Over the last few years, saving money on an email solution has been the most common driver for companies switching from legacy on-premises systems to Google Apps. But customers aren’t just using Google Apps for email. They’re also adopting innovative teamwork tools like web-based documents, spreadsheets, presentations and project sites, and we now know the value of improved productivity by “going Google” is actually even larger than the substantial cost savings.

To quantify the complete value of Google Apps including collaboration and productivity benefits, we enlisted the help of Forrester Consulting to measure the “Total Economic Impact” that a typical company can expect over three years, moving from legacy on-premises infrastructure to Google’s web-based solution. After dozens of in-depth customer and stakeholder interviews and hundreds of survey responses from IT administrators and end-users, we're excited to share the research results, and we invite you to download and share Forrester's report.

The key findings of Forrester’s analysis bring the benefits of Google Apps into sharp focus. The following results are what a typical large customer with 18,000 employees and several offices around the world can experience by making the switch.

• Over 300% ROI
  The return on investment of switching to Google Apps is 391%. (307% after adjusting for risk.) In plain English, for every dollar spent on Google Apps, the system pays back the initial investment and more than three more dollars in additional business value.
  
  
• Dramatically improved productivity
  The value of improved productivity from Google Apps is even greater than costs saved by making the switch. Features like fast email search, integrated IM, message threading, great spam filtering, collaborative sites and real-time, multi-person collaboration in documents, spreadsheets and presentations all contribute to the productivity improvements quantified by Forrester.
  
  
• Break-even under 7 months
  The break-even payback period of switching to Google Apps is very short – faster than seven months. After the investment quickly pays for itself, the productivity gains from Google Apps continue to grow year after year.
  
  
• NPV over $10,000,000
  The risk-adjusted Net Present Value (NPV) of switching to Google Apps is over $10,000,000 for the typical large business. Productivity gains contribute over $7,000,000 to this amount.

Of course, both Google and Forrester strongly advise readers to conduct their own impact analysis when evaluating Google Apps, but this research solidifies what the Google Apps team has been hearing loud and clear from customers about the business benefits they’ve experienced. If you’re already using Google Apps, we’d love to hear your story too, and maybe even feature your organization in the future.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Today we announced changes to the data that powers Google Maps features like the map tiles, geocoding, and driving directions. These changes can be seen in many countries in Europe, Africa and the Pacific:

Australia
Austria
Belgium
Denmark
Liechtenstein
Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
South Africa
Switzerland

The new base maps will have greater features such as expanded geocoding coverage, more detailed water bodies, university campuses, zipcode and postal code coverage – all leading to better, more accurate maps for your employees and customers. Along with this update we've launched the popular "Report a Problem" feature in these countries (as we've had in the U.S. and Canada), enabling you to tell us about errors and changes directly for faster Maps updates. It's highly recommended that you re-geocode all of your data to take advantage of the new updated data.

Learn more about the Google Maps API Premier at google.com/enterprise/maps.

Posted by Natasha Wyatt, Product Marketing Manager, Google Enterprise Maps/Earth team

Shortly after launching Google Apps for business customers in 2007, we began to hear that IT solution providers were recommending Google Apps to their customers as a new option for messaging and collaboration tools. At the time, we didn’t have formal support for solution providers, and their only incentive was to act in the best interests of their customers.

During those early days of Google Apps, we spent valuable time gathering feedback from these leading-edge solution providers and learning how best to create an official reseller program for Google Apps that worked for solution providers’ business models. As a result, when we launched the Google Apps Authorized Reseller program in early 2009, we focused the program on providing resellers the best of both worlds - an innovative web-based messaging and collaboration suite for their customers and a reseller program that allowed them to retain and enhance their customer relationships.

An Apps ecosystem milestone

Over the past 8 months we’ve doubled the number of resellers in our Google Apps Authorized Reseller program, and now have over 2,000 authorized resellers worldwide. And our unique qualification process continues to ensure that new resellers understand both the business value and technical aspects of the offering.

During the past year we’ve highlighted a number of customer success stories where resellers such as Dito, LTech, Sheepdog, and Cloud Sherpas led complex customer deployments. These resellers, and many others, have put together growing businesses by focusing primarily on Google Apps and other cloud-based applications.

But that’s not all. We’ve also gained awareness and adoption within mainstream IT channel communities. This includes value added resellers, managed service providers, web developers, web hosting companies, Internet service providers, and system integrators, all of whom have established businesses with existing client bases and have expanded their business by offering Google Apps.

Going mainstream

Like the early adopters in 2007, these solution providers are foremost focused on doing the right thing for their customers. But they’re also taking advantage of the primary design point of our reseller program - allowing the reseller to manage the billing and support relationship and be the primary point of contact with the customer. We’ve recognized from the start of our program that providing resellers with control over billing and pricing, and allowing them into the primary flow of account provisioning, support, and messaging, is critical for them to effectively support their customers and make money.

We’ve seen strong adoption among managed service providers (MSPs) who tend to foster long-term, trusted customer relationships, understand recurring revenue models, focus on service offerings, and have fixed fee service contracts which are a great fit for reliable and predictable products like Google Apps.

Agosto is an example of an early MSP that has seamlessly rolled Google Apps into their full IT support helpdesk offering. They’ve been able to cross-sell their offerings in both directions, including converting customers of their Google Apps implementation service into full IT service clients. Even more powerfully, they’ve been able to enhance their long running client relationships by re-engaging them with relevant new opportunities to use collaboration capabilities in Google Sites, Video, and forms in Google Docs.

We’ve also seen adoption among web development, design, and hosting companies, for whom providing an email service is often a necessary part of helping small businesses with their online presence. Companies like Vision Multimedia Technologies are able to remain focused on their primary business of web development by using Google Apps to reliably handle the customers’ email, while also introducing the benefits of the rest of the Google Apps suite. And they’ve been able to offer consulting and web development services such as implementing portal and workflow solutions based on Google Sites to streamline content management for clients. All while providing the customer a simplified, single bill to pay.

The Google Apps Marketplace helps businesses discover the best web-based business apps that integrate with Google Apps, helping employees to be more productive and reducing implementation costs. Every month on App Tuesday, we welcome even more apps that expand the range of solutions available to businesses.

As always, all Marketplace apps offer single sign-on convenience and hassle-free access through the universal navigation bar. Many go even further by integrating with your Gmail inbox, Google Contacts, Google Calendars and more to improve your productivity, read below to learn how.

• Outright - Accounting and Finance
  Outright simplifies the accounting process for your business by automating data entry, generating critical reports, and maximizing tax deductions.
  Integrations: Single sign-on, Google Calendar, Gmail inbox
   
• Connect2Field - Calendar and Scheduling
  With Connect2Field, service businesses can easily manage their workers by scheduling jobs, delivering real-time instructions, and capturing live data from the field.
  Integrations: Single sign-on, Google Calendar, Google Contacts
   
• Insightster - Idea Management
  Gather ideas from across your organization, collect feedback from the right people, and make informed decisions without the hassle of endless meetings.
  Integrations: Single sign-on, Gmail inbox, Google Calendar, Google Contacts
   
• PromaSys Flo - Workflow Management
  Convert manual processes and paper trails to web-based workflows, allowing for improved tracking and auditing to reduce labor costs and standardize processes.
  Integrations: Single sign-on, Gmail inbox
  
  
• Ming.ly - Professional Relationship Management
  A professional relationship management tool that  aggregates social networks, phone and SMS feeds to help manage all of your relationships in one place (chrome only).
  Integrations: Chrome extension, Google Contacts, Gmail inbox
  
  
• Matchbook - Customer Relationship Management
  A system for teams to manage contacts and call lists for their clients that introduces a competitive element among sales teams to encourage optimal performance.
  Integrations: Single sign-on
  
  
• DomainManagementStudio (DMS) - Admin Tool
  A suite of admin tools that allows admins to populate Google Groups dynamically, assign admin tasks, filter access to contact information, and audit email usage.
  Integrations: Single sign-on, Google Contacts, Google Groups
  
  
• SADA Site Copier - Google Sites Management
  Site Copier allows Google Sites owners and Google Apps admins to quickly and easily duplicate a Google Site from one domain to any Google Apps domain.
  Integrations: Single sign-on, Google Sites

Check out the Google Apps Marketplace to explore one of these new apps or try one of the other over 200 additional apps. If you've #gonegoogle and tried the #appsmarketplace, let other users know what you recommend via Twitter or submit your suggestions for additional apps.

Posted by Harrison Shih, Associate Product Marketing Manager, Google Apps Marketplace

We're thrilled to share stories from the people and organizations that use Google Apps to explore, discover and push the boundaries. These businesses truly embody the freedom enabled by the cloud.

Our first Apps Adventure profiles Mark Thiessen, a 20-year veteran photographer for National Geographic who works on the front lines of some of the world’s most powerful fires.



I wanted to become a photographer because it allowed me to see parts of people's lives and lifestyles that I've never seen any other way. What I love about my job is not so much getting my pictures published – that used to be really important to me. For me, what I love are the people I get to meet along the way. They say it's the journey, not the destination that's important, and that is so true.


A lot of people think I just go on vacation and take pictures. That couldn’t be further from the truth. To impress picture editors who have seen the best pictures in the world, I need to show them pictures they’ve never seen before. At National Geographic they give you the time and resources to go do stories no one has ever done before.

I have a deep personal passion for photographing wildfires and the people who fight them. A couple years ago I went to Russian Siberia. Russia is twice the size of the United States and two thirds of it is covered in timber. They have about 4,000 smoke-jumpers and their job is to put out fires anywhere they’re burning.

We flew in helicopters with them for hours over vast forest, with no signs of human life. There’s no place to land, so they rappel out of helicopters straight into the fire with nothing but the metal part of a shovel. Then they’d whittle a handle in five minutes and get to work. These guys do it for barely any pay – no hazard or overtime pay. We were there for five weeks, in the middle of Siberia, with mosquitoes the size of jet planes all over us. It was terrible, but it was such a great story.

No one else had done that story. There are so many aspects to fire that intrigue me – the people who fight them, the forests’ need for fire, the human impact, people’s desire to build in fire-prone areas. Most people don’t even know the Russian smoke-jumpers exist, but with National Geographic, I get to experience their lives and share their experiences with the world, and Google Apps helps me do that.

With Google Apps my data is backed up in the cloud. So no matter what happens to my laptop, I know that my data is safe. That’s important with a job like mine. Google Apps allows us to do things we never could have done before. We can collaborate on a master plan for a story, we can share a calendar with story deadlines and shoot dates, and because of Gmail’s search capabilities, I know I can find any email whenever I want it. Google Apps allows me to be flexible. I can access emails or my documents on any computer or any mobile device. That’s critical when I’m out in the field.

Posted by Mark Thiessen, National Geographic

[With our recent announcement about the more than 10 million students, faculty, staff and alumni who have "gone Google" we thought it would be fun to share this post from the Google Docs blog]

A few months ago, my colleague Julia and I were at a technology conference for educators. Teachers were very enthusiastic when we demonstrated working together on documents at the same time and were really excited about how they could use it in their classrooms. What surprised us though, was how many of our favorite features - like working together at the same time - were brand new to them.

We knew we wanted to share that same excitement with even more people. Inspired by the Search Stories videos, we set off to tell a story using Google Docs. The result is this video:



We hope you enjoy seeing some of the cool features Google Docs offers in action. And if you think your friends would like it, show it to them too!

Posted by Bryan Carroll, Consumer Operations Strategist, Docs Team

Customer relationship management (CRM) is the most frequent search query in the Google Apps Marketplace, showing a trend of businesses moving their customer management to the cloud. The flexibility of cloud-based CRMs means there is no longer one traditional type of CRM, siloed in an on-premise server. Marketplace CRM apps can now help you manage your contacts across any channel, including emails, phone calls, projects, and even social networks, while working in sync with many other tools that you use.

Join us in a live webinar next Tuesday, Nov 9th, where I will host three Marketplace CRM vendors to discuss how your business can use cloud-based CRM apps:

• Rodrigo Vaca, Director of Marketing at Zoho
• Sachin Garg, Director of Strategy & Business Development at Applane
• Bart Lorang, CEO of CloudCenter, the maker of Rainmaker

The Google Apps Marketplace offers a wide range of richly integrated CRM apps, take this unique opportunity to hear directly from the developers of these three apps.

Webinar: How Google Apps and integrated cloud-based CRMs can change your business
Tuesday, November 9th, 2010
10:00 a.m. PDT / 1:00 p.m. EDT
Register here

Posted by Harrison Shih, Google Apps Marketplace Team

Google’s Deployment Lead, Alex Diacre, will be hosting a live webcast this Thursday, November 4th at 11:00 AM PT. Alex has been at Google since 2007 and has been leading the Enterprise Deployment Team in deploying Google Apps at businesses all over the world. Join us to hear from Alex and his team about exactly what you need to do to deploy Google Apps in your organization.

This live and interactive webcast with the Google Enterprise Deployment Team will give you tips for replacing traditional on-premise applications such as email with Google Apps:

* Learn how to scope your deployment process
* Hear about the key design points for moving to Google Apps
* Discover best practices that can be used by your organization

Register today for this live webcast Thursday, November 4, 2010 2:00 PM ET / 11:00 AM PT / 6:00 PM GMT

Posted by Ashley Chandler, Google Apps team

The control panel is an integrated place for administrators to manage all their Google Apps services. You can manage user accounts and email lists, customize sharing capabilities within applications, turn services on and off, manage mobile device policies and more. Last week, we added new service activity graphs so Google Apps administrators can see at-a-glance how their users are accessing Google Apps. This information can help customers evaluate the success of Google Apps deployments and scale internal support resources efficiently.

The activity graphs display information about the number of active users in your organization as measured by login activity. We display trend lines showing user activity for the prior 1-, 7- and 30-day periods for Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Google Sites.






To view the graphs for your organization, click “View Usage and Reports” under the “Advanced Tools” tab of the Google Apps control panel. We’ll have more service activity data options to share with administrators soon, but in the meantime, you can check out the Reporting API for even more granular data on Google Apps activity within your organization.

Posted by Jaideep Mirchandani, Google Apps Product Manager, and Ashish Kumar, Google Apps Engineer

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

The weather report may predict sun today in New York City, but it’s beginning to look more like a city that’s in the “cloud.” Today, NYU announced that it’s moving to Google Apps for Education, providing cloud-based email and collaboration tools to the entire university community. This announcement comes just weeks after New York State created an initiative to bring Google Apps for Education to their K-12 schools. With students and faculty across New York now using Google Apps, it looks like the Empire State has fully embraced the cloud.

This move to Google Apps will provide more than 60,000 students, staff and faculty at NYU with Google tools like Gmail, Calendar, Docs and Sites and will bring all 18 schools of NYU—including medical, dental and law schools—together on one uniform system. This project is estimated to save the University around $400,000 annually by eliminating the need to purchase, upgrade, and maintain in-house mail servers and software licenses.

Marilyn McMillan, NYU’s Chief Information Officer says the move is “...a win-win: in one stroke, we are able to provide better email services to members of the NYU community, offer a new set of tools for academic collaboration, and achieve savings for the University.”

The community of NYU joins more than 10 million users from thousands of schools across the globe who have gone Google, and we’re proud to welcome them to the family.

To learn more about how you can bring your campus to the cloud, visit www.google.com/a/edu.

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Apps for Education team