A look back as we move ahead: Google Apps management capabilities

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Product Marketing Manager

Over the last few weeks, we’ve covered some of the ways that Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Sites have really improved over time, and in this final installment, we’re shifting our focus to how the administrative capabilities in Google Apps have grown up, too. We’re always looking to streamline how administrators can foster better teamwork, easier mobile access and a more secure environment through easy-to-use management tools.

We hope you’ll discover a few admin capabilities here that you weren’t familiar with before, or just haven’t used in some time. If you’d like to hear more about these developments for administrators, please join our webinar on September 1st (details below).

Designed for Teams
Google Apps is designed with the idea that working together should be easier, faster and more fun than working alone. Google Apps makes this simple for administrators by letting users handle many routine tasks without IT support, and by including collaborative capabilities that you’d need to purchase and manage separately with other solutions.

• Google Sites lets employees set up private, secure workspaces ranging from team sites and project portals to intranets and status dashboards, all without burdening IT for setup help. End-users can initiate a site quickly, and don’t need any special programming skills to collaborate together on a great site.
• User-managed groups also facilitate teamwork and take the burden off of IT. Teams can self-assemble and manage their own workgroups and mailing list aliases, so administrators don’t need to constantly keep these lists up to date.
• Google Apps also makes it painless for organizations to have private template galleries for team-oriented sites, documents, spreadsheets, drawings and presentations. Administrators don’t need to hassle with setting up special template repositories, because they’re built right into Google Apps.
• Likewise, administrators don’t need to manage servers and complex file share systems to let employees upload and distribute documents, spreadsheets, presentations and other kinds of files. Google Docs handles this without customers needing any special infrastructure on site.
• PC-to-PC voice and video chat also comes standard with Google Apps. Instead of needing to purchase, install and manage special software and server infrastructure, these real-time communication channels are part of Gmail, and accessible from the browser.
• Users can also make calls from Gmail to mobile and landline phones without businesses having to manage any specialized telephony technology.
• Form and survey capabilities are also packaged with Google Apps as part of Google Docs, so it’s easy for users to collect structured responses from colleagues and external audiences, and you don’t have to license surveying software from another provider.
• Another powerful collaboration technology included with Google Apps without any additional administrative complexity is translation functionality. Instant translation works in documents, spreadsheets and sites, and Gmail can even translate multilingual IM conversations in real-time between dozens of languages.
• Want to provide multi-person collaboration in Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint without upgrading to Office and SharePoint 2010? Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office is a lightweight Office plugin that lets people work together simultaneously in these applications, without the hassles of collaborating over attachments.
• Administrators also have the ability to fine-tune user collaboration capabilities across Google Apps. Admins can provide different applications for different groups of users, set permissions for who can email outsiders, and enforce sharing controls in documents and sites to limit information sharing beyond the organization.
• More complex organizations with users at multiple domains can still work like a cohesive unit with multi-domain management. This feature lets people all across your organization share information seamlessly together without the traditional barriers that domain boundaries can create.
• Finally, our 100% web applications allow administrators to see a snapshot of how their users are working together with these tools, through an intuitive collaboration dashboard integrated into the administrative control panel. You can see stats like the number of active documents, the average number of people documents are shared with and more.

Productive Anywhere

Gone are the days where supporting a new mobile platform or operating system requires a heroic effort.  With Google Apps, users just access their work from any modern browser or major mobile operating system.  We also provide administrators with tools to secure and manage mobile devices at no additional cost.

• 100% web-based applications mean that users can access their email, calendars, documents and other applications right from their browsers, on any operating system.  This makes it much easier for administrators to support a heterogeneous OS environment without leaving any users behind.
• Android natively supports Google Apps through a comprehensive suite of mobile apps built right into the mobile platform.  For iOS devices and Windows Mobile, Google Sync enables synchronization of email, contacts and calendar.   BlackBerry sync is also available through Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server.
• To help administrators manage and secure a diverse fleet of company- and user-owned mobile devices, our mobile device management tool allows administrators to enforce mobile password requirements, remotely lock devices, and even wipe devices over the air.  Employees can also access self-service tools, like the ability to view the location of a lost phone.

Simple & Affordable

Deploying and managing Google Apps should be as easy as using Google Apps, so we’ve added tools to help businesses get started quickly, integrate with existing systems and customize the experience to their needs.

• It all begins with a free 30-day trial that takes just a few minutes to start, and you don’t even need to put down your credit card.  If you like what you see, Google Apps for Business is a simple $5 per user per month or $50 per year. 
• Once you begin your trial, the interactive setup wizard will guide you the process, from creating user accounts to managing mobile devices.
• For organizations that already have IT systems in place, Google Apps plays nice with other systems through tools like Directory Sync, which can automatically provision Google Apps accounts, groups, shared contacts and more, all based on your existing user directory.
• Some organizations deploy Google Apps to make a fresh start, while others want to bring along data from old systems to Google’s cloud.  With migration tools for Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange, and many other platforms, you can go with either transition approach.
• You also have choice when it comes to the pace of innovation that’s right for your business.  With our new release process, you can join the Rapid Release track to get new features as quickly as possible -- often several times per week -- or choose the Scheduled Release track for a bit more time to digest changes before they roll out to users.
• Flexibility also comes in the form of customizable administrative roles.  Delegated administration lets you assign full or partial administration rights to other users or groups, making it a snap to give teams like help desk staff the right privileges to do their jobs effectively and safely.
• The possibilities for adding custom functionality to Google Apps are also endless.  You can select from dozens of additional Google applications, layer on integrated 3rd-party applications from the Google Apps Marketplace, write your own custom interactions between applications with Google Apps Script, or tap into a full spectrum of management and application APIs.
• These same APIs power another essential tool: the ability to take your data and move to a different provider if we ever stop meeting your needs.  Our Data Liberation effort includes a comprehensive set of tools to help you get your information out of Google’s cloud should the need arise.

Pure & Proven Cloud

Google Apps for Business not only has an uptime guarantee, but we also provide transparency by offering a publicly available status dashboard.  In addition to our reliability efforts, we also provide administrators with options to help keep their data more safe and secure.

• Our 99.9% uptime SLA guarantees reliable access to Google Apps, and our commitment doesn’t have any exceptions for planned maintenance.  This is because our systems are designed to handle updates without interruptions for customers.
• Our publicly available status dashboard offers transparency about the health of our systems, and 24x7 phone and online support is there when you need it.
• Google goes to extensive lengths to protect the customer information in our data centers, including extensive personnel background checks, security-focused processes, advanced technology, and around-the-clock physical protection.
• Google Apps has completed a SAS 70 Type II audit, a SSAE-16 audit, and has achieved the U.S. Federal goverment’s FISMA certification.
• With default https connections, your users’ information is encrypted as it travels from your web browser to our servers.  This helps protect your data by making it unreadable to others sharing your network.
• Google Apps accounts can be further secured with 2-step verification, which requires users to sign in with something they know (their password) and something they have (their mobile phone).  With verification codes available via SMS, even basic mobile phones can serve as powerful authentication devices.
• Account access can also be fortified with custom password strength requirements that administrators can tailor, and the ability to put Google Apps behind your own single sign-on infrastructure.

Customers tell us they love rapid, continuous innovation in our applications, but we’re just as focused on making the administrative experience faster, easier and more powerful over time.  I hope you found a few new management capabilities here that will make Google Apps even more useful at your organization.  Join us for a free webinar on September 1st if you’re interested in learning more about many of these improvements.

A look back as we move ahead: Google Apps management capabilities

Thursday, September 1st, 2011

9:00 a.m. PDT / 12:00 p.m. EDT

Register here

More power to Google Apps administrators

Posted by Muzammil Esmail, Product Manager, Google Apps

In our continuous drive to make it easier for Google Apps administrators to create, manage and secure their users and data, we’ve introduced a number of features over time in the Google Apps for Business administrative control panel, such as the delegated administration, multi-domain support and fine-grained user policy management, just to name a few. These features have been well-received by the administrator community and we’ve seen healthy adoption among Google Apps for Business customers where these capabilities are helpful.

Starting today, millions of organizations using our free Google Apps service can begin taking advantage of these capabilities and many more as well. Now all Google Apps administrators can use advanced control panel features to manage users and customize the security policies for their organizations, regardless of which version of Google Apps they’re using.

If your company uses our free Google Apps service and requires additional business-critical features such as 24x7 support, 25GB mailboxes, enhanced functionality like email routing, or advanced reporting or migration tools, you can try a 30-day upgrade to Google Apps for Business for free.

New email security settings for Google Apps

Posted by Adam Dawes, Enterprise Product Manager

Postini email services help provide Google Apps users access to robust, cloud-based email security, filtering and archiving services. Today, we’re excited to announce our first step in creating a unified Google Apps experience by moving some Postini features directly into the Google Apps administrative interface.

The new Objectionable Content and Content Compliance email security settings, available directly in the Google Apps control panel, will allow admins to filter messages based on word lists or predefined sets of words, phrases, text patterns, or numerical patterns. And because these are built into the Google Apps infrastructure, admins will be able to use their existing user and organization structures set up for their domain to customize policies for different groups.

Bill MacKenzie, ICT Consultant for Ontario's Upper Grand District School Board, finds the new settings useful and easy to manage: "The content compliance feature has been a great addition to our cloud solution. It was a snap to set up, surprising our tech folks at how little work and time it took to implement. The compliance tool lets students, parents and administrators know that the email at our district is being supervised."

Over the coming weeks, we will be making these features available to business, education and government customers. We're especially excited to introduce these settings to K-12 schools. With these email filters and the walled garden functionality we announced earlier this year, K-12 schools will be able to address their email security needs and easily manage policies for students and teachers -- all within Google Apps.

Because all K-12 schools will automatically have these advanced email security features, we will no longer offer Google Message Security free of charge to new K-12 Google Apps customers. While we will continue to provide the service to K-12 schools currently using advanced features of Google Message Security, we plan to add even more email security features to the Google Apps control panel during the next year. Once comparable features are available in Google Apps, we will require K-12 Google Apps customers using Postini to consolidate their email security features into the Google Apps control panel. Google Apps for Business and Google Apps for Government customers are welcome to try these new features but will not be required to transition until a later date next year.

We invite everyone to start trying these new features for your domain. You can create similar filters to those you have in Postini in the improved Google Apps control panel interface. For more information about the transition to the new email security settings in Google Apps, please visit the Help Center documentation for Objectionable Content and Content Compliance and read the FAQs.

We're excited to begin the process of building Postini features into Google Apps and simplifying email security policies for Google Apps domains. Stay tuned for new features in the future!

A customizable approach to administrative privileges

Posted by Jaideep Mirchandani, Product Manager, Google Apps

Managing Google Apps for an entire organization is not always a one-size-fits-all job. Google Apps Administrators often need to securely share management responsibilities with others. These users may need to have access to certain administrative privileges like user creation, password resets or managing groups, but not to all of them. To address these needs, we’re launching Delegated Admin to our Business and Edu customers. With this new feature, your primary administrators or “Super Admins” can now offer other users specific administration controls.

Lukas Karlsson of the the Broad Institute summed it up, “I like the fact that I can create additional administrator accounts and grant them access to certain administrative functions without having to make them full-fledged administrators. Our organization is growing quite large and, as that happens, we want to grant more folks access to specific tabs in the control panel, so this is very useful.”

Joseph Dellano of Tempus Nova, Inc. believes, “this will be well-used by enterprises that have specific people in charge of of responsibilities like mailing list administration.” Specifically, a Super Admin can create a help desk for your organization by granting other administrators the minimal access necessary to do their jobs. Consider an example:

Collin is an IT Associate at your company who is responsible for helping employees who have lost their password or username. You can now give Collin the ability to access the “Organization & Users” tab in the Control Panel, so that he can manage user access to Google Apps. You can also further control which actions he has the right to perform. For example, you may give Collin the right to reset passwords, but not to create new user accounts.


With these customizable privileges, Delegated Administration is another way you can tailor Google Apps to your business needs. To get started today:

1. Log in to the Google Apps administrator control panel
2. Under “Organization and Users,” find and click on the user account to which you wish to grant privileges
3. Click the “Privileges” tab
4. To make the user a Super Admin select the check box labeled “This user has full administrative rights within this Control Panel.” To restrict the user's access to selected functions the Control Panel, select the check boxes next to the tabs you want the user to access
5. Select the specific actions the user is allowed to perform under each tab
6. Click “Save changes” to confirm that you want to grant administrator access to the user

When the user signs into the control panel, only the Dashboard and the selected tabs will appear in the menu bar. The user will have administrator access to the settings you granted them, but nothing more.

We look forward to continuing to make it easier to help Google Apps administrators share tasks across teams and Help Desks.

New version of Google Apps Directory Sync

Moving to the cloud often means bringing over a great deal of data from various legacy systems. At Google, we try to make this process as easy and seamless as possible for our users with tools such as Google Apps migration for Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes. These tools allow you to move old emails, calendar and contact data into Google Apps.

Directory information is another important asset to consider. About two years ago, we launched the Google Apps Directory Sync tool, which allows customers to sync their Active Directory or other LDAP servers with Google Apps to those existing repositories of user account information. Rather than manually re-creating and maintaining this info in Google Apps, you can set up Google Apps Directory Sync to continuously sync your users, user profiles, shared contacts, mailing lists, LDAP groups and more to Google Apps.

Last week we started rolling out Google Apps Directory Sync 2.0, an update that features new enhancements including:

• Aggressive multi-threading to dramatically improve the speed of synchronizing users
• Support for OAuth, which eliminates the need to input and remember admin passwords
• Support for synchronizing conference rooms and other room resources

For more information about these features, please review the updated administrator's guide. Existing Google Apps Directory Sync users should see these changes today, and new customers can download the tool on our help center. As always, we appreciate your feedback, so please leave us a comment below to let us know your thoughts.

Posted by Aditya Kulkarni, Product Manager

Get in touch faster with new Gmail Contacts for Google Apps

Update: We're excited to announce that the new Gmail Contacts for Google Apps has launched for all Rapid Release users as of 4/7/11. Please continue to give us your feedback in the Comments below.

In our ever-connected world, working revolves around collaborating. It’s important to be able to quickly reach people in your network, speeding up the tasks you perform daily, like making a phone call or sending an email – whether you’re at your desk or on the go. To help with this, we’re rolling out an updated version of Contacts that makes it easier to use, organize and edit your work contacts in Gmail.

In addition to all of the improvements we made to Contacts for individual users, we’ve been hard at work on bringing additional, business-specific features to help you and your colleagues get in touch with contacts more easily. Now, you can:

• Add new contact information that will default to “Work” instead of “Home” field types
• View contact details from the domain directory together with the contact details that you’ve added yourself
• Add contacts from the domain directory to your “My Contacts” list in a single click
• Manage groups more easily by quickly adding email addresses to groups, and picking from a contact’s multiple email addresses to use on a group-by-group basis
• Revert changes to your Contacts for up to 30 days in case you need to restore deleted or merged contacts, or undo an import

If you’re the Google Apps administrator for your organization, you can enable the new Contacts interface in Gmail for your users from the Service Settings > Contacts area of the next generation administrative control panel. It may take up to an hour for users to see the difference once you make the change.

Make collaboration easier today by switching to the new Gmail Contacts (and once you do, be sure to contact us with your feedback).

Posted by Sean Purcell, Product Manager, Google Contacts

Go Google in record speed

Over three million businesses have gone Google to help their employees become more productive, and more companies, schools and other organizations are coming onboard at a record clip. We love hearing stories from customers that switch to Google Apps over their lunch break, but still we know we can make it even easier for organizations to transition. This week we simplified the process for administrators with a brand new setup wizard.

Now when you sign up for Google Apps, the setup wizard will greet you in the administrative control panel. The interactive guide can walk you through all the key configuration options, from creating user accounts to activating email, migrating your existing data to Google Apps and configuring mobile devices. Whether you want to test the waters with a group of pilot users or you’re ready to fully deploy today, the setup wizard will help you manage the roll-out strategy that’s best for your organization. The wizard includes progress indicators so that you can easily come back to the setup tab to continue where you left off.

So if you recently signed up, are a seasoned administrator, or are just considering Google Apps, check out the new setup wizard. We'll be adding more content on an ongoing basis, so you may find it helpful even if you’ve already made the switch to Google Apps. Google Apps resellers can also use the guide to streamline deployments while developing a customized deployment plan for their customers if needed.

Posted by Heather Folsom, Product Manager

App Tuesday brings new integrated web apps for your domain

We’re back with App Tuesday, and a lot has happened since our last post. Over the past couple months, we’ve been busy growing the Google Apps Marketplace to include new apps like SAP’s StreamWork and 20+ new education-focused apps in the new education category.

This App Tuesday, we welcome a number of new apps that were added to the Marketplace in the past month, including apps for financial tracking, employee recruiting and mentoring, and productivity. As always, all installable Marketplace apps are integrated with Google Apps and offer single sign-on convenience, giving users hassle-free access through the Google Apps universal navigation bar (see image below).

We wanted to highlight a few apps in the last month that integrate with users’ Gmail inbox and synchronize with Google Contacts:

• Celigo Gmail Sync for NetSuite provides a seamless integration between Gmail and NetSuite, allowing Gmail users to locate, add and edit NetSuite records and quickly attach messages to those records directly from within Gmail.
• Zoho Books gives businesses the ability to manage their accounting online with complete visibility of their financial positions and the inflow and outflow of money.
• Chronus Mentor enables organizations to run hi-impact mentoring programs in a forward-thinking and cost-effective manner.

Other notable new apps are Zoho Recruit, an easy to use applicant tracking system (ATS), Bookeo, an online meeting scheduler, and Travel Expenses Instant App, an expense reporting app.

Check out the Google Apps Marketplace to explore and install these new apps, or one of the more than 250 additional apps. If you've #gonegoogle and tried the #appsmarketplace, let other users know which apps you recommend via Twitter, or submit your suggestions for additional apps.

Posted by Harrison Shih, Google Apps Marketplace Team

Creating a safer email environment

While most organizations using Google Apps provide unrestricted email access to their users, some schools and businesses need to maintain a safer and more secure environment by allowing certain users to only send and receive email within the organization. This "walled garden" approach has been a popular feature request for K-12 schools looking to provide additional safeguards for student email. It can also help businesses where the email access of particular contractors and other groups should be limited.

Today, Google Apps administrators can create policies specifying who their users can communicate with over email, and administrators can tailor these policies for different groups of users. For example, school faculty and staff can have unrestricted email access while students have the freedom to send and receive emails within the school community but are protected from unwanted email interactions with outsiders.

"Using these new controls finally gives us the ability to provide email to our 40,000 high school students. We are confident that this will help protect our children from inappropriate communications and excited about new class activities and collaboration that email will bring. Not all kids are comfortable speaking up in class and this gives many of them another avenue to approach their teachers," said Laurie Tranmer, Email Services Manager at Prince George's County Public Schools.

This feature will be rolling out over the next couple of days to Google Apps for Business, Education and Government customers. Administrators can configure their policies in the “Advanced Tools” section of the control panel.

Posted by Adam Dawes, Google Apps 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

Google Apps shared contacts, now with double the capacity

Starting today, Google Apps for Business, Education and Government customers have space for twice as many contacts as before in their organization’s shared contacts. IT administrators told us that they needed more capacity, so we upped the limit from 25,000 to 50,000 entries. Shared contacts are part of the organization’s global address list (GAL), and these contacts auto-complete across Google Apps to help employees work faster and more accurately. Once you start typing to address an email message, invite colleagues to a calendar event, or share a Google Docs file, you can just click a recipient’s name to complete the entry.

We’ve also made optimizations to the Shared Contacts API so administrators can upload contacts much more quickly. Enjoy!

Posted by Mike Helmick and Petr Konecny, Software Engineers

Threaded email or not, now it’s your users’ choice in Gmail

We didn’t build Gmail to work like all the other email options out there. We launched with a full gigabyte of storage per person (now 25 GB for business users), lightning fast search, labels instead of folders, and newer improvements like Priority Inbox to help you cope better with lots of information. While most Gmail users find that these features save lots of time, naturally there are people who want to keep using email in more familiar ways. That’s why we launched alternatives like Microsoft Outlook® synchronization, native BlackBerry® integration and IMAP support. More choice helps people move to the cloud more quickly.

Conversation view is perhaps Gmail’s most hotly debated feature. Threading enthusiasts say they spend less mental energy drawing connections between related messages and that their inboxes are much less cluttered. On the other hand, email traditionalists like many former Outlook users think conversation view just complicates something that has worked for years. Russ Midford, Senior Information Systems Engineer at Sanmina-SCI, sums it up well. “I personally prefer threaded conversations, but as an administrator who still needs to support some long-time Outlook users on Gmail, the unthreaded option is like gold.”

We really hoped everyone would learn to love conversation view, but we came to realize that it’s just not right for some people. So today we’re introducing another valuable choice. Users who prefer a traditional inbox can toggle off conversation view to see email as individual messages in chronological order. Some actions commonly associated with unthreaded email can be accomplished with searches in Gmail, so check out our tips on advanced search operators.

Over the next few days, we’ll be rolling out conversation view settings to users in organizations with the “Enable pre-release features” option selected in the Google Apps control panel, and to individuals using Gmail.

Whichever side of the debate you’re on, we hope we’re continuously making Gmail more useful to you. For more information about migrating from common legacy solutions to Google Apps, see our resource pages for Microsoft® Exchange and Lotus Notes®, or contact our sales team.

Join the Google Apps team for a demonstration of this feature, a recap of recent Gmail innovations, and tools to help your school or business switch to Google Apps:
Wednesday, October 6th, 2010
10 a.m. PDT / 1 p.m. EDT / 6 p.m. GMT
On-demand webinar

Posted by Dong Chen, Software Engineer

App Tuesday: Celebrate Google Apps Marketplace’s half birthday with 12 new apps

Six months ago, the Google Apps Marketplace was born, and we’re excited to celebrate its growth in this short time. Today, more than 4 million Google Apps users have Marketplace apps installed on their domain. In addition, there are now more than 200 integrated apps available to Google Apps users, covering customer relationship management, accounting, finance, project management, and more. Almost every week, third-party applications are joining the Apps Marketplace to address an expanding range of business needs.

This App Tuesday, we’re celebrating our half birthday by launching 12 new apps to the Marketplace. If you are an Apps domain admin, you can extend your Google Apps functionality with just a few easy clicks. All of these installable apps offer single sign-on, so your users can start using them conveniently right from the universal navigation bar in Google Apps. In addition, many applications have implemented deeper integrations with Google Apps, such as Calendar sync or Gmail contextual gadgets, which present relevant information from third-party apps in-line within a Gmail message. Try out these apps and join the other 4 million Apps Marketplace users:

• Grockit - Social Learning Platform for Students
  A social platform for learning that provides students with collaborative, real-time study rooms and relevant coursework to achieve various educational goals.
  Integrations: Single sign-on, Google Calendar sync, Google Docs
• Elance - Talent Acquisition and Management
  An employment platform that offers talent-hungry companies instant access to qualified online workers and the tools to hire, evaluate, and compensate them.
  Integrations: Single sign-on
• ERPLY - Enterprise Resource Planning
  An ERP software that helps you easily manage your points of sale (POS), inventory, relationships and billing by providing real time information.
  Integrations: Single sign-on, Google Calendar
• Insync - Document Management
  A dropbox for Google Apps that bi-directionally syncs Google Docs to Finder and Explorer, allowing a user to work seamlessly across a desktop and browser.
  Intergrations: Single sign-on, Google Docs sync, Google Contacts
• Rainmaker - Social CRM
  A tool to supercharge your contacts by searching a user’s social networks to auto-populate critical information and merging it right into Google Contacts.
  Integrations: Single sign-on, Google Contact Sync
• Pipeline Deals - Customer Management
  A CRM tool to help manage your sales pipeline by overseeing deal flow, tracking leads, and running reports. Current PipelineDeals users manage a combined sales pipeline of $60 billion.
  Integrations: Single sign-on, Google Calendar Sync, Google Contacts Sync
• Idea2 - Customer Management
  A CRM tool that organizes data according to employees’ usage patterns and makes critical data available to them in the most relevant locations.
  Integrations: Single sign-on, Gmail, Google Calendar
• Kashoo - Accounting and Finance
  Accounting software that creates and sends invoices, manages expenses, reconciles bank statements, tracks cash flow, and generates financial reports.
  Integrations: Single sign-on, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Gmail
• SimplifyThis - Productivity
  A tool to help employees book appointments, manage billing, and track clients through a fluid interface with Google Apps.
  Integrations: Single sign-on, Google Calendar
• OffiServ - Productivity
  An application that supports administrative processes by automating various functions, such as purchase order approval, vacation management, and resource distribution.
  Integrations: Single sign-on
• Mindquilt - Productivity
  An internal question and answer platform for companies to help streamline the process of employee inquiries and knowledge distribution.
  Integrations: Single sign-on, Gmail, Google Talk
• RecMan - Security and Compliance
  A tool that provides transparent records management and compliance features, centralized document access control, and retention, legal holds and disposition policy management.
  Integrations: Single sign-on, Google Docs, Gmail

Check out our Apps Marketplace to explore one of these new apps or the other over 200 existing 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, Google Apps Marketplace Team

Early adopters: transition to the new infrastructure for Google Apps accounts

Back in May we shared details about a big change so Google Apps accounts can start accessing dozens of Google services beyond the core suite of messaging and collaboration apps. This change will let users access many new services such as Blogger, Reader, Google Voice and calling-in-Gmail (US only), Picasa Web Albums, AdWords and iGoogle from their Google Apps accounts. This big improvement addresses 9 of the top 20 requests from customers in one fell swoop, so we’re thrilled that the new infrastructure is now open for early adopters! After accounts are transitioned to the new infrastructure, these customers will be able to tap into much more innovation happening all across Google, helping people be even more productive with a broader range of tools in the cloud.


Why just for “early adopters” you ask? We’re still working on a few important features, but after extensive testing we’ve found that what’s ready today is already tremendously valuable to many Standard, Premier and Education Edition customers. Here’s the functionality that early adopters won’t see before the new infrastructure is feature-complete:

• Administrators do not yet have the ability to turn off access to any of these additional services as they can today for applications in the core suite.
• A few applications are not compatible with the new infrastructure at this time including Google Health, PowerMeter, YouTube, Web History, Buzz and Profiles.

You should also be aware of two other details not specific to early adopters: support limitations and “conflicting accounts”. Additional applications beyond the core suite are not covered by Google Enterprise support or the 99.9% uptime guarantee. However, many services have self-service online help resources, and a subset (such as AdWords) offer enhanced support options. Finally, a small fraction of Google Apps users have created personal Google Accounts based on their organization’s Google Apps email addresses. Users in this situation will need to rename these “conflicting accounts” during the transition process, and we’ll help these users make the necessary changes.

So...if you understand the limitations and would like to transition users to the new infrastructure, sign in to the control panel. If you use the control panel in English and meet our other early adopter eligibility criteria, you’ll start seeing a notification in your dashboard in the next few days where you can get started. You can begin with a handful of pilot users, and then transition your whole organization once you’ve had a chance to kick the tires.


If any of the current limitations are problematic for you, or if your organization isn’t eligible yet, hang tight and keep an eye out here for the next phase of our roll-out. We’re excited to help you move to the new infrastructure too, and we’ll be ready for you soon! For more information, please explore our Help Center documentation for administrators and for end-users.

Posted by Denis Sosnovtsev, Product Manager

App Tuesday: nine new apps announced for the Apps Marketplace to help your business grow

As your business grows, so does the complexity of managing projects, securing data, tracking resource usage, and communicating with coworkers. Today, we are excited to announce nine new installable apps in the Google Apps Marketplace that can help ensure that your business growth doesn't outpace your technological capabilities. So instead of patching servers and updating desktop-based software today, check out some of our more than 150 installable web apps available to Google Apps users. All of these installable apps offer single sign-on functionality so your users can start using them conveniently right from the universal navigation bar in Google Apps. Some have additional integrations with Gmail, Calendar, Docs and other apps, which makes these Marketplace apps more powerful than comparable stand-alone offerings.

Google Apps Premier, Education and Standard Edition administrators can install Marketplace applications in a few simple steps -- watch this video to see how it works.

Complex projects and tasks have a potential to grow out of control and lose focus, so we’ve included a series of project, communication, time, and task-specific management apps in this App Tuesday launch.

• DeskAway is a simple, yet powerful web-based project collaboration tool that streamlines the way you and your team work by giving you an accurate view of project progress and tackling some common problems that occur when multiple people are collaborating.
• Acunote is an online project management software. It helps you manage projects, products and requirements, track progress, realistically predict completion dates and analyze company productivity.
• RescueTime is an automatic time and attention tracker that helps teams work smarter. It is widely used by a range of companies and now has user and team sync for Google Apps accounts, plus a real time stats gadget in Gmail.
• ToBeeDo is an online task management service. The familiar, fast and intuitive interface helps you to organize your workflow and it doesn’t require any setup.
• Ketera is a network that simultaneously offers savings for business buyers and online sales opportunities for B2B suppliers to help members discover new trading partners and market insights, aiding in billions of dollars in transactions every year.

Your business also requires additional apps to help manage its growing mounds of internal and external information. These applications can help streamline this process:

• FormLizard is for when you need paperwork completed properly. You and your customers can complete forms, contracts, and more online, giving you complete, accurate, legible, and professional paperwork every time.
• LumoFlow provides social collaboration workspaces for enterprises to manage projects, share documents and keep teams in sync. It also helps connect global business operations and manage joint projects with partners and customers.
• MangoSpring Collaboration Suite seamlessly integrates all the MangoApps to provide next generation collaboration experience. Each MangoApp solves an important part of the business workflow.
• Backupify provides secure, scalable, and automatic backup for your Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Contacts, and Sites. You can securely access and manage archives of backups from any web browser.

We encourage you to explore some of these great new apps in the Marketplace. Join us next Wednesday when we hold a live webinar to discuss with a few of the app creators on maximizing your productivity with these apps.

Webinar: Increase productivity with new Google Apps Marketplace Apps
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT
Register here

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

Posted by Harrison Shih, Google Apps Marketplace Team

Upgrade your users’ knowledge with Google Apps Tips and Tricks

As a Google Apps trainer, I’ve spent more than two years working with Google Apps customers on deployments, researching how they use resources provided by Google or from our professional training partners.

I always learn a lot from “Go Live” week – the first days of deployment, when users start to discover Apps’ features and capabilities. But for me, the real “aha” comes a month or so later, when users are familiar enough with Apps that they want to dive in and do more. I often see people beginning to seek out and share power tips and tricks for using Apps around that time.

To help with that sharing, we’re announcing a new addition to the Google Apps Deployment Site: a center for Google Apps Tricks and Tips. This center contains a collection of ideas and suggestions that that users can try to take their Apps use to the next level. The first collection of tips focuses on Gmail, but insights on using Docs and other features are in the works.

View this image in detail here.

The tips are short, easy to understand, and incorporate step-by-step graphics to walk the user through the tip. They’re designed to encourage users to discover features of Google Apps they may not have known existed, and to educate them when new functionality is incorporated into the products.

We’ve made it easy for Google Apps administrators to use these resources. Our Tips and Tricks Getting Started Guide walks you through the process of incorporating the tips and tricks in your training site. (If you haven’t created a launch or training site, check out our support site templates for an easy way to get started.)

Give Google Apps Tips and Tricks a try and watch how quickly your users become more collaborative, productive, and proficient as they incorporate the newly learned features into their daily routine.

Posted by Gary Giurbino, Google Enterprise Training team

Introducing user policy management for Google Apps

In the past six months, we’ve released a series of new features giving administrators more controls to manage Google Apps within their organizations. Recent additions include multi-domain support, new data migration tools, SSL enforcement capabilities, more mobile device security controls, and the ability to tailor Google Apps with more than a hundred applications from the new Google Apps Marketplace. Today, we’re excited to announce one of the most highly requested features from administrators: user policy management.

Now administrators can segment their users into organizational units and control which applications are enabled or disabled for each group. For example, a manufacturing firm might want to give their office workers access to Google Talk, but not their production line employees. Mayooran Rajan, CTO of Revevol Consulting, noted, "We work with businesses with 100 to 20,000 employees moving from on-premise solutions to Google Apps. The new user policy management feature helps us tailor Google Apps and provide businesses with granular control for each department within their company."

Organizations can also use this functionality to test applications with pilot users before making them more widely available. Sheri Stahler, Associate Vice President for Computer Services at Temple University said, “Using the new user policy management feature in Google Apps, we’re able to test out new applications like Google Wave with a subset of users to decide how we should roll out new functionality more broadly.”

The ability to toggle services on or off for groups of users can also help customers transition to Google Apps from on-premise environments. For example, a business can enable just the collaboration tools like Google Docs and Google sites for users who haven’t yet moved off old on-premise messaging solutions.

Administrators can manage these settings on the ‘Organizations & users’ tab in the ‘Next generation’ control panel. Alternatively, organizations can mirror their existing LDAP organizational schema using Google Apps Directory Sync or programmatically assign users to organizational units using the Google Apps Provisioning API.

This feature is starting to roll out to Premier and Education edition users at no additional charge. To learn more about user policy management on Google Apps, please visit our Help Center documentation.

Posted by Adam Dawes, Google Apps Product Manager

It's App Tuesday: 10 new apps available in the Google Apps Marketplace today

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

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

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

Several of the new applications help you manage communications more effectively, from tracking contact with customers and partners to making your inbox more efficient:

• Bantam Live is an easy CRM & team collaboration app to track contacts, prospects, deals and organize projects, tasks, and events. It Integrates with Google Apps and social networks to import/aggregate contacts.

• Etacts helps grow your relationships. The application and Gmail contextual gadget enable you to instantly find out who you talk to the most and who you’ve neglected.

• Organizer by OtherInbox helps cure email overload. It automatically organizes low priority email out of the way, leaving your Inbox much smaller so it's easy to find the important messages from real people.

Here are the other apps launching on the Marketplace today for you to check out:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Steven Bazyl, Google Apps Marketplace team