Posted:
Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is John Buckholz, VP of Information Technology for LCC International, Inc., a global wireless engineering company with 1,200 employees in North America, Europe and the Middle East. Following eight years as a management consultant with Accenture, John has since led the IT groups at three global companies. John has managed Lotus cc:Mail, IBM Notes/Domino, and Microsoft Exchange systems during his career, but his most recent choice for messaging and collaboration is Google Apps.

John will be speaking on a live webcast this Thursday at 2:00 p.m. EST / 11:00 a.m. PST / 7:00 p.m. GMT.


LCC International designs, builds, operates, and maintains wireless networks throughout the world. We have a diverse user base, including field technicians who collect statistics on cell phone signals, radio frequency engineers who use applications specific to our industry, and administrative staff who support the business operations. We operate in more than 20 countries throughout North America, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. With standard workweeks varying by country, along with the various time zones across the globe, our workforce operates around the clock, 365 days a year – which means a lot of coordination to keep everyone in sync.

For email, we had most recently been using Microsoft Exchange. Prior to that, we had IBM Notes/Domino and before that, Lotus cc:Mail. The company intranet was based on Microsoft SharePoint. These on-premise solutions required a fair amount of ongoing support and maintenance. We had a total of 10 IT people supporting all of our systems, and we frequently found ourselves addressing issues on weekends, especially early on Saturday mornings as our colleagues in some countries were starting their workweek. We were stretched too thin with covering all of these products around the clock. It felt like firefighting a lot of the time.

We wanted a solution that would lower our overall costs and free up IT time. At the same time, we knew that we couldn't afford to have downtime. We initially wondered if Google Apps was enterprise-ready. Then we attended
a webcast featuring Genentech, and we thought to ourselves, “If Google Apps are good enough for Genentech, it’s good enough for us.”

We conducted a pilot, and, to our surprise, everything was silent. We thought no one was using the Apps. But it turns out that people were doing fine and accessing Google’s training materials on their own when they had questions.


That’s when we decided to move into the cloud in earnest. We’ve been on Google Apps for one year now, after what I would say was a fairly easy transition with a little help from
SADA Systems, a Google Apps partner. We now have good email service, including reliable access for mobile users. We collaborate on documents using Google Docs.

And we converted the company intranet from SharePoint to Google Sites. We took the least experienced person on our IT staff and asked him to try converting the intranet to Google Sites. He really amazed us. With no formal training, he just built the whole thing. It’s a testament to how easy Google Apps is to learn and use.


With Google Apps, we are now saving 60% over other alternatives, and my team no longer spends their weekends monitoring system uptime and addressing email issues. Most importantly, IT has been able to shift resources to more mission-critical initiatives. We now have a smaller IT team and a much less complex environment. A few short years ago, we were slaying dragons day and night. Now, we can all get down to supporting the business in more strategic ways.


I’d be delighted to share my insights and top three reasons to consider making a move to Google Apps. Please join us for “
LCC International on three reasons to consider Google Apps.

Join us for this LIVE Event on:
Thursday, December 3, 2009
2:00 p.m. EST / 11:00 a.m. PST / 7:00 p.m. GMT

Posted by Serena Satyasai, the Google Apps team

Find customer stories and research product information on our resource sites for current users of
Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino.

UPDATE 12/02/09: Our apologies for the faulty link in the first reference to this webinar. We've corrected it and are sharing the direct link here: http://whitepapers.techrepublic.com.com/webcast.aspx?docid=1181191. We're sorry for the confusion.

Posted:
Google Apps is helping millions of companies save money, but more importantly, Google Apps helps businesses move beyond the slow, multi-year innovation cycle typical of legacy technologies. We’ve released over 100 significant improvements and updates over the last year, and businesses automatically have access to these updates without having to manage complex and costly upgrades.

Last week I hosted a webcast titled Google Apps Premier Edition Innovation – Year in Review to spotlight the most important improvements we’ve made recently. You can watch the replay below or see it on YouTube.



Innovation happening across the web is rapidly translating into better business email tools, more efficient collaboration choices for coworkers, and more secure, higher reliability technology for companies. We’re excited about what’s in store for Google Apps, and to keep up with future developments, you can subscribe to the Google Apps Updates RSS feed, or sign up for email alerts.

Posted:
When we launched the Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry® Enterprise Server in August, we focused on addressing the needs of companies operating their own BlackBerry Enterprise Servers, typically supporting a couple hundred BlackBerry smartphone users per server.

Of course, companies of all sizes are adopting Google Apps, and their needs for supporting BlackBerry smartphones are as diverse as their businesses. So today we're making it easier for companies large and small to manage their BlackBerry smartphones and save money.

With Google Apps Connector for BES version 1.5, large businesses can now support 500 BlackBerry devices per server, double the previous capacity. This lets them serve more users with fewer servers.

Small businesses get more flexibility too. The Apps Connector now supports BlackBerry Professional Software, which is designed for up to 30 BlackBerry smartphones. We've also made it possible for a single BlackBerry Enterprise Server to serve users across multiple companies, enabling low-cost hosting services to be offered by hosting partners.

Stay tuned for more announcements from partners offering hosting services for Google Apps customers with BlackBerry smartphones. In the meantime, we're going to continue to make it easier for you to manage mobile devices of all types with Google Apps.

Posted by Zhengping Zuo, Software Engineer and Darrell Kuhn, Site Reliability Engineer

Posted:
Thousands of administrators visit the Google Apps Help Forum every day in need of advice and technical knowledge. The heart and soul of this community are known as the Google Apps Power Posters: LMckin51, Jim McNelis, jlee, ScienceMan, Benjamin, FrankM, Ingraye, Anurag Bhatia, DLW, and Amit.

These superstars volunteer their valuable time freely to provide their expertise and share their knowledge of Google Apps with users on the Help Forum.

The Power Posters come from diverse backgrounds: we have an environmental engineer, a college freshman, and a website administrator who helps out at his local church, but they all share the same passion for the product and zeal to help users:

"For all of the time I have invested in helping others on the forums, the knowledge and friendships that have come from these experiences have been more rewarding than I would have ever imagined." - Jim McNelis

"I first visited the Help Group to learn how to setup something (I no longer remember what). I found my answer almost immediately. Just as important, I found other users with questions I could answer. After that first 'thank you' from a fellow user, I was hooked." - DLW

"I love it when as all the gears snap into place and things just start to work. Almost like magic." - Ingraye

On the first anniversary of the Google Apps Help Forum, we would like to take this opportunity to show our appreciation for their efforts. Between them they have answered more than 25,000 posts since it launched in November 2008 - a mammoth achievement.

The entire Google Apps community thanks our Power Posters for their hard work, dedication and passion!

We'd also like to dedicate this post to the late techlover, who was a constant inspiration to our Power Posters and is still sorely missed.

Posted by Jolly Ngemu and Anjoli Podder
, Google Apps Advisors team


Posted:
Editor's note: Please welcome today’s guest blogger, Michael Rodger, Director of Digital Innovation for Delta Hotels and Resorts. Mike oversees technology strategy, development and operations and is based in Toronto, Canada.



Delta boasts a diversified portfolio of 44 city center, airport and resort properties, and employs more than 7,000 people. The company is at the forefront of cloud computing, not only for email and collaboration, but also for building social networks that encourage employee collaboration.

Mike will be telling more about Delta's transition at a
live webcast this Thursday, November 19, 2009, 2:00 p.m. EST / 11:00 a.m. PST / 7:00 p.m. GMT.

At Delta Hotels and Resorts, we continually look for ways to enhance the relationships we have built with our guests, colleagues, and owners. As a people-centric organization, we have a vibrant colleague community which is empowered to deliver honest and genuine service on a daily basis. One of our technology goals is to provide innovative ways in which our employees can strengthen the Delta community.

Our talented and hard-working colleagues are, undoubtedly, the difference-maker for our brand. Collectively, the spirit, creativity and passion for service that personify our staff enables Delta Hotels and Resorts to rank as one of Canada's top employers and maintain one of the lowest employee turnover rates in the hotel industry. Within our culture, we affectionately comment that our colleagues have "Delta in their DNA."

To support our colleagues and optimize the way in which they work, our IT department develops ideas that improve collaboration and push the boundaries of technology. One recent implementation involved the wholesale replacement of a static and outdated Intranet platform with an engaging employee social networking site. The general idea was that our colleagues would embrace a user-generated content platform that truly permits information sharing across the hotel and the entire company. The results have been staggeringly successful! So much so that our IT team is now developing enhancements which are intended to take the platform to even greater heights.

Delta Hotels and Resorts decision to embrace Google Apps is another example of our commitment to improving collaboration and breaking down conventional technology bottlenecks. The pain points of conventional, on-premise solutions include desktop software licensing, private wide area networks, and never-ending storage requirements.

Conventional solutions are simply too expensive and too rigid to support progressive organizations such as Delta. From a cost perspective alone, the move to Google has cost us 75% less than a comparable on-premise messaging and calendaring solution.

While the switch to Google has created new opportunities for colleagues, it has also enabled IT to remove bottlenecks on technology processes and resources. Extensible storage, message archiving and built-in disaster recovery are three basic examples of situations where Delta Hotels and Resorts has saved significant sums of money by choosing a cloud-based solution to replace an on-site headache.

You can see more in our video, here:



To date, Delta Hotels and Resorts has provided Google Apps accounts to more than 4,000 colleagues across 44 hotels. One out of two staff has a Google Apps account and we're striving to improve that ratio. In order to reach staff who may not otherwise touch a computer on a day-to-day basis (e.g. doormen, housekeepers, banquet servers and others), we've deployed Apple iMacs across all employee cafeterias. In addition, we've developed programs which encourage our staff to connect from home computers, smartphones or any browser with an Internet connection.

We are proud of our decision to embrace the cloud and implement Google Apps. I am delighted to share some of the insights we’ve gained from our move and supporting a multilingual workforce, during a live webcast, "From Microsoft Exchange 2007 to Google Apps: The Delta Hotels and Resorts Story."

Join us for this LIVE Event on:

Thursday, November 19, 2009
2:00 p.m. EST / 11:00 a.m. PST / 7:00 p.m. GMT
(please note that you will be registering on the webinar host's site)

Posted by Serena Satyasai, the Google Apps team



Find customer stories and research product information on our resource sites for current users of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino.

Posted:
Nearly two years ago, we launched Google Sites to make it easier, faster and more affordable for employees to create and collaborate in rich, dynamic sites, even without any technical background. We’re seeing companies large and small gravitate to Google Sites, shifting away from legacy on-premises workspace solutions.

Our customers really tell the story best. Ron Brister, Senior Manager of Worldwide IT Operations for Serena Software, says, “We’re moving our project workspace collaboration to Google Sites because it requires less expertise and administration than Microsoft SharePoint, and it’s easier for employees to use. Better ease-of-use directly translates into more fluid information-sharing, which helps our teams move faster and cross-pollinate good ideas.”

Luke Leonhard, Web Services Manager for Brady Corporation adds, “Google Sites is a very efficient way for our teams to aggregate and share information together. With our old IBM Lotus Quickr solution, it took seven clicks and three page refreshes for employees to publish new information internally. Google Sites makes it just two clicks. Because Sites makes it so easy, coworkers are sharing information more freely than ever before.”

Bill Behrman, Stanford University Associate Consultant Professor adds, “Typically, public information officers create press releases and other content in Word documents, email these to their Web people, and wait for the Web folks to update the website. With Google Sites, the Santa Clara Public Health Department public information officers were able to directly and instantly publish and update content on the web. This brings critical information to local residents without delay, and government agencies don't need to worry about their servers being overwhelmed with website traffic.”

Today, we’re helping companies move to Google Sites even more quickly with templates for sites like employee intranets, project tracking sites, team sites, employee profile pages and more. Templates give you a head-start with page layouts, navigation links, embedded gadgets, content, themes and other site attributes. Employees can submit their own templates to a private gallery for colleagues to use, so the gallery will become even more useful over time.

Example template: employee intranet site


If your business is ready to move beyond traditional collaboration hardware and software, learn more about Google Apps (which includes Google Sites). You can try Premier Edition free for 30 days, or contact our corporate sales team to begin exploring a larger deployment.

We also invite you to join us on Thursday, November 19th at 10:00 a.m. PST (1:00 p.m. EST) for a web seminar on Google Sites. You'll learn how your business can efficiently collaborate with Google Sites, including how to use the new site templates features. Register here.

Posted by Anil Sabharwal, Product Manager, Google Apps team

Posted:
According to the newly-released 2009 Campus Computing survey statistics, 44% of colleges and universities have converted to a hosted student email solution, while another 37% are currently evaluating the move. Of those that have migrated, over half — 56% precisely — are going Google.

Since this time last year we have seen lots of exciting growth for Google Apps Education Edition. We've rolled out more than 100 new features, launched free Google Message Security for K-12 schools, integrated with other learning services such as Blackboard and Moodle, and have reached well over six million students and faculty – a 400% increase since this time last year.

The Google Apps for Education team celebrated these big changes with Apps customers – including students – and conference attendees last week at EDUCAUSE, an important annual gathering for higher ed IT. Here are a few photos:



Read more about EDUCAUSE and our exciting year of change, and be sure to visit www.google.com/appsatschool to learn more about how your school can go Google.

Posted by Miriam Schneider,
Google Apps Education Edition team

Posted:
It's not often in life that we can get more for less. But that's just what cloud computing is offering cash-strapped governments across the country: an opportunity to upgrade their dated infrastructure to state of the art, and save money in the process.

That was the appeal of Google Apps to Conrad Cross, the CIO for the City of Orlando. Conrad is leading the migration of all 3,000 city employees from Lotus Notes/Domino to Google Apps, including the Police and Fire departments. Facing software license renewals, major upgrade costs, and a 12% reduction in staff, it was the right time for the City to consider other options. For half the cost of the alternative, Orlando is jumping onto Google's innovation curve and freeing up IT resources to focus on more important efforts. "The time was right," said Cross. "I'm delivering a better service with less resources, and that gets me ahead of the game." Just down Interstate-95, the 11th largest school district in the US, Palm Beach County, is also moving its more than 200,000 students, staff and other users to Apps.

The New Mexico Attorney General’s Office has a similar story. Its 120 attorneys and 200 full-time employees use Google Apps for email, archiving, and document management. After moving from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps, the employees no longer need to delete mail or worry about backing up sensitive information. The data's instantly available whenever they want it and they're more productive.

Fast growing cities like Canton, Georgia are also benefiting from the cloud. Strained by escalating spam and endless server maintenance, Camille Wehs, the city's only IT staffer, moved all 165 employees to Apps. With additional reliability, disaster recovery, flexibility and anywhere access to information, she sleeps better for it.

Most recently, the Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to move its 30,000 employees to Apps. If you're also interested in getting more for less, please join us for a live webcast this Thursday featuring James Ferreira, CIO for the New Mexico State Attorney General’s Office.

Join us for this LIVE Event on:
Thursday, November 12, 2009
2:00 PM ET / 11:00 AM PT / 7:00 PM GMT

Already a Google Apps customer? Submit a form to share your story.

Posted by Michael Lock, Director, Americas Sales & Operations, Google Enterprise

Posted:
Editor's Note: Please welcome our guest blogger, James Ferreira, Chief Information Officer for the Office of the New Mexico Attorney General. He provides IT services to the largest law office in the state. James Ferreira has the privilege of serving the New Mexico public as Attorney General Gary King's CIO. Mr. Ferreira is tasked with the responsibility of facilitating the communication between the public and nearly 200 office staff, including attorneys. Additionally, Mr. Ferreira has served as a member on many committees including the NM Information and Technology committee, NM Technical Counsel, Department of Information and Technology Project Review Committee and the Conference of Western Attorneys General WAGGY committee.

Please join us for a live webcast on
Thursday, November 12, 2009 2:00 PM ET / 11:00 AM PT / 7:00 PM GMT where James will be on hand to answer your questions about his office's switch to Google Apps from Microsoft Exchange (3rd party registration required).

Attorneys rely heavily on documents like pleadings, deposition transcripts, exhibits, briefs and other legal materials. In the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office, we have 120 attorneys and 200 full-time employees whose jobs revolve around documents. And it's not just the attorneys. Imagine the news releases, media advisories, scripts and other materials that our communications department has to produce.

We essentially use email as our day-to-day file and case management system, so it is mission-critical. Our previous Microsoft Exchange email solution was falling short – especially regarding the need to safeguard and backup sensitive emails. We looked at moving to a clustered system of in-house email servers for failovers, but we calculated the cost at $300,000, not including continual upgrades.

We began searching for something with ample inbox storage, easy backup and data redundancy and perhaps most importantly, a system that offered high security and reliability. Google Apps Premier Edition emerged as the clear alternative. To put it in perspective, Google Apps and Gmail can support any attorney over the course of a whole career, storing and backing up every email he or she ever sends. Google Apps Premier Edition also passed muster with well-known third-party security auditing organizations.

The move to Google Apps took minimal time and effort, and our users now appreciate the reliability and large storage quotas of their new email system. We have realized many additional cost savings. For instance, we have created a prototype Google Docs archiving solution, using the Documents API. In addition, a few years ago, the department paid more than $50,000 for replication software to store data from a SAN to a disaster recovery site. It didn't work very well – but is no longer required with Google Apps. We also spend less time and money on licensing. In the past, I often joked that we needed to check if we needed a license for the license with our former software vendor. With Google Apps, we get the whole deal up front.

Google Apps Premier Edition was a good fit for the Attorney General's Office. It provides secure, available, and searchable access to documents and emails, while reducing costs and lessening workloads for our busy IT staff. It has reduced the "paper chase" across the board, from attorneys to our busy communications staff. I hope you can join me on a live webcast this Thursday where I'll take your questions about "going Google."

Microsoft Exchange or Google Apps? One Government Agency Goes Google
Thursday, November 12, 2009

2:00 PM ET / 11:00 AM PT / 7:00 PM GMT

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps team

Find customer stories and research product information on our resource sites for current users of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino.

Posted:
As we approach the holidays, retailers are gearing up for the seasonal shopping traffic. While they can't, of course, control overall consumer spending, they can control the experience they provide to consumers – both in their brick-and-mortar stores and online.

To help accomplish this, today we're announcing a new product, Google Commerce Search, to power e-commerce and search for online stores.

In the online shopping world, search quality is a big factor in converting browsers to buyers, and in keeping customers happy. In fact, 43% of visitors to online retail sites say the very first thing they do is type the product name or product category into the search box (MarketingSherpa).

While most of the top retailers have a search engine on their websites, the speed and accuracy of search results can make a real difference in visitor engagement and conversion rates. Visitors spend an average of only 8 seconds before deciding whether or not to remain on a website (MarketingSherpa
), so fast, accurate results can make a big difference in conversion.

That's why we're prioritizing speed and search quality for online stores with Google Commerce Search (GCS). GCS is a hosted, cloud-based offering that brings the relevancy, speed, and Google ease-of-use to e-commerce sites. Learn more here:



GCS also has a bunch of user-friendly features that make shopping on online stores easier, and search results more refined and accurate. Some of those features are:
  • speed GCS leverages Google's ultra fast platform, because it's hosted, providing sub-second response times to users.
  • Google quality and ranking GCS analyzes every item in the data feed using proprietary signals to determine its optimal placement in the result set, for more accurate query results for shoppers.
  • parametric search and sortingGCS allows users to refine or sort results by category, price, brand, or other attribute; this is fully-functional parametric search for e-stores.
  • product boost and promotions – Retailers can boost the relevance of certain items, or highlight specific products during a sale, and cross-sell related products.
  • spell check, stemming and synonyms – By leveraging the larger Google search engine, GCS can include these advanced search and synonym options, so the shopping experience is smoother for customers – even customers who mistype.
  • fast deployment and scale – Since this is a cloud-based offering, GCS can be deployed in days and, because it's hosted on the Google platform, retailers can scale to meet their higher-demand periods like the holidays without worrying about slowdowns or spikes.
The hosted factor is a key feature in making GCS easy for administrators to use. Because there's no hardware (or software, servers, operating systems, cables, or any other equipment), admins can upload product information to Google Merchant Center and provide a few extra customization parameters – and Google Commerce Search utilizes that product feed to power their website store search.

Retailers can use the same feed to submit their products for indexing in Google Product Search
as well, cutting down on time and tech costs.

With GCS, any e-commerce website can provide visitors with an improved shopping experience. That improvement can drive higher visitor-to-buyer conversion rates. While the conversion rates of most retailers is around 3% (Forrester), the best-performing sites have been able to achieve much higher conversion rates – even reaching double digits. For the top online retailers, improving the conversion rate from 3% to even 4% might actually mean improving online sales by 33% – a jump that can represent millions of extra dollars each month.

GCS frees online stores to do what they do best – create the product and promotional mix that their visitors need – and leaves Google to do what we do best: search. This helps retailers improve conversions and drive the sales that matter this holiday season – and, in fact, all year 'round.

Learn more about GCS at google.com/commercesearch.

Posted by Anna Bishop and Eric Larson, Google enterprise search team





Posted:
Editor's Note: Taylor McKnight is a co-founder of SCHED*, a web based scheduling and social networking application for conferences and festivals. He is currently a partner at The Hype Machine, a music blog aggregator and discovery tool for music fans and has worked extensively as a web developer at Gawker Media and The University of Florida. Taylor built SCHED* using Google Docs, part of the Google Apps suite of messaging and collaboration apps available in Education, Standard and Premier Editions.

We're sharing Taylor's story as an example of how Google Apps speeds innovation and makes it easy for good ideas to turn into real businesses, quickly, reliably, and without the need for investment in IT infrastructure.

I'm a rabid music fan, and friends often ask me for recommendations when it comes to festivals, bands, and other music-related events. SCHED* was born out of a desire to keep track of my favorite events.

SCHED* is a simple, social scheduling app that Chirag Mehta and I launched as an unofficial SXSW 2008 Schedule and which spread like wildfire among attendees. There were more than 4,000 bands, panels, films and parties going on during that week and I was obsessed with not missing a thing. I had grown weary of manually building a schedule of recommendations for friends and wanted to build an easy way that anybody could create and publicize a schedule themselves.

We soon expanded to support all kinds of events and new clients including music festivals like Lollapalooza, tech conferences like The Next Web, and political conventions like the UK Labour Conference. We've now handled 80+ new events.

We ran the original version of SCHED* at SXSW 2008 as a makeshift solution using an exported Microsoft Excel spreadsheet file. Once we began working with clients, we began looking for a more streamlined solution – ideally, an online spreadsheet that they could update on-the-go and didn't require programming knowledge. Google Apps Premier Edition provided the answer.

Google Docs spreadsheets, included in Google Apps, was the clear front runner because a majority of conference organizers already had Google accounts and were familiar with the interface. Additionally, the API made it easy for organizers to retrieve data from their spreadsheets. Here's what it looks like when it's up and running:

The idea of driving our entire admin interface from within a Google spreadsheet was exciting. Little to no learning curve, no server overhead, and Google's redundancy made this decision a big payoff. After setting up a simple data template, we used the Google Docs API to give the organizers a way to update the live site. In a single day it was integrated so that a simple click of a button would trigger an XML export of the Google Docs spreadsheet to our servers, instantly updating both our database and the live schedule that users would see.

The benefits of creatively using a Google Docs spreadsheet as a database entry point also gave us additional features we didn't have to build.

Document sharing was an easy way to provide access to all those involved as well as troubleshoot any difficulties live with the built in chat room. If a client needed help with formatting or suggestions for their event types we could give them live suggestions within the spreadsheet. Revision history gave us instant rollback in case there were any accidental overwrites, which are bound to happen.

Having these support features and safety nets built in to Google Docs spreadsheets let us spend more time improving the product itself (like an iPhone compatible version!) instead of reinventing the wheel.



We also use the Google Talk chatback badges embedded into every page of our new marketing site to provide always-on, live chat access to our team. We're excited to give our current and potential clients a new, simple way of communicating with us (even without logging into anything!).

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps team

Have a story to share about how you use Google Apps? Tell us here and we may follow up with you.

Posted:
In July we announced that the Google OpenID Federated Login API has been extended to Google Apps accounts used by businesses, schools, and other organizations. The service is important not only to individuals, who can now use their single Google Apps Account to sign in to a variety of websites without sharing credentials, but also to the organizations themselves, who increasingly rely on multiple Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions from different vendors.

For these organizations, Google Apps can now become an identity hub for multiple SaaS vendors.

In fact, since July a number of vendors have used this API to add support for single-sign-on with Google Apps Accounts, including ZoHo, Tripit, Smartsheet, Socialwok, and Manymoon.

These vendors are reporting increases in registration rates after deploying this feature, and today we announced new features for this API to make these implementations even more powerful.


When integrated with partner solutions such as PingConnect from Ping Identity, OpenID support can be extended to other services like Salesforce.com, SuccessFactors, and WebEX — as well as B2B partners, internal applications, and of course consumer web sites. See Ping Identity's post to learn more about their implementation and view their demo and Data Sheet.

The OpenID Federated Login Service is available for all Google Apps editions. However, it is disabled by default for the Premier and Education editions, and it requires the domain administrator to manually enable it from the Control Panel.

Posted by Eric Sachs, Product Manager, Google Security