2008 was an action-packed year for Google Apps for Education. We grew by 300% since last year, released two new products: Google Sites and Google Video, heard directly from thousands of students on our cross-country road trip across the U.S., celebrated our two-year anniversary, and fostered new relationships with schools across the globe who have decided to make the move to Google Apps.

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Google Apps for Education Team

We are excited that our 10th Enterprise Labs experiment in just over a year is also the 5th experiment (see others like our Google Apps Integration) that lets Google Search Appliance users reach securely into the cloud, tapping into the vast resources of the internet and Google's latest and greatest technologies.  Many of our enterprise search customers have dozens of offices all over the world with tens of millions documents indexed in a host of different languages.  Before today, when users searched for a topic, the search only returned documents that were in the same language as the query.  Cross-Language Enterprise Search instantly translates your Google Search Appliance query from one language to one or more other languages using Google's best-in-class translation engine.

It's amazing to think that just a little over ten years ago, the Internet was a technological toddler with only the most basic of networks, a limited number of users and an offering of information that today we would call mediocre. Following its expansion into popular use in the 1990s, the Internet has had a dramatic and positive impact on culture and commerce worldwide. Education, in particular, has benefited as people have discovered the strengths and uses of the Internet as it continues to grow and develop. A vast array of information now available to anyone with a connected computer and can be searched, added to, and developed collaboratively.

Laurie Wales, a Google Certified Teacher from the Catholic Schools Office in Newcastle Australia is well versed in the value that online tools can deliver in the classroom. In a presentation at the recent Victorian Information Technology Teachers Association Conference, Laurie discussed how "adopting a collaborative approach alongside an inquiry learning process allows educators to re-balance their roles as both leader/director and facilitator."

Laurie's well-received workshop, titled "Connect - Construct - Collaborate," included an overview of a wide range of Google applications available for educators. In her workshop, Laurie demonstrated how Google Sites can be used to create an e-portfolio allowing students to record, archive, and share their work with peers, parents, class, school, and the world – and showcased how developing projects using Google applications has the potential to bring teachers and students together by making them part of a "global community."

Google Docs, a set of free online collaborative tools for creating and sharing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, is also very popular in classrooms around the globe. Fendalton School in Christchurch, New Zealand uses Google Docs extensively to help staff collaborate on team meeting agendas, track meeting minutes, and manage their budgets. Fendalton School uses Google Docs in the classroom to help children as young as seven get organized and receive immediate peer feedback on class presentations through online forms.

Blogs are also used extensively across the school, allowing students to discuss key events and helping parents break through the typical "What did you do at school today?" silence. Fendalton School's new web site, FOS Live, is driven through Google docs and pulls in RSS feeds from class blogs to share learning as it happens in classrooms.

This has the potential to reduce traditional barriers between home and the school. In the video below, Fendalton School's Rob Clarke describes some of the uses of Google tools by Fendalton teachers and students.

If you're interested in learning more about using Google Apps in the classroom, you can find a number of online resources, including class plans, here. Or visit the Google for Educators Discussion Group to engage with other educators and share information about Google in education.

Posted by Andrew Mitchell, Google Apps Online Operations Senior Strategist

Google Apps provides powerful messaging and collaboration tools that people anywhere can use simply by accessing a browser. With no hardware to set up or software to install, many businesses are comfortable using Google Apps right out of the virtual box.

But some businesses with more complex IT scenarios prefer to work with an expert on issues like data migration and sync, or they need additional features to meet their business needs. Fortunately, Google's growing network of solution providers – developers, system integrators, and professional IT consultants – can help these businesses. They provide information on their services in the Google Solutions Marketplace.

One of our more active partners so far is SADA Systems, Inc. SADA is involved in many Google Apps projects, most recently helping Virgin Mobile USA develop a custom hosted Single Sign-On solution in just three days.

SADA also assisted Kings, Krebs, and Jurgens, a New Orleans-based law firm, in their recent deployment of Google Apps. Working side-by-side with the firm's IT staff, SADA ensured that the Google Apps deployment complied with the firm's legal requirements for retaining old emails. They also implemented a dual delivery email configuration that continues mail delivery to the legacy system as the firm evolves to Google Apps.

Finally, SADA helped Kent State University provision accounts and migrate data to Google Apps Education Edition for more than 120,000 students, faculty, and staff.

SADA is not alone in helping businesses succeed with Google Apps. Over the past eight months, hundreds of vendors have showcased their products and services on the Solutions Marketplace. They've shared descriptions of their setup and support services, products, training, and custom development work for businesses of all sizes. Migrating users from legacy systems, syncing data with programs and devices, and helping users get the most out of the collaborative features of Google Apps are just a few examples of the products and services these solution providers offer.

Curious about what a solutions provider might do for your business? Visit the Marketplace for contact information, or read more customer stories on the Solutions Marketplace blog.


Posted by Jimmy Caputo, Enterprise Partners Team

Do you ever wonder what it would feel like to be free – really free – of spam? Many businesses, it seems, are so busy keeping email threats at bay that they can't even imagine what things might be like if they didn't even think about spam. What would it be like to forget about email threats entirely and just get things done?

Steve Comeau, Rutgers University Athletics' IT Manager, shared a glimpse of that freedom with participants in Google's recent Cloud Camps. Walking participants through Rutgers Athletics' implementation of Google Message Security, powered by Postini, Steve made it clear: things really do get better when workgroups stop worrying about spam.

Facing high threat levels (more than 93% of incoming email was unwelcome), concerns with compliance and NCAA regulations, and slow performance as server-based solutions struggled to keep inboxes clean, Steve surveyed a range of options before choosing Google. Seeing email as "a lifeline" for his teams and coaching staff, he knew that he had one chance to get it right – and Google's hosted approach made the cut.

Citing ease of setup, price, security and "greenness" (Steve values the "no new hardware, no extra power" approach that Google's hosted solution delivers) as key decision factors, all at Rutgers Athletics cheer for the reliability and results that Google Message Security have enabled.

Steve shares the full story here:



Anyone interested in understanding how spam prevention really can create strategic value should tune in to Steve's play-by-play look at Rutgers' spam defense. He also weaves in a bit of sports trivia, for those of you who enjoy that. All in all, it's a great view of how Rutgers launched a winning strategy in a high-stakes game...and scored big in the fight against spam.


Posted by Sundar Raghavan, Google Enterprise Team

As we continue to expand the capabilities of Google Maps API Premier, such as offering access over https and supporting unlimited address-level reverse geocoding, we see that our users increasingly host applications across a large number of domains. In the past, Google Maps API sites have required that an an associated key be provided whenever the API is used, which required managing multiple keys for various domains. We've heard that this process can be cumbersome, and in response, we've introduced maps without keys, exclusively for Premier users.

What does this change? First, it's no longer necessary for Google Maps API Premier customers to supply a key when using the API. Second, we will no longer issue keys to new customers. In place of the key, we will now validate requests against a list of domains that we'll maintain for your client ID.

This change arrives in conjunction with the launch of our new site for technical documentation specific to Google Maps API Premier. Check it out for more details on how to update existing applications and take advantage of key-less mapping. For more information on adding Google Maps API Premier to your site, please contact us here.

Posted by Thor Mitchell, Technical Solutions Engineer, Google Maps API Premier

As employees increase their use of the web to be more productive at work, you want to be sure that your network is protected from the web malware that is also increasing to match. That's where Google Web Security comes in. Google Web Security uses the power of the cloud to proactively protect your network from the latest threats, without relying on outdated approaches like web filtering alone.



Posted by Tim Johnson, Google Enterprise Team

The countdown to the end of the year has begun and you may be searching for creative but low cost ways to spread a little holiday cheer. Today we shared some tips on the Official Google Blog (Part I) to show you how templates in Google Docs can help your business save time and money when sending cards and gifts to customers and colleagues. Here we share 5 more tips to help you promote your business, organize the holiday office party and make sure you stay within budget:

As information continues to pile up behind the corporate firewall, companies and executives are fast recognizing that effective findability is more than a nice-to-have -- it's a must-have for their business. In fact, in a recent survey by AIIM, 62% of respondents saw findability as "imperative or significant" to their overall business goals and success, while only 5% reported that it wasn't a factor.

Findability is a complex problem, and our goal is to provide businesses with a simple solution. That's why we've put together 'Enterprise Findability Without the Complexity' - a look into our philosophy and approach to search for businesses. We've noticed that approaches to findability can vary dramatically, which can have a significant impact on subsequent results. For instance, a traditional architecture, as demonstrated in this video, might include a plethora of servers, such as front-end web servers, index servers, query servers, database servers, and SAN storage. Not to mention load balancing servers, identity servers, disaster recovery servers, patch deployment servers, and volume license management servers. What a mouthful!

On the other hand, there is the appliance based model - i.e., one box that does it all. The Google Search Appliance can search 10 million documents with just one box, and pull information together from across a business - whether it lives in a database, intranet, business application or content management system. Not to mention it looks pretty snazzy too.

You can read the full document here. We look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Posted by Vijay Koduri, Product Marketing Manager

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Work often needs to get done when you're not at your own desk or using your own computer. Software-as-a-service has a natural advantage here, because your information is accessible from the cloud anywhere, with any internet-connected device. Since we launched Google Sync for BlackBerry, for example, workers have been able to keep their mobile devices in sync with Google Calendar.

Calendar access isn't the whole mobile story, though, and today we're adding BlackBerry contact syncing to Google Sync. This improvement offers two-way synchronization between your BlackBerry's built-in address book and your Google Apps contacts automatically over the air.

To use Google Sync or upgrade from the older version, visit m.google.com/sync from your BlackBerry browser.

By the way, Google Apps supports mobile access on many different phones, so take a look at our other Google Apps mobile options.

In today's economic climate you need to be more efficient with your IT budget. And since email is a key tool for almost every businesses, keeping spam and malware out of inboxes remains a top priority. In our experience, companies often overlook the productivity costs that spam and viruses have on their business. This simple ROI calculator lets you see how much spam can impact expenses and productivity, particularly if your current anti-spam solution is waning in effectiveness.

Once you quantify how much spam is costing your company, it makes sense to re-evaluate the IT options for managing spam. The first, and perhaps biggest, decision is whether to keep spam filtering in-house or use a hosted service. It can be difficult to add up the true expenses of each solution. On the surface, the cost of an appliance may seem reasonable, but the up-front costs are just the beginning in a complete cost-of-ownership calculation.

At Google, we believe that email security makes sense as a hosted service for several cost-related reasons:

* A cloud computing solution provides you with a predictable expense. A spike in spam can hit at any time, and companies using an in-house solution may find themselves dealing with the unexpected capital expense of a new appliance to deal with the load.

* You save on maintenance costs. After installation, most in-house appliances require regular upgrades and maintenance. With a hosted solution, all the updates are handled through the cloud. Nothing to worry about or budget for.

* Using the cloud makes email security more effective. With a hosted service such as Google Message Security, you tap into a network of intelligence that spans more than 40,000 businesses and 14 million users, reaping the benefits of the economies of scale that come with that.

To help you understand the whole cost of spam, we're introducing a TCO (total cost of ownership) calculator, which lets you compare expenses for in-house appliances versus hosted services. Using a three-year time horizon and considering both start-up and maintenance costs, companies can save thousands by choosing a hosted service. The graph below models the results of one cost scenario, for a 100-user company:



Let's look at a customer who was re-evaluating their spam solution last year: Gaines, Wolter, & Kinney, P.C. is a civil litigation firm in Birmingham, Alabama, that specializes in tort defense. They needed a solution that would reduce the inflow of network traffic and be cost effective. David Hebert, an IT administrator for GW&K, recalls, "Our limits on connection bandwidth meant that a service that filtered out spam was a no-brainer decision." But David needed data to convince management that a change was essential. He used a ROI calculator and found that they were losing 122 hours per employee in productivity each year to spam. With the hourly rate of their lawyers, this meant that choosing Google Message Security paid for itself in 1 day.

If your business is interested in learning more about how hosted services like Google Message Security can save you money and increase productivity, visit us at www.google.com/a/security.

Posted by Amanda Kleha, Google Security and Compliance Team

Last week, a web hosting service that was a significant source of spam was taken offline by the combined efforts of Security Fix and several Internet providers. Google would like to congratulate Security Fix for leading this effort and striking another blow in the battle to stamp out spam on the web. The removal of this service helps "clean up" the web for everyone, and dovetails with efforts like Google's to make web communications safer and more secure in all of the ways that people use it.

We'll continue to monitor spam traffic, as we always do, but here's what we've seen in the past few days:

On November 11, when the spam source was taken down, we saw a 70% drop in spam from levels seen at the beginning of the month. However, we've seen drops like this before. In late July this year there was a similar drop that was reversed within a few days.


Gmail servers, which also noticed a drop in spam on November 11, are now showing an upward trend as new sources of spam, as always, continue to emerge.
The team at Google stays "on guard" as the fight continues!

Posted by Amanda Kleha, Google Security and Compliance Team

With thousands of universities currently using Google Apps, it's not uncommon for us to learn about a new school going live every day. One of the latest school to deploy Apps is the University of Westminster in central London, which will soon be introducing our hosted email and collaborative tools to over 25,000 students and staff on campus.

Westminster's Information Services director, Professor Roger James, said that using Google would help the school better engage with “Gen-X, Gen-Y” students brought up on the web, and the inherent collaboration abilities of web-based software would also be a boon. As proof of their mission to resonate with students, the University even asked their students what system they would prefer to use. We were delighted to hear that over 90% of their students agreed that Google was their preference. According to James, “modern IT needs everyone to support the change to be successful; it is as much a decision around what the users want as any technical decision. Products like Google offer a tremendous platform for IT to build on the interest of their users."

We find it incredibly valuable to listen to students about how they use Apps, so we're glad that Westminster has listened to their students as well.



Posted by Miriam Schneider, Google Apps EDU Marketing

You may know the term "cloud computing" or you may already be doing much of your business "in the cloud"...but whatever your use of the phrase or what it offers, there's more to learn about web-based computing at Cloud Camp.

Cloud Camps are offered by Google as a way to connect with regional audiences on various topics related to business in the cloud. Three upcoming camps – emphasizing the role of the cloud in increasing network security and reducing risks – will immerse participants in a morning of learning on eDiscovery, email security, legal issues and more. Space is limited, but our short online form will put you in touch with your local Google contacts so that you can see if this event is a fit for you.

Dates and locations follow:

Atlanta, GA – Tuesday, November 18
Philadelpia, PA – Thursday, November 20
Irvine, CA – Wednesday, December 3

Learn more about these Cloud Camps here.

Posted by Sundar Raghavan, Google Enterprise Team

When you have a new product or promotion, or recent news to share on your website, it's important that visitors and customers can find it with ease. On a homepage where real estate for promotions and links is limited, search is the universal key to unlocking all of the content on a site - the fastest way to share information with the world.

At Google, we realize that for many businesses and organizations, site updates represent some of their most important and valuable content. As more and more visitors turn to search as a first source for information, it's vital that new pages and site changes be reflected in search results.

That's why today, we're excited to introduce On-Demand Indexing, a new feature for Google Site Search - our hosted search solution - that gives site owners full control to incorporate new pages and updates into search results on their website.

On-Demand Indexing gives site owners an "Index Now" button, making it fast and easy to index new content for search as soon as its available. New pages are searchable within hours -- taking no longer than a day to appear within site search results. This complements Google's regular updating of website indexes, which occurs as Google web crawlers index the greater web.

For more information about On-Demand Indexing, and how Google Site Search can help your online business or website, check out the video below, or visit us at www.google.com/sitesearch.



Posted by Chris Rothstein, Google Site Search Specialist

As we mentioned at the beginning of the month, the Google Apps for Education team recently celebrated its two year anniversary at the EDUCAUSE conference. Since our users are at the core of our mission for Google Apps, we invited our customers from schools around the country to join us for a special evening. We were excited to spend time with them because there's been a lot of activity with Google Apps over the past two years, especially in 2008. We kicked off the evening highlighting some of our significant milestones, including:

• We now have 2.5 million active users at thousands of universities worldwide
  
• We traveled more than 5,000 miles in a bio-diesel Google bus and met with students, faculty, and staff at 10 universities using Apps across the country.
  
• We recently announced some new web-based collaboration tools such as Google Video and Google Sites
  

We also focused on some of the latest trends in education technology, which is an important topic these days considering that recent studies predict that over 45% of universities are planning to outsource their email services*. It's becoming increasingly challenging for educational institutions to meet the demands of this new generation of students, and services like Google Apps is one way to offer students a better experience online. On our cross-country tour, we had the opportunity to hear from students directly about their experience with Apps, and here's some of what they had to share:

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Google Apps for Education

I happen to work in the New York City office (one of Google's many distributed offices), while most of my teammates work in the Mountain View headquarters. While we make good use of video conferencing, there are times when I need to talk to a teammate at a moment's notice.

That's where Gmail's new voice and video chat comes in. Now, regardless of where I am -- whether I'm in New York, working from home, or traveling -- I can connect with my coworkers instantly by starting a voice chat, or better yet, a video chat. By video chatting, we can hear and see each other in real time. And since voice and video chat is integrated with the Gmail interface, you can have a productive conversation with colleagues without ever leaving your browser.

Using voice and video chat in Gmail is free no matter how near or far the other person is. All it takes is a small (~2MB) plugin. For video chatting, you'll also need a webcam.

Learn more about voice and video chat and how to purchase a webcam at discounted prices (while supplies last and through 11/30/2008).

See voice and video chat in action:



Posted by Joyce Sohn, Google Apps Marketing Manager

If you manage information technology for a business that has deployed BlackBerry phones, listen up. The Google Mobile team has provided some great new ways to deploy Google Maps for mobile in your business using BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

Employees who go on business trips use Google Maps to get directions to their meetings, or to find hotels or restaurants in cities they visit. Employees can easily use Google Maps on their desktop computers, but it's not as easy to use Google Maps once they step away from the office.

Sometimes employees do not know about Google Maps for mobile. In other cases IT managers haven't whitelisted the application in BlackBerry Enterprise Server, which might prevent BlackBerry users from installing it.


To remedy this, Google encourages IT managers to install Google Maps for mobile on company-issued phones. Recently the Maps for mobile team developed new installation packages that make it easier than ever to give your staff Google Maps on their BlackBerry phones.

The new installation packages include the latest Google Maps for mobile release, which features Street View and walking directions.

To give your staff Google Maps for mobile, visit http://mobile.google.com/enterprise

Posted by Ryan Pollock, Google Mobile Product Marketing Manager

We're happy to announce several new controls that IT administrators can now use within Message Security and Discovery. These Postini powered services provide spam filtering and email archiving to organizations that maintain their own email infrastructure.

(1) Our spam protection continues to evolve, this time with NDR (non-delivery receipt) filter improvements. Administrators can now more precisely deal with NDR attacks which includes the ability to distinguish between legitimate and spam NDR messages and set rules that bypass the NDR filter.

(2) Customers who route their outbound mail through our datacenters greatly benefit from this next enhancement. We've observed that customers' mail servers can send volumes of junk messages, which in most cases are generated when servers are inadvertently configured as an open relay and used by spammers. This creates a number of problems, including the DNS "blacklisting" of the outbound server. Our outbound mail processing now includes spam scanning. This reduces DNS blocking issues and helps raise awareness of possible mail server security issues.

(3) Within Message Discovery, administrators can now place a hold on messages of a particular user to prevent them from being removed from the archive. This is useful in cases where an investigation involves a particular employee or group of employees.



If you're an IT decision maker in an organization running email systems such as Exchange or Lotus Notes and you would like to learn more about Google Message Security & Discovery, join us for our next live webinar, "Is your spam fight costing you too much time and money?," on November 12th at 11am PST. Register for the webinar here or visit our website.



Posted by Amanda Kleha, Google Security and Compliance Team

Posted by Eran Feigenbaum, Director of Security, Google Apps

Ever since the first Gmail users began trusting Google with their private information, keeping people's data safe has been one of our top priorities. Today, more than a million businesses, plus thousands of schools and organizations using Google Apps rely on us to safeguard their critical information.

We've published some of the ways we keep sensitive information where it belongs, but we wanted to go farther and have external independent security specialists audit our systems and procedures. Here's the outcome: an independent public accounting firm has verified the effectiveness of our technical processes and controls for Google Apps, and Google Apps has satisfactorily completed a SAS 70 Type II audit.

Our commitment to keeping customer information safe – whether they're consumer users or our largest enterprise customers – is part of our DNA, and we protect this information as rigorously as we protect our own sensitive corporate information. In fact, we use the very same services that we offer to our users for our own email, documents, project team sites and calendars.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Cloud computing can conserve IT budgets, let IT departments focus their time on core projects and equip employees with powerful tools, fostering competitive advantages and healthier businesses. But you might be surprised to learn that switching to Google Apps can help keep our planet healthier, too.

Here's why: a very large, well-tuned network of computers is more efficient per unit of computing output than a single computer, or even a traditional corporate server room. Think of cloud computing as carpooling for computing power.

With Google Apps, energy savings come from highly efficient servers that make use of nearly 85% of the energy pulled from the wall, wasting less than half of what's typically lost in power conversion phases. Energy savings are also achieved through complex infrastructure projects like advanced cooling systems that are only cost-effective at the largest of scales.

Here's how Google's infrastructure stacks up against typical data centers:



And there's more to this story. Google has had a goal of being carbon neutral for 2007 and beyond. We use renewable energy like electricity from the solar panels at our Mountain View campus, and we invest in viable carbon offset projects to keep our net carbon footprint – including our data centers – at zero. We also reuse or recycle nearly 100% of materials from retired server hardware.

So when you use Google Apps, the computing you do is not only energy efficient, but also less wasteful. If you believe sustainability is important as we do, or if your company has environmental mandates, we invite you to learn more about Google's Commitment to Sustainable Computing.

Posted by Nick Cooper, Google Apps Engineer

You may already use Google Analytics to see how people interact with your public website. Now we're letting Google Apps administrators harness the power of Google Analytics to shed light on how their users are interacting with Google Docs and Google Sites.

Want to see how many employees checked out your company's new travel policy? Curious if your European sales team is taking advantage of the same resources as your US team? Because you can slice and dice usage information for content by hour, day, week, month, user location, browser type and more, answering these kinds of questions is easy.

Google Apps Premier and Education Edition administrators can link their Google Analytics accounts to Google Apps through the Google Apps administrative control panel. Just go to the 'Advanced Tools' tab, click 'Setup Google Analytics' and enter the profile ID number from your Google Analytics account to begin collecting usage data.

Posted by Andrew Olsen and Lily Xia, Google Engineering

Organizations using Google Apps can take advantage of our APIs to make Google Apps fit their unique businesses processes and technology environments. Customers have pulled off some useful customizations, like synchronizing Google Calendar with Microsoft Exchange and updating email preferences for all of their users. Today we're making our Google Apps APIs even more powerful.

First, we're improving the API for Google Docs, which is now capable of updating the actual content of documents, sharing documents, and moving documents into and out of folders programmatically. You can learn more about this API here.

We're also making our APIs even more versatile. Domain administrators can now use OAuth authentication to access GData feeds for users on their domains. This lets admins do things like integrate with document management systems, enable third-party workflow applications, centralize backup of documents and contacts, and monitor document sharing inside and outside of the company. Using OAuth, administrators can enable this type of functionality for end-users without any end-user involvement. Premier and Education Edition admins can enable OAuth in the 'Authentication' section of the 'Advanced tools' tab of the Google Apps administrative control panel.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

We've got more good news for Google Apps users. Today we're pleased to announce that we're extending the 99.9 percent service level agreements we offer Premier Edition customers on Gmail to Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Talk. Check out the Google Blog to read more about the announcement and how the reliability of Gmail compares to on-premises alternatives.

Posted by Gabe Cohen, Google Apps Product Manager

Posted by Ellen Petry Leanse, Google Enterprise

Posted by Shyam Sheth, Product Manager, Google mobile team

We're happy to announce some big improvements to Gmail for mobile for J2ME-supported and BlackBerry phones. Our focus for this version was to make the experience faster and more reliable. Along the way we've added some time-saving features so you can check email across multiple accounts (including both Gmail and Google Apps email accounts), compose messages even when you don't have a signal, return to your inbox while mail sends in the background, undo recent actions, and work quickly with shortcut keys which you can learn about in Gmail for mobile's main menu (click Help).*

Also, Gmail for mobile is available in over 35 languages now.

To download the new version of Gmail for mobile, just go to m.google.com/mail in your mobile browser. For more info, check out the Google mobile blog.



*Please note that not all features are available for all phones.

Posted by Kevin Gough, Sr. Product & Marketing Manager

I was recently forwarded an email from the CEO of Zuora, a Google Apps customer whose company has embraced Apps across the board. According to CEO Tien Tzuo, "Google has been transformative, allowing us to have the nimbleness of a startup but be even more productive that large companies with lots of resources."

They have a lot of characteristics that we see in Apps customers.

- Company: fast growing, geographically distributed
- Employees: knowledge workers, multi-lingual
- Computing environment: Multi-platform (Mac, PC), mobile devices (iPhone, Blackberry)

Tomorrow, Thurs, at 10 AM PT we're hosting a webinar on the security of Google Apps that will also feature details on Zuora's move to Apps. Sign up for the webinar.

Below, posted with Tien's permission, is the initial email he sent outlining how they use various Google Apps. There are lots of great ideas in here.


From: Tien Tzuo
Date: Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 8:00 PM
Subject: Zuora as case study for Google Apps

Dave -

I wanted to write you to let you know that we are a post-child for Google Apps.

Our company, Zuora, is a 40 person company located primarily in Redwood City, CA and Beijing, China. We also have extended team members in Seattle, Phoenix, and Shanghai. We're a technology company, TechCrunch calls us "The Salesforce of Online Billing".

We run our whole company on Google Apps, and have been since day 1. We're on the Premier Edition.

Our email is Gmail. We access it from all sorts of clients -- Outlook, Entourage, Mac Mail, Outlook Express. I personally just use the browser interface. We also access it from our Blackberries and our iPhones. And we use Google Chat for presence and quick chats. Plus, we get 25GB storage a person! That's 100x greater than what each employee used to get at Salesforce. Gmail is great, we have no intention of every going off of it, I've already vetoed our new CFO's request to put in hosted Microsoft Exchange.

We use Google Calendar. Works great. Fully syncs to my blackberry with Google Sync. Good support for conference rooms, and it even handles invite responses from non-gmail users as well.

We use Google Documents. Almost all of our files are online. We have proposals, documents, weekly status reports, budget spreadsheets, and our corporate directory, all stored in google documents, and all searchable and easy to find.

We use Google Sites. Every feature, every project, every client engagement gets a Google Sites page. We create a Site for every department, and everyone in that department subscribes to changes on that Site. Now, I always have a pulse on what each team is working on.

In addition, Google Sites has been transformative for our development teams. We have developers in Beijing that work together with our developers here, and the challenge was to get people communicating. Email wasn't working, we could not get developers to actively email... chat was problematic because of the time zone differences. We almost decided to re-structure our teams to minimize the need for cross-city communication. Then we discovered Google Sites. Each developer creates a sites page and then starts writing a tech spec for the feature he is working on. Everyone subscribes to the page, and contributes their opinion, and now the Google Sites has become our primary collaboration tool for working across geographies.

We use Google Translate. We let our junior guys in Beijing write specs on Google Sites in Chinese... the American dev team can paste that into Google translate, which translates great. No more language barriers.

We use Google Video. The problem with distributed teams is often, you've never met your teammate. Now, every employee is expected to record a video introducing him or herself and putting it on Google Video. We shoot our team meetings, birthday celebrations, throw it all onGoogle VIdeo, so even though we're in multiple locations, and some of us have never met face to face, we feel like one small team.

We use the Salesforce.com integration to Google Apps. So, all emails to salesforce contacts actually go through gmail and get stored as an activity, so we have the full history.

We use Google Analytics. So we always know the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns. We do lots of A/B testing, and we always know what are our top referring sites, our top search terms, and the demographics of our web site visitors.

And best of all, we have no servers! Nothing to maintain, nothing to backup.

In short, Google has been transformative, allowing us to have the nimbleness of a startup but be even more productive that large companies with lots of resources. This is a story waiting to be told!!!

- tien

Tien Tzuo
CEO
Zuora, Inc.

When you next open a spreadsheet in Google Docs, you'll notice a number of updates to the spreadsheets interface. The simplified toolbar makes it easier to find the most commonly used formatting tools, and spreadsheet features can be found in the new menu, which resembles the interface you're already familiar with in documents and presentations. Use the blue 'Share' menu to publish your spreadsheets to the web, give users viewing rights, or add collaborators who can edit your spreadsheets with you. And as you create formulas and format your data, you'll also notice that we've made speed improvements so your spreadsheet changes load faster.

All the features you love about Google Docs spreadsheets are still here -- just better organized to tidy the interface and let us easily add new functionality.



Posted by Joyce Sohn, Google Apps Marketing Manager

In these uncertain times, like many folks, you may be trying to find ways of doing more with less.  You may already know how easy it is to use Google Apps to power your business email, calendar and instant messaging applications.  But you may not yet have discovered the power of our online collaboration tools that are included in the Google Apps suite - Google Sites, Google Video and Google Docs.  Last month we began a series of online seminars to focus the spotlight on innovative uses of Google Apps in the workplace.  We spoke with internal teams at Google on how they use Google Apps to manage teams and product launches and also Home Care Assistance, a customer who has grown its business 15-fold using the dynamic duo of Google AdWords and Apps.  We received a lot of good feedback and also questions on two topics in particular:  Moving to hosted applications sounds great but how should my business evaluate whether hosted applications are right for us?  And, if we move our business data "to the cloud," just how secure, private and confidential is all my data on Google?  So, for October, we have invited guest speakers to discuss the following topics:

A strategy for lean times:  Adopt a hosted messaging and collaboration solution with Google Apps.  If you’re thinking about upgrading your messaging and collaboration tools, come listen to Michael Osterman of Osterman Research on Thursday, October 9, 10AM PDT.  He will talk about factors to consider in moving to hosted solutions and how to best prepare for a smooth transition. Register here at Google Apps Online Seminars.

Investigate the Security of Google Apps.  Learn the steps that Google's taking to keep your Google Apps data safe on Thursday, October 23, 10AM PDT.  Hear from Google Apps security expert, Eran Feigenbaum, on new updates to Google's processes and technology that make our web applications even more secure.  Register here at Google Apps Online Seminars.

We hope you will join us for these live seminars.  But, if you can't make it, you can always listen to them later on at our Google Apps channel on Youtube.  We also keep our Google Calendar Gadget update-to-date with informative webinars and other events.  As always, let us know if there are specific topics you'd like to see us cover.  Thanks again for your interest!

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps Marketing

In their recently released Magic Quadrant for Email Security Boundaries (published September 11, 2008), Gartner Inc., an information technology research and advisory company, placed Google in the "Leaders Quadrant." Quadrant leaders, as Gartner defines them, are "performing well today, have a clear vision of market direction, and are actively building competencies to sustain their leadership position in the market." Quadrant leaders also "offer a comprehensive and proficient range of email security functionality, and show evidence of superior vision and execution for current and anticipated customer requirements.

Leaders typically have relatively high market share and/or strong revenue growth, own a good portion of their threat or content-filtering capabilities, and demonstrate positive customer feedback for anti-spam efficacy, and related service and support." The report goes on to say that "The email security market is rapidly maturing, yet continues to show strong growth and remains a 'must have' security purchase."
The Gartner Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2008 by Gartner, Inc., and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Posted by Adam Swidler, Google Enterprise Product Marketing