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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.

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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.

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There is a widely held belief that technology progress in the enterprise is slow and methodical, that adoption cycles are long, and that experimentation is inappropriate. Here at Google we believe that experimentation is a good thing - even in the enterprise space.  Some of our best ideas have emerged from experiments, products like Google Maps and snazzy new Gmail Labs features like Calendar and Docs gadgets, as well as Google Suggest and the collection of enterprise search labs.

Today we're extending that innovation and announcing Labs for Google Apps, a set of experimental features available free to businesses and schools using Google Apps. The first set, available now, are derived from tools Google uses internally and can be installed easily from the Google Solutions Marketplace by Google Apps domain administrators.  Once installed (see walkthrough), users on your domain will be able to log in and access these features alongside existing applications like Gmail and Sites, and your domain administrators can configure them using the standard Google Apps control panel.

The new experimental features are:
  • Google Moderator: Take Q&A to a whole new level -- manage feedback from the smallest video conference to the largest all-hands company meeting.  Learn more
  • Google Code Reviews: Collaborate with others to catch bugs in software changes before you check them in. Learn more
  • Google Short Links: Create easy-to-remember links for both your internal and external web pages Learn more
These new Google Labs tools are built on Google App Engine, the same scalable, efficient, and reliable infrastructure publicly available to developers. Read more about Labs features and App Engine.  We're also planning on opening up the Labs for Google Apps platform to third party developers, so that new and existing vendors can build apps for the million-plus businesses using Google Apps today. Going forward, we'll also be adding more of our own Labs applications for your teams to experiment with and benefit from.

Check out the new features and let us know what you think!

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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.

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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.

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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.



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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