Putting big data on the map: helping customers see location-based information

Rahul Sood, Enterprise Director of Partnerships

Today, all types of businesses rely on geographic information to make better decisions about their customers, products and processes. As part of our ongoing effort to make geographic information accessible and useful, we offer the Google Maps API Premier to businesses that want to integrate Google Maps directly into their own applications and websites. Interactive maps have become critical to many basic business functions from asset tracking in the logistics industry to inventory planning in retail.

Earlier this week, we announced a new collaboration with SAP aimed at helping enterprise customers use Google’s mapping services with SAP’s business analytics software. As this demo from SAP shows, the Google Maps API lets companies visualize geographic data more easily, leading to better business decisions. Access to SAP and Google tools on tablets and other mobile devices means that employees can review their business data whenever and wherever the need arises.

Google is committed to helping businesses and software vendors build, run and support innovative applications that involve huge data sets. These “big data” sets require massive storage and processing power, a task Google’s cloud infrastructure is uniquely well suited to handle. Today, in addition to the Google Maps API, Google also provides the Google Prediction API and Google Storage for Developers to support businesses working with their important big data. Like the Google Maps API, businesses and developers can use these services to process data or build applications.

Businesses innovate and scale faster on Google App Engine

Posted by Gregory D'alesandre, Sr. Product Manager, Google App Engine team

It was another exciting year at Google I/O for Google App Engine, with more than a dozen businesses participating in the Developer Sandbox showcasing the innovative apps they are building on Google App Engine. We had a chance to hear feedback from our customers on our new version of App Engine, our future plans and our new pricing model. People were excited about the changes and eager to share with us how important App Engine has been to their businesses.

In the Sandbox, we took some time to catch up with Dan Murray, founder and managing director at WebFilings, to learn how building on App Engine has given them the speed, reliability and scale to secure major Fortune 500 clients including Valero, eBay, United Airlines, and Dish Network.



We also talked with Jessica Stanton from Evite about how it leveraged App Engine to build a technology that serves billions of pageviews a month. Evite did all of this with a team of only five developers, something it couldn't have done without the easy management and scalability App Engine provides.



And finally we heard from Gary Koelling from Best Buy, who explained to us:

“Our experience with Google App Engine really changed how we do things. We can use far fewer developers, and we don’t have to spend any time doing system administration or setting up servers, which allows us to focus on the development and testing new ideas.”

Google App Engine was discussed in more than 24 sessions at I/O this year, all of which you can view on the Google I/O site. If you’re interested in reading more about App Engine from the people who built it, check out our I/O recap post on the App Engine blog. We look forward continuing to improve App Engine for businesses and have an exciting year ahead.

Google Apps Script opens new ways to deliver workflow solutions for businesses

Posted by John Gale, Solution Developer, Appogee

Editors note: Guest author John Gale is a developer at Appogee, a Google focused systems integrator in the UK. John helps Appogee customers make the most of the Google platform and is the author of Appogee Bookmarks for Android.

Google Sites offers an incredible way to author and distribute content, and we use it extensively both for ourselves and our clients. Therefore it was not surprising that our customers started requesting a content approval workflow in Google Sites. Now with Google Apps Script, we have been able to develop Appogee Content Approval for Google Sites.

The Solution
Appogee Content Approval for Google Sites (ACA) can be set up for any existing Google Site without having to make any changes to the site. ACA works as follows:

1. The ACA spreadsheet generates a Content Submission Form and any content submitted is routed to a selected approver.
2. The approver receives an email notification, which they can authorize or reject.
3. Once authorized, the ACA spreadsheet writes the new content into the target Site using Apps Script’s Sites services. The new content is then visible to anyone with view permissions in the target site.

Approver receives an email containing the submitted content

The content submission URL can be shared to any group or published directly on the target Google Site, which represents the end goal on the workflow diagram below. Content may only be submitted by users that are logged into your domain and content can only be published with Approver sanction.

ACA Workflow Diagram

Google Apps Script made it easy

We used a number of Apps Script services to develop this application. Apps Script was an easy choice as it builds on pooled knowledge from the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and uses Javascript syntax. Using Apps Script’s UI Services, we were able build up a working user interface quickly. Google has since introduced a new experimental feature to complement the UI Services, which provides a drag and drop GUI for building screens. We expect this feature to reduce development time required for building future apps, as well as offering a wide range of widgets and controls to improve the user experience. We used a standard Google spreadsheet as a kind of a data store in ACA. It’s worth mentioning that Apps Script’s documentation site has a plethora of tutorials covering everything from simple spreadsheet macros to full help desk applications.

One of Google Apps Scripts’ core features is the ability to seamlessly integrate different services together, in our case this was Google Sites and Spreadsheets, but many other services are accessible, such as Mail and Contacts. It was always the aim to make ACA a powerful tool without unnecessary complexity and thanks to Google Apps Script, we have successfully delivered content approval workflow to Google Sites. ACA represents our third off-the-shelf product to be listed in the Google Apps Marketplace.

App Tuesday and Staff Picks help you find apps from the Google Apps Marketplace

Posted by Harrison Shih, Product Marketing, Google Enterprise

This month we’re adding Staff Picks to our monthly App Tuesday posts to better help businesses identify and try great applications from the Google Apps Marketplace. With our inventory growing to well over 300 applications, these efforts help bring to the forefront new and interesting applications for your business.

Our vision for 100% web is to provide a seamless workflow with our apps and the best apps on the web. Whether you need project management solutions, finance tools or a database for your customer interactions, with Marketplace apps you can benefit from convenient integrations such as single sign-on, Gmail integration and Calendar and Docs synchronization.

We want to extend a warm welcome to some of the notable apps that have joined our Marketplace in the last month:

• Nutshell CRM - a customer management app that helps you manage leads and customers through a unified interface and mobile access
• Olark - a customer management app that helps boost sales on your website through a live chat widget
• Weebly - a website tool that makes it easy for you to create a great website with no technical expertise
• Symphony 440 - an application platform that enables you to create your own apps for CRM, project management and other workflow needs

We also want to highlight this month’s Staff Picks, which are chosen based on great functionality, ease of use, and deep integrations with Google Apps:

• Mavenlink (slideshow) - a project management solution for professional services delivery
• Solve360 (slideshow) - a CRM that integrates with Gmail, Calendar and Docs to help manage client projects
• Smartsheet (slideshow) - a project management app based on great functionality, ease of use, and deep integrations with Google Apps
• GQueues (slideshow) - a task management app that lets you share lists, assign tasks, get reminders and stay organized

Instead of managing on-premise solutions for your everyday business needs and dealing with constant software updates, patches and access issues, try running your business through Google Apps and the Google Apps Marketplace.

Directski.com goes Google

Posted by Ronan Hughes, CTO at Directski.com

Editor's Note: Next up, we’d like to welcome Ronan Hughes, Chief Technical Officer at Directski.com, a web based travel company based in Dublin. Directski.com migrated to Google Apps six months ago with the help of Google Apps Authorized Reseller, Baker Security & Networks. 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.

Directski.com have been in business for over ten years, with a mission to make ski holidays more affordable for all. As a 100% web based company, Directski.com doesn’t have glossy brochures, expensive middlemen, high street shops or call centers. We’ve developed a market leading website that has been designed specifically for the sale of ski holidays. We have 30 full time employees and large numbers of seasonal staff that provide ski packages to over 200 European ski destinations.

Effective use of technology has been a key driver and cornerstone of our success. For example, we have used open source products to provide us with scalable, flexible and secure IT systems that have allowed us to grow rapidly but in a cost effective and pragmatic manner. We are always thinking about how technology can simplify and enhance our business processes so that we continually live up to our mission of helping our customers to “ski for less.”

Recently we examined how cloud computing could help us keep this advantage over our competitors. One product that quickly caught our attention was Google Apps and we implemented it across our organisation. The migration to Google Apps was seamless and our employees love it. It’s a huge improvement on our old system and it simply takes care of itself. Our employees find it very intuitive and the combination of Gmail, video sharing, chat and Google Docs allows for great team collaboration across our 5 offices.

Google Apps has numerous advantages for us; it has helped us control our costs, allowing us to focus on the core IT projects that will will add value for our customers, and, in turn, for our business. It is easy to use and offers cutting-edge functionality. Required training is minimal which is very important to us given the large number of seasonal staff we employ. Being a fast-paced, nimble travel company, accessibility is of paramount importance to our team and Google Apps provides this for us.

We’re so impressed with our migration to Google Apps that we’ve put together a quick video to tell you more! We would recommend Google Apps to any faced paced, innovative company.

The Google Apps Marketplace - 1 year and 300 apps later

Today the Google Apps Marketplace turns one! In the past year, we’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with many of the best developers on the web, working to make it easy for you to extend Google Apps with great apps for your businesses or school. Our selection has grown from 50 to over 300 apps, and includes great apps for CRM, project management, customer support, finance, email marketing, and more.

You’ve told us we’re on to something...what else have we learned? In a nutshell:

1. Web app adoption is accelerating across every business function and need
2. You value web apps that work together — what we call integrated apps (see video below)
3. It’s harder than ever to evaluate and select the right app, given the number of new apps coming to market, and their increasing specialization

With these learnings firmly in mind, we’re more excited than ever about our mission with Apps Marketplace, and are working on features to make it even easier for you to discover, evaluate and deploy web apps that integrate out of the box. Beyond single sign-on and quick access through our universal navigation bar, our best Marketplace apps synchronize data and offer integrated features designed to keep you and your users productive as you move closer to 100% web.



Here’s a look back at some of our fondest memories from our first 12 months.

One year ago, the Apps Marketplace was born with 50 apps, including cloud content management app Box.net, fostering a new model for businesses to discover, purchase and deploy integrated web apps online.

Then in May, to make integrations even more useful, we announced the ability for apps to seamlessly appear inside Gmail when a message is read, enabling users to interact with their apps -- like marking an approval or updating a customer record — without leaving Gmail. For example Capsule CRM offers a Gmail contextual gadget, saving users precious time as they process their email.

With the number of apps continuing to grow, in June we started inviting businesses to “make it App Tuesday” on the 2nd Tuesday of each month. Instead of patching legacy software to fix bugs and close security holes, businesses can simply get more functionality — such as Mailchimp for email marketing.

Starting mid-summer, it became clear users were particularly interested in a handful of top selling app categories. So we shared publicly that our top search term was “CRM”, which was driving success for apps like Insightly, and ended up attracting even more apps to the Marketplace to help you manage customers. We also shared that our most installed app category was Project Management, where apps like Smartsheet were seeing success. We wrapped up our category highlights with a timely post on Accounting and Finance before tax season, which featured apps such as Outright for small business accounting.

All along, we were hearing a growing demand from our Google Apps for Education customers for more education-focused apps. So on January 25th, we introduced an education category and added 20+ related apps, including LearnBoost, a free online gradebook.

It’s been a successful year bringing 300 new integrated apps to our users around the world. Let us know what you’d like to see added or improved using our ideas page, and keep checking back for new apps.

Posted by Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead, Google Enterprise

Google Apps Certification Program launches

Adoption of Google Apps is accelerating around the world with over 3 million businesses that have gone Google. Google Apps Authorized Resellers play a critical role in helping businesses get started. As our partner community has more than doubled in the last year to over 2,500 partners in over 70 countries, partners have been seeking opportunities to demonstrate their expertise and competence to a growing customer base.

We are therefore happy to announce the Google Apps Certification Program, which recognizes IT professionals for demonstrated abilities to sell, deploy, develop, and support Google Apps. Available today globally, is the first of these certifications, the Google Apps Certified Deployment Specialist, which certifies IT professionals who have demonstrated the fundamental knowledge and skills required to migrate to, configure, and deploy Google Apps.

“As we continue to build out our global Google Apps practice, it is essential for us to differentiate ourselves and to gain recognition for the great depth of Apps expertise we have developed with so many customers. The Google Apps Certification Program will help generate new client interest by highlighting our commitment to offering the highest-value consulting services to the market," explains Jon Hallett, CEO of Cloud Sherpas, a Google Apps Authorized Reseller.

Like Google Apps, this certification is 100% web – any IT professional with a browser and an Internet connection can register to take the online proctored exam. It is available in English now, and will soon be available in additional languages. To learn more, go to certification.googleapps.com.

Posted by Stephen Cho, Director, Google Apps Channels

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

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

You Can Be Lost in Data Without A Map

Editor's note: From time to time, Google likes to highlight partners and customers who have developed interesting and unique applications using our products. Peter Rossiter is a founder and CEO of Integeo, a company whose product leverages Google Maps API Premier. With over thirty years experience in the IT industry, Peter has led many innovative commercial ventures and research projects.

Location-based services have quickly become pervasive in our everyday lives and maps are now widely used as a convenient and useful visual tool to present data in ways that people can easily relate to.

Business Intelligence (BI) covers a collection of techniques and tools that support an organization’s decision making process. The advent of Google Maps familiarized people with the concept of data points on a map and progressively more and more BI customers are expecting fully integrated maps and spatial analytics with their tools of choice. Seeing data in the context of its location often exposes information previously hidden in the raw data.

But a tool is only useful if it’s usable. You need to focus on solving your business problems not technology. Avoiding the need for specialist programming resources is a good start followed by ensuring the BI skills of a dashboard or report designer are sufficient even if the underlying spatial analysis is quite complex.


Google Maps API Premier is a solid platform for presenting a rich background context of street and satellite data for analysis of business data. The Google API also enables us to dynamically geocode address data and users can zoom to particular areas of interest using our enhanced Google Search facility.



There is a lot more to visualizing data on maps than just plotting points and icons. Integeo’s Map Intelligence comes out of the box with an extensible, easy to use palette of spatial analytical functions. These enable clear and immediate perception of data relationships, groupings, classifications, patterns, trends and variations that stand out when mapped. A summary of the features of Map Intelligence can be found on our website.

At the click of a button, the analytics currently being viewed by a user can be interactively viewed on Google Earth. The dynamic map layers are generated by Map Intelligence from the “facts and dimensions” in the dashboard or spreadsheet, offering the choice to either use KML (KMZ including images, legend, etc.) or a network link that will update from the Map Intelligence server whenever the user changes their Google Earth view. All the information and data relationship layers are dynamically available so that as filters are applied in the BI environment they are automatically applied to the view in Google Earth.

Please visit www.integeo.com if you would like to learn more about Integeo and see why Map Intelligence is the only BI product to rank top 10 among purpose built GIS solutions (Ovum Research 2009). We offer integrated mapping analytics incorporating Google Maps API Premier as an “off the shelf” solution for users of all the major BI platforms - currently these include (but are not restricted to) BI products from Cognos (IBM), Business Objects (SAP), Oracle, MicroStrategy, QlikView, Actuate, BIRT, Microsoft Excel and SQL Reporting Services.

Posted By Natasha Wyatt, Google Earth and Maps Team

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

Bergelectric on evaluating Microsoft BPOS-S and choosing Google Apps

Editor’s Note: We invited Kyle Swafford, Director of IT Services for Bergelectric, to share the story of Bergelectric’s evaluation of Google Apps and Microsoft BPOS-S and their subsequent migration from Novell Groupwise to Google Apps using Google Apps Authorized Reseller SADA Systems, Inc.

Since our founding in 1946, Bergelectric Corporation has provided electrical contracting on thousands of construction projects for clients such as Phoenix International Raceway, the FBI, the University of Southern California, and Ritz Carlton Hotels. Bergelectric has more than 1,300 field employees and over 400 office professionals coast to coast.

Our company had been a Novell Groupwise shop for many years, and IT staff had begun to feel increasing frustration with the platform due to its stagnancy. They were forced to dedicate substantial time and resources to maintaining servers across many sites nationwide. And we had to enforce email storage quotas of 100MB, though this amount of storage was often inadequate for users. Collaboration possibilities were practically nonexistent. In short, this aging environment wasn’t keeping pace with Bergelectric and this created a significant challenge for the organization.

The choice to move to a hosted e-mail service was discussed passionately at every level of the company and marked a significant departure from the costly, and dated, infrastructure constraints of our on-premise system. After we made the decision to move to a hosted provider, we spent a considerable amount of time comparing offerings, including Microsoft BPOS-S and Google Apps. Initially we found Microsoft BPOS-S an attractive option, but as we delved deeper into the contract and piloted a production environment deployment we found the BPOS-S solution came up short - even with the significant concessions Microsoft made in order to be competitive with Google. For example, we were put off by the fact that we would have to go through a third party company for email archiving and retention. We soon came to the realization that we would have to invest significant additional time and money into BPOS in order to meet our initial expectations of migrating to the cloud.

We decided to revisit Google Apps. For email archiving and retention, Google Message Discovery was easier to use, significantly cheaper, better integrated into the entire email migration process, and offered more features than the third party options available with BPOS. Once more, through the course of our lengthy evaluation, Google continued to update Apps’ functionality to incorporate virtually all of the features that we had valued in Microsoft’s offering. After updates such as Google Calendar Sync, which syncs events between Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook Calendar, and the ability to delegate calendar management to an administrative assistant, we had reached the tipping point where users adamant about using Outlook became confident in the capabilities of the Google Apps suite.

Following a rapid response by a combined team from Google and Google Apps Authorized Reseller, SADA Systems, Inc., Bergelectric quickly made plans to “Go Google.” Key components of the deployment included user synchronization between Active Directory and Google Apps, single sign-on to Apps using Active Directory credentials, migration of all data from Groupwise to Google (including historical email, contacts and calendar items), Google Apps integration with BlackBerry Enterprise Server, implementation of the Google Message Discovery product for mail archiving and discovery, and a complete training and change management effort to ensure the smoothest possible transition and high user adoption rates.

Our migration off the Groupwise platform has allowed the IT staff to focus its resources on more strategic, business-driven initiatives in the online space. The IT team has regained precious time previously spent patching and keeping the e-mail servers running and are now able to focus on things like business continuity and compliance. Employees have a generous 25 GB of e-mail storage and the ability access e-mail and collaboration tools from our many offices and remote project sites, whether it’s via a desktop, laptop or mobile device.

We were impressed by Google’s commitment to making it easy and simple for long-term on-premise users to migrate to the cloud. And Google’s data liberation policy gave us peace of mind that, if we ever wanted to move platforms, we’d be able to readily do so. Once more, their commitment to open standards and APIs allow us to access our own data and customize our implementation in ways that we never thought possible. As our business needs evolve, we can find additional apps in the Google Apps Marketplace or we can easily build our own on Google App Engine.

Overall, our employees have been extremely happy with the move to Google Apps. IT is relieved to finally have true redundancy, painless scalability and better control, all while no longer needing to maintain remote servers and tape backups. Management is pleased with the cost savings and vastly improved service offerings.

Posted by Kevin Gough, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Google Enterprise