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.