Broadway Malyan improves accessibility and lowers costs by going Google

Editor’s note: Over 3 million businesses have adopted Google Apps. Today we’ll hear from Ali Ball, CIO of Broadway Malyan. To learn more about other organizations that have gone Google and share your story, visit our community map or test drive life in the cloud with the Go Google cloud calculator.

Broadway Malyan is an award-winning international practice of architects, urbanists and designers with a highly dispersed workforce. Headquartered in the U.K, we have over 500 employees working across 13 offices throughout the UK, Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia. The practice also has project offices in Baku and Edinburgh, and associated offices across Europe. In September 2010 we made the decision to switch to Google Apps with the support of Cloudreach, a UK-based Google Apps Authorized reseller and Cloud solutions system integrator. They have extensive experience in migrating businesses to Google Apps, and place a particular emphasis on managing business change and application development.

Our main motivation for moving to the cloud was to simplify our IT infrastructure and improve accessibility. After consultation from Cloudreach, we felt that Google Apps would provide exactly what we needed in terms of a greatly simplified service for our global user base and the accessibility that our mobile users require. We had recently upgraded to Microsoft Exchange 2010, however there were some major operational costs involved in running that platform. Despite those recent upgrade costs, there was still a significant financial advantage in moving directly to Google Apps.



From a day-to-day perspective, we were able to introduce our users to a new way of working through the real time collaboration in Google Docs. This method of working helps us significantly when building proposals or customer presentations. Giving users the ability to collaborate on documents and presentations online, and also use the chat and video features has not only increased our efficiency, but it has also saved us money by reducing the amount of travel required.

With Google Apps, the average user’s inbox storage has increased significantly from 1Gb to 25Gb meaning they never have to delete an email again. Plus, with Gmail’s built-in search feature they can find an email or chat message in an instant.

We have also implemented a mixture of Google Groups and Google Sites as a direct replacement for public folders, which will no longer be supported by Microsoft.

We’ve already saved a significant amount of money by moving to Google Apps, but I estimate savings will continue to increase in the future since we’ll no longer have to carry out upgrades to server-based applications, or spend management time on it. For example we no longer have to buy care packs for all of our Microsoft Exchange servers, or worry about purchasing new disks for the storage arrays when we reach capacity. To accomplish what we have with Google Apps using traditional hosted solutions would be almost impossible, and certainly cost-prohibitive. We’ve also made ourselves less dependent on office infrastructure. Everything now runs smoothly, with no intervention from us.

Posted by Ali Ball, Broadway Malyan

Enhance your productivity with more applications for Google Apps

Last month we launched an improvement that makes more than 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. Since the launch, we’ve featured posts from product teams across Google to showcase how you can benefit from the new services.


Our colleagues working on Google Reader, Google Alerts, Google News, and Google Finance described how their products give you new ways to discover content on the web. The Blogger and YouTube teams shared how their services can be used to connect with your customers and communicate information about your products and brand. We also featured posts from the Google Analytics, Google Website Optimizer, Google Custom Search, and Google Translator Toolkit teams to highligh tools that help your company build and optimize your web property. Posts from Google AdWords and Google Places showed how you can make it easier for potential customers to discover your business when they are searching online, and a post from Google Checkout described how you can let visitors purchase products from your site once they arrive. And if your business isn’t built around an online transaction model, the Google AdSense and DoubleClick for Publishers teams outlined tools that you can use to efficiently monetize traffic to your website. We also featured posts on Picasa Web Albums and Google SketchUp & 3D Warehouse that highlighted use cases for sharing and editing photos and 3D images at your organization. Finally, posts from Google Voice and Google Chrome Sync featured products that leverage the power of the web to allow you to work seamlessly across multiple devices, so you’re not tied to your desk phone or desktop PC to be productive.

This series has highlighted a few ways that you can use these additional Google applications, and we’re confident that you will discover many new and interesting use cases that fit your business. You can explore even more exciting Google services now available with your Google Apps account at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

All of these new services can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). Your domain administrator can grant different groups of users access to different sets of applications, so your company can get up and running today with more than 60 productivity-boosting applications matched to those users that will benefit from them most.


Posted by Jeremiah Dillon, Google Apps team

Note: Some products may not be available in all areas.

Improved migration tools for Microsoft® Exchange and Microsoft Outlook®

With more than 3 million businesses using Google Apps, it’s been an exciting year for 100% web-based computing! To help make it easy for our customers transition to Google Apps, over the years we've launched several tools to migrate email, contacts and calendar data from Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Outlook and other IMAP servers into Google Apps. This year alone, customers have migrated over 3.5 billion emails to Google Apps, along with over 100 million calendar events and 25 million contacts. But we’re still working to make it even easier: today we’ve added new versions of our data migration tools for Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook, which are available to Google Apps for Business and Education customers.

Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Exchange: This tool lets administrators migrate data for batches of users from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps. The new version features performance improvements and supports several additional IMAP servers, including Novell® GroupWise, Cyrus®, Dovecot® and Courier®. You can migrate email from @gmail.com accounts as well with this tool. We’ve also improved support for PST files and Hosted Exchange with this release. Please explore the administrator’s guide and visit the download page for more information.

Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Outlook: This tool allows end-users to migrate email, contacts and calendar data from their Microsoft Outlook profiles or local PST file to Google Apps. The new version features improvements for Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007, and adds support for 2010. It also includes support for 64-bit versions of Microsoft Outlook. Head over to the download page to get the updated migration tool.

Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook: If some of your users want to continue using Microsoft Outlook as their email interface, this tool is for them. This tool now also allows seamless migration of existing data from Microsoft Outlook into Google Apps (via Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Outlook), and keeps Outlook email, contacts and calendar data in sync with Google Apps accounts. Get the latest version from the download page.

Google Calendar Connectors for Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes: Some customers still choose to operate in a dual-deployment environment, and to that end, we’ve also been busy updating Google Calendar connectors that allow bi-directional look-ups of calendar free/busy information for users in the organization still on Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes. The new versions of the Calendar Connectors also now support the new Google Apps account infrastructure that brings over 60 additional Google applications to your Google Apps accounts.


Posted by Aditya Kulkarni, Product Manager

A look at the best of the Google Apps Marketplace in 2010

Closing out 2010, we are excited to offer over 250 installable applications in the Google Apps Marketplace that work seamlessly with Google Apps. The Apps Marketplace has grown rapidly, now with over 4 million users with at least one Marketplace app installed on their domains.

With Google Apps and the Apps Marketplace, you can finally go 100% web with your business, realizing greater functionality and flexibility at a lower cost. For example, you can manage your entire sales cycle anywhere you have access to a browser – send marketing and lead generation emails through MailChimp, manage and track responses with Zoho CRM and even close the sale with an e-signature from EchoSign.

Every month on App Tuesday, we aim to give you a break from patching your systems by introducing even more apps to help you move to the cloud. To wrap up the year, we wanted to give you a recap of what’s been big in the Marketplace, the top categories and apps of the year as well as a preview of 2011.

Top Installed Categories

1. Project Management - with over 30 project management apps, businesses can find applications that address key project needs including cross-functional collaboration, task list management, and time tracking.
   Top 3 installed: Manymoon, Mavenlink, RapidTASK
2. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) - the most popular searched for category in 2010, businesses can find all types of CRM apps, including those related to end-to-end sales cycles, social and project-based.
   Top 3 installed: Insightly, Zoho CRM, Applane
3. Accounting and Finance - bring simplicity to your accounting and finance needs with Marketplace apps that manage your cash flow, billing and invoicing, and expense tracking.
   Top 3 installed: Outright, myERP.com, Freshbooks

Top Recently Installed Apps of 2010

1. Manymoon
2. Insightly
3. Zoho CRM
4. Aviary Design Suite
5. Mavenlink
6. Outright
7. MailChimp
8. RapidTask
9. Insync
10. myERP.com

Honorable Mention - #11 for 2011

    11. Grockit, our first ever app focused on education

Best Integration
Gmail contextual gadgets - This integration, offered by many Marketplace apps, allows you to access your most relevant and important data streams right where you need it, inline with your emails. For example, many CRM apps provide gadgets that populate information about contacts in an email thread to add context to your communications.

Looking forward to 2011, we have a number of new ideas in the pipeline. We have plans to help improve your shopping experience, find the exact apps you need, and add additional integration capabilities to make users more efficient.

As you prepare for 2011, consider making a new year’s resolution to go 100% web to capture the benefits of reduced costs, greater scalability and flexibility. Whether it’s switching your messaging and collaboration tools to Google Apps or augmenting your sales and marketing efforts with web applications from the Apps Marketplace, resolve to make 2011 the year your business moves to the web and boosts productivity.

Posted by Harrison Shih, Product Marketing, Google Apps Marketplace

Now available with Google Apps: Google Chrome Sync

Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.



Welcome to Google Chrome Sync
These days, we spend more and more time working in a web browser, in fact, the number of hours the average American spends online has grown by over 120% in the last 5 years.* Much of the information we consume is delivered through the web, and tools like Google Apps make it easier than ever for workers to collaborate and create using nothing but the web. This shift of data and applications to the cloud makes us less dependent on the specific hardware device that we use to get our work done.

You may use a desktop or laptop PC or Linux box at your desk, then a netbook or maybe even a pilot program Chrome OS notebook when you’re on the go, and then perhaps work from a personal computer when you need to send a quick email from home. Traditionally, your experience has been different on each of these devices depending on how the browser is configured. Now, recently added integration with Google Apps lets you unify your browsing experience across the different devices you use to get your work done, just like millions of Chrome users already do with Google Chrome Sync.

Google Chrome is a modern web browser that was built with today’s web in mind, with a focus on speed, security, and simplicity, and it’s used by more than 120 million people worldwide. One of the features of Chrome that makes it so simple and easy to use is the ability to synchronize your bookmarks, extensions, apps, theme and browser preferences with a Google account, so they are always available in the browser, no matter where you are signed in. Google Apps users now have access to this functionality, allowing you to make these components of your browsing experience available across any device you use to access the Chrome browser.



With Chrome Sync, many of the inefficiencies that result when you switch from one device to another are eliminated. When you bookmark a news article relevant to your business on your desktop PC as you're running out the door to catch a flight, that bookmark will be there when you connect to WiFi as you’re waiting at the airport. The Google Mail Checker extension you discovered last week was synced to your laptop so you notice the email that comes in at the last minute before you close your laptop for take-off. And when the passenger in the seat next to you spills coffee on your keyboard in the middle of the flight, you’re secure in the knowledge that Chrome on your new laptop will have all of the personalization you added on your old one.

Now that Google Chrome is ready for business, Chrome and Chrome Sync combined with Google Apps make a powerful combination for workers leveraging the power of the cloud to be productive no matter where they are and what device they are using.

Learn more and get started
Google Chrome Sync can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

You can find more information about using Chrome in your organization on our Chrome for Business webpage or take a look at a product overview.


Posted by Nick Carter, Software Engineer, Google Chrome

Note: Google Chrome Sync may not be available in all areas.
* Forreseter Research, 2010

Gaining Altitude: Perspectives on Productivity in the Cloud

Editor’s note: Continuing our Gaining Altitude series, we’ve invited guest blogger Michael Bungay Stanier, the author of Do More Great Work: Stop the Busywork and Start the Work that Matters.

Do you ever feel that your work life consists mostly of meetings and email, while the all real, important work needs to be squeezed into the gaps? In an age of information overload, people often talk about the importance of multi-tasking. This can be an effective way to survive the constant onslaught of information, but you have to wonder: does multi-tasking take away from our ability to do great work? How can we actually come up with ideas and think them through if we don’t have dedicated time to focus? Perhaps we need to change the way we operate so we can we not just get things done, but instead do great work?

In Do More Great Work I suggest you can divide everything you do into three simple but powerful categories:

• Bad Work: Often called bureaucracy - excess rules, excessive processes, pointless meetings. Sadly, it often comes standard as part of your job.
  
• Good Work: Productive, efficient and focused, this is the bulk of what you do. It’s also at the heart of how your organization succeeds - which means that “good work” is essential. The challenge is there's almost always more Good Work to do than there is time in the day - it sometimes seems that your time is spent just trying not to get further behind.
  
• Great Work: The work that makes a difference and that has meaning. It’s what you were hoping for when you signed up for the job. It’s both exciting and engaging - and a little scary and uncertain.
  

What you're looking for is a better work diet, one that has you making an impact and doing work with more meaning. What you want is more Great Work - and less of the other stuff.

Simple recipes for success

A few simple techniques and some good tools - like Google Apps - will help you make sure you're doing more great work.

1. Define your Great Work Project

Before kicking off 2011, take the time to think about the one or two Great Work projects you want to work on. Define where you you want to truly invest your time and effort, your hard work and brain power. Establish a goal that will stretch and challenge you. Set your Great Work Project for the year: how it starts, who else needs to be involved, what success looks like, when it will be completed. Use your Great Work Project as the foundation of a memorable, challenging and interesting year.

2. Keep what matters top of mind

Use Calendar and Gmail to prioritize your day. Begin the day by identifying your One Plus Two. First, determine one action that must happen to move your Great Work forward. Then add another two actions that, if you get to them, will be an added bonus. This gives you both focus and flexibility.

Add these three actions as an all-day event at the top of your Google Calendar. That way they’re front-and-center every time you look at your calendar, and serve to remind you to focus on what matters.

If you haven’t gotten to those important actions by mid-day, use labels in Gmail to label any incoming email related to your One Plus Two activities. Then, as the day unfolds and when information is coming at you from all directions, you’ll be able to identify the high priority emails that need your attention.

3. Good work takes collaboration

There are talented people on your team, in your business division and your company. Great Work is often the product of many people sharing ideas and working together. Google Apps makes this easy. Instead of creating a document and working alone, start a Google document and share it with members of your team. With real-time collaboration you can edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations simultaneously, or leave comments and suggestions in the margins.

We all know how hard it can be sometimes to find a time when everyone can meet in person. Rather than setting up a meeting or clogging up your co-workers inboxes with another email, try using Google Talk or video chat to quickly ask a question.

If you prioritize, set aside the time and collaborate with talented peers, instead of trying to do everything, you may just find that you do Great Work.

Posted by Michael Bungay Stanier, author of Do More Great Work

We Asked. You Told Us Your Wishes for 2011.

Editor's note: For all the small businesses out there including the millions that use our Google Enterprise products, we recently asked a question – if you had one wish for your small business in 2011, what would it be? Today we're excited to share some of the responses in this cross-post from the Google Small Business Blog.

Two weeks ago, the Small Business Marketing team asked about your aspirations for the coming year. You told us the biggest wish for your business, and the wish for expanding your business’ online presence. Today, we’d like to share what we heard.

We combined your responses from our blog, Facebook and Twitter and organized them into three main themes and then sub-themes. Of course, not all wishes fell neatly into these themes, so we did create a Miscellaneous category.

Before the drum roll, thanks to everyone that took time to share and participate. Some wishes were big and audacious and others more practical, but all with an underlying tone of passion for what you do and a focus on delighting your customers. On with the results…

Theme 1: Move my business online
Not surprisingly, you’re passionate about the business products you’re using and made very specific feature requests. Rest assured if they were Google product related, we’ve shared your wishes with our product teams. Additionally, you said you want more online resources to help your business grow. Your comments acknowledged that referrals are now happening online through social media channels and, as such, you want to understand how to use these online tools. You also want more out of your websites. Ultimately, you said you want to do more online to run your business more efficiently and spend more time concentrating on your customers.

Click for larger image.

Theme 2: Grow my business
We heard that you want to continue to grow your business with increased profits, more customers, or more people. Lots of wishes for more marketing tools to increase your business’ visibility – the range included the entire marketing mix. You want simple tools made specifically for you. There were wishes for funds to buy equipment, spend more on advertising, build e-commerce into your offering, and lease real estate – to name a few.

Click for larger image.

Theme 3: Love my business
Many resounding wishes to continue fueling your passion because you love what you do. You’d love to learn more – from social media, AdWords and Places to creating marketing plans. You prefer support face-to-face with people and training at a relatively low cost. Many of you want more opportunities to network and support your fellow business owners. Whether it’s help getting the most out of applications and tools, or navigating a healthcare plan, you’d like some expertise to assist.

Click for larger image.

We thank you again for telling us your wishes for the coming year. Stay tuned as we will use these wishes to build upon our plans to help small businesses succeed in 2011.

Posted by Leslie Hernandez, Product Marketing Manager, Google Small Business Team

Now available with Google Apps: Picasa Web Albums

Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.



Welcome to Picasa Web Albums
Sharing and collaboration are central to Google Apps with over 30 million users in businesses, schools, and government already using products such as Gmail, Google Docs and Google Sites to work together more efficiently. As part of the effort to enhance the tools available to our Apps users, we’re pleased to bring the the photo sharing capabilities of Picasa Web Albums to your Google Apps account.

Picasa Web Albums makes it easy to organize, share and edit your photos, and collaborate with others. You can create web albums to group your images, add tags for organization and searching, edit your photos using Picnik to ensure they look their best, add places to your photos with geotagging via Google Maps, and easily share your photos with colleagues.

Whether it’s photos from a recent corporate offsite or holiday party, or visuals for insertion in a document or blog post, Picasa Web Albums allows you to store your images in the cloud and access them from any browser on any device. Sharing with colleagues is easy as well using your Google Apps account with email address autocomplete linked to your existing Contacts list.


Uploading, storing and sharing your photos is just the beginning. Picasa Web Albums is also integrated with other Google products such as Google Docs, Google Sites and Blogger, which allows users to seamlessly insert images stored or shared with you in Picasa Web Albums into documents, sites or blog posts in just a few clicks. It’s never been easier to compose a multimedia document using nothing but the web.


Stop sending photos to colleagues as attachments and load them into the cloud instead. Just like Google Apps, Picasa Web Albums runs in your web browser so your photos are at your fingertips anywhere you have an Internet connection.

Learn more and get started
Picasa Web Albums can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

You can learn more about Picasa Web Albums in our Help Center or you can stay up to date on product news as well as tips and tricks on our blog.


Posted by Lisa Conquergood, Picasa Team

Note: Picasa Web Albums may not be available in all areas.

Nothing but the web

This year cloud computing went mainstream, and the conversations moved beyond "this is a way to cut costs" to "this is a better way to run my business." While many IT vendors have now adopted (or co-opted) the term “cloud computing” to describe a wide variety of technologies, most don’t deliver on the true promise of the cloud. Hosting single-tenant server products in a data center is not cloud computing. Nor is requiring customers to install thick client software. These solutions lock-in customers to multi-year release cycles, leave them with the significant costs of managing client software, and expose sensitive data on insecure devices. In 2011, we are committed to moving beyond the current notion of cloud computing to bring customers to a world we call 100% web.

100% web
In a 100% web world, business applications are delivered over the Internet and accessed in a web browser. The applications and the data are stored centrally and are designed to be served from a highly scalable, secure and reliable multi-tenant infrastructure. Devices like notebooks, tablets, and smartphones are portals to the data that help people be productive from anywhere, at any time. Upgrades aren’t necessary to get access to the latest innovation, just refresh the browser. Businesses no longer own or manage servers and client software: they purchase integrated applications and development platforms from others, and now devote their valuable time to business logic and features that create competitive advantage.

We are investing in a variety of technologies so that companies can be productive with nothing but the web:

• Google Apps is the world’s most popular suite of web-based communication and collaboration applications, and includes email, instant messaging, calendaring, documents, sites, video sharing, Postini services and dozens more. We will continue to improve and expand our offerings to bring more powerful technologies to our more than three million customers.
• Google App Engine lets companies build their own applications for internal or external use and host them on Google infrastructure. This allows for faster and easier development, virtually no ongoing maintenance, and the ability to easily scale to meet capacity needs at short notice. App Engine already sees more than 1 billion page views per day from more than 150,000 active applications, and we will be launching App Engine for Business more broadly in 2011.
• Google Apps Marketplace provides the other applications customers need to build their business on the web, integrated with Google Apps and installed in a few clicks. The marketplace will continue to grow beyond its 250 applications and make it easier for businesses to find, evaluate, and purchase the best non-Google applications on the web.
• Android is one of the fastest growing mobile platforms in the world and designed to drive innovation and choice. Companies can now manage Android, iPhone, Windows Mobile, and other ActiveSync devices right from the browser. And the Android team is hard at work on a new version of the platform that addresses the unique aspects of tablet form factors and use cases.
• Google Chrome is an open source web browser developed to provide users with a fast, simple, and secure web-browsing experience with modern web applications. Chrome has become 300% faster in just two years, and adoption has tripled over the last year. This week we announced new features for Chrome to make managing enterprise deployments easy. Also, companies using older versions of Internet Explorer for their legacy applications can use Google Chrome Frame to access modern web apps that rely on technologies like HTML5.
• Google Chrome OS is a new operating system designed from the ground up for 100% web. By building an operating system that is essentially a browser, we can make computers faster, much simpler and fundamentally more secure. Last Tuesday, we announced the Chrome notebook Pilot program (apply to pilot) and Chrome devices for business will be available for purchase in 2011.

While many companies are able to jump right to 100% web, we understand that other larger businesses have substantial investments in legacy technology. So we’re also investing in solutions that bridge existing technologies to the world of 100% web:

• Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office allows people to continue to use the familiar Office interface (including Office 2003, 2007, and 2010), while reaping many of the benefits of web-based collaboration that Google Docs users already enjoy. It will be available soon.
• Google Message Continuity is a very cost-effective form of disaster recovery that lets Microsoft Exchange customers leverage the reliability of Gmail to back up their servers.

100% web is a dramatic shift from how companies have traditionally purchased, deployed, and managed IT. But the more we talk with customers the more we realize that this is the change they’ve been waiting for. It is the ultimate extension of the cloud computing model, and it brings substantial benefits for companies that no other IT model can provide in terms of simplicity, cost, security, flexibility, and pace of innovation. If 2010 was the year of the cloud, 2011 looks to be the year of nothing but the web.

Posted by Dave Girouard, President, Google Enterprise

Announcing Google Earth Enterprise 4.1

Back in August we announced Google Earth Enterprise 4.0. This version introduced the new Google Earth Portable Solution, and a Google Earth Android Client, for enterprise use. Since then, we’ve been speaking with numerous customers about the release, learning all about the compelling ways they’re using our portable and mobile technologies and listening to their helpful feedback. We’ve made additional developments based on that feedback, and today we’re pleased to announce an update to Google Earth Enterprise (GEE). The new version 4.1 brings with it:

2D Map Cutting and 2D Map Portable Serving: Google Earth now supports cutting and serving 2D (Mercator) maps.

Google Maps API V3 on Google Earth Enterprise Solution: Developers can now use the Maps API V3 to build and serve mapping applications.

Customized search services for Google Earth: Search tabs on the portable server can be extended via Python search scripts that you bundle with the server for distribution.


Thanks again to all our customers and partners who provided us with great feedback over the past few months and we look forward to more of your feedback.

Posted by Dylan Lorimer, Enterprise Earth/Maps Product Manager

Google Apps innovation: join our quarter in review webinar

100% web technologies have many advantages for customers over legacy software and server technologies, but the ability to access improvements without doing any work is particularly important. By simply refreshing the browser, new features just show up without any complex software patching or hardware upgrades. This is how software should “just work”, and the power of the cloud makes it possible.

Because of this rapid acceleration of innovation, we wanted to make it easier for customers to keep up-to-date with what’s new in Google Apps. For nearly real-time information, administrators and users can follow along through RSS, email alerts or Twitter. This year, we also began hosting periodic “quarter in review” webinars to sum up what recently launched. If you’d like a refresher on previous quarters’ developments, you’re welcome to watch the replays on YouTube.

Next Wednesday I’ll be hosting the Q4 2010 recap where you’ll hear about powerful new features like mobile document editing, automatic email prioritization in Gmail, new mobile device security capabilities, granular application policy controls, the addition of more than 60 additional applications from Google and much, much more. I hope you’ll be able to join me next week.

Register to attend the live webinar on December 22, 10am PST / 1pm EST / 6pm GMT.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Now available with Google Apps: Google News

Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.



Welcome to Google News
Staying up to date on all the day’s news is a challenge – even when that news might be absolutely critical to your business. Missing a story could mean missing an opportunity. That’s why we’re pleased to make Google News available with your Google Apps account.

Google News is a computer-generated news site that aggregates headlines from news sources worldwide, groups similar stories together, and displays them according to your personalized interests. You can customize Google News with topics you are interested in, and even indicate which publications you’d like to prioritize in your personalized news stream.


Google News will surface stories relevant to the interests you indicate and will aggregate articles from multiple news sources covering that story. For example, if a story about changes in the funding environment for small businesses shows up in your news stream, you’ll be able to click through to coverage from a variety of news outlets in order to get a spectrum of views on the issue.

Now that Google News is integrated with Google Apps, sharing the articles that you discover with coworkers is easier than ever. You can email a link directly from the News interface with address autocomplete linked to your existing Contacts list.


And Google News even makes it easy to stay current on the latest developments in the news when you’re away from your desk. When you connect to Google News on your smartphone with your Google Apps account, you will find an experience optimized for viewing on your mobile device and get the same personalized stream of news you see in the full browser version.


Now you can make the most of those spare minutes between meetings or the transit time on your morning commute by reading the latest news, complied and organized just for you.

Learn more and get started
Google News can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

For answers to specific questions you can visit our Help Center or you can follow the latest updates on our product blog.

Posted by Chase Hensel, Product Manager, Google News

Note: Google News may not be available in all areas.

Chrome is Ready for Business

When we announced that Chrome is now used by over 120 million users and showed off some of its latest features last week, we saw a tremendous amount of excitement from both users and businesses. Many businesses asked how they can get the benefits of increased security, speed and the modern browser capabilities that Chrome offers with the configurability and customizations they need.

The good news is that businesses don’t need to wait any longer to deploy Google Chrome. Today, we’re announcing that Chrome offers controls that enable IT administrators to easily configure and deploy the browser on Windows, Mac, and Linux according to their business requirements. We’ve created an MSI installer that enables businesses who use standard deployment tools to install Chrome for all their managed users. We’ve also added support for managed group policy with a list of policies and a set of templates that allow administrators to easily customize browser settings to manage security and privacy. For your users that need access to older web applications not yet qualified for Chrome, we also added group policy support to Google Chrome Frame, an Internet Explorer (TM) plug-in that provides Chrome-quality rendering for the broader Web, while defaulting to host rendering for any web applications that still require IE.

By deploying Google Chrome, organizations can take advantage of improved security and web application performance without needing to upgrade other expensive software licenses or buy new hardware. Deploying Google Chrome also gives users access to productivity-enhancing HTML5 web applications. Since Google Chrome is the same as the browser on Chrome OS, admins considering Chrome OS for their organizations can start testing their mission-critical web applications by deploying the Google Chrome browser.

Support for these new administrative features is available to Google Apps for Business admins by phone and email as part of their Apps deployment. For those who are not Google Apps for Business customers, we’ve also posted documentation to assist administrators deploying Chrome inside their organization.

Over the past few months, we’ve worked to test Chrome with admins in a diverse set of large organizations interested in moving to a more secure, modern browser. Organizations such as Vanguard, Boise State University, and Procter & Gamble (and Google!) have already successfully deployed Chrome to thousands of users. They’ve provided us with excellent feedback, and we’re continuing to work on the next set of features that they’ve requested.

What we’ve built is just the start of what we’d like to offer businesses with Google Chrome. We’re excited by the features built so far, and we’re working hard on polishing the next set of policies that will make Google Chrome even more customizable and useful to users in the future. Please give the new features a try and let us know what you think!

Posted by Glenn Wilson, Product Manager and Daniel Clifford, Software Engineer, Google Chrome team

Email delegation now for all customers

A while back, we launched email delegation for customers using Google Apps for Business. Today, we're happy to bring this highly-requested feature to Google Apps and Google Apps for Education customers as well. As more universities migrate their faculty and staff to Google Apps, this feature will be particularly useful to schools as it allows administrative support staff to screen and send email on behalf of others who assign them as delegates. To enable this feature for your domain, select the Mail Delegation checkbox under Email Settings in the control panel.

With businesses and schools continuing the rapid move to the cloud, we are committed to continually releasing features like this that help streamline migration and constantly enrich the Google Apps experience.

Posted by Hari Nidumolu, Software Engineer

Live webcast this Thursday: “Google on Google”

Have you ever been curious about how we run our business on Google’s products? Join us Thursday for a live webcast with Julie Pearl, a Director in Google's Corporate Engineering group. Julie leads the team responsible for building and operating Google's own enterprise IT services on top of Google products (known internally as running "Google on Google"). Julie's team manages messaging and collaboration for all of Google, and builds a wide range of custom IT applications that are deployed to personal computers and mobile phones.

Register for this live and interactive webcast on Thursday, December 16th, 2:00pm ET/ 11:00am PT to learn from Julie how Google empowers more than 20,000 users in 20 countries, using technologies such as:

• Google Apps for Business (messaging, collaboration, and communications)
  
• Google App Engine (web application development on Google's cloud computing infrastructure)
  
• Android (mobile operating system and application platform)
  

Posted by Ashley Chandler, Google Apps team

Finding the perfect place

Editor’s note: Today’s guest blog authors are Rick McMullins, VP and CTO bitHeads, inc. and
Elaine Yim, Senior Product Manager, Rent.com, to talk about the use of Google Maps API Premier in the Rent.com mobile application.

Rent.com is the nation's #1 Internet listing site (ILS) in the rental housing industry, enabling renters to find a residential rental property online using a free robust search tool. Rent.com has the most online traffic and the largest inventory of contracted property listings.

Rent.com recently extended their reach from the browser to the smartphone by releasing mobile applications for the Android, Blackberry and iPhone smartphones. The Rent.com mobile applications give users the ability to quickly and easily search Rent.com’s complete list of detailed online listings from the palm of their hand. Google Maps API Premier was a critical component to the Rent.com mobile application for renters to see the location of properties on a map as well as a way to quickly get driving directions to visit a particular property. After Rent.com users narrow down the list of properties that they would like to check out, either through the Rent.com website or by using one of the new mobile applications, they can hit the street with mobile phone in hand to go see the properties.


Property search results, properties viewed and contacted as well as favorites are all synced back to a user’s Rent.com account so that they are accessible from both the original web platform and the mobile application. Plus, while visiting the properties users can create notes and take pictures of the properties using the mobile application and forward them via email. This feature is especially handy when the user wants to quickly share the property details with friends.

A big part of the Rent.com’s mobile strategy was to make sure that people could easily find properties in personally desirable neighborhoods. “By taking advantage of the Google Maps Javascript API V3, the mobile applications team at Rent.com was able to implement an easy to use solution for a user to be able to view rental properties in specific areas of interest.”, said Elaine. With the Rent.com application, a user can view all of the properties from a search result on a single map to get a feel for where the properties are located or display a single property on a map. Furthermore, should the user wish to visit the property they can bring up driving directions to the selected property within the application.

“By using the Google Maps JavaScript API V3 to implement the mapping components of the applications, the mobile applications team at Rent.com was able to quickly implement the core set of location based features that were crucial to the success of the mobile applications.”, said Rick.
To access the Rent.com mobile applications:

Android:
Type Rent.com/m into the browser on your phone and click to download.
-or-
Scan the following QR Code.

Blackberry:
Type Rent.com/m into the browser on your phone and click to download - App World required.

iPhone:
Type Rent.com/m into the browser on your phone and click to download.
-or-
Search for Rent.com in the App Store on your phone.

Posted by: Natasha Wyatt, Google Earth and Maps Enterprise team

Composites One moves to Google Apps for increased productivity and improved collaboration

Editor’s Note: As part of our Going Google Everywhere series, we’ve invited guest blogger, Hal Greene, Director of Information Systems, at Composites One to talk about his experience “going Google.” Learn more about other organizations that have gone Google on our community map or test drive life in the cloud with the Go Google Cloud Calculator.

Composites One is the leading distributor of composites materials. Our products include fibers, resins, and a wide range of chemicals and accessories used in manufacturing. We have distribution centers serving over 8,000 customers across North America and Asia, and we strive to provide the best quality materials, exceptional service, and personalized support

We had been using Novell Groupwise for over 15 years, but maintaining it was becoming increasingly costly and cumbersome. We had separate file servers in more than 30 distribution centers, and keeping up-to-date with Groupwise required major upgrades to all servers involving license renewals and significant IT department resources. In addition to the cost and maintenance issues, end-users weren’t satisfied with the functionality of Groupwise. They wanted the features they were accustomed to having in the products they used in their personal lives.

We began looking for a solution that would provide improved functionality, better support of mobile devices, and cost savings. We put together a 10 year cost of ownership model for Google Apps and we came out way ahead by moving to Google Apps. With many of our employees on the road, we needed better mobile access to communication and collaboration tools. We started to see how much Google Apps would improve our ability to remotely and operate more efficiently. Several employees, including our IT team members, already used Gmail outside of work. After talking to IT executives and CIOs already using Google Apps, who gave very positive reviews, we successfully pitched the idea of moving to Google Apps to the executive team.

Cloud Sherpas, a Google Apps partner, helped us get started with a small pilot for two months, and then roll Google Apps out incrementally to the entire organization. Cloud Sherpas helped with the migration process and initial training sessions. Overall, our roll-out went smoothly and people picked up Google Apps quickly.

One of the biggest benefits to the business we’ve seen is the creation and sharing of calendar for transfer truck routes allow for easy identification for transporting inventory as needed.

Moving to Google Apps has allowed us to increase productivity, give our employees better access to tools from the road, and save money. Our employees are working together with better applications, and our IT department spends less time maintaining servers and updating software on servers all over the country. Google Apps has become essential to the daily operations of our business.

Posted by Hal Greene, Director of Information Systems, Composites One

Now available with Google Apps: DoubleClick for Publishers

Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.



Welcome to DoubleClick for Publishers
For millions of online publishers—from the smallest blogger to the largest entertainment, news, e-commerce and information sites—online advertising revenue is vital. When publishers can maximize their returns, everyone benefits from more vibrant online content and websites. A publisher's ability to manage this process can have a significant impact on how much money they make from their online content, which is why we’re happy to bring our Google Apps customers our next generation ad serving platform to solve these problems: DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) from Google.

Imagine you're a major online publisher with a popular global surfing website and an ad sales team. Every second of every day, you have difficult decisions about what ads to show and how to measure their relative performance. For example:

• In the same ad space, a surfboard wax advertiser wants to run a static image ad for your Australian readers, while an airline offering flights to Hawaii wants to run an expandable interactive ad for your American readers.


• A fast-food restaurant wants to run its burger ads before noon and its pizza ads in the afternoon.


• You've sold 10 different surfboard makers a million ad slots at slightly different prices; now you have to allocate them across your various webpages to fulfill all these orders over the next two weeks.


• One of your surfing tournament reviews is linked to by a popular news site and you have a surge in traffic. Your sales team couldn't predict this, so you’re left without any ads for thousands of readers. You want to fill this ad space by selling it via an ad network that has ads available.

These examples illustrate how complicated it can be to optimize ad serving on your website, and they only scratch the surface.

DFP comes in two flavors, tailored for different publishers' needs: DoubleClick for Publishers, for the largest online publishers, and DFP Small Business, a simple, free version designed for growing online publishers. As a Google Apps user, you now have access to both versions of DFP with your existing Apps account.


With advanced features such as streamlined ad trafficking, inventory management and forecasting, revenue optimization, granular reporting, and an open API, DFP offers a complete toolkit to easily sell ads on your site directly to advertisers while also working dynamically to help you get the most money from inventory you sell through partners like AdSense and ad networks.

Just like Google Apps, DFP runs in Google’s cloud so you get the same reliability, flexibility, and easy access without any software to install or hardware for IT to maintain. Also, DFP is fully supported by Google so you don't have to worry about manual system updates or downtime.

Learn more and get started
DoubleClick for Publishers can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

To learn more about how DFP can help you manage and grow all of your online ad inventory, please visit our website or follow along with the latest news and release updates at the DoubleClick for Publishers blog.

Share your story
Have you already started using Google Custom Search at your organization, or plan to now that it’s available? Please share your story and your organization could be featured in the next Gone Google ad campaign!


Posted by Stephen Kliff, DoubleClick Team

Note: DoubleClick for Publishers may not be available in all areas.

More power to metadata

Last year, we introduced the ability to return Google Site Search result sets that include custom metadata attributes (data which specifies information about your content, such as author or time and date of creation), as well as the means to restrict results to a smaller set as defined by a specific attribute value. Today, we are happy to announce two new metadata features that allow you to customize search results even further.

The first feature, restrict to range, introduces the ability to confine results to a defined range. For example, if you designate date as a metadata attribute, an administrator could elect to only display results published within a given time period. Through a custom user interface, you could also extend these refinement privileges to your users.

Our second feature, sort by attribute, provides the option to order search results by metadata attributes, such as by date, rating, or price - letting you or your users further tailor the presentation of search results, providing a more effective search experience.

Google Site Search customer SignOnSanDiego.com is a California news portal which uses the new sort by attribute feature. Given that readers come to the site to be informed of the latest local news, the portal uses a date bias to favor recent articles over older ones. This provides users with results that are now not only relevant, but also timely.

With Google Site Search’s new sort feature, readers at SignOnSanDiego.com see the latest news results first.

Like SignOnSanDiego.com, you can use metadata attributes to enhance your search results. If you’ve already marked up your site with metadata attributes, you can use these new features today and tweak Google Site Search so that it is just right for your visitors. See our metadata documentation for more information.

Posted by Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager, Google Enterprise Search

BI-LO sees productivity gains and increased collaboration by going Google

Editor's note: Over 3 million businesses have adopted Google Apps. Today we’ll hear from Carol Dewitt, CIO of BI-LO. To learn more about other organizations that have gone Google and share your story, visit our community map or test drive life in the cloud with the Go Google cloud calculator.

BI-LO is coming up on its 50th anniversary. We are a grocery retail chain with over 200 stores in the Southeast and have more than 4,500 teammates who utilize e-mail in our corporate offices, retail locations, and on the road. We had been using our previous email system for about ten years, but when it came time to upgrade we evaluated our evolving needs and what we would need to grow our business in the future. While cost was an initial priority, we quickly realized that collaboration was even more more critical to our success.


With our previous solution, we struggled to enable communication with our retail stores, with teammates who frequently travel, and even between teams in the corporate office. We also have a lot of manual and time consuming processes and knew that in order to push our business forward, we needed a better solution. So though cost is what initially led BI-LO to Google Apps, a growing focus on enabling collaboration and empowering our teammates is what convinced us that Apps was the best product with the best features for our growing needs.

Prior to deploying Apps, we structured our IT department so that one group supported intranet applications and a separate group was responsible for email. Since we really wanted to improve collaboration and support our users, working from any location, we decided to form a collaboration team. Since moving to Google Apps this fall, this team is focused less on fixing email issues and managing infrastructure and more on improving our business processes and helping people be more productive.

With the creation of this new team and the help of Cloud Sherpas, a Google Apps reseller, moving to Google Apps has been relatively painless. We migrated data and went live with all 1,500 corporate teammates in less than 90 days (our Executive Leadership migrated successfully in the first 30 days). We were worried that the transition would be difficult for end-users, but we’ve found most of the issues to be minor and that teammates are adopting new products like Docs and Sites before we’ve even announced them.

Teammates who are always on the road love having web-based access to email and documents that are easily shared across teams. We’ve started to replace manual, paper-based processes and expensive applications with Google Docs and Sites. Teammates in our corporate offices used to spend hours calling or emailing stores to ask them about on-going promotions, inventory and recall issues; as they are adopting the forms feature in Google Docs, we’re seeing those processes improve dramatically. We have also replaced several of our old email-based applications, like ethics disclosure, with Google Docs and forms.

Making sure our teams had access to the information they needed was also a big challenge before Google Apps. Now, with Google Sites, it’s easy. We moved our entire corporate intranet to Google Sites, and this has allowed us to give our teammates on the road easy and secure access to company information via the web. We’ve set up the intranet so that our users log in to their Google Apps accounts from the home page of the intranet. This ensures that they always see the most up to date company news and events every day. We posted our most recent commercial on the intranet and our CEO is planning to use Google Video to post announcements. Much of this information sharing had previously been done over email or costly meetings, but this way, we’re sure that everyone has seen important updates and news.

Google Apps has enabled our company to be more collaborative and more productive. Workflows previously handled by IT, like creating content for the intranet, can now be done organically by teammates. Work that used to be done repetitively and manually is now done automatically and instantly using Google forms and shared spreadsheets. Best of all, our teammates are enjoying the ease of access to all their communication and collaboration tools provided by Google Apps. The CEO and the CFO have both stated, “please don’t make us go back.” We don’t plan to. We’ve seen so many improvements since moving to Apps, and we’re just getting started.

Posted by Carol Dewitt, CIO, BI-LO

Now available with Google Apps: Google AdSense

Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.



Welcome to Google AdSense
Do you have traffic to a web property that you would like to monetize? Whether you’ve invested time and energy in developing web content that brings in tons of traffic or would just like another income stream to support your business’s online presence, there is a solution for you that now works with your Google Apps account: Google AdSense.

Google AdSense enables millions of website owners of all sizes to display relevant ads alongside their online content. AdSense taps into Google’s vast network of local and international advertisers so there is great variety in ads, and Google technology selects ads specifically targeted for your website and visitors. By allowing advertisers to compete to display ads you can easily monetize traffic to your website and earn revenue.

Setting up an AdSense account is easy and free. As soon as you set up your account you can begin to place ads on your website. AdSense provides actionable data to help maximize your revenue, rich controls to protect your brand, and other helpful resources to improve your efficiency in managing and optimizing your revenue streams.



AdSense is simple to set up, you just have to add a few lines of code to the HTML of your site and you’re ready to start displaying ads. With AdSense, you stay in control of the user experience on your site by customizing the size, location, and types of ads that appear, and there is no commitment so you can turn the ads off at any time.

Before this improvement enabled access to additional applications, Google Apps users had to create a separate account to sign in to AdSense. Now, Apps users can access their cloud-based productivity applications, along with AdSense, using the same account. As an Apps user, you will now be able to seamlessly control your AdSense ads, as well as view a wide range of descriptive statistics and graphs about your ad performance using your existing Google Apps account.



Just like Google Apps, AdSense runs in Google’s cloud so you get easy access from anywhere without any software to install or hardware for IT to maintain.

Learn more and get started
Google AdSense can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

You can learn more about Google AdSense in the Help Center or stay up-to-date on the latest launches on the Inside AdSense Blog.

Share your story
Have you already started using Google AdSense at your organization, or plan to now that it’s available? Please share your story and your organization could be featured in the next Gone Google ad campaign!


Posted by Nate DeOms, AdSense Team

Note: Google AdSense may not be available in all areas.
Update: For those of you who already have a Google AdSense account, we're in the process of finalizing the infrastructure that will allow you to seamlessly transition your existing AdSense account and data over to your Google Apps account.

Now available with Google Apps: Google Custom Search

Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.



Welcome to Google Custom Search
These days, content is being created faster than ever. In fact, the data equivalent of 250,000 years of DVD-quality video is created every two days, which is more than the entire amount of digital information that was created from the birth of the world up to 2003. Users are faced with the challenge of wading through all of this data to find the information they are looking for, and businesses are faced with the challenge of making this easy to do for their customers and employees. Most businesses consolidate their information on a public-facing website, internal micro-sites, product blogs and customer portals to help visitors surface relevant content. But even with this type of organization and structure, information can still be difficult to locate. That’s why we are pleased to introduce Google Apps customers to a product that will make finding easy for their employees and for their customers: Google Custom Search.

Google Custom Search brings the power, speed and relevance of Google.com to any website through a hosted search bar.


Custom Search allows visitors to your site to scour your web pages in fractions of a second with the same speed and familiarity that they are used to when performing a search on Google.com. The technology behind Google Custom Search powers the built-in search capabilities of Google Sites and Blogger, so if you organize your web content using these tools then you’re already using it. For other websites you create, set-up takes only a few minutes and adding the search box is as easy as pasting a few lines of pre-generated code to the HTML of the page where you want the search box to appear. Just like Google Apps, with Google Custom Search there’s no hardware or software to maintain or upgrade - it gets better as Google gets better.

Google Custom Search will automatically display advertisements and allows you to monetize them using AdSense for search. If you prefer that ads not be displayed you can upgrade to Google Site Search.

Learn more and get started
Google Custom Search can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

For more detailed information, you can take a look at our Help Center or follow the latest news and updates on the Google Custom Search blog.

Share your story
Have you already started using Google Custom Search at your organization, or plan to now that it’s available? Please share your story and your organization could be featured in the next Gone Google ad campaign!


Posted by Guillaume De Zwirek, Google Enterprise Search Team

Note: Google Custom Search may not be available in all areas.