Posted by Cyrus Mistry, Enterprise Product Manager

So you have your shiny blue or yellow box up and running and life is good. As the searches keep coming, you begin to wonder.... How many of my users are clicking on the first search result? How many refine their search? How many use the Advanced search capabilities? How many click on a KeyMatch? How many have to click the Next page link? How many aren't finding what they want?

Now you can answer these and hundreds of other questions with the introduction of Advanced Search Reporting for your Google Mini or Google Search Appliance. Through a detailed analysis of what your users are clicking, you can now extract volumes of rich behavior detail that you can use to improve your search quality and their search experience.

For example, you might learn:


Owners of a Google Mini or Google Search Appliance can visit Google Enterprise Labs to download this feature today!

Posted by Dan Israel, Google Enterprise, Government Products

I recently reviewed an interesting case study about CrimeReports.com, a website that makes crime data from local law enforcement agencies available on the internet using Google Maps. CrimeReports.com is a partnership between a company called Public Engines and local police departments across the country -- from San Jose, CA to Washington, DC. These police departments wanted to make information about neighborhood safety directly available to the public, but did not have the resources to set this up themselves. Enter Public Engines, who built a service using the Google Maps API they are making available at a low cost to any interested police department.

In the past, local crime information could be difficult for citizens to find -- they could read police blotters in local newspapers or watch the evening news -- but it wasn't easy to see historical data or understand trends. By providing the data in a rich, visual interface, plus letting citizens get alerts if something new happens in their neighborhood -- CrimeReports.com makes information accessible to citizens in a much more useful way. If want to learn more, read the full case study.

The advent of new Internet technologies like blogs, wikis, & RSS makes it easier than ever for government to share information directly with the citizens they serve, without the need for any intermediaries. This sort of direct communication can be extremely valuable in letting citizens know what government officials are doing in their community. We're always on the look-out for other good examples of this; if you know of any, please share.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager, from my mobile phone

Being focused on helping people access, create, and share information, I shouldn't still be surprised by the stats about how people get online, but I am. For example, the count of personal computers worldwide is about to cross the 1 billion mark. That's a big number, but did you know that around 3 billion people have mobile phones? Nearly half the world's population already can, or may soon be able to, have the world's information in their pocket. Let that sink in for a moment....

And lots of people who go online with their phones aren't doing it that way for lack of a computer. Even with its small screen and squashed keyboard, my phone has become my web-connected device of choice in lots of situations. Like when I'm visiting a new city and need directions, when I want to send a quick email from a ski lift, or when it's just easier to reach into my pocket than fire up my MacBook.

These are some of the reasons why Google is committed to improving the mobile experience. The latest example, launched today, is Google Sync for mobile. This application for BlackBerry® smartphones keeps your Google Calendar in sync with your BlackBerry® calendar. So whether you update your schedule from your mobile device or from your computer, your agenda will be up to date however you decide to access your information later on.

You can download Google Sync for mobile by going to http://m.google.com/sync on your BlackBerry® browser. And for more about the other ways Google Apps users – including those without smartphones – can access their information on the go, check out the Google Apps mobile access overview.

Posted by Adam Swidler, Product Marketing Manager, Postini

Postini is a recent addition to Google that offers solutions that help enterprises make their existing email infrastructure more secure, compliant and productive. We process email for more than 35,000 businesses and 12 million end users, and block about 1 billion messages per day, which is a good sample size to report on global spam trends for businesses. In 2007, Postini data centers recorded the highest levels of spam and virus attacks in history. Much of this was fueled by an increase in the number of botnet computers being used to send spam. Botnets are networks of infected PCs, usually with broadband Internet connections that are co-opted by hackers and used to send spam and virus attacks. Often they are compromised without their owner's knowledge. We started to see these botnets kick in back in September of 2006. Since that time, spam volumes are up more than 163 percent. We saw a peak of activity in October 2007 where volume was a 263 percent increase from September 2006 and Postini blocked 47 billion spam messages, more than 320 Terabytes of spam (now that's a lot of spam). The average unprotected e-mail user would have received 32,000 spam messages in their in-boxes so far this year. Talk about lost productivity. In fact, Nucleus research estimates unchecked spam can cost a company up to $742 per user.

But what's really different this year is the innovation with which spammers attempted to evade detection by spam filters. In the early part of 2007, image spam was used heavily, with the spam content (such as "pharmaceuticals for sale," "hot stocks," etc) contained in an image attached to the message. Over the course of the year image spam declined and was replaced by PDF spam, document and spreadsheet spam and even multimedia spam. That's right - an audio file promoting a particular stock. We saw examples of compressed and password protected emails as well. All this effort to deliver spam content in email attachments had a significant impact on the size of spam overall. Taking 7.5 Kb as an average spam message size, an organization with 100 employees (that didn't use a hosted solution to block spam outside the firewall) would have wasted 22Gb of storage and bandwidth. Who wants that sitting on their servers?

The chart below shows the trend of the volume of spam rising throughout the year (blue line) and the peaks in the size of spam (orange line):



In Europe, spam volume was also up in 2007 and the percentage of email that is spam increased from 70% to 90% as shown below:




Virus attacks in 2007 were also at record levels and showed similar techniques to what we observed for spam email. In January 2007, the high profile "Storm" botnet got its start with an email that was spammed out with an executable file attached. In April and May, we saw virus emails with password protected executables attached and the password contained in the body of the email. In the late summer, we saw a huge spike of Storm virus attacks that used a blended threat - an email message with a URL that took the user to an infected website that then downloaded the Storm malware to the PC. The linkage between spam and viruses continued in 2007, with messages being spammed out from botnets with virus attacks intended to add more computers to the botnet. The chart below shows the Storm virus activity for 2007:



For 2008, this game of chess will continue, and the stakes may become even higher. While the number of threats may not increase, the complexity will. Businesses will be challenged to identify more types of malicious content and protect sensitive information against new methods of social engineering. So what does the forecast for next year looks like? Here are some of the trends we expect to see coming to a business near you in 2008:

• Spam volume will stabilize and could actually decrease in 2008 as spam attacks become more targeted and less of a pure volume game. As more and more spam content will be contained in attachments, we do expect that the overall size of spam will continue to increase.

• Virus attacks will continue to blend with spam and will focus more on identity theft. They will utilize increasingly sophisticated social engineering techniques that will be related to specific current events such as the Olympics, the Super Bowl, natural disasters etc. Virus attacks will become more targeted toward executives at specific companies and will appear to come from legitimate business agencies. Their goal will increasingly be to steal corporate and government data. We expect to see several of these types of attacks, leading to data breaches from commercial enterprises and government agencies. This may force some companies to modify their email practices, such as financial institutions not including any links in their email communications to customers.

• More businesses and organizations will implement specific policies that address outbound content in email and will deploy systems to monitor and enforce those policies to prevent sensitive or confidential data leaks.

• The growing need for managing consumer data privacy and retention policies globally will drive growth of encryption and archiving and hosted solutions will play a major role in reducing the cost and complexity.

• Identity theft attacks will increasingly be launched through web sites, especially those that enable user created content such as social networking sites, blogs and auction sites.

If you’d like to know more about Postini’s spam and virus trends, you can read our weekly summaries on the Postini Community Forum in the Threat Advisory board.

Posted by Cyrus Mistry, Enterprise Product Manager

Do you have multiple Google Minis or Google Search Appliances? Many customers have several yellow and blue boxes spread across different departments, regions or even continents. Wouldn't it be great if you could easily see if there were other relevant search results from another Mini or GSA half way around the world?

Now, in just a few simple steps, you can create a OneBox that will call out to another Mini or GSA and bring back results in fractions of a second! For example:

Owners of a Google Mini or Google Search Appliance can visit Google Enterprise Labs to download this feature today!

Posted by Ryan Pollock, Product Marketing

Silicon.com recently published this case study about how Monarch Airlines set up Google Custom Search Business Edition on www.flymonarch.com to enable better customer self-service and reduce the number of customer support inquiries. As a result of deploying the search engine – which only costs $100 per year - Monarch saw a 30% decrease in the number of customer support inquiries. The case study cites a number of the great benefits of deploying Custom Search: speed, relevance, and customizability. Monarch also uses Google Analytics to understand how their site's visitors navigate.

If your website's search isn't yet powered by Google, learn more about CSBE.

Posted by Engin Yilmaz, Product Marketing Manager, Enterprise Europe

July 2007 saw the launch in the United States of our hosted site search solution, the Custom Search Business Edition (CSBE), for organisations and businesses of all sizes. Today we are pleased to announce that the CSBE is now available internationally in 40 languages and will be offered in almost 80 countries.

Early interest in the global offering has been positive, for example, we recently worked with the UK Parliament to implement the CSBE on their website so that nine million documents have become easily accessible by the public.

Some of the reasons why the UK Parliament and other organisations and businesses choose Google hosted site search include the:

• Highly relevant and sub-second query response times which are characteristic of Google.com
• Speed of implementation with there being no need to install or maintain additional technology
• Power and reliability of Google’s infrastructure
• Ability to setup and manage results online
• Reporting features which give and insight in to visitor behaviour

Google’s Custom Search is also available as a free, ad supported version and the Business Edition provides incremental benefits such as:

• Full customisation of the search results through an XML API
• Options for e-mail and telephone support available through the Google Enterprise group
• The choice of whether or not sponsored adverts are served against visitors search queries

Custom Search Business Edition can be purchased online and starts at $100 a year for up to 5,000 webpages and extends to $2,250 for 300,000 webpages with larger page volumes supported through Google’s Enterprise sales group.

For more information about hosted site search please visit http://www.google.com/sitesearch

Posted by Kevin Gough, Acting Product Marketing Director

A few weeks ago a representative from PC Magazine contacted me to let me know that Google Docs had won the magazine's editors choice award. In the online review, the editor mentioned the number of new features added over the last year and called Google Docs "more elegant, efficient, and enjoyable" than other online productivity suites. Since we at Google have a launch early and often mentality, I've gotten comfortable with new features appearing in the Google Apps products that I use on a weekly basis. However, this award caused me to pause and take a look back at all of the new features that have been added to Google Docs since I started using it. There were some features, like presentation capabilities and accessing documents on my mobile phone that I've become instant an convert to. However, looking at the "What's new" page of Google Docs, there were a lot that I'd missed.

One of the most interesting enhancements that I discovered were functions within Google Docs spreadsheets that can automatically pull external data from Google search results, Google News and other sources into spreadsheet cells. Check out the video below to see how these functions can make Google Docs a powerful tool for maintaining up-to-date research on competitors, customers or business opportunities.

Posted by Cyrus Mistry, Enterprise Product Manager

One of the best ways to improve search quality and user satisfaction is to provide your users with quick and easy ways to give feedback. These automated tools make it easy for your users to provide feedback such as:

• "I really like this new search results user interface!"
• "How can I promote my engineering design doc to the top of the search results?"
• "I like the new glossary definition results, but how can I contribute another database search idea?"

These tools will automatically send the user's query with their feedback to a designated mailing list or administrator and then quickly disappear making it fun and easy for users to send feedback on their search experience. For example:


The toolkit provides samples that you can use out-of-the-box, and, since the source code has been made available, customization is easy.

Owners of a Google Mini or Google Search Appliance can optimize their search quality by visiting Google Enterprise Labs to download this toolkit today!

Posted by Gabe Cohen, Google Apps Product Manager

We're always looking to make it even easier for companies to move to Google Apps. And some customers are reluctant to step into the future without bringing along the email from their past.

Not long ago, we launched an email migration tool that lets administrators move email from their existing IMAP mail systems to Google Apps, so users didn't have to leave their old mail behind. Since then, more than a hundred million messages have been migrated. But this solution didn't solve the whole problem. If your existing solution didn't support IMAP, you were out of luck.

Today, we're excited to announce the new Google Apps Email Migration API, which can move email from anywhere – not just IMAP systems – to the Premier, Education or Partner Editions of Google Apps. If you need to migrate email from your users' desktops, migrate email from a server not supported by the IMAP migration tool, or do a push migration because of your security policies, a tool built on this API could be the perfect answer.

A growing network of partners now offer helpful and affordable migration solutions to organizations switching to Google Apps. For example, using the Email Migration API, LimitNone has already built a tool called gMOVE, which can move Microsoft® Outlook® calendars, email and contacts into Google Apps. You can find gMOVE and other migration solutions for your organization in our Solutions Gallery.

If you're interested in building an email migration tool yourself using this API, you can create an administrator or end user tool to migrate email extracted from any data source. The email migration API is based on GData, so it's easy to use, and you can learn all about it on the Google Code website. If you are a developer, and think organizations using Google Apps might be interested in what you've built, we could list your offering in our Solutions gallery. Please let us know by submitting your solution.

This API is just the latest in a stream (read, torrent) of innovations we've rolled out this year for Google Apps email. In case you missed any of those improvements, we'd thought we'd list some of the highlights here:

• IMAP support, so you can use your favorite mail clients like Outlook®, Thunderbird® or your iPhone® with Google Apps
• More email storage, up to a whopping 25 gigabytes per users (room for hundreds of thousands of messages)
• 99.9% uptime guarantee, so you can count on Gmail to be available when you need it
  
• Policy management and message recovery, putting more security and compliance controls into the hands of administrators
• Inbound email routing and email gateway support for pilot configurations, dual delivery and mixed messaging environments
• Email migration tool for moving old mail from an IMAP server to Google Apps

Posted by Adam Swidler, Product Marketing Manager, Postini

One of the things I've heard a lot since joining Google is "speed matters," and it's been great to have a hand in the rate at which we innovate.

In that spirit, today we're taking another step toward making corporate email communications more secure, compliant and productive. We've started rolling out a new set of tools to help Postini and Google Apps Premier Edition customers protect and manage their electronic communications.

The new capabilities include:

• content-based policy for inbound and outbound email traffic for more protection of sensitive data, such as credit card and Social Security numbers
• the ability to create advanced policy rules based on content patterns and apply a variety of dispositions including logging, routing to reviewer queue, bcc: to reviewer queue, bounce and encrypt using Postini Encryption Services
• new granular content inspection capabilities for messages and attachments
• email security advancements for faster detection and protection of viruses and spam, including early detection of zero hour threats, additional defenses against botnet attacks and new dispositions for encrypted files

The content policy management capabilities and the new email security advancements are being made available as part of the Postini Email Security service and Google Apps Premier Edition at no additional cost.

As part of this launch, we are also rolling out enhancements to the Postini Message Archiving service. These are available to Postini Message Archiving Customers and Google Apps Premier Edition users for an additional fee.

Of course, since our services are hosted, users get access to these tools quickly and seamlessly. Read more.

Coming just eight weeks after the acquisition, and six weeks from the first integration of Postini and Google Apps, we hope this launch is further evidence that Google is committed to continued investment in Postini solutions, as well as accelerated delivery to our customers. Speed does matter!

Posted by Ryan Pollock, Product Marketing

The Google Analytics team recently introduced some great new features. Most relevant for this audience was the introduction of site search reporting, which allows you to link your website's internal search engine to your Analytics account.



Google Search Appliance, Google Mini and Custom Search Business Edition customers can leverage the new capabilities provided by Google Analytics and further improve the site search experience on their website by better understanding visitor behavior. You can see what people are searching for on your site and access a number of reports that detail user conversions and query refinements. Configuring your Analytics account to recognize your search engine is easy -- you need only specify the URL for your search engine and identify the query parameters.

Avinash Kaushik, a web analytics evangelist, wrote up this great post about how to use site search reporting to gain insight into what works on your website. The new Analytics functionality includes a number of reports, each of which gives unique insight into your users and your website. With most Analytics reports, you can only interpret what the user really wants. These site search reports are a gold mine of data. When people search for something on your site they are voting for exactly what they want to see. If you provide it, great. If not, they are on to another website. This is the one place where you can see truly qualitative data about what visitors are looking for and adjust your site content accordingly.

Perhaps most interesting in Avinash's example was the comparison of conversions for users who search and those who don't. Conversion for users who didn't search was 3.6%, but for users who did search, conversion was 21%. Presumably, visitors who search are more qualified and likely to convert, but this statistic certainly speaks to the value of having search on your site. Your site's visitor wants to search, and when he does, he's more likely to convert.

If your site does not have search capabilities, checkout the Google Enterprise search products to learn how they can help you to power search on your website.

When properly used, the new Google Analytics reporting will allow you to calculate an ROI for your search investment. If you're not already using Google Analytics on your website, this is one great reason to give it a try. Oh and by the way, Google Analytics is free.

Posted by Scott McMullan, Google Enterprise Partner Team

Last night's OpenSocial announcement highlighted the simple idea that the web becomes more valuable for users when they can more easily interact with friends and colleagues.

OpenSocial supports this by providing a common set of APIs between a social application and a website. Developers can reach a broad set of OpenSocial-enabled websites using a single HTML/JavaScript-based API, and websites can tap in to the creative energy of a large pool of third party app developers.

As members of Google's Enterprise team, we have a particular passion for serving business users and use cases, which is why we're extra-excited about the business apps OpenSocial will enable.

In fact, in addition to the support announced last night by folks like LinkedIn, Viadeo, and Oracle, we're proud that several Google Enterprise professional partners participated in last night's announcement with demos to preview how OpenSocial will help businesses:

• Salesforce.com demonstrated its platform support as an OpenSocial-enabled website (video, demo about three quarters in)
  
• Theikos and Appirio created OpenSocial apps that run inside Salesforce.com
• LimitNone's iBuild app can now add OpenSocial-powered features to its Gadget-based apps

iBuild empowers non-technical users to create lightweight apps that run as Google Gadgets in iGoogle. Apps like team to-do lists or shared contact managers in a business context or tracking sports teams in a consumer context come to mind. And now, by adding OpenSocial support, those apps can take advantage of social features like publishing actions to activity streams in any OpenSocial-enabled site.

Appirio's Google Gadget Builder for Salesforce.com, which currently allows you to display dynamic "dashboards" of Salesforce.com data on iGoogle, will take a similar approach by incorporating OpenSocial-powered features.

Both developers and users win because these products will work across a growing number of OpenSocial-enabled sites.

If you're a developer and would like to learn more about OpenSocial applications for business, you can start today by signing up for an Orkut or Salesforce.com OpenSocial sandbox account. The list of OpenSocial websites for business will grow over time, but these two early adopters enable you to start exploring today.

Posted by Rob Painter, Senior Federal Manager

The coffee and bagels were great, but it was more than a free breakfast that convinced folks to battle the traffic into downtown DC for the Google Federal User Group meeting. A few hundred government employees and engineers from the aerospace industry gathered in Washington DC to experience firsthand how ESRI's GIS product offering and Google's Earth and Maps enterprise products can powerfully co-exist and inter-operate to deliver an exciting and intuitive user experience.

Michael Bradshaw, Google's Head of Federal and Jeff Peters, ESRI's Federal Director, kicked off the event and set the stage for a number of live demonstrations. First, members of ESRI's technical marketing team walked the audience through a short series of presentations that highlighted ArcGIS Desktop, ArcGIS Server, and data from ESRI's Business Analyst with interactive results seamlessly presented within Google Earth and on Google Maps. The demos showed how someone unfamiliar to DC could find an apartment using Google Earth, ArcGIS server and external web content sources such as Craigslist. The demo also showed how one could edit vector data in ArcGIS by moving and adding nodes within a dataset and then via a network linked KML that referenced an instance of ArcGIS Server, changes in the data were promptly reflected on Google Earth globe. Additional demonstrations showed models combining ArcGIS and Google Earth data on issues such as international health and the socioeconomic risks intrinsic in natural disasters. Google engineers then demoed the new releases of Google Earth Fusion 3.0 and Google Earth Enterprise Client (EC) 4.0. We've previously shared some of our customers’ reactions to the launch of these new Google Earth Enterprise products and posted them on this blog and we also shared some of the specific details of these new products themselves on Google's official Lat Long Blog.

We look forward to continuing to work with ESRI and our customers to leverage the power of geospatial information. If you would like to learn more about our products and how we compliment an ESRI enterprise or want information on how to register for the next Federal User Group meeting or in, contact us here.

Posted by Pam Saenger, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Greetings from Interop, NYC.

Matt Glotzbach, Enterprise Product Management Director, announced this morning during his keynote the launch of IMAP support for Gmail, the newest Google Apps release since the suite of communication and collaboration tools debuted in February of this year. That's right -- you can now sync actions taken in your Gmail account across all of your devices, instantly and automatically.

Matt's keynote also dealt with innovation best practices and included some startling facts (for example, approximately 2.4 billion people -- 1/3 of the world's population --carry a cell phone; every minute, there are 7 hours of video uploaded to YouTube). He explained that there are multiple ways that companies can innovate successfully, all of them important and none of them mutually exclusive: product, process, service and business model innovation. Matt also talked about the importance of building products with the aim of meeting user needs and placing an emphasis on iteration and rapid change.

Posted by Matthew Glotzbach, Product Management Director, Enterprise Team

Working at Google has its perks - great food, amazing people, the shuttle to and from work. But one of the best "perks" of working at Google is being in an environment that is designed to bring out the best in all of us. Every aspect of Google is tailored to the individual and the team, and making those teams more productive, fostering creativity, and designing solutions to really big problems that can have game-changing effects.

I also count myself lucky to spend some time now and then with Douglas Merrill, VP of Engineering and our CIO here at Google. I've learned a lot from him in our conversations, and now he's shared some of his thoughts on the role of IT and the future it will play in companies in the latest issue of CIO magazine. I found it an insightful read, and highly recommend it to anyone who has a technology role in business.

Posted by Ryan Pollock, Product Marketing

We're pleased to announce that we're awarding the Google Enterprise Superstar award to three businesses that have implemented the Google Mini to power search on their public websites.

Steve Suhocki of the GAIN Capital Group chose the Google Mini to power search on www.forex.com , their online foreign exchange trading platform. Read the Forex.com story.

Kris Arnold implemented site search with a Google Mini on NUVO.net, Indianapolis' popular weekly publication for real news in local, politics, culture and art. Kris' likes using KeyMatches to pair popular searches with the content users will probably be most interested in. Read the NUVO.net story.

And last but not least, we're awarding the Google Enterprise Superstar award to MotorcyleUSA for implementing site search with a Google Mini on MotorcycleUSA.com, and for using a Google Search Appliance on their ecommerce store front at Motorcycle-Superstore.com . Read the MotorcycleUSA story.

Congratulations to our latest award winners!

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Lead Product Manager for Search, Google Enterprise

Today we announced the release of Google Search Appliance version 5.0. We're not often big on version numbers, but for us and our customers who need to find information throughout their enterprise, that "5.0" means something. Among other things, it represents five years of experience tackling the challenges of search for businesses. With the Google Search Appliance we've taken much of what we've learned about serving results efficiently and at scale to millions of users worldwide and brought it to the enterprise.

And we went further. We added enterprise-grade security to ensure users only see the content to which they have access. We also gave more control over system set-up and administration without sacrificing the relevance and ease of use you expect from Google. Along with more control, we extended the reach even deeper into the enterprise. Users will now be able to search for data residing across the numerous siloed content repositories that have become commonplace in large businesses, including EMC Documentum, IBM FileNet, OpenText Livelink, and Microsoft Sharepoint, through the same easy to use interface, in the same intuitive way.

Version 5.0 also represents a wealth of innovation potential. So we've also launched Google Enterprise Labs as a way to share some of what we're continuing to explore. With Do-it-Yourself KeyMatch, for example, users can promote results they feel should appear at the top of the page. We recognize that institutional knowledge not only resides in documents, but in people. We use Do-it-Yourself KeyMatch inside Google -- an experiment that's both social and technical. And the results, so to speak, have been great.

Finally, 5.0 represents what we hope for the future in enterprise search, which means both more (in terms of reach and relevance) and less (in terms cost, administrative overhead and wasted time). It's a perfect balance we will continue to pursue.

Posted by Maureen Bradford, Product Marketing Manager

Last year we launched the capability for organizations to get a domain name and set up Google Apps from our website. Now we're proud to announce more options for streamlining set up. We've launched a new program that allows organizations to sign up and be automatically configured for Google Apps directly from a favorite registrar or web hosting company. We're working with partners who automatically provision businesses for Google Apps. For these customers, we're taking set up off the plate - replacing manual domain and DNS configuration - so that they can focus on running their business. For our partners, we provide a provisioning API and co-branded experience to attract new customers, as well as financial incentives to generate a new revenue stream. Check out two newly-launched partner sites, www.Name.com and www.DomainSite.com, who are helping their new SMB customers get up and running faster. If you are a domain registrar, web host, or other type of professional services provider to small businesses and would like more information please contact us.

Posted by Vijay Koduri, Product Marketing Manager

A couple of weeks ago, we exhibited at a conference specifically for call center managers, the 'ACCE' show in San Diego. The first question everyone asked was, "What on earth is Google doing at a call center show?" With an attendance at more than 1,500 people, we had to answer this question quite a few times!

Our story was simple - call centers want to provide faster customer service. Their agents need to access the right information at the right time. These agents are used to Google at home, so why not give them Google at work?

The attendees really understood the story once we explained how one of our customers, a global auto manufacturer, was using the Google Search Appliance. Their agents would get questions like "Why are the brakes on my 1996 hatchback model squeaky?" While much of the information resided in 22,000 documents in their knowledgebase, their previous search system was not providing relevant results. Immediately after piloting the Google Search Appliance, they said "Straight out of the box, without any customization, we were seeing a lot better results with the Google Search Appliance."

Needless to say, the attendees of the ACCE show quickly 'got it' and understood exactly why Google was at a call center show. (Of course, from our end, the show being in San Diego was reason enough :-)

To find out more about our call center solution, read our white paper.

Posted by Ryan Pollock, Product Marketing

Last year we established the Google Enterprise Superstars award to recognize companies that use Google's enterprise search solutions in particularly innovative ways.

Today we're announcing three new award winners.

Williams Scotsman International, a leading provider of modular space solutions, has earned a Google Enterprise Superstar award for deploying the Google Mini for site search on www.willscot.com and for setting up a different Mini to power search on their intranet inside the company. Read their story here.

eCompressed air has won the Google Enterprise Superstar award for using the Mini on ecompressedair.com, its e-commerce business-to-business website for the compressed air market. Site search powered by the Google Mini has increased website transactions by a whopping 204%! Click here to read their story.

ESAB Welding has earned the Google Enterprise Superstar award by improving their site's user experience by adopting a Google Mini. ESAB Welding previously had separate search engines for its product catalog and for its company information, but with the Google Mini, they were able to create a search engine for both kinds of content, thus simplifying the user experience on their site. Read how the Google Mini helped them.

We'll be announcing additional Enterprise Superstars over the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

Posted by Attila Bodis, Software Engineer

A few months ago at the Web 2.0 conference, our CEO Eric Schmidt, in conversation with John Battelle, announced our plans to launch an online presentation application this summer. Well, summer is winding down, and today, people who use Google Apps can create, share, upload and collaborate on online presentations in real time. As part of Google Docs (formerly Google Docs & Spreadsheets), your presentations can be edited from anywhere, shared with specific individuals or an entire organization, and viewed in presentation mode simultaneously by distributed teams.

Maybe you need to revamp an outdated sales presentation -- import it into Google Docs and invite your colleagues to chime in. When it's finished, you can drive the presentation directly from Google Docs as your field sales team looks on. Or maybe you just found out that your group has been called on to deliver a presentation in a couple of hours -- create a presentation from scratch, add your teammates as collaborators, and work on it simultaneously to get it done faster.

For a while now, Google Apps users have asked for a presentations feature within Google Docs to make it easier to create and share presentations online, so this launch is particularly exciting for the Google Docs team. We look forward to developing increased functionality for Google Docs, and we hope to have more to share with you soon.

For more on this, read the post on the main Google Blog.

Posted by Ryan Pollock, Product Marketing

Today I'm at Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference. Marc Benioff just unveiled Force.com and the new VisualForce service for customizing application user interfaces. But rather than write up a review of the keynote, we wanted to share Salesforce.com's story about how they use our latest SaaS product, Google Custom Search Business Edition.

A few weeks ago I sat down with Adam Gross, Salesforce.com's VP of Developer Relations, to hear how developer.salesforce.com uses Google Custom Search. It's interesting to hear Adam stress how important search is to developers, and it's great that Salesforce.com was able to quickly implement our search solution to provide search across a large number of disparate websites. You can't even tell that the search engine is powered by Google since there's no Google branding.

To hear the story in Adam's own words, check out the video below.

And if you're interested in hearing more about what Google and Salesforce are up to with SaaS, we'll be at Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference for the rest of the week.

Posted by Jeff Ragusa, Enterprise Partner Team

Our collaboration with the fine folks at Salesforce.com continues to roll next week as we will be participating in their Dreamforce '07 user and developer conference. In fact we'll be there in a few different forms which speaks to the growing synergy between our organizations.

Given the hosted model leveraged by many of Google's business offerings, it makes sense that many of Salesforce's 35,000+ business customers have interest in complementary offerings from Google. To that end, we partnered with the Salesforce team this past June to make available our Adwords advertising platform right from within Salesforce Group Edition. So businesses can seamlessly manage their online advertising campaigns using Adwords and then convert the leads that get generated into new customers using Salesforce.com's CRM solution. We're also seeing a lot of interest in Google Apps from this customer base. So, in the Salesforce.com Campground, our product managers will be eagerly available each day of the conference to further discuss how you can take advantage of the Google Adwords integration and/or Google Apps.

Meanwhile on the developer and IT front, we're also seeing a lot of overlap in our respective communities. Google is exposing a growing set of functionality and content through its APIs and developers are realizing that they can use those APIs to enrich their own business applications. So in the developer track on Tuesday of the conference, we'll be hosting a breakout session discussing Google Gadgets, Google Data APIs, and Google Gears and their specific applicability to the business use case. We'll also welcome Google Enterprise Professional partners Appirio and Theikos who will show some of the recent ways in which they've built product that makes use of both Google and Salesforce technologies. And our developer programs engineers will be available for discussion Tuesday in the Developers Lounge, including a special featured session in the ADN theater during the lunch break.

So come check out the conference and visit us in the Campground, in the Developers Lounge, and at the breakout session talk. Salesforce is even offering a special 50% off deal for developers and customers new to their platform. See you there!

Posted by Cyrus Mistry, Enterprise Product Manager

We all know how google.com somehow miraculously finds the best documents for us - but did you know that a big part of that is based on a large synonym dictionary that was automatically generated using advanced Machine Learning techniques? One of the great advantages of owning a Google Search Appliance is that you get the benefit of what we've learned from billions of queries about words and their synonyms right in your box!

Query Expansion is a feature of the Google Search Appliance that intelligently expands the terms of the query based on the context to find more candidate documents. Query Expansion uses word stemming techniques (e.g . expanding "car" to "cars") and a list of common synonyms from Google's internal dictionary (e.g. expanding "car" to "automobile") to find all relevant documents. This feature can also optionally expand the query terms based on a custom dictionary that you upload to the appliance.

This feature is off by default. In most cases, you will usually see a marked increase in relevancy simply by enabling this feature.

There are 4 modes of Query Expansion from which to choose:

• None: Disables query expansion
• Standard: Enables query expansion using Google's built-in synonyms
• Local: Enables query expansion using only the synonyms that you upload to the appliance
• Full: Enables query expansion using both Google's built-in synonyms and the files that you upload to the appliance

So, if you have not uploaded any of your own custom synonyms to the appliance, then you should choose Standard. However, if you have uploaded your own custom synonyms to the appliance (highly recommended for company-specific colloquial or jargon), then choose Full.

Don't be shy... turn it on and try it out! To test more deterministically the effects of query expansion, stay tuned for a blog post on possible search quality evaluation techniques.

Happy expanding!

Posted by Jonathan Rochelle, Google Spreadsheets Product Manager

This past week I attended the Office 2.0 conference, organized by It|Redux, for the second year in a row. Last year was a special year for me and the Docs & Spreadsheets team. We publicly launched the combined product—the Spreadsheets product in Google Labs came together with the Writely product we had acquired earlier that year. We’ve spent the last 11 months improving the product with great feedback from users, who are a combination of consumers and business groups. It’s hard to believe that the Docs & Spreadsheets product hasn’t even hit its first birthday yet.

That’s the main thing that struck me about this conference—it’s a quickly evolving space that is maturing beyond its precise chronology, like a precocious kid whose parents say, “She is four, going on 16.” That’s what web-based applications seem like. We feel the “watch this trick” excitement, but with high expectations and the anticipation of a fast-moving development cycle. In fact, during the “Death of the App” panel, in which our own Rajen Sheth participated, one attendee asked whether the space will cool off as the novelty of the technology diminishes. Ramana Rao of iCurrent responded matter-of-factly with, “The coolness is already gone"—which to me holds some truth. It certainly seems that businesses now expect the interaction and accessibility of the web in any new business app they procure—they aren’t enticed by just the "wow" factor any longer.

From left: Frank Zamani, Rajen Sheth, Ramana Rao, Greg Olsen, Danny Kolke, Mark Bagley, MC Greg Ruff

In that same session, Dan Farber asked the panel why there was so much optimism and confidence when all this activity “isn’t even a blip on [the] competitive radar yet.” The panelists had some good answers. My answer goes something like this: In any technology shift, there is opportunity for new ideas and new winners. The potential and reward for small, creative teams to build products and, hopefully, successful businesses, is thankfully greater than the fear of losing to the status quo or reliance on business-as-usual. That’s why this conference is so interesting—even as the space matures, there are still plenty of great ideas coming from new players.

Thanks to all of you who remind me that inertia and fear of change never bring improvements, and that the best ideas come from the optimistic and energetic pursuit of something better.

Kevin Smith, Head of Enterprise Partnerships

If you haven't yet caught today's news, global services provider Capgemini just announced their partnership with us and their focus on Google Apps for large enterprises. The crux of their announcement is that they'll be integrating Google Apps into their world-class managed desktop services, bringing email and collaboration tools to employees of large enterprises who do not currently have the right tools (or any tools, in some cases).

We're very excited about this, since it means many of our larger customers will have access to the high-quality services and support that Capgemini provides to its clients. Thousands of large, medium, and small organization are adopting Google Apps daily, and this partnership now gives larger enterprises--who often have very specialized requirements--a new choice of a trusted advisor to help them make the transition.

For details on what Capgemini is offering, I suggest going directly to the source: http://www.capgemini.com/google

Posted by Salim Parak, Google Enterprise Training Team

While it is simple and easy to configure your Google Search Appliance or Google Mini to crawl content and serve search results, our engineers are hard at work adding more and more functionality. Why not learn about how to take advantage of these features?

Everyone has a different learning style, whether it be self-exploration or in the classroom. You can select the content delivery option that fits your need best:

Browse our library of self-paced training videos (current customers only)
Explore the online tutorials
Take an instructor led class from our certified training partner

Also note, Google partner Fig Leaf Software will be delivering courses in San Francisco this September. For our Mini customers, they are offering an introductory special on their new Google Mini 1 day course.

Stay tuned, we are working on offering more instructor led content in locations closer to you.

Posted by Cyrus Mistry, Enterprise Product Manager

So, for those of you that have unwrapped your blue or yellow box with excitement and are wearing the Google T-shirt proudly, the fun is just beginning... As promised in my 'How to take your Enterprise Search to the next level' blog post from a few weeks ago, I plan to continue this series of posts by introducing best practices that will provide your searchers with the ultimate search experience.

First, the Google Mini and the Google Search Appliance make it very easy to stay current on our software. As part of your support agreement, you can download all software updates and releases right from our support site.

Unlike more bulky enterprise search solutions, staying current on Google software is a built-in feature of the version manager within the appliance so there's no reason not to do it!

Here are the top 10 reasons to make sure you are running the latest release (4.6.4 G70) today!

1. Integration with Google Analytics
2. Google Sitemaps export
3. Enhanced security - support for NTLMv2
4. Query expansion in multiple languages
5. New crawl reporting
6. New reboot and shutdown buttons
7. Source Biasing - you can let the appliance know which URL patterns are more authoritative (GSA only)
   
8. Preview of Dynamic Result Clustering (GSA only)
   
9. Google products are always fast - but we've made this release even faster!
10. So you can follow along with these blogs and get the most out of your search appliance!
    

The newest releases can always be found at http://support.google.com/enterprise and you can always find more information on the new features in our release notes located at: https://support.google.com/enterprise/doc/gsa/relnotes/relnotes_464G70_O.html#NewFeatures.

Upgrading couldn't be easier:

1. Download the system update file from the support site
2. Log in to Version Manager and Install the file you just downloaded by following the easy wizard prompts
   
3. Repeat the above steps for the software update file
4. Generate and test a new index
5. Once everything is working fine, accept the new update

The best thing about upgrading is, before you decide to switch over, you can have both versions of the software running in parallel! Your users will continue to see the older version, but you and your team can test out the newer version. Once you're satisfied that everything is working great, you can make the switch over. Google has provided a built-in QA environment right on your appliance!

To see detailed step-by-step instructions, Mini customers can visit https://support.google.com/enterprise/doc/mini/00/update_index_page.html and GSA customers can visit https://support.google.com/enterprise/doc/gsa/00/update_index_page.html .

Stay tuned for examples of how you can leverage some of these great new features!

Posted by Ryan Pollock, Product Marketing

It's been more than a month since we launched Custom Search Business Edition, and already thousands of websites have adopted it for site search. When we launched, businesses could use our online checkout process to buy site search up to 50,000 web pages. A number of businesses asked us about searching more than 50,000 pages, so today we added two more options to the online Custom Search Business Edition offering. We've introduced two new plans that businesses can purchase online:

• Search up to 100,000 web pages: $850 per year
  
• Search up to 300,000 web pages: $2,250 per year

If you want to search more than 300,000 pages, contact us.

Businesses can sign up for Custom Search Business Edition in just a few minutes. If you want to learn more about Google's site search solutions, we'd also recommend you attend a webinar.

Posted by Dave Armstrong, Product Marketing Manager, Google Enterprise


With Google Apps and Google Custom Search Business Edition we've been touting the benefits of hosted services. However, this doesn't mean we're trying to move everything to the cloud. Instead, we continue to focus on offering the right software architecture for a specific job - desktop software, appliance, client-server or hosted.

For example, we chose an appliance architecture for our Google Mini in order to simplify installation and upkeep, provide more complete control over how frequently content is indexed and to securely search both public and private content - simple yet sophisticated.

We recently added many new features to the Google Mini, and it continues to garner great accolades. In a recent ZDNet product review, Jonathan Bennett comments that of search products available today, the Google Mini is "...probably the simplest to get working, yet highly capable and configurable." Add that to the 4 star rating that the Mini received in a June PC Magazine review and you have a happy product manager and even happier customers.

Posted by Cyrus Mistry, Enterprise Product Manager

12,000 employees? 56 offices worldwide? Nearly 100 million documents? Yup - we'd say our enterprise search problem was pretty big... Of course, we were able to get a great discount on a couple powerful Google Search Appliances! :)

In fact, we really exploited the power of the Google Search Appliance in many unique and interesting ways so we thought this blog could be a great place to let you in on some of our Intranet search secrets and best practices...

To start with, we chose to place a checkbox underneath the search box which allows users to pass their search queries to an alternate front end where we can try neat experiments (like different ways to return the results, new and interesting OneBox implementations, etc.). Since only some percentage checks the box, it gives us a great way to test out new ideas and new technologies before releasing them to the main search results page. For instance, you might want to use this alternate front end to test out a different look-and-feel for your XSLT; you might want to filter out certain domains to see if it improves the results; you might want to try out some new OneBox modules; you might want to turn on/off Query Expansion (word stemming, synonyms, etc.); you might want to try source biasing. In future posts we'll talk about the many ways in which we've used this Next search screen.

To add an alternate experimental front end and a checkbox to get to it is not very difficult. Click here to see the simple 3-step process.

The screenshot below shows all the tremendous amount of rich information we provide when users even enter just a simple three letter query.

This is an actual live screenshot (with some data sanitization, of course) showing what users see once they query for 'gfs'. You'll see that, in addition to the highly relevant search results, the user is able to see a variety of useful OneBox implementations such as Googler information and user-created bookmarks, they can segment their search to just tech documents, they can narrow their search even further, or, they can add their own KeyMatch if they didn't find the result they wanted.

In upcoming blog posts, we'll talk about how to implement some of these other features. Some of you may choose to follow along with these posts and try out these methods and we encourage it! If you ever have any questions, please feel free to join or write to our Google Search Appliance group at http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Search-Appliance.

Stay tuned for much more!

Posted by Scott McMullan, Google Enterprise Partner Team

In the spirit of celebrating small successes, I want to give a shout out to Google Enterprise Professional partner LimitNone, who recently passed the 100 customer mark for their gMOVE/gXFER Google Apps migration products.

These tools help Microsoft Outlook and Gmail users migrate their data to Google Apps, and complement some of the other migration tools available today, including our own IMAP migration feature.

Congrats to the team at LimitNone!

Posted by David Bercovich, Product Marketing Manager

We launched the latest version of Google Earth Enterprise today, with a number of new features, including the ability to display enterprise search results (from say, the Google Search Appliance) on the globe inside Google Earth. You can read all about it on the Google geo blog.

We're very excited to enable customers to easily publish Google Earth Enterprise datasets in a browser, so that employees across the organization can leverage the power of Google Earth. I thought I'd share a little about what our customers are saying:

• Dell is pleased to take advantage of the new features of Google Earth Enterprise for both marketing and customer support. By visualizing global website traffic at www.dell.com in Google Earth, we are building a stronger sense of community with our internal and external partners through awareness and better visibility around traffic trends and patterns. In addition, our global Enterprise Command Center gains a global view of customer activity at a glance, ensuring optimum responsiveness for customers with Enterprise Silver, Gold and Platinum Plus support. Google Earth gives us the intuitive yet powerful interface to critical business information that we need to manage effectively in today's fast paced business environment.

• Norsk Hydro welcomes Google Earth Enterprise as an innovative tool for our global exploration efforts. With Google Earth's intuitive 3D geo-browsing experience, researchers can visualize data more effectively, allowing us to explore areas of interest more efficiently than ever. Deployed in our Research Centre in Bergen, Norway, the Google Earth Enterprise system is used to synthesize large quantities of global data including high resolution imagery and terrain models and dozens of vector layers that are relevant to Hydro's interests. It's an eye opening experience to see years of accumulated geological and geophysical data appear with just a few clicks.

• Google Earth Enterprise enhances our ability to identify, track and update critical infrastructure throughout Alabama. Our Virtual Alabama information sharing database is anchored by Google Earth Enterprise. The incorporation of Google Earth Enterprise into the Virtual Alabama model will dramatically improve the speed and accessibility of Virtual Alabama to our user population.

We'd love to hear how Google Earth Enterprise is helping your business benefit from geographic information, so please let us know.

Posted by Matthew Glotzbach, Product Management Director, Google Enterprise

One thing we've all learned from the Internet is that just because you see something in "print," it doesn't mean that's the whole story, or that it's entirely factual. You always need to check the source and make sure it's trustworthy. I was reminded of that point recently when I received a white paper published by Autonomy, one of our enterprise search competitors.

The topic of the paper was, oddly enough, Google. Let me first note that I was surprised that the Autonomy marketing folks took the time to write a whole paper (nicely formatted and all) on our enterprise search efforts.

That notwithstanding, the more I read, the more concerned I became. The paper would lead a customer or prospect to believe a number of things about Google that are just fundamentally not true. Inaccuracies about our enterprise ranking algorithms, and downright fabrications about our security and access control capabilities. The text is an amalgamation of hearsay and speculation attempting to push customers away from Google and toward their competitive product.

I decided the best course of action was to both set the record straight, and remind everyone of a key lesson. So for the record, let me call out some specific points:

1. Relevancy: The paper states that Google "relies on rich linking technology that was built for the Web to determine relevancy." This is false, and it's misleading. Google's enterprise search algorithms rely on hundreds of factors, only one of which is PageRank, to determine the most relevant content within an enterprise. We leverage the work of the largest engineering team focused on search and information retrieval in the world to solve this complex search problem.

2. Reach / Aggregation: Autonomy states in their paper that "Non secure web servers can be indexed out of the box but, integrating information from databases, file systems and content management applications into Google is considerably more complex -- and in some cases impossible." Google's appliance can natively reach into all content stores in an enterprise, including web servers, file servers, databases, document management systems, and business applications. All of this is offered as out of the box (or, ironically enough in the case of the appliance, "in the box") functionality. You can take a Google Search Appliance or Google Mini from its cardboard box to serving content from file systems and databases in less than 30 minutes. What's the setup time for other enterprise search systems?

3. Languages Support: The paper reports that Google's search is "language dependent technology that currently only supports 28 languages." It is true that we have a feature that supports the auto-detection of 28 languages, and if your query was in one of those 28, we'll offer you results in that language. And of course, offer you all results as well. This is a popular end-user feature on Google.com. However, our indexing and search is by no means restricted to those 28 languages.

4. Stemming: Autonomy states that "Google does not provide advanced language support such as stemming." This one is just wrong. A while back we added a query expansion feature which performs the same function as stemming, but just does it smarter. Anybody can do things like taking "park" and make it "parks" -- but in a lot of cases, we've seen that unintelligent stemming actually will make results worse. Drawing off of the intelligence derived from billions of queries, we know that a good solution will detect context, and expand a query like "city park" to also include "public park" but not "city parking." So, whether you want to call what the appliance does "smart stemming" or "Context Sensitive Query Expansion" (the latter being what our marketing team chose) it's a core feature of our product.

5. Security: In perhaps the most egregious statement in the whole document, the paper states that "Google provides open access to most documents -- a potential hazard for businesses needing to keep proprietary information under wraps." From the beginning, we have provided fast, accurate, and SECURE search within the enterprise. Our document-level security and access control capabilities ensure that users only see the content they are allowed to see, without requiring customers to deploy a new security system or undergo complex integrations. Google's appliances are used in the most secure environments including Fortune 500 and Global 1000 companies as well as numerous government agencies.

That's it for setting the record straight. I have by no means covered every point, but I think you get the picture. We have been working for more than 5 years with a team dedicated specifically to solving the enterprise search problem, and hold a market leadership position with over 9,000 enterprise search customers. We leverage the work and innovation of the world's largest search company, and deliver that consumer powered innovation to the enterprise. But you don't have to take my word for it: feel free to talk to any one of our thousands of delighted customers.

And about that lesson: Just because it's printed and looks official, doesn't mean it's accurate.

Posted by Kevin Gough, Sr. Product & Marketing Manager

Nitin Mangtani, Product Manager for Google Custom Search Business Edition, will be a featured guest on our weekly public site search webinar series. Nitin will be available to answer questions about Google Custom Search, our new hosted site search offering, or upcoming cricket Test matches. You can sign up for a session on Jul 25 @ 11am PDT or Aug 1 @ 11am PDT.

Posted by Bob Purvy & Robert Escorcio, Google Engineers

From the very beginning, we've recognized that, in order for customers to get the most out of Google Apps, they will want to enjoy the Apps but not rip out their infrastructure to do so. As a result, we've tried to have open APIs to our applications and to Google Apps administration. One key area is corporate directories, and most companies already manage their users through their LDAP or equivalent directory service.

To give customers a jump start in migrating and synchronizing users from their LDAP directory, we've created an LDAP synchronization tool that we are releasing on code.google.com. However, while many companies have an LDAP directory, they often use it in different ways. Because of this, we've decided to release this into open source, so many developers can improve and adapt the tool to their own needs. The tool is written in Python, and uses the Google Apps User Provisioning API to create, delete, and suspend users.

Best of all, we eat our own dogfood, and we've used this tool here at Google to synchronize with our own LDAP directory. We run our own business on Google Apps, and we want other companies to benefit from this effort.

We hope to see a thousands flowers bloom, and look forward to other developers adding to and morphing the tool for their own needs. You can find the project at: http://code.google.com/p/google-apps-for-your-domain-ldap-sync/

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Product Manager for Enterprise Search

In our nearly six years in enterprise search, we’ve always looked to develop offerings that would help businesses of all sizes find and share the right information with their employees, customers and target audiences when they needed it. Today, we’re building on this heritage by announcing our newest solution for enterprise public website search: Custom Search Business Edition (CSBE).

CSBE builds on the Google Custom Search Engine -- a hosted search solution introduced last October that allows organizations to create a website search engine and search results that are tailored to their point of view. Since our launch, businesses have asked for increased flexibility and support. We're addressing these needs with CSBE. Businesses that want further control over results presentation and integration with their website can obtain results through XML. Businesses now have the option to turn off ads and can have further control over branding. In addition, CSBE provides options for email and phone support. You can sign up for CSBE starting at $100 per year for searching up to 5,000 pages.

We think this addition to our enterprise suite of search tools will be just the thing for the millions of businesses lacking the technical resources to set up search for their websites. We also expect Business Edition to offer a much-needed boost to site owners whose entire company depends on their ability to guide visitors to the right information about their company and its offerings as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Here's how to obtain CSBE for your business.

Posted by Jens Scheffler, Software Engineer, Google Apps Team

Since we first launched it in August 2006, Google Apps has become one of our most flexible offerings. It's helping to meet the needs of family domains, businesses of all sizes, Internet Service Providers and universities. Starting today, we're extending the Education Edition of Google Apps to registered nonprofits.

We're excited about this development not only because nonprofits, like universities, can benefit from access to powerful technology tools that don't strain overburdened budgets, but because we believe our technologies should promote as much of a positive impact in the non-commercial world as we hope they do for commercial enterprises.

In addition to the hosted suite of communication and collaboration tools such as email, calendaring, and online document-sharing -- available for free through Google Apps Standard Edition -- nonprofits can now access additional product and support offerings available to universities at no additional cost, including:

• Email migration tools to help transfer existing inboxes to Google Apps
• 24/7 assistance, including phone support for critical issues
• Extensibility APIs to integrate with existing IT systems

Many nonprofits including the Nonprofit Technology Network, Mercy Corps, Idealist.org, and the East Bay Community Recovery Project have already moved their IT infrastructure over to Google Apps with positive results. Ltech Consulting, one of Google's Enterprise Professionals, has even begun offering discounted Google Apps services to nonprofit groups.

We couldn't be happier about enabling a wide range of nonprofits to carry out their incredibly important work. To find out more or sign up, visit www.google.com/a/npo.