Every month, we invite a featured customer to talk about their experience bringing Google Apps into their businesses, sharing insights and suggestions for other teams looking to bring Apps into the workplace. We invite you to join this conversation since it's a great opportunity to get "real world" answers to your questions about Google Apps.

These talks are informal and open. We share an overview from our featured customer and a brief look at Google Apps, followed by Q&A. There's a lot to say about Google Apps, and we figure that our customers are the best people to tell you how they've used Google Apps in business – what's worked, what they've learned, and what they'd recommend to other businesses who might be considering a move to Google Apps.

The big news at the Googleplex today is the latest release of Google Earth, making features like Ocean, Historical Imagery, and Touring available to Google Earth users everywhere.

We're happy to open up these new worlds of exploration to our Enterprise customers, with new releases of Google Earth Pro and Google Earth Enterprise also available today. This is a tremendous advance for organizations who work on -- or under -- the Seven Seas, or who have archives of historical photos and data that they'd like to make more accessible to their employees.

People who use Google Earth Pro, the workplace edition of Google Earth, will see the new oceanographic data, historical imagery, and other features through their connection to Google's public globe of satellite imagery, maps, terrain & 3D buildings. With today's release of the Google Earth Enterprise 5.0 client, customers can start to realize the benefits by layering their own private data on top of the Google-hosted Ocean or Historical Imagery via KML. Google's public data about the world's oceans and images from the past should give a glimmer of what's possible.

We're hard at work to allow Google Earth Enterprise customers to build their own Ocean or Historical Imagery for their private networks, in much the same way they today build their own Earth. This will enhance organizations' ability to build private globes displaying this information while ensuring that authorized users can visualize the data quickly and easily.

(That's Cape Fear under water, by the way.)

The new Touring feature already works with private globes, allowing for simple creation of narrated tours of an area to share critical information with other Google Earth users. Touring compliments the Movie Maker capability, which lets users "fly through" Google Earth while capturing video that can be used in presentations, broadcasts, or on websites, available only in Google Earth Pro and the Google Earth Enterprise client.

And there's more. With this latest release, importing data from GPS devices is easier than ever. Customers will also find better ways to interact with their data. Pop-up windows for your data can now include fully compliant HTML and javascript, allowing organizations to provide their employees with richer context about the location they're viewing. And we've improved the startup speed and the performance of layers.

Existing customers who want to get started with the Google Earth Enterprise 5.0 client should contact Google customer support to access the download. Google Earth Pro customers will be prompted to upgrade the next time they start Google Earth. If you want to learn more about either product, drop us a line.

We hope you'll learn more about this announcement and bring the power of these new services to your organization, no matter where in the world (or the ocean!) you may be.

Posted by Bryan Atwood, Product Manager, Google Earth Enterprise

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

Posted by Amanda Kleha, Google Apps Security & Compliance Team

In July, our Postini datacenters saw the biggest volume of email virus attacks so far in 2008, with a peak of nearly 10 million messages on July 24. One of the more prominent attacks in the month involved a spoofed UPS package-tracking link that was intended to lure recipients into clicking on it and downloading malware. Our zero-hour virus protection technology first started catching these emails on July 20.



Many of the viruses we see follow a similar format, in which an email with an embedded website link in the message is changed from what the link displays. Another recent example was a spoofed CNN newsletter sent out by spammers. In this case, the content included current news stories with numerous links in the message. The majority of the links were valid, but there were some that were replaced with malicious links. As soon as our technology started detecting these messages, we implemented a filter to stop these elusive viruses and voila! -- all of our 14 million business users were protected. This network effect and rapid protection against these new tactics is why businesses are increasingly moving their email security into the cloud.

Viruses tend to increase during the summer months, and August is already showing some new types of viruses. On August 5, we saw a large inflow of messages with an encrypted .RAR attachment. The overall 2008 trend has been a decrease in the use of attachments, so this new virus is confirmation that spam doesn't follow trends for long.