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We’re excited to announce the launch of 10 new apps in the Google Apps Marketplace today, joining the more than 150 installable apps made available to Google Apps domains in the Marketplace since March. Instead of spending today patching operating systems, we invite Google Apps users to explore these new applications which can deliver immediate business value to your organization.

These apps, like all installable apps in the Marketplace, offer single sign-on with your existing Google Apps user accounts, so there are no new passwords to manage. Beyond single sign-on, many offer deeper data integration with Google Docs, Gmail, and Google Calendar to help users work more efficiently, regardless of which app they happen to be using to get their job done.

As a Google Apps administrator, once you install and evaluate an app, you can deploy it to your users in only a few clicks. (watch how this works)

Several of the new applications help you manage communications more effectively, from tracking contact with customers and partners to making your inbox more efficient:
  • Bantam Live is an easy CRM & team collaboration app to track contacts, prospects, deals and organize projects, tasks, and events. It Integrates with Google Apps and social networks to import/aggregate contacts.
  • Etacts helps grow your relationships. The application and Gmail contextual gadget enable you to instantly find out who you talk to the most and who you’ve neglected.
  • Organizer by OtherInbox helps cure email overload. It automatically organizes low priority email out of the way, leaving your Inbox much smaller so it's easy to find the important messages from real people.
Here are the other apps launching on the Marketplace today for you to check out:

Aprigo NINJA for Google Docs provides advanced access management controls for Google Docs, giving organizations greater visibility and control over how documents are shared within and outside of the company.

Gliffy makes creating professional-quality flowcharts and diagrams simple, intuitively helping you turn complex information into attractive images everyone can understand

Gminutes is your one stop meeting minutes management solution for professionally executing meetings. All you have to do is create your meeting space, add relevant people to it and you are good to go.

Meetingmix helps you run meetings. It allows you to easily create agendas, take minutes, and share with attendees.

ReachPeople provides easy group alert notifications for critical communications. Now, schools and businesses can send one or thousands of mass notification messages via voice, SMS text, or email.

SiteKreator is an online service that allows anyone to instantly design, build and publish elegant, fully-branded, and interactive business websites.

TheDeadline is an intelligent Todo-Manager. The system makes collaboration very easy and helps users focus on the most important tasks and keep an overview of large sets of todos.

If you’ve #gonegoogle, and tried the #appsmarketplace, let other users know what you recommend via Twitter or submit your suggestion for additional apps here.

Posted by Steven Bazyl, Google Apps Marketplace team
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Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Sites and all Google Apps were designed as cloud-based services from day one. Google’s web-centric approach allows any application to work seamlessly on any device with a browser, allowing users to work when, where, and how they want. No more need for constant upgrades, security patches and bug fixes required by client based software.

Given the first step to the cloud for many businesses and schools is Gmail, the Google Apps Marketplace aims to make it easier for organizations that have “gone Google” to take the next step and take fuller advantage of the cloud by running even more of their infrastructure on cloud-based apps, from hundreds of software companies.

These software companies agree the web-centric approach is the way to go, and are building their applications on web-based architectures and open standards like OpenID for Single Sign-On and OAuth for data access. Marketplace developers build their applications using the technologies and hosting platform they prefer. Want to build using Java? Great. Ruby or PHP? Fine with us. .NET? Sure, the Marketplace supports that too. These apps are then hosted on developers’ own servers, on Amazon EC2, on Google’s App Engine, or on any other cloud hosting service. As developers, they don’t need to worry about proprietary tools, vendor lock-in, or proprietary cloud architecture lock-in, and as Google Apps customers, you’ll even find apps that compete with Google products such as SlideRocket presentations and Zoho CRM, giving you the maximum possible choice.

The key advantage of Marketplace apps, however, is their integration with Google Apps. All installable Marketplace apps feature single sign-on with Google Apps, and most go beyond that to incorporate specific features that help you accomplish everyday tasks more easily in combination with Google’s applications. Here is a tiny sampling of Marketplace apps that integrate with various Google Apps:

Gmail – Manymoon is an online project management tool that make it easy to turn emails from team mates or customers directly into tasks in your projects. Kwaga Context and Awayfind are two productivity apps that help you manage your conversations directly in your Gmail inbox, helping keep you more productive.

Spreadsheets – Sliderocket lets you connect media-rich presentations to live data in Google Spreadsheets, so your presentation always display the most up to date charts and graphs, and Smartsheet lets you extend Google Spreadsheets with Gantt tracking and customer management features to empower your sales teams.

Calendar – Tungle.me and Timebridge are meeting management tools that make it easier to set up and conduct meetings with partners and customers who use different calendaring systems.

Sites – RunMyProcess lets you embed custom business process workflows into Google Sites, so each part of an organization can more easily access business process that effect their daily work.

Talk – Atlassian integrates Jira Studio with Google Talk, so your software development team can stay up to date with the latest build status and team conversations from within Jira Studio, all in real time.

There are hundreds more business applications available on the Marketplace for every aspect of your business. Find CRM apps, Admin tools, Document Management apps, Productivity apps, and many more.

Every week more cloud-based business applications are added. If you can’t find an app you want please post a suggestion.

Posted by Don Dodge, Google Apps team
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Editor's note: This is the latest in a series of posts on new apps in the Google Apps Marketplace – things that have caught our eye here at Google. We’ll do this every few weeks or as we see things that we'd like to share. Look for the label "marketplace highlights" and subscribe to the series if you'd like to stay tuned.

Businesses that use Google Apps not only get access to Google's applications, they also get easy access to some of the best business apps on the web through the Google Apps Marketplace. These Marketplace apps are easy to try and buy, and integrate with Google Apps "out of the box," making it even easier for businesses to run more of their systems in the cloud.

You can learn more about the Marketplace and watch a short video on how it works here.

Get Satisfaction – Customer communities
Get Satisfaction is a social platform that helps businesses and organizations create customer communities that facilitate conversations, reduce support costs, and gather real-time market feedback.
  • Build better customer relationships
  • Reduce support costs
  • Collect valuable market data
Jobscore – Recruiting and applicant tracking
JobScore is a "hiring headquarters" where your entire team can securely see and search your jobs, resumes & feedback.
  • Free applicant tracking system and careers site
  • Easily post to multiple job boards with one click
  • Unlimited users = more referrals & better feedback
Concur Breeze – Expense Reports
Concur Breeze is designed specifically to help small businesses take the hassle out of expense reporting, enabling employees to spend more time making on productive work.
  • Expense reports created from credit card charges
  • Built-in best practice setup
  • 30-day free trial
gTrax – Timesheets
gTrax is an integrated tool for recording and reporting on your employees time usage on a per project basis.
  • Identify and apply resources to projects
  • Explore employees' activities
  • Create time budgets and monitor progress
Surveymonkey - Online Surveys
Quickly and easily gather the insights you need to move your business forward.
  • Powerful yet simple survey creation
  • Fast & flexible response gathering
  • Intelligent reporting & analysis
Posted by Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead, Google Enterprise
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If you’re running your business on Google Apps, you’ve seen how the cloud can make messaging and collaboration faster, more efficient, and less expensive. The Google Apps Marketplace enables those same cloud benefits for all of your business apps, from CRM and project management to marketing and graphics.

Next Tuesday, June 29, we’re hosting a free webinar to showcase three Accounting & Finance apps from the Google Apps Marketplace -- MyERP.com, FreshBooks and Bill.com. You’ll learn about the key features of these apps, how Google Apps customers are already using them, and how you can easily get them for your business. Please join us!

Simplifying business operations with Accounting & Finance applications from Google Apps Marketplace
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
9:00 a.m. PDT / 12:00 p.m. EDT / 5:00 p.m. GMT
Register here





Posted by Chris Kelly, Google Apps Marketplace team
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We’ve been adding new apps to the Google Apps Marketplace every week since launching in March, but today are happy to bring you 16 new apps in a single day. These apps, like all installable apps in the Marketplace, offer single sign on with your existing Google Apps user accounts, so there are no new user names or passwords to manage. Beyond single sign on, many offer deeper data integration with Google Docs, Gmail, and Google calendar to help users work more efficiently, regardless of which app they happen to be using to get their job done.

As a Google Apps administrator, once you install and evaluate an app, you can deploy it to your users in only a few clicks. (watch how this works)

Here’s the full list of 16 apps launching today on the Marketplace for you to check out:

Applane CRM
Applane CRM is a new approach to CRM that goes beyond capturing sales data to actually facilitating the process of sales and building customer relationships.

Copy2Contact
Instantly grab new contacts and appointments from any text on your screen, including email signatures, search results, Google documents, daily correspondence, and more.

DirectIQ
Create and send email newsletters to your customers, manage contact lists, and get live reports on email opens & clicks. First Month Free if you join through Google Apps Marketplace.

DokDok
DokDok makes it easy and automatic to find and work on the latest version of any document attached to your email.

Express Planner
ExpressPlanner provides event and registration management solutions for organizations that hold many events per year.

Floorplanner.com
Floorplanner is a quick and easy way to create professional looking floor plans in both 2D as 3D and is used by real estate agents and facilities professionals.

Flowr
Bring social collaboration into your enterprise as a private and secure network. Flowr for Google Apps integrates your accounts and syncs with Google Docs and Google Calendar.

Gantter
Gantter.com is a powerful, web-based project management tool that integrates with Google Docs.

GinzaPhone
Ginza Phone provides small businesses & organizations with a business class phone service without the need for any additional phone hardware. Fax service coming soon.

Gravitydev
Gravity is a simple but powerful tool to help you manage agile software development projects.

Harvest
Harvest is a simple time tracking application which makes it fast and easy for businesses to track billable hours and create invoices.

Jive Express
Jive Social Business Software combines collaboration, community, and social networking software so you can engage employees, customers, and the social web.

Promevo GPanel
Promevo gPanel for Google Apps administration is an enterprise class administration console that provides 360° visibility and management ability of any Google Apps environment.

Stupeflix Studio
Create awesome videos in a few clicks. Whether you want to promote your business or tell your story, video is a powerful medium. With the Studio, creating stunning videos is easy as pie.

TheBugTrack.com
TheBugTrack is an easy-to-use, online bug tracking service and team collaboration tool designed specifically for Google Apps users. No setup is required.

YoolinkPro
Add a social layer to Google Apps! YoolinkPro is a design-awarded social network, it allows thousands of companies to foster discussion among their teams, share Google docs and work more efficiently.

If you’re an Apps admin, head on over to the Apps Marketplace to check out these apps and more. If you’re a cloud app developer, we invite you to learn more about selling your app in the Marketplace and check out the Google Apps developer blog to see how current developers are benefiting from joining the Google Apps Marketplace.

Posted by Ryan Boyd, Google Apps Marketplace Team
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Does a certain Tuesday each month feel like the movie Groundhog Day, where you find yourself going through the same firedrill with no end in sight? Let’s hope you never have it as bad as the character in this video:



With Google Apps, instead of spending time behind-the-scenes patching existing systems, you can focus on providing new functionality that will have a material impact on your business. The Google Apps Marketplace offers more than 100 cloud apps that integrate with Google Apps, many of which are free to get started, so they’re easy to try and can deliver immediate value to your users.

Marketplace apps come in many sizes, from bite-size apps that add features to Google’s existing applications to large apps that can run major business systems and processes. As an Apps administrator, once you install and evaluate an app, you can deploy it to your users in only a few clicks.

Here’s just a small sampling of apps that have recently been added to the Marketplace for you to try.

Kwaga
See social profiles, a list of all your conversations with a contact, and remember whether or not an email thread remains unanswered - all at the bottom of each mail in Gmail.

Mailchimp
Easily send email newsletters to your customers, manage your subscriber lists, and track campaign performance.

MyERP.com
Deploy CRM, sales, accounting, projects, purchasing, and inventory apps that are integrated with Gmail, Contacts and Calendar.

Promevo
Get an enhanced administration layer for Google Apps that includes role-based access control and delegation.

Viewpath
Manage project workflow and task collaboration with graphically-rich task and resource tracking.

Every month we’ll be highlighting apps that make your users more productive, with no patching required.

And we’re continuing the conversation on our @googleatwork Twitter account with the hashtag #apptuesday. So tell us, what Marketplace apps do you recommend?

Posted by Kevin Gough, Sr. Product & Marketing Manager, Google Enterprise

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Editor's Note: Pedro Mar is director of Método DeRose Matosinhos Uni-Yoga school in Portugal. Método DeRose provides more than 65 students personalized exercise routines based on an intimate knowledge of each student's needs, as well as healthy eating choices, social activities and creative ways to improve all aspects of his or her life.

When Mar and his team were looking for software to help manage their three year-old business, they needed something as accomodating and personal as the services they provide. Already happy using the Google Apps suite, they turned to the Google Apps Marketplace, and found that they were able to design a solution that perfectly met their needs with BatchBook CRM, which not only met all of their needs for a CRM system, but easily integrated with Google tools and other Marketplace apps they were already using.

Here, Mar shares some insights into the business benefits he has seen since using the Google Apps Marketplace.

Diogo Toledo, Joana Santos and Pedro Mar from Método DeRose Matosinhos

I run an independent yoga school that is part of Uni-Yôga (www.uni-yoga.org), a worldwide network of approximately 150 schools. My business needed a solid customer relationship management (CRM) software program, mainly to keep track of former, current and potential students, but also to provide a good workflow. I was looking for a program that gave me the freedom to customize the data in a way that worked best for my business and suited its needs.

A friend and student of mine recommended searching the Google Apps Marketplace for a CRM software application. I tried several trial versions of some of the solutions offered there and eventually decided on BatchBook. After viewing the tutorial videos offered on the BatchBlue website, I knew I could customize the software to suit all our needs. After using BatchBook for more than two months, I can see the progress we've achieved.

Getting personal with our customers
All of our services are tailored to our clients' health profiles, so it very important that we have the most accurate information about each individual. Since creating our BatchBook account, we have customized the contact information to track things beyond name and address. These include everything we need to know about potential new students; things we learn during our time with our students, such as their birthdays, classes they've taken and experience levels; how often we are communicating with all of our contacts.

We sync BatchBook with our company Gmail app to keep every customer's information updated. We can also track our products and services--like books and workshops --as well as create lists that are important to our business. This all means we can provide better customer service, making our clientele happier and enjoy better, longer relationships with our students.

A workflow that bends to our needs
The to-do template in BatchBook is an amazing feature. Using the template we are able to enter a student’s information upon enrollment. From there we can easily create a scheduled list of tasks for each student to complete up to two years into the future. We use Google Apps to manage several calendars, and we can follow all of the BatchBook to dos right in Google Calendar. This is great for tracking students and their overall progress through our program as we help them achieve one level after another. All of our academic programs, marketing programs, and operational programs are also tracked in the to-do templates, so we are sure not to miss a thing.

Finding the right marketing balance
Our best and most cost effective marketing strategy is communicating, communicating, communicating. We track every e-mail, phone call, cell phone message, class, note, student referral and recommendation in BatchBook. By doing so, we are constantly connected with our network of people. We even use the Rapportive integration with BatchBook and Gmail to obtain social network information we need about a customer right within an e-mail message. It's genius.

We also take advantage of MailChimp's integration with Google Apps and BatchBook to allow different team members to send e-mail newsletters to different groups. Each of the different departments within the school can create their own lists from our list of contacts, and reach out with personalized details about upcoming events, special parties or birthday wishes.

Within one month of using BatchBook our number of students has grown by 10%. We are now managing more than 1,000 contacts in the software and with BatchBlue, we can turn more propects into engaged students. Once we create a file on a prospective student within BatchBlue, we never lose track of him or her. That is a huge value to us.

Previously, we simply had too many other things to worry about. With only four to five instructors at the school, we would easily lose track of a potential student or forget something like a birthday, which is unforgivable in our school's culture of appreciation, attention and trust.


Other programs we tried in the past did not support the rich interaction we have with our students or the workflow that helps us stay on top of the important details like BatchBook, Gmail and Google Calendars does. Using BatchBook, we can now closely monitor our relationship with each student and each lead.

Clearly, BatchBook has made a positive difference in how we run our business. Since using the program, we have improved the quality of our outreach to potential clients, and we have registered new students more easily. With the assistance of the customized to-do templates, integrated with our Google Calendars, we are reminded regularly when to send an email or reach out through another method of communication to a prospective student.

Our success using Google Apps and BatchBook has led me to encourage other schools within the network to do the same. By duplicating our system and taking advantage of our efforts, they can implement the practices into their own business and see firsthand the results we have experienced.

Posted by Chris Kelly, Google Apps Partners team






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Editor’s Note: Rob Salvatore is CEO of Tongal, a cloud-based entertainment company. Tongal facilitates creativity in the cloud by crowdsourcing video content through Internet-based collaborations. The company marries its professional network of content creators to businesses that need video content. Tongal’s focus is on video advertising, music video, instructional video, and brand integrated short films. Customers include the New York Knicks and Kiva.org.

Our business is built on collaboration, and we wouldn’t be able to do this without the power of cloud computing. On average, each project at Tongal involves more than twenty separate contributors.

Thanks to Google Apps and SlideRocket – an integrated presentation app available on the Google Apps Marketplace – we’re no longer prisoners of desktop software and we're able to easily work across time zones and oceans.

Efficient & effective communications
For months we struggled with effective ways to share our high-definition video content. We’re dealing with very large files and it’s critical for us to exhibit and present our work online, not to mention the need to maintain the integrity and quality of the video. The combination of Google and SlideRocket made it possible for both us and our community to create, manage and share video files with a few simple clicks.
  • When users submit video content to a Tongal collaboration, Google converts it ad hoc. So, we're free of heavy conversion software licensing agreements and only pay for what we use, when we use it.
  • After the Tongal community and platform complete the video product, SlideRocket helps us show it off. We can easily embed the finished video product into our presentations without worrying about diminished video quality or file size.

SlideRocket has eliminated the need for us to burn videos and presentations to disks in order to send our content to customers and prospects. Plus, SlideRocket’s platform generates unique URLs for each presentation that we can immediately send to prospects via email without worrying about file size.

100% accurate, integrated information
Another benefit of working in the cloud is that we've linked our Google Docs and information from Google Analytics directly into our presentations, ensuring our slides are accurate and up-to-date every time the presentation is viewed. When we make a change to our Google Spreadsheet, that change is immediately reflected in our SlideRocket presentation. This saves us a lot of “busy work” updating our marketing presentations. As a start-up, every employee and each hour is important, and any application that saves us time and effort is invaluable.


Insight and analytics lead to shorter sales cycles
Not only did SlideRocket solve our technical issues, it also brought insight and intelligence about our customer’s behavior through the statistics and analytics that we would not be able to get with any other application. This has significantly shortened our sales cycle, and help us target our efforts.

For example, if one potential customer spends a lot of time on a slide about cost, we know that might be an issue for them. If another spends time on a slide that showcases a particular video, we know that their interest is truly piqued. If they spend no time at all – well, we can take a hint...

The viewership statistics and analytics that SlideRocket provides for each presentation have a direct effect on the success of our business. We’re gaining valuable insight into our customers’ experience with the content we’ve developed. Not to mention the fact that we can secure our presentations with password protection, especially if we’re dealing with sensitive content. SlideRocket is the only presentation solution out there that offers this kind of intelligence and control.


Posted by Chris Kelly, the Google Apps Partner team

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Editor's note: This is the latest in a series of posts on new apps in the Google Apps Marketplace – things that have caught our eye here at Google. We’ll do this every few weeks or as we see things that we'd like to share. Look for the label "marketplace highlights" and subscribe to the series if you'd like to stay tuned.

Businesses that use Google Apps not only get access to Google's applications, they also get easy access to some of the best business apps on the web through the Google Apps Marketplace. These Marketplace apps are easy to try and buy, and integrate with Google Apps "out of the box," making it even easier for businesses to run more of their systems in the cloud.

You can learn more about the Marketplace and watch a short video on how it works here.

Bill.com - Simple bill management

Bill.com is used by thousands of businesses to automate bill management. Simply upload bills, route for approval, schedule and pay, and sync with your accounting system.
  • Eliminate paper filing and storage
  • Automate approval process
  • Pay anyone electronically
Syncplicity – Easy sync, backup, share and file management

Syncplicity’s unique Google Apps synchronization means users now have the choice to create and edit their files in desktop apps and then open that same file in Google Docs seamlessly.
  • Sync your desktop directly with Google Docs
  • Continue to create and edit files on your desktop
  • Offline access, backup, and sync for Google Docs
TextFlow – Powerful track changes for Google Docs

TextFlowintegrates with Google Docs to offer a powerful alternative to Microsoft Word(tm) "track changes," document comparison, and review functions.
  • See what changes have been made by whom
  • Visualize the full revision history of a document
  • Decide which changes to accept or reject
Mavenlink – Project collaboration for consultants

Mavenlink manages project communications, documents, budgets, and payments between independent professionals and their clients.
  • 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
Gist Gadget – Rich profiles for your email contacts in Gmail

The Gist Gadget automatically pulls together information for anyone in the “From” or “CC” fields in Gmail and places a profile at the bottom of an opened email.
  • See contact information and updates
  • Request profiles to build a direct connection
  • Search across all your contacts
Posted by Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead, Google Enterprise
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Google Apps is built for the web, with open standards and APIs that enable our customers to extend and integrate Google’s expanding suite of web-based applications with other services – whether those services are offered by software vendors through the Google Apps Marketplace or built by their own IT departments. Today, we’re excited about two important developments: Google App Engine for Business now enables customers to deploy their own internal apps on Google’s cloud infrastructure, and our collaboration with VMware on cloud portability gives enterprises the ability to build apps using familiar tools and deploy them to their cloud of choice or to on-premise infrastructure.


With Google App Engine for Business, companies can build and host applications on Google’s scalable cloud infrastructure. New enterprise-level capabilities include centralized administration, premium developer support, a 99.9% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA), simple and predictable monthly pricing, and – coming later this year – access to premium features like cloud-based SQL and SSL. Read our post on the Google Code blog to learn more and sign-up for a preview.

To make it easier for businesses to build cloud-based apps and to give them more deployment choices, we're working with VMware, an industry leader in virtualization. Businesses can now build applications in a familiar development environment that they can easily deploy to Google App Engine, a VMware environment (in-house vSphere infrastructure, a choice of vCloud hosting partners, or VMforce), or other infrastructure such as Amazon EC2. This development environment also allows developers to more easily create data presentation widgets that run on all devices, from phones to tablets to desktops.

By enabling portability between on-premise and multiple cloud environments – including enterprise-ready App Engine for Business – we’re giving our customers more flexibility and making it easier for them to move to the cloud.

Posted by Matthew Glotzbach, Director of Product Management, Google Enterprise
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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.

Contextual gadgets in Gmail – like YouTube, Google Docs and Picasa previews – intelligently display relevant information from other systems as you read your email, so you can be more efficient without leaving your inbox.

Starting today, third party developers can build Gmail contextual gadgets and distribute them in the Google Apps Marketplace. These gadgets can display information from social networks, business services, web applications and other systems, and users can interact with that data right within Gmail. Contextual gadgets are yet another example how the power of the web can outpace traditional business technology.



Several new contextual gadget integrations for Gmail are available to Google Apps customers in the Apps Marketplace today:
  • AwayFind lets you mark certain contacts or message topics as ‘Urgent’ and then alerts you via phone, SMS or IM when relevant messages arrive.
  • Kwaga displays social network profiles and lists recent email exchanges with people you correspond with.
  • Gist brings together information from across the web about people you’re corresponding with, providing rich person and company profiles, news and updates.
  • Pixetell detects email links to video messages created with Pixetell’s video software and lets you preview, comment on, and share those videos without leaving your inbox.
  • Smartsheet lets you access and update entries in Smartsheet’s sales pipeline and project management tool.
  • Xobni, Rapportive, Manymoon, Newmind Group, and BillFLO have also launched their own contextual gadget integrations.
Like any other application in the Google Apps Marketplace, a Google Apps domain administrator can install a contextual gadget from the Marketplace with just a few clicks. Both before and during the install process, administrators can review the portions of an email the gadget will have access to, and can revoke that permission at any time from their control panel. For more information on the Google Apps marketplace, watch the overview video.

To learn more about the new contextual gadget applications available in Gmail, head to the Google Apps Marketplace and browse for apps that have ‘Mail Integration’.

Posted by Chandrashekar Raghavan, Product Manager, Google Apps extensions

Editor's note: Gmail contextual gadgets are available to businesses, schools, and organizations using Google Apps. Domain administrators can purchase and install contextual gadgets along with other applications through the Google Apps marketplace.
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Editor's Note: Sunir Shah is Chief Handshaker with FreshBooks, the leader in online billing and bookkeeping. Available in the Google Apps Marketplace, FreshBooks is an essential tool helping small and medium-sized companies manage their needs 100% online, providing invoicing, estimates, time tracking, reporting and other business functions.


Roy Potterill and Natasha Taljaard are two of the lead creative wizards at Inner City Ink, a Johannesburg-based print shop producing high-quality screen printing and merchandise, including T-shirts, caps, stickers, posters, buttons, flyers, hoodies and just about anything else you can print on. Inner City Ink take pride in being able to print pretty much anything their clients want on whatever they want, supplying creatives, retail clothing labels, the music industry, event companies and more.


Sunir Shah: Running a business is hard enough; people shouldn't have to deal with complex systems to do their billing and bookkeeping. That's why we built FreshBooks – to help small businesses and teams everywhere get paid, painlessly, so they can focus on what they love to do.


Right from the start, FreshBooks has always been a cloud-based app and we're big believers in the value of the cloud for small businesses. Having all your business data available online, from anywhere, is a huge thing for small teams.


The Google Apps Marketplace is a great step forward in our view – it helps millions of businesses find new online tools, and provides a simple way to connect all these tools together. We're really happy to have been part of the Google Apps Marketplace from the beginning and we've already heard from customers like Inner City Ink about how it's making a real difference in their business.


Roy Potteril: We've got a reputation at Inner City Ink for innovation and doing things differently that extends beyond the originality of our design and printing work all the to how way we work with clients.


We've been in growth mode for a while, but with the World Cup coming up this summer, and word getting out about our work, our business just exploded. Suddenly, we've got t-shirt and custom printing orders coming out our ears. Before we found Freshbooks, we were always scrambling under pressure and bound to one PC at the office, with stacks of paperwork lying everywhere. With the sudden increase in work it was bedlam.


Natasha Taljaard: We were taking orders and handling all the print jobs we could during the day, then plowing through quotes and invoices every night, or whenever we could get to the office. As an on-the-go group, living on our cellphones, being tied to the one PC in the office we used to write up quotes and bills was killing us. Freshbooks was our ticket out of the madness.


RP: I've been pushing for ways to scale our business and help us work better for a while. Web technology is the key to transforming a business like this. I was already a Google Apps convert – doing everything I could through Gmail, Google Talk and their other web apps. The access anywhere model just makes sense with the way my life works. When I found out about FreshBooks through the Google Apps Marketplace, it seemed like a no-brainer.


Now the whole team can quickly get into any info we need, wherever we are, and we're not worrying about seeing the most up-to-date version of a quote. Better still, we don't have piles of paperwork all lying around everywhere and we look way more professional when we can produce that all-important first quote in next to no time.


With everything in the cloud, we're doing 100% more quotes a day. In the first two months of using Freshbooks we had an increase in turnover of over 30% per month. We're now able to cut out 50% of the workload because of the speed at which we can do quotes and invoices.


At the same time, we’re able to finish our work a lot quicker, and spend more time on follow-ups and marketing. We're always on the same page and connected, so we have more time to spend on the important things – talking to clients and selling, not spending the day stuck behind the computer.


NT: One of our biggest corporate clients was so impressed with this whole setup, their financial manager called in his associates to come and check out the way we're working. That makes us look great. You might not think web technology could have such a big impact on an old-school business like screen-printing, but we're only just scratching the surface here - this is going to be huge.


I had this dream of being able to enjoy a glass of wine on the stoep of a farm on the West Coast, while still being plugged into what's going on back in Johannesburg. I think she's still a bit stunned that she can do exactly that now that I've set her up with FreshBooks and Google Apps.


Posted by Chris Kelly, Google Apps Marketplace team
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