We always enjoy going "back to school" – visiting college campus quads and K-12 classrooms – especially because we get to learn from our users, who are always happy to tell us what they want. One idea we hear a lot is, "Build a learning management system (LMS) to go along with Google Apps." We love the concept – but we also really value the great work being done by educational software developers - including those in the Open Source community who work on projects like Moodle, an LMS web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites.

Up until now, Google Apps and Moodle were pretty much eying each other across the classroom – but not quite talking. Then Moodlerooms, a Moodle partner, entered the scene.

Here's why. Moodlerooms, a SaaS provider of Moodle, just launched an application built on the Moodle platform that lets school admins bring Moodle and Google Apps together with a single sign-in. So now, students who told us they didn't want to sign in to multiple environments – like an LMS to get their course content and a productivity suite like Google Apps to actually do their work – have the answer they've wanted.

With the update, administrators of Moodle can easily set up Google Apps accounts for their students. And students who log into their school's version of Moodle can now automatically be signed in to their school's Google Apps Education Edition service. Now, they can access whatever their instructors may have posted in their LMS, such as lecture notes, homework assignments, and relevant links and resources, and easily integrate that content into their workspace on Google Apps. They can collaborate with their classmates in Google Docs, build a fully fleshed-out Google Site, or even just send an email - without having to manage multiple accounts in multiple systems. And, needless to say, the same goes for their teachers, professors, administrators – anyone who uses the system.

If you've ever looked at your existing email system and wondered if there might be a better way, tune in to Andy Nallappan's online review of his recent migration to Google Apps on Monday, March 2, at 10:00 AM PST (1:00 PM EST).

Andy, Director, IT, Engineering and Enterprise Infrastructure for Avago Technologies (which provides components and subsystems to equipment manufacturers) recently migrated 3,000 of his company's employees from Microsoft Exchange 2003 to Google Apps – and he promises to tell all.

Explore the questions and concerns he faced as he researched the migration, including global integration, technology capabilities and workarounds, feature tradeoffs, cost savings, and more. Andy will share how he found his answers, what he'd do differently, what his internal pilot revealed, and how, in the end, Google Apps is working for his users.

This will be a clear, first-hand account what it takes to move a large corporate email system over to an integrated Google solution – and what that means for email systems of any size. We hope you'll join us, no matter what email system you're currently using, for a real-world look on what's possible in email today and what it takes to get there.

The agenda includes time for Q&A, so bring your questions and learn from Andy's experience.

Register for this free 60-minute webinar . We hope that you'll join us.

Monday, March 2, 2009 10:00 AM PST / 1:00 PM EST
Webinar: Avago Technologies: from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps

Posted by Kevin Gough, Google Apps Team

Update (03/02/09): More than 200 participants joined in as Andy Nallappan, Director, Enterprise Infrastructure for Avago Technologies, reviewed how he moved 4,100 users to Google Apps, primarily for email, in Q408 through Q109.

Avago expects to realize $1.1M in annual savings from moving from Exchange 2003 to Google Apps.

Editor's note: We always value learning how our customers use our products to meet critical business needs. Here's a case where those needs were especially critical. The FDA recently mobilized website search, powered by the Google Search Appliance (GSA), to address a major public health issue. The FDA sped information access to the public, removing barriers that could have made this type of information difficult to find.

Rajesh Sripada, a Certified Google Search Engineer with GlobalNet Services, Inc. – a fast-growing provider of web development and system integration solutions to business and government clients – explains the pivotal role of the GSA in providing this service. Thanks to Rajesh for sharing this story.

Did you think twice the last time you reached for a jar of peanut butter? You’re not alone. The ongoing salmonella outbreak in peanut products has sparked one of the largest product recalls in history. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is proactively keeping the public up to date on recalled products, and they’re doing it with the help of the Google Search Appliance.

If you want to know whether the box of granola bars in your pantry has been recalled, simply visit the FDA web page and query for the type of product, like granola bars, or a brand name, to see whether the product has been recalled.

Previously, people would have had to scroll through a long list of products to try and locate the one they were looking for – a much more time-consuming process. Thanks to search, people can make fast, informed decisions.

GlobalNet Services, Inc. (GNSI) is a Google Enterprise Partner who manages and administers the intranet and Internet search for the FDA. For the peanut butter recall, GNSI is responsible for daily database and website updates to www.fda.gov. Information is available to the public through the Google Search Appliance (GSA), and visitors to the site can also download information in PDF and XLS files. The speed of the search appliance is crucial and the data in the GSA needs to be updated as soon as we receive it. Each night, the GSA re-crawls the database and refreshes any new information. This takes less than an hour and still allows late-night visitors to search for recall information.

In its first three weeks of existence, the peanut butter product search page received over 25 million page views, and the search appliance has handled the resulting search traffic with ease. This graph shows the number of queries per minute on the FDA search appliance. A spike like this happens every morning, with a sustained use of around 250 queries per minute for most of the working day. Public safety depends on the availability of this information, and the search appliance keeps it available. To help the search appliance handle the traffic, GNSI turns on caching during the day, and turns off caching at night to re-crawl the database.

Posted by Dan Israel, Google Federal Team

Editor's note: We've had enough interest in this story, which ran yesterday on the Official Google Blog, to share it again here. If you are using (or interested in using) Google Apps and other Google solutions in education, be sure to watch the video – and use comments, below, to fill us in on Google Apps stories from your school.

You might remember reading our posts from the road when we hit the streets and headed "App to School" in our retro bio-fuel bus (below) to visit ten universities across the U.S. that used Google Apps. One of our main goals for this trip was to hear from the technology experts themselves -- the students -- about how they were using Google tools like Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Sites, and Talk to be more effective on and off campus.


Luckily we had a video camera along for the ride, and we filmed a bunch of students telling their stories. Every week we'll share a new video on the Google Students blog, so you can hear from the students themselves and hopefully learn a few new ways to use these products. If you want to make sure you catch all the latest videos, and stay up-to-date about other news and tips for students, you can subscribe to the student blog.

Here's one video from a student who uses Google Calendar to manage lab studies with his classmates:



Can't wait another week to see more videos? Check out our playlist. And if you have your own story to share, we encourage you to upload it as a response.

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Associate Product Marketing Manager, Google Apps for Education

For workers on the go, having up-to-date calendar and contacts information is crucial. Knowing about last-minute changes to schedules can mean the difference between winning and losing a big deal. Today, we're happy to announce two-way push sync of calendar and contact information for Google Apps users with iPhones and Windows Mobile devices. We're also releasing contact sync for mobile devices that support SyncML.

With Google Sync, whether users make changes to calendar events and contacts from their browsers or mobile devices, changes will be reflected in both places automatically, within minutes. And because Google Sync ties directly into devices' pre-installed calendar and contacts applications, employees don't need to learn a new interface.

To get started, Google Sync must be enabled for your domain from the Google Apps control panel. Then, employees will be able to configure Google Sync from their devices. The instructions for each type of phone are different, so check out our help center for device specific information.

Before getting started with this beta release, please take a minute to review some syncing limitations we're aware of with the iPhone and Windows Mobile devices. Also, keep in mind that Google Sync will replace all existing contacts and calendar information on your phone, so make sure to back up any important data before you get started.

For more information, visit m.google.com/sync.

Posted by Debbie Leight, Google Apps Team

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.

Following up on last week's announcement of offline access in Gmail Labs, we're happy to let you know that read-only offline access is now an option in Calendar for Google Apps customers.

So on top of organizing your Gmail inbox while you're traveling or without a strong Internet connection, you will be able to see your events in Google Calendar from wherever you are. Offline Calendar will let you view your existing schedule and events, but not edit them, so you don't have to print out calendars the night before a trip.

To enable offline in Calendar:

1. Sign in to Calendar.
2. In the upper right-hand corner of your account, next to your username, there will be a new 'Offline Beta' link. Click this link to start the offline synchronization process.

Users of Google Apps Standard Edition can get started on these steps immediately. For Premier and Education Edition, domain administrators will first have to check the box next to 'Turn on new features' in the 'Domain Settings' page of the Google Apps control panel before their users can enable this option.

This offline feature uses Gears, an open source browser extension that adds offline functionality directly to the browser.

Posted by Joyce Sohn, Google Apps Marketing Manager

We've heard quite a few requests for email list enhancements, so we know our users will be happy to hear that several new administrative features for email lists are available today.

First, administrators can now assign permissions per email list that determine who can send email to that list. The sending of email can be restricted to members of the list, anyone in the domain, anyone in the world, or even a subset of members designated as list owners. This means you can more effectively use lists for internal communications, announcements, external contact aliases, and even cross-organizational collaboration.

Second, lists and list membership are easier to manage in bulk in the control panel. Mailing lists can even contain other mailing lists, which allows you to easily reuse frequently-referenced lists. We've also updated the Provisioning API for Premier and Education Edition administrators, which replicates all the email list functionality in the control panel, enabling automated mailing list management. We already have individual customers managing upwards of ten thousand lists using this API.

Third, we've renamed "email lists" to "groups". You can access the feature from your control panel under 'Users and Groups' > 'Groups'. Why would we bother renaming it? We see more uses for groups than just sending email to lists. So, we'll be making groups useful for other enterprise tasks in the future, like easily sharing a document with a group of people. Also, we'll be incorporating many of the features that our consumer users love in Google Groups into Google Apps over time.

All of your existing Google Apps email lists have been converted to groups, so check out our getting started guide and get more out of those lists today!

Posted by Justin Sadowski, Google Apps Engineer

New Google Apps users quickly notice that Gmail uses labels instead of traditional folders for organizing email. Why this design decision? Put simply, you can organize and then find messages more efficiently with labels.

Here's why: a message can be tagged with multiple labels like "Project Orion" and "Budget," so you can find that message in either context down the road. With folders, you'd need to pick the one best place for that message – let's say the "Project Orion" folder – making it harder to find later if you're looking for that same message in the context of budget planning.

We hear that the concept of labels can feel foreign at first, and, up until now, the way you had to first apply a label and then archive to move it from your inbox was a two-step process. Listening to users, we heard that people wanted the flexibility of labels but the simplicity of folders.

As of today we're making it easier for you to work with labels. From your inbox or when viewing labeled messages, you'll see a new "Move to" button that labels and removes messages from the current location in one step, just like folders. To apply a label without archiving or removing existing labels, click the "Labels" button.
For you keyboard shortcut diehards, V lets you quickly move, and L lets you label selected messages...but first make sure you've turned on keyboard shortcuts.
Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Product Marketing Manager

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