• Build better customer relationships
• Reduce support costs
• Collect valuable market data

• Free applicant tracking system and careers site
• Easily post to multiple job boards with one click
• Unlimited users = more referrals & better feedback

• Expense reports created from credit card charges
• Built-in best practice setup
• 30-day free trial

• Identify and apply resources to projects
• Explore employees' activities
• Create time budgets and monitor progress

• Powerful yet simple survey creation
• Fast & flexible response gathering
• Intelligent reporting & analysis

• Eliminate paper filing and storage
• Automate approval process
• Pay anyone electronically

• Sync your desktop directly with Google Docs
• Continue to create and edit files on your desktop
• Offline access, backup, and sync for Google Docs

• See what changes have been made by whom
• Visualize the full revision history of a document
• Decide which changes to accept or reject

• Keep all team members and your clients in the loop
• Get paid for your work with controls over budgeting and overages
• Email digests keep everyone working together, with minimum noise

• See contact information and updates
• Request profiles to build a direct connection
• Search across all your contacts

Businesses rely on Google’s accurate routing engine to bring customers from their homes to company stores, from company headquarters to customer sites, and more. This is important on any platform, including mobile devices, and within increasingly-complex uses of map data.

But sometimes, technology has gotten in the way of the right user experience. No more. With today’s announcement, Google is delivering the most requested Maps API feature: a Directions web service. This new addition lets you couple the Static Maps API with the Directions API, letting users both visualize and get route directions through a simple HTTP interface.

Driving, walking, and biking directions are all included so regardless of your mode of transport, Google Maps API Premier has you covered!

Look for another blog post tomorrow with more exciting launches at Google I/O. Click here to learn more about using Maps API Premier.

Posted by Daniel Chu, Product Manager, Google Enterprise Maps/Earth

Google is making familiar tools like email and office applications much more collaborative than traditional software, but with Google Wave, we started with a blank slate to try new approaches to teamwork without the constraints of existing applications. Today – one year after first introducing Wave – we’re extending Google Wave (Labs) to businesses, schools and organizations to let more people try this tool and to learn how we can improve the Google Apps suite.

Since we began previewing Google Wave last fall, we’ve consistently heard that Wave shines in small group settings where teams need to discuss and debate as they create content together, like developing an engineering project plan, creating a trip itinerary or building an event invitation list. For example, you can learn how teams at Deloitte use Google Wave to build consensus around technical design documents and other content.

Google Wave has a few characteristics making it uniquely-equipped for these kinds of discussion-heavy, collaborative tasks:

Discussion in context with your content – When you have a question or suggestion about something you see in a wave, you can have a conversation right in the wave with other participants. When you reach consensus, you can clean up your wave by finalizing the content and removing the completed discussion.

Logical information structure – You can respond anywhere within a wave, not just at the very end, so you end up with an organized record that follows the flow of the conversation.

Revision playback – Wave preserves a timeline of how a wave evolved, so when someone adds you to an existing wave, you can play back the history to see how it evolved to its current state. Playback lets you see content in its logical and chronological context.

Extensions – Extensions bring rich, dynamic functionality into waves. Google provides a number of useful extensions (like voting gadgets and maps) but there's an ever-growing library of extensions created by third-party developers. Organizations can even create extensions tailored to their own needs.

Next time you need to create consensus among a small team as you create content together, consider test driving Google Wave. Starting today, Google Apps administrators have the option to let their users try Google Wave. In the administrative control panel, click 'Add more services', then click 'Add it now' to enable Google Wave.

To learn more about how your organization might find Google Wave useful, we invite you to join our webcast on Wednesday, May 26th at 9:00 am PDT. The Wave team will be on hand to share real world use case from businesses and other organizations, and to answer your questions. Register for the webcast

Posted by Greg D'Alesandre, Google Wave Product Manager

Since launching the Google Apps Marketplace in March, Google Apps administrators have deployed integrated third party apps to more than one million users, and today we're excited to build on this momentum with the launch of a new Gmail API that lets Marketplace apps present relevant information to users right in Gmail, when they’re reading a message.

Lotus Notes customers love Google Apps because they get many of Notes’ best features – like document libraries and scripting – in addition to a 99.9% uptime guarantee, 25GB of email storage, and substantial cost savings. Today, we’re making it even easier for Lotus Notes customers to try Google Apps with Google Calendar Connector for Lotus Notes.

This calendar connector allows businesses to switch to Google Apps department by department, by making calendaring work more seamlessly between Notes and Google Apps. Google Apps users in your organization can look up free/busy info for coworkers still on Lotus Notes, and vice versa.

In addition, we’ve made it easier to go Google with several improvements to Google Apps Migration for Lotus Notes. Some of the updates include:

Support for multi-domain management across all APIs

Migration of Domino Directory data, including groups

Enhanced user provisioning that can automatically generate Google Apps passwords when accounts are created

New domain-wide and user-level options to manage spam folders and archive labels

If you have a legacy Lotus Notes footprint, we invite you to learn more about Google Calendar Connector for Lotus Notes.

Posted by Chris Vander Mey, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps

On Tuesday I shared some some thoughts on the choices businesses have as you consider upgrading Microsoft Office. This decision goes far beyond traditional productivity applications though; a new generation of workplace tools that reflect the collaborative nature of today’s work environment are becoming more essential to employees. Instant messaging accelerates information sharing between coworkers. Video chat lets people around the world meet face-to-face. Video and image sharing is becoming a critical form of communication. Companies develop passionate communities around blogs and other social media. Customers learn about businesses through online maps and search engine marketing.

Today’s workers need tools to facilitate all these activities, and traditional productivity software comes up short, even after “major” upgrades. Last week we announced that we’re working to make Blogger, Picasa Web Albums, Google Reader, iGoogle and many more Google services available soon to Google Apps customers. What will customers need to do to access all this new functionality? Simply refresh the browser. No 64-bit servers to purchase, no complex software prerequisites (28 of them for SharePoint 2010 alone!), no backup systems to install, no VPN connectivity issues to worry about. It’s an upgrade that will truly change the workplace.


By no means do we think that Google could possibly develop all the functionality that any employee might need, but at the same time, there’s real value in services that all connect to a common backbone for core systems like contacts, presence and user authentication. Businesses need specialized accounting tools, CRM systems, marketing automation capabilities, project management tools and much more. Through the Apps Marketplace and our developer tools, customers can integrate 3rd party cloud services with Google Apps and enhancements they develop themselves. The possibilities are limitless.


This new approach – the integrated combination of Google Apps, a broad array of other Google services, and complementary functionality built by developers and partners – will give your employees the tools they need to be productive in the modern workplace. I invite you to learn more about Google Apps and to start a conversation with our team about providing your employees with the best tools for their jobs.

Posted by Matthew Glotzbach, Google Enterprise Product Management Director

Editor's note: This is the second in a series of posts on new apps in the Google Apps Marketplace that have caught our eye here at Google. We’ll do this every couple weeks or so. Look for the label "marketplace highlights" and subscribe to the series.

9 of the top 20 requests from Google Apps customers are for their accounts to work with more services from Google, not just for the core suite of messaging and collaboration applications. Later this year we’ll dramatically accelerate customer access to innovation, and give users the convenience of using any Google service allowed by their administrator from a single account affiliated with their organization.

For example, coworkers will be able to publish their organization’s blog on Blogger, share project images with Picasa Web Albums, track industry news in Google Reader, advertise online with AdWords and much more, all without switching back and forth between multiple accounts. While these additional applications won’t initially be covered by the core suite’s support and service level agreement, this change will open up the spectrum of Google’s functionality to businesses, schools and organizations using Google Apps and we’ll evaluate future support options.


We intend to have all Standard, Premier and Education Edition customers moved to the new infrastructure that enables this change in the fall, and customers who would like more control over the timing of this change will be able to make the switch voluntarily during the summer.

This will be a significant overhaul to our underlying systems and we want to make this transition as seamless as possible for customers. We’ll be sharing information in advance so Google Apps admins can plan ahead which additional Google services users can access with their accounts and other aspects of this roll-out. Stay tuned here for further updates in the coming weeks and months, and visit our Help Center for more details.

Posted by Dennis Troper, Product Management Director, Google Apps

Update: We're thrilled to see all the enthusiasm for this big upcoming change that many readers have expressed in the comments below, and we're beginning to bring on early testers now. If your organization would like to move to the next-generation infrastructure for Google Apps accounts – and be able to sign in to many more Google services with your Google Apps accounts – please fill out this form.

If you're a Google Apps user, you're already running part of your business in the cloud, and realizing the benefits around speed, efficiency and collaboration it brings. The Google Apps Marketplace enables those same cloud benefits for your entire business, beyond messaging and collaboration.

• Create ANY diagram: flowcharts, UI Mockups to UML
• Powerful project based collaboration
• Full featured, intuitive interface

• Track leads, proposals, opportunities and projects
• Full history of customer interaction
• Central shared contact list

• Always free
• Full double-entry bookkeeping
• Easily email invoices

• Manage tasks, files and conversations
• Easy to use and fun interface
• Inbox-driven collaboration

• Easily schedule meetings with anyone, anytime
• No more double bookings, or time zone mishaps
• End the back and forth of finding a time to meet

From building and improving search on Google.com, my fellow engineers and I have learned a lot about how people search and why factors such as stemming, spelling, and synonyms are so important, even in the context of our business tools.




It's easy for search engine administrators to add synonyms to their accounts. Simply log into the control panel and add or delete search terms you want to trigger the synonym expansion. Or, if you have a large number of terms to add, you can create an XML file and quickly upload that to your account.

Thousands of businesses and schools have been using Google Sites as a collaboration platform for teams, classes, or entire intranets.

In the past year, we've helped simplify the site creation process with site templates and let businesses create domain-specific gadgets with private gadgets. Gadgets are snippets of code that can embed rich media, pieces of web content, or Google Apps products like Docs or Calendars, directly into Google Sites. One request we've received from Google Apps administrators is the ability to manage the types of gadgets available to users in the gadget directory.

Available to Google Apps customers, we're releasing an update to the Feed Server Client Tool (FSCT) – the same developer tool that enables private gadgets – to allow administrators to set which gadgets appear in the Sites gadget directory. Using the FSCT, businesses and schools can choose to explicitly select relevant gadgets for their domain's directory or blacklist inappropriate gadgets.

To find out more about using FSCT to manage your domain's gadgets in Google Sites, read the Help Center Article.

Posted by Jeffrey Harris, Associate Product Manager, Google Apps

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

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: