Posted by James Wang, Google Mini Product Specialist

Yes, I know, you just read that title and now have the Rolling Stones stuck in your head. Well, as you enjoy that mental background music, here's some highlights from a recent review about the Google Mini by Jim Dalrymple from Macworld. Jim heard widespread rumors that the Google Mini was easy to install, and wanted to see if this claim had any truth to it. Here's what he had to say:

"The Mini comes with everything you need to get up and running—the 1U rackmount appliance, a crossover cable, an Ethernet cable and power cord. For the truly challenged among us, Google even colored the cables and the slots they go in to, so that it's nearly impossible to make a mistake."

"It took me about 30 minutes from the time I cracked open the packing tape on the box to the time I did my first search. It was almost too simple—for a while, I wasn't sure I actually finished the complete setup."

"I am impressed with how quickly the box was setup. We all know that Google Search packs a lot of power and it's nice to see the company is able to bring that to small business users in such an easy-to-use box."

We are blushing, Jim. Thank you.

Posted by Noah Doyle, Enterprise Product Manager

Millions of users around the world have used Google Earth to 'fly' around the world and check out everything from Buckingham Palace to their childhood homes.

Believe it or not, Google Earth isn't just for individual exploration of the world. A growing number of companies and government agencies have been using Google Earth's Enterprise solutions to layer their data onto the globe. Energy companies have been particularly enthusiastic in adopting Google Earth Enterprise. With huge amounts of exploration imagery and the need to manage oil rigs, pipelines, equipment etc. all over the world, the energy industry is a natural fit for Google Earth Enterprise.

That is why we are pleased to announce that Spatial Energy has joined the Google Enterprise Professional program as a Google Earth Specialist. Spatial Energy has extensive experience providing imagery solutions to the oil and gas industry, so we are excited to work with them to extend the reach of Google Earth to more oil and gas companies.

Posted by Kevin Smith, Google Enterprise

Inxight, a Google Enterprise Professional partner, has once again released a free complement to Google enterprise search technology. This time it's the Inxight Search Extender for Google Desktop, which combines Inxight's entity extraction and natural-language processing with Google Desktop's search capability. Search results from Google Desktop are automatically clustered on-the-fly, enabling users to filter their results sets by the people, companies, places, concepts and other information contained within them.

Oh yeah--what was Inxight's earlier free offering? A java API wrapper for the Google Search Appliance and the Google Mini, available at http://code.google.com/enterprise/opensource/. While you're there, check out other offerings from developers, or click on "API Documentation" to see some different ways to integrate with Google enterprise search products.

Posted by Jeff Ragusa, Google Enterprise

We're always excited when a developer, customer, or partner takes such great interest in our products and in our community that they spend the time and effort to contribute their own improvements. I've recently had the pleasure of working with software engineer and web standards aficionado Joe D'Andrea who has made it his personal mission to take our Google Search Appliance into the wonderful world of web standards compliance. He's created a new XSLT stylesheet that displays our search results in a way that conforms to the XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.1 specifications. In doing so he's completely separated the markup from the styling in our default stylesheet.

What does this mean to you? Well for starters it means that you could install this single stylesheet into your Google Search Appliance and provide a search experience that automatically adapts to the device its being viewed on! On a computer screen Joe provides the familar look we all love. On printed paper the astute eye notices some added conveniences. What about a mobile phone? Ok, now we're talking. The drastic transformation into a Google Mobile-like interface seems like magic. But thats nothing. Go ahead and try your favorite text-based or speech-based browser! Ah, there's nothing quite like having your search results read to you like poetic verse...

Read more about the many other benefits in Joe's own blog post. He's published the stylesheet, along with lots of screenshots and notes, as a project on Google's open source hosting platform.

If you would like to contribute to our growing list of open source projects related to our Enterprise products, drop us a note and let us know what interesting things you're working on!

Thanks Joe!

Posted by Kevin Gough, Enterprise Product Marketing Manager

Well according to Ken Yarmosh, author of the TECHNOSIGHT blog, Google product manager Rajen Sheth was "on fire" during his keynote at today's The New New Internet conference. Rajen spoke about Google's approach to developing web-based enterprise software and our new Google Apps for Your Domain offering. Upon hearing Ken's proclamation, Rajen responded, "I'm fired?" No Rajen, quite the opposite. Read Ken's synopsis of Rajen's talk and view a few video clips from it.

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Search Product Manager

As a product manager it’s always fun to work on cool, interesting technology and then release it to customers. Today we shipped an all-new version of the Google Search Appliance with increased document capacity and some great new features. With this new release, the GB-5005 can now search up to 10 million documents while the GB-8008 can search a whopping 30 million. (By the way, if you ask nicely, we can build them even bigger! Just let us know.)

We also added some cool features such as date and number range search. So now you can restrict your search to only those documents authored between say, January 1st and September 19th 2006. Similarly, when you're looking for that special Digital Camera, you can restrict your search to cameras in the $250 to $1000 price range. My wife would perhaps like me to restrict this search to the $250 to $500 range ;-)

Finally something special for our international friends; we now have our administrative interface, product documentation and search interface available in an additional 10 languages, now totaling 16 languages: Chinese (Simplified & Traditional), Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Spanish, Swedish.

If you are a customer, you can grab the update from our support site. If you aren't yet able to find things inside your enterprise, check out the Google Search Appliance and see if its right for you.

Posted by Jeff Ragusa, Google Enterprise

Xythos Software provides document and file management products for educational institutions, government organizations, and commercial organizations who need secure and easy to use methods to manage and share their information. They just made access to that information even easier for their customers who own a Google Search Appliance by creating a OneBox for Enterprise module.

On October 18th, Xythos will be hosting a web seminar to discuss the module, how it was built, and what it can do for organizations. Our own David Bercovich will join them. You can find out more and sign up for the web seminar on their web site. The OneBox module is available now in our OneBox Gallery.

This accomplishment offers a great example of how any individual or organization can create and publish a useful OneBox module, without even having a Google Search Appliance of their own!

Posted by Andria McCool, Google Enterprise Federal Marketing Manager

I don't know about you, but a few of my favorite things are Google Earth and Stephen Colbert's 435 part series "Better know a District". You can only imagine how excited I was to see that Google Earth has updated its US Government Layer so everyone can know more about their districts! We've updated the congressional boundaries, and added a layer for both US Senators and US Representatives. With embedded search for Google Images – you are only 2 clicks away from a picture of your favorite Representative! Check it out in the latest version of Google Earth!

Posted by Rodrigo Vaca, Enterprise Product Marketing Manager

We're always excited to hear when our enterprise search products help improve employee productivity and reduce costs, especially when those are are taxpayer dollars. The State Services Commission of New Zealand recently set a Google Mini out to do just that, specifically providing top-quality search across their SharePoint portal.

"We needed a product to replace our legacy search tool. It had to be simple to integrate with the SharePoint Services sites which make up the PSI, and be as user friendly as possible. An excellent search function is vital to the PSI and the Google Mini functionality fulfilled all the criteria," said State Services deputy commissioner of ICT Laurence Millar.

We couldn't agree more... happy searching!

Posted by Kevin Gough, Google Enterprise

This week, Google applications won in four out of six categories and got runner up in a fifth category in Forbes' review of the best web-based applications for SMBs. Google winners included Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Notebook and Google Spreadsheets. These accolades came only a week after we launched Google Apps for Your Domain, our suite of integrated productivity tools that includes Gmail and Google Calendar. If the whole is better than the sum of its parts, then Google Apps for Your Domain is going to make SMBs even more effective and given really positive initial feedback, we hope that it too finds a place in the winners circle next year.