplace, a Google Apps domain administrator can install a contextual gadget from the Marketplace with just a few clicks. Both before and during the install process, administrators can review the portions of an email the gadget will have access to, and can revoke that permission at any time from their control panel. For more information on the Google Apps marketplace, watch the overview video.

To learn more about the new contextual gadget applications available in Gmail, head to the Google Apps Marketplace and browse for apps that have ‘Mail Integration’.

Posted by Chandrashekar Raghavan, Product Manager, Google Apps extensions

Editor's note: Gmail contextual gadgets are available to businesses, schools, and organizations using Google Apps. Domain administrators can purchase and install contextual gadgets along with other applications through the Google Apps marketplace.

Automating business processes with Google Apps Script

Hicham Alaoui — Tue, 18 May 2010 17:00:00 +0000

Google Apps Script is a powerful way to automate business processes ranging from expense approvals to time-sheet tracking to ticket management and order fulfillment. Scripts are an efficient way for customers to add custom functionality beyond Google’s expanding suite of web-based applications. Today we’re launching improvements to Google Apps Script which make it even more versatile than before:

Data interoperability through JDBC (Java Database Connectivity): Now Google Apps Script can connect to any MySQL database, including business databases running on servers behind firewalls.
Custom user interfaces for scripts: Google Apps Premier Edition users can now script graphical interface elements and menus. For example, a company could power an internal application for purchasing office supplies. Users could shop via a customized menu interface, and the script could email the employee’s selections to their manager for purchasing approval before routing the order to fulfillment team.
Standalone invocation of scripts: It’s now possible to call a script from any website, so you’re able to build web pages where users can submit entries that will be collected in a Google spreadsheet.
More integrations with other Google properties: New integrations with Google Docs and Google Maps add the ability to create and modify files in the Google Documents List and retrieve directions from Google Maps.

Businesses large and small are already simplifying their IT environments with the power of Google Apps Script. Stephanie Anthony, IT Tools Architect at Motorola Mobile Devices, says the company is, “saving $1,000,000 per year by using Google Apps Script to replace our IT portfolio and resource management solution.”

To help you get started with scripts, we put together a new set of script templates with pre-built functionality. One of our favorites is the Map Mail Merge script. Let’s say you need to send conference invitations to 100 email recipients in your team’s database. Generating and sending custom invitations can be tedious, but Google Apps Script automates the process, including individualized door-to-door driving directions.

Stay tuned for more updates to Google Apps Script. Until then, start scripting and let us know what you come up with!

Posted by Evin Levey, Product Manager, Google Apps Team

New reset cookie functionality on Google Apps

Hicham Alaoui — Mon, 03 May 2010 16:59:00 +0000

Google Apps provides businesses with seamless, secure access to information regardless of device. You can check your email or consult your calendar, sites, and documents from any web-enabled device anywhere in the world with an Internet connection.

The ability to access your data from virtually anywhere enables higher productivity, but just like traditional systems that don’t run in the cloud, security concerns can arise if a user loses a computer or mobile device that can access their sensitive information. Fortunately, when users store data in Google Apps, they do not need to keep it on the device itself. Starting today, administrators can also easily invalidate a user’s active connection to Google Apps services from the Google Apps control panel.

More specifically, administrators can now reset a user’s sign-in cookies to help prevent unauthorized access to their account. This will log out that user from all current web browser sessions and require new authentication the next time that user tries to access Google Apps. Combined with the existing ability for administrators to reset user passwords, this new feature to reset users’ sign-in cookies improves security in the cloud in case of device theft or loss.

If you have any questions about this feature, please check out our help page.

The security and privacy of our customer’s data is paramount so stay tuned for more security features on Google Apps.

Posted by Will Smit, Software Engineer, Google Apps

Ability to reset sign-in cookies from the control panel

Hicham Alaoui — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 00:58:00 +0000

Now Google Apps admins can reset the sign-in cookies for any user from the Google Apps control panel. This will log out a user from all current browser sessions and require new authentication the next time that user tries to initiate an browser session to log in to Google Apps.

Editions included:

Premier, Education

Languages included:

All languages supported by the Google Apps Administrator control panel

How to access what's new:

To reset the sign-in cookies for a user:

- In the Google Apps control panel, click the 'Users and groups' tab, then click the user's name.

- In the 'Password' section, click 'Reset sign-in cookies'.

For more information:

http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=178854

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Laying the foundation for a new Google Docs

Hicham Alaoui — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 15:59:00 +0000

Over the last year, we’ve been hard at work rewriting the infrastructure underlying Google Docs to take advantage of the latest advances in modern browsers. Our updated codebase will help us deliver richer functionality more quickly, and over the next few days, we’ll be rolling out a preview of the new editors.

New document and spreadsheet features

You shouldn’t have to give up any routine features when you switch to web-based applications, and we’re addressing many longstanding requests across Google Docs with this release that were not feasible with older browser technology. Documents support better formatting options like a margin ruler, better numbering and bullets, and more flexible image placement. Spreadsheets now have a familiar formula editing bar, cell auto-complete, drag-and-drop columns and more.

Higher fidelity document import

It should be easy to move files saved on your computer to the cloud, so we made our document upload feature much stronger. Imported documents keep their original structure more accurately, so you can spend less time adjusting files you move to the cloud.

Speed and responsiveness

Browser-based applications shouldn’t force you to compromise on performance either, and our new architecture is much faster than before. Working with very large spreadsheets is even snappy now. Web apps really can feel just as fluid as traditional software.
Faster collaboration

Collaboration has always been Google Docs’ forte, and the new codebase is letting us leap forward here, too. The applications support up to 50 simultaneous editors, and documents let you see other people’s changes character-by-character as they type. Finally, we’ve added multi-user editing to drawings too, so now you can build flow charts, schematics, and other kinds of diagrams collaboratively.

The new Google Docs editors will take advantage of faster rendering engines in modern browsers as well as new web standards like HTML5. As a result, we need to temporarily remove offline support for Docs starting May 3rd, 2010. We know that this is an important feature for some of you, and we are working hard to bring a new and improved HTML5-based offline option back to Google Docs. Please note that this change only concerns Google Docs. We will continue to support offline access for Gmail and Google Calendar. To learn more, please see our Help Center.

Over the next few days, users will be able to start creating collaborative drawings from the Docs list. For Google Apps customers with the control panel option set to “enable new pre-release features,” users will have the option to enable the new document editor in the ‘Document settings’ page, and activate the new spreadsheet editor with the “New version” link at the top of any spreadsheet.

These improvements to Google Docs are designed to help businesses like yours move to the cloud faster and be more productive than ever before. We look forward to hearing what you think.

To learn more about these new features, check out our on-demand webinar.

Posted by Anil Sabharwal, Product Manager, Google Apps

Editor's note: To learn more, check out the Google Docs blog for deep dives on the new editors for Documents, Spreadsheets, and Drawings. Original links to webinar registration removed on 04/23/2010.

Update (05/05/2010): We’ve received a lot of great questions about the new Google Docs editors in our forums, blog comments, and webinars. Check out this post on the Google Docs blog for answers to the most frequent questions.

Announcing upload and store anything in Google Docs

Hicham Alaoui — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 04:00:00 +0000

Earlier this year we launched the ability to store and share any file on Google Docs. Since then, we've received great feedback from our users and today we're excited to announce the logical extension of this feature: the ability to store anything on Google Docs.

Just like files in Google Docs, you can easily access any physical object you’ve stored with Google and share it with anyone in the world. For example, you can save on business trip costs by avoiding baggage fees -- just store your luggage in Google Docs before you travel! Forgot your cell phone at home? Have a friend post it on Google Docs and download it on the go. And now you never have to run out of business cards -- store some online and you’ll be able to retrieve them whenever you meet someone!

We also make it easy to search and find what you need across your entire collection of objects, with automatic indexing of everything you store on Google Docs. And as with all your files, you can rest easy knowing your objects are securely stored in the cloud.

With competitive pricing starting at $0.10 per kg, along with free pickup and delivery from any location on the planet, now it’s easy to store everything on Google Docs. To learn more about this new feature and how to join the beta test, head on to the our informational page. Only a fool would pass this up!

Posted by Hicham Alaoui, Associate Product Marketing Manager, Google Apps

Rescheduling meetings made easy

Hicham Alaoui — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 22:45:00 +0000

Outside of our Gmail inboxes, we, like many businesses, spend quite a bit of time in meetings – and scheduling and rescheduling meetings. And we know that trying to get a group of people with busy schedules into the same empty conference room at the same time can be quite a challenge.

As a result, our Calendar team began noodling on how to help solve group scheduling difficulties. The result is a new experimental feature called Smart Rescheduler, available in Google Calendar Labs. Smart Rescheduler automatically generates a list of good meeting times that would work for invitees when someone has a conflict. Through the power of search and cloud computing, employees can now focus even more time on the real business at hand.

As a Labs feature, Smart Rescheduler may not work exactly as you’d expect each time, but we wanted to share this feature with customers while it’s still in the testing phase to hear how it’s working in the real world. If you have ideas or suggestions, we welcome your feedback.

Businesses, schools and organizations can start using Calendar Labs once their Google Apps administrator selects ‘Turn on new features’ in the Google Apps control panel. Once new features are enabled there, users can enable Labs in Google Calendar’s settings page.

Happy Scheduling!

Posted by Ken Norton, Google Calendar Product Manager

Now it’s easy to switch to Google Apps from Microsoft® Exchange

Hicham Alaoui — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Today we're making it a lot easier for customers of Microsoft Exchange to go Google with Apps. Google Apps Migration for Microsoft® Exchange is a new server-side tool that migrates your company's email, calendar and contact data from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps. With the tool, migrations are:

• Easy: set it up in just 4 steps

• Efficient: select the combination of mail, calendar and contact data that you want to move, with the option of doing so in phases

• Fast: migrate hundreds of users at the same time

• Painless: employees can continue to use Microsoft Exchange during the migration without interruption or any involvement on their part

As Paul Lovett, Project Manager for the Google Apps project at New Zealand Post, described, "We are a very calendar-bound organization, so Google Apps Migration for Microsoft® Exchange was the missing link in our migration strategy, allowing us to perform a server-side migration of our calendar and contact data from Microsoft Exchange 2003. We moved our corporate executive team first which required spot-on accuracy and a quality product, and Google Apps Migration for Microsoft® Exchange met that high bar.”

The tool has been a boon to our Google Apps partners as well. Mayooran Rajan, CTO of Revevol Consulting, noted, "We work with companies with 100 to 20,000 employees. This tool will help us move our clients to Google Apps faster and more efficiently, helping us save them time and money."

Google Apps Migration for Microsoft® Exchange works with Microsoft Exchange 2003 and 2007, and both on-premise and hosted Exchange. It's available free to Google Apps Premier and Education Edition customers here. If you're considering the switch from Microsoft Exchange, you can find resources to help make your decision here.

Also, for those who have already gone Google by making the switch to Google Apps, you can share your experiences and spread the word at www.google.com/apps/spreadtheword.

Learn about Google Apps Migration for Microsoft® Exchange best practices and customer experiences:

On-demand webinar

Posted by Abhishek Bapna, Product Manager

Editor's note: Original links to registration page removed on 03/29/2010.