Today we're happy to announce that Google has joined the Cloud Security Alliance, a non-profit organization of experts focused on best practices and education efforts around the security of cloud computing.
Cloud computing continues to gain momentum, and organizations such as the CSA are an important part of an ecosystem that works to increase transparency, lower risks, and promote independent research. The CSA's focus on security best practices offers valuable information to organizations looking to move to the cloud, and as a member of the CSA, we look forward to providing ongoing education about cloud computing and its value to the organizations that use it.
Small business owners often ask us how Google Apps can help improve the way they work. We'll be sharing some answers in May when we join the U.S. Chamber of Commerce at this year's America's Small Business Summit.
Every day, thousands of businesses of all sizes sign up for Google Apps to help save money, reduce IT hassles, and improve collaboration. For small business owners, Google Apps provides a familiar set of easy-to-use Google business applications with minimal setup and maintenance costs, so that you can stay focused on more strategic elements of running your business.
We hope that you'll join us at this upcoming summit, and, in the meantime, we invite you to take a look at how a few small businesses are using Google Apps today to help improve they way they work.
Every day thousands of companies move to Google Apps, but it's not that often that we get to bring Apps to those who already work among the clouds. We're excited to share that KLM Royal Dutch Airlines has moved 11,200 of their crew members to Gmail as part of their Google Apps Premier Edition deployment. KLM crew members will now be able to send and receive email effectively from any location and using any Internet connected device, including personal laptops, shared computers, BlackBerry devices, mobile phones, or PDA devices.
The adoption of Gmail marks KLM's move to cloud computing. With 25 GB of storage per account, Gmail provides them with a powerful, intuitive and efficient messaging platform with integrated IM (Google Talk) and a series of additional features that facilitate communication.
For example, message translation allows KLM employees to translate email from and into 42 different languages with one click of the mouse. The employees' familiarity with Google's consumer products meant that minimal or no training was needed to complete the deployment.
Are you considering Google Apps for your organization? Would you want to hear about the strategies other organizations have used in deploying Google Apps? Do you want to learn field-tested best practices to accelerate deployment and maximize employee satisfaction?
Then please join us this Thursday, February 25, for a live webcast with Jim Copeland, Dan Kennedy and Marcello Pedersen, Google Apps deployment specialists. Get your questions answered on which best practices will help you succeed.
When we launched the Google Apps Authorized Reseller Program a year ago, a number of partners around the world were already actively helping customers of all sizes reduce IT costs and complexity while giving users the productivity tools they wanted – Gmail, Google Calendar, and more. Since then, millions of businesses have gone Google – and our resellers, too, have gained momentum. With nearly 1,000 Google Apps Authorized Resellers from more than 50 countries now building successful Google Apps practices, we celebrate our partners' progress over the last year and look forward to them continuing to drive customer success with Google Apps in the years to come.
In a recent mark of this progress, the MSPmentor 100 Report for 2010, which ranks top managed service providers worldwide, reports that already 22% of these top MSPs are now promoting Google Apps to their clients.
Our resellers represent a wide range of firms who assist businesses in adopting, leveraging, and extending Google Apps – from global systems integrators to smaller, specialized IT service providers. Acting as trusted advisors, these solution providers work to serve their clients' unique business needs and to improve user productivity via Google Apps at lower costs and with greater reliability.
In our first year, we launched some important tools to help our partners better serve customers, including our online Reseller Console for automated ordering, provisioning, and management of their Google Apps clients. Our Solution Providers resource site provides a full range of marketing, sales, and product information, while we also instituted a series of online webinars and live training sessions in Google offices around the world.
Conversations with channel firms at events hosted by Everything Channel, CompTIA, ConnectWise, and SMB Nation reinforced our belief that customer needs are well served when resellers act as the primary contact for provisioning, deployment, billing, and ongoing consulting and support.
We're especially excited about the relationships we've built with our partners over this first year. Some highlights include (in alphabetical order):
• Appirio and Genentech (large enterprise): Appirio, a cloud solution provider, migrated 15,000 Genentech users from a variety of legacy systems such as Apple Mail, Exchange 2003, Sendmail MStore, and Thunderbird. Appirio also provided a range of value-added services including integration with new systems such as Magic Meeting Marker, end user training, and on-site support.
• Cloudreach and Small World Financial Services: Cloudreach, a UK-based reseller, successfully migrated Small World Financial Services, a family of retail financial services businesses that operates worldwide, from their legacy Microsoft Exchange and Kerio environment to Google Apps. In total, 500 users across 9 countries were migrated resulting in cost savings in excess of 75% annually against their legacy software license. Here's more:
• Cloud Sherpas and Lincoln Property (mid-market): Cloud Sherpas, cloud computing systems integrator and application developer, assisted Lincoln Property with the configuration, implementation, change management and deployment support around their move to Google Apps. In addition to successfully migrating GroupWise mail and contacts data for 950 users, they implemented SherpaTools, a free app from Cloud Sherpas that provides additional IT management functions for admins and new features for employees.
• Sheepdog and Evisu (small business): Sheepdog successfully migrated Evisu off of Microsoft Exchange 2003 in less than two weeks, allowing the company to avoid its renewal deadline. They also provided comprehensive Gmail and Calendar training for all users and continue to offer support as Evisu adds new users to Google Apps.
We recently kicked off our second year by hosting our first Google Apps Partner Advisory Board here at Google in Mountain View. Our partners provided valuable input on the best ways to continue to enrich our program. In 2010, we look forward to strengthening our reseller relationships and finding new ways to help our partners build sustainable, profitable cloud computing businesses.
If your firm is interested in Google Apps reselling and services, we invite you to learn more about the Google Apps Authorized Reseller Program and join this growing movement.
Posted by Stephen Cho, Director, Google Apps Channels
Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Tim Horton, Co-Founder and CEO of DiscountOfficeItems.com, one of the largest office supply superstores on the internet. Offering more than 65,000 name brand office supplies, technology products and office furniture, DiscountOfficeItems.com is an Inc. 500 and Internet Retailer Top 500 company.
In late 2009 Tim and his team identified search as a problem area for their site and began researching eTail search solutions. When they saw a demo of Google Commerce Search, they decided to switch and were able to integrate the new solution within their existing UI in less than a month. Almost immediately, they saw sizable lifts in revenue, traffic, transactions, and average order size.
Tim will join Nitin Mangtani, Senior Product Manager at Google Enterprise on a live webcast Thursday, March 4 at 10:00 a.m. PST / 1:00 p.m. EST to share his experience and answer questions about their decision to switch to Google Commerce Search.
When I co-founded Discount Office Items in 2003, our main objective was to offer customers a large selection, low prices, and top-notch customer service. Our site experienced rapid growth and high overall customer satisfaction, but our homegrown search was sluggish and returned irrelevant results.
In late 2009 we decided to evaluate Google Commerce Search and requested a demo. When we saw how fast we could recoup our spending and start making more money due to better, faster search, the decision to implement Google Commerce Search was clear. After the deployment process (which took just a couple of weeks including the winter holiday), we saw an immediate lift in revenue and traffic as well as transactions and searches done on our site.
More people are using our site search now to find the right products – Google Commerce Search works well and the results are highly relevant. Search was one of the weakest parts of our site. Now, it’s one of the strongest – all with less load on our servers and less time spent on maintenance for the IT staff.
Please join me and the Google Commerce Search team for this live webinar:
Editor's note: We're sharing some news – and a cross post from the Official Google Blog – about a new milestone for Google Apps Education Edition: use by 7 million students and faculty worldwide.
Since the fall of 2009 we've seen more and more students and faculty take advantage of Google Apps Education Edition. We've seen our active users grow – first we had 5 million, then 6 million, and today we're happy to announce that we've crossed the 7 million mark. With so many students and faculty using Google Docs, Google Sites, and Gmail to collaborate and share their academic work, we figured it's the perfect time to hit the road and help more schools see Google Apps in action.
At every stop, the host universities will share how their students and/or faculty use Google Apps, and show how they've deployed and connected Apps within their technology infrastructure. We'll be devoting a lot of time for questions and we'll have plenty of demos from the Google Apps team. If you're a university CIO, CTO. or IT Director in New York, Florida, Georgia or Virginia (or nearby!) and would like to join us at a roadtrip stop, please let us know via this contact form. We hope to see you there!
Google Apps Education Edition CIO Roadtrip - Spring 2010
4/16 : Hofstra University (in conjunction with the New York Higher Education Technology Forum) Hempstead, NY
4/19 : University of South Florida Tampa, FL
4/21 : Columbus State University Columbus, GA
4/23 : University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA
Early June : Texas Southern University Houston, TX
Editor's note: Don Dodge is a Google Developer Advocate helping developers build new applications on Google platforms and technologies. Don has been a startup evangelist at Microsoft and is also a veteran of five start-ups including Forte Software, AltaVista, Napster, Bowstreet, and Groove Networks.
You can follow the Developer team's updates on Twitter, too – @googleappsdev – and, while you're at it, stay tuned to updates from the Google enterprise team at @googleatwork.
We've just launched have a new blog, Google Apps Developer Blog, for developers interested in building applications that leverage Google Apps. This blog will cover topics of interest to Google Apps developers building applications on top of Google Apps, integrating with them or utilizing the APIs.
Some of our topics and resources will include:
• code snippets and samples • reviews of customer integration and deployment cases • interviews with developers on best practices for developing in Apps • voting on most-requested developer extensions in Apps • discussion of OAuth roadmap • references to OpenID • smart ways to do logging (and analysis/reporting) in AppEngine, etc. • storing JSON in AppEngine
Watch this blog for announcements of developer events, DevFests, Google I/O updates, product announcements, links to other Google developer related content and case studies on actual integration, implementation and deployments.
Also, don't forget to register for Google I/O, which is May 19-20, 2010 in San Francisco. Google I/O will feature 80 sessions, more than 3,000 developers, and over 100 demonstrations from developers showcasing their technologies. You'll be able to talk shop with engineers building the next generation of web, mobile, and enterprise applications. Last year's I/O sold out before the start of the conference, so we encourage you to sign up soon.
We want your feedback! Ask questions, suggest topics, and even submit your own stories for possible inclusion in the Google Apps Developer Blog. ContactGADBeditor @ google if you have a story for submission, or story suggestion. Comments will be enabled on this blog, and we hope you'll join the discussion.
Thanks,
Don Dodge Developer Advocate Developer Relations Team
Posted by Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead
Today the Gmail team introduced Google Buzz, a new feature that lets individuals share links, photos, and other updates with their network of contacts – or with the whole world – right within Gmail. Google Buzz helps people kick off conversations around information that people find mutually interesting.
Within a few months, we also plan to make Google Buzz available to businesses and schools using Google Apps, with added features for sharing within your organization. Stay tuned, and for more information about using Google Buzz with your personal Gmail account, head over to the Gmail blog or visit buzz.google.com.
Posted by Matthew Glotzbach, Google Enterprise Product Management Director
Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our RSS feed or email alerts.
Update: As of November 14, 2011, we are no longer supporting Google Buzz, and it will not be made available to customers using Google Apps.
Today we're announcing a new enhancement to Google Apps Script: the ability to create and access Google Sites.
Using the new SitesApp Service, your scripts now have full control over your sites including adding attachments, changing the text within a web page, and even adding new collaborators to your sites so you can share and edit them with your friends. For more details, see the Apps Script Sites documentation.
A good example came to our attention recently as a colleague set about improving the organization of his soccer league. He had to create home pages for each of the teams, with information on each of the players in the league. Before long, he was overwhelmed with the task of managing all of the information on these sites.
Luckily, the players were already listed in Gmail Contacts, and training times and matches were already entered on Google Calendar. It proved a simple task to write a script that created a new Google Site for each team, pulling in player details from Gmail Contacts, and copying training and match details from Google Calendar.
This automation saved him a lot of repetitive button pressing, and it made adding future team sites a snap.
A tutorial detailing the creation of a site in script can be found here. You can take it a step further by using one of the many site templates that are freely available. Start by creating a site customized from your chosen template, and then update it with team specific content using Apps Script.
We think this is a great example of taking useful information from semi-private, hard-to-access sources, and sharing it with a wider audience – be it your soccer league, your enterprise, or the entire world.
The Google Maps API Premier team looks to customer input as we build tools that enrich websites, applications, and devices with location information. Customers frequently tell us that the higher than standard limits on web services such as geocoding and static maps are among the most valuable aspects of Maps API Premier.
However, any web service can be vulnerable to anonymous automated access. To further protect our Premier customers from unauthorized use of their client IDs, we’re adding an additional layer of security to Google Maps API Premier.
Starting today, we will be issuing a private cryptographic key, unique to each account, to all Maps API Premier customers. From now on, requests made to certain web services from Maps API Premier accounts will need to be “signed” with this key. This security enhancement will ensure that requests are authorized by the owner of the Maps API Premier client ID specified in the request.
Existing Maps API Premier customers should expect to receive an email from Google within the next 10 days containing their private cryptographic key. For documentation explaining how to use this cryptographic key to sign requests, please refer to the Maps API Premier Developer Guide. The Static Maps V2 API is the first API to support URL signing.
As of March 2, 2010, requests made to the Static Maps V2 API will need to be signed to be accepted. However, for added security, we encourage you to begin signing requests you make to this service now.
By enhancing the security of our services we better protect the interests of our customers and of our data content partners. I’m excited to continue to develop the secure infrastructure that support ongoing innovation from Google – and for our customers.
Posted by Daniel Chu, Product Manager, Google Enterprise Maps & Earth team
Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Jay Kenney, CIO of Lincoln Property Company, a residential property management and development company. Prior to joining Lincoln Property, Jay was a Managing Director at BearingPoint for eight years and spent 19 years at SBC (now AT&T).
Last year Jay inherited a Novell Groupwise system powering email for 950 of his firm's approximately 3,500 employees. After careful consideration, Lincoln Property migrated from Groupwise to Google Apps, saving the company $200K – and enabling Jay to provide all 3,500 employees with company email.
Jay will be available on a live webcast this Thursday at 11:00 a.m. PST, 2:00 p.m. EST, 7:00 p.m. GMT to share his experience and answer questions about Lincoln Property Company's experience in switching to Google Apps. Michael Cohn from Cloud Sherpas, a Google Apps Authorized Reseller, will also be on hand to answer questions about the migration process.
Lincoln Property is the fifth largest property manager in the United States. When I joined the company, 950 of our 3,500 employees were using Novell Groupwise for email. We were maintaining an expensive infrastructure including servers, a SAN and data center space. It was difficult to maintain our email archive. It was also tough to find IT staff skilled in Groupwise. At the same time, we were looking to outsource as many of our mission-critical applications as possible.
Evaluating our options, we first considered remaining with Groupwise or switching to Microsoft Exchange. At the prodding of one of our tech-savvy partners, we tried out Google Apps and liked what we found. We did a comprehensive TCO analysis that included licensing and maintenance, data center costs, spam protection, server, SAN, migration costs, you name it.
The business case was clear. At approximately $200K per year cheaper than the existing system and infrastructure, Google Apps would provide email, instant messaging, great mobile options, and AV/AS protection for just $50/user/year. And, we would be able to equip all 3,500 employees with company email instead of just the 950 who were on the legacy on premise system.
After trialing Gmail, Google Calendar, and Gmail's integrated chat, we made the move to Google Apps. Cloud Sherpas was instrumental in helping us extract email and contacts data out of GroupWise and migrate it into Google Apps for 950 users in a phased migration. They also provided webinar and video training to ease our users through the transition.
Now we are on track to migrate our remaining 2,500 users in 2010. The results so far have been stellar. I’d be happy to share the lessons we’ve learned – what we did that I’m glad we did!
Today, we're introducing a new feature for Google Postini Services: Message Log Search. This feature delivers the search and analysis capabilities normally available with on-premise solutions, but without the associated complexity or maintenance.
When messages pass through the Postini service, header and transaction data about these messages is stored in a log. Previously, admins only had access to this data through customer support. With the Message Log Search feature, email administrators can now easily run searches on these logs and drill down to the details about how specific messages were processed.
For example, admins can view the disposition of messages, such as whether a message or group of messages was delivered, quarantined, archived, or encrypted.
Say an admin was checking the delivery status of all inbound emails from Matthew Smith:
Message Log Search returns results which include who received the message, date/time, disposition, and more. Click the image below for full view.
Customers trying a beta version of Message Log Search have found many useful, time-saving applications for the feature. For example, Dave Lugo at Affiliated Computer Systems is "very happy" that Message Log Search helps him track errant emails and easily resolve the "they didn't get it / we didn't get it" tickets he receives from his users. Joe Stark at HeidelbergCement uses log searching to "proactively search for problem senders" and block them entirely from his network.
Other customers have found that the Message Log Search interface is "very fast and responsive," and helps them to determine the effectiveness of new content policies and gain insight into traffic patterns across their organization.
These are a few examples that illustrate the flexibility and power of Message Log Search, and starting today, you can try the feature for yourself. Message Log Search is now available through the Postini service administration console to Postini and Google Apps Premier Edition customers.
Note: Message Log Search data is managed and stored in Google datacenters pursuant to the privacy and data confidentiality provisions spelled out in our customer agreements. The message security service stores information about messages in a log, such as how it is processed, but does not store the content of messages.
In a world focused on improving business productivity, companies look to solutions like Google Apps to provide employees with seamless access to information regardless of location or device. With the rising adoption of Internet-enabled devices, employees increasingly seek access to their email, documents, and other corporate data from their mobile phone.
Last year, we addressed this need with a number of enhancements focused on mobile productivity. For BlackBerry users, we launched the Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server. For Android phones, we announced new web versions of Gmail and Google Calendar, as well as updates to Google Docs. We also launched Google Sync for iPhone, Nokia E series, and Windows Mobile devices, enabling Google Apps users to access and sync mail, calendar, and contacts from their mobile device to the Google cloud.
Tomorrow, we're expanding these capabilities further by launching new controls that enable administrators to help ensure corporate policy enforcement across a range of mobile devices.
With this change, Google Apps Premier and Education Edition administrators will be able to manage their users' iPhone, Nokia E series and Windows Mobile devices right from the Google Apps administrative control panel, without deploying any additional software or having to manage dedicated enterprise mobile servers.
These new mobile device management capabilities will allow administrators to:
Remotely wipe all data from lost or stolen mobile devices
Lock idle devices after a period of inactivity
Require a device password on each phone
Set minimum lengths for more secure passwords
Require passwords to include letters, numbers and punctuation
These features will be accessible from the 'Mobile' tab under 'Service Settings' in the Google Apps control panel. Once a user starts syncing their devices with Google Apps, the domain administrator will be able to remotely wipe device data, right from the user settings page.
These policies will let employees access their data from their phone while helping IT administrators easily control access to corporate data on mobile devices.
Stay tuned for similar features for Android devices like the Nexus One and Droid, and if you have any questions, please check out our help page.
Posted by Bryan Mawhinney, Google Mobile Software Engineer
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This year's Google I/O will play host to a number of sessions and events aimed specifically at helping Software as a Service companies integrate with and monetize Google Apps, including:
We are planning several more sessions that we'll be announcing in the coming weeks that you won't want to miss. We'll also be hosting a mixer event just for the enterprise developer community that'll take place just before the After Hours party at I/O.
Google I/O is our biggest developer event of the year, and it's also the best chance you'll get to learn about the technologies that can help you build a thriving business extending Google Apps. We hope you'll register today!
Posted by Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead
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