2008-11-14 "No logo" default option available for Google Sites
Google Apps administrators can now specify that all new user-created Google Sites will not display a logo at the top of each page.
Editions impacted:
Standard, Premier, Education and Partner Editions
Languages impacted:
US English
How to access what's new:
Sign in to the administrative control panel, click 'Domain settings' and then 'Appearance'. Un-check the box for 'Show this logo in all sites that users create', then click 'Save changes'.
For more information:
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/collaboration.html#sites
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2008-11-14 Google Calendar now available in Hebrew and Arabic
Google Calendar users can now access their accounts in Hebrew and Arabic, including a complete right-to-left user interface.
Editions impacted:
Standard, Premier, Education, Team and Partner Editions
Languages impacted:
Hebrew and Arabic
How to access what's new:
Sign in to Google Calendar and click 'Settings' to change your language preferences.
For more information:
http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=37032
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2008-11-11 Browser-based voice and video chat available in Gmail
You can now have voice and video chats with your contacts for free within your browser's Gmail window.
Editions impacted:
Standard, Premier, Education and Partner Editions
Languages impacted:
US English
How to access what's new:
From Gmail, open a chat session with a contact, click on the 'Video & more' menu at the bottom of the chat window, then select 'Start video chat' or 'Start voice chat'. The first time you use this feature, you'll be prompted to download and install a small plugin.
For more information:
http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2008/11/gmail-voice-and-video-chat.html
2008-11-03 Google Analytics for Google Apps
Google Apps administrators can now link their Google Analytics accounts to Google Apps, providing administrators with usage data for Google Docs and Google Sites.
Editions impacted:
Premier and Education Editions
Languages impacted:
US English
How to access what's new:
Sign in to the administrative control panel, go to the 'Advanced Tools' tab, click 'Setup Google Analytics' and enter the profile ID number from your Google Analytics account to begin collecting usage data. Sign in to Google Analytics to view and analyze the data.
For more information:
http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2008/11/google-analytics-for-google-apps.html
2008-10-31 New capabilities for the Google Docs API
The Google Docs API is now capable of updating the actual content of documents, sharing documents, and moving documents into and out of folders programmatically.
Editions impacted:
Standard, Premier, Education, Team and Partner Editions
Languages impacted:
US English
How to access what's new:
Visit the Google Documents List Data API overview site to get started. (See link below.)
For more information:
http://code.google.com/apis/documents/overview.html
2008-10-31 OAuth for APIs available with Premier and Education Editions
Premier and Education Edition administrators can now use OAuth authentication to access GData feeds for users on their domains. Using OAuth, administrators can act on behalf of end-users without any end-user involvement.
Editions impacted:
Premier and Education Editions
Languages impacted:
US English
How to access what's new:
Premier and Education Edition admins can enable OAuth in the 'Authentication' section of the 'Advanced tools' tab of the Google Apps administrative control panel.
For more information:
http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=61017
2008-10-30 SLAs available for Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Talk
Google Apps Premier Edition now includes a 99.9% uptime guarantee for Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Talk.
Editions impacted:
Premier Edition
Languages impacted:
All
How to access what's new:
This uptime guarantee is available to all Premier Edition customers.
For more information:
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/sla.html
2008-10-29 New Google Calendar features launched
Google Calendar now supports several new features:
– When scheduling appointments, you can now automatically find the next available time that works for all attendees and resources like conference rooms.
– Google Calendar now does time zone auto-detection to help you view your calendar in the right local time zone when you're traveling.
– You can add a secondary time zone to see when events take place if you frequently travel between time zones or work with people in other time zones.
– Meeting reminders can now be customized more granularly between zero and five minutes before an event.
– Google Calendar supports more keyboard shortcuts now.
Editions impacted:
Standard, Premier, Education, Team and Partner Editions
Languages impacted:
US English
How to access what's new:
To have Google Calendar find the next available time for a meeting, click 'Create Event' and then 'Check guest and resource availability'. Add the invitees and resources (like conference rooms) you want to invite, set the duration of your meeting, and click 'Find next available time'.
To add a secondary time zone, click 'Settings' and then 'Show an additional time zone' to make a time zone selection that will appear on your calendar alongside your primary time zone.
Granular meeting reminders can be set per-event by clicking 'Event details' and adjusting your preferences.
To see a list of keyboard shortcuts, enter "?".
For more information:
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/messaging.html#calendar
2008-10-28 Google Labs applications now available
Organizations using Google Apps can now start using Google Labs applications. The first three new apps are:
Google Moderator – Manage Q&A sessions from the smallest video conference to the largest all-hands company meeting.
Google Code Reviews – Collaborate with others to catch bugs in software you're developing.
Google Short Links – Create easy-to-remember links for both your internal and external web pages.
Stay tuned for more Google Labs applications from Google and other software developers.
Editions impacted:
Standard, Premier, Education and Partner Editions
Languages impacted:
US English
How to access what's new:
Visit the Solutions Marketplace (see link below) to learn more about Google Labs and select the new applications you want to use in your organization.
For more information:
http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/viewVendorListings?vendorId=1012
2008-10-23 Gmail for mobile adds features and support for 40 interface languages
Users of J2ME-supported and BlackBerry phones can now check email across multiple accounts (including both Gmail and Google Apps email accounts), compose messages without a signal, return to the inbox while mail sends in the background, undo recent actions, and work quickly with shortcut keys. The interface is also now available in 40 languages.
Editions impacted:
Standard, Premier, Education and Partner Editions
Languages impacted:
Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (UK), English (US), Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.
How to access what's new:
Go to m.google.com/mail in your mobile browser to download the new Gmail for mobile for your phone.
For more information:
http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2008/10/introducing-gmail-for-mobile-20.html
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Friday, November 7, 2008
Calendar and Docs gadgets in Gmail
Gmail Labs has been a really fun way to easily try out new ideas and get some of our pet feature requests implemented quickly. We wanted to take this to the next level and let you start adding your own stuff to Gmail. Today we're launching a few Labs experiments that let you add gadgets to the left-nav, next to Chat and Labels.
To get you started, we've worked with the engineers from the Calendar and Docs teams on two highly requested features: a simple way to see your Google Calendar agenda and get an alert when you have a meeting, and a gadget that shows a list of your recently accessed Google Docs and lets you search across all of your documents right from within Gmail.
There's a third Lab that allows you to add any gadget by pasting in the URL of its XML spec file (e.g. http://www.google.com/ig/modules/youtube_videos.xml). We realize this isn't very user friendly right now; it's a sandbox mainly aimed at developers who want to play around with gadgets in Gmail. We're not tied to the left-nav as a primary way to extend Gmail -- in fact we think it is relatively limited and doesn't offer scalable real estate. There are also some downsides to the iframe-style Gadgets we're using today -- they can sometimes slow down the page. We're fanatical about speed, so we'll be keeping a close eye on performance.
This is also a chance for us to test the developer infrastructure involved. We're using common gadget infrastructure, such as the Apache Shindig project, and working with other gadget containers to make gadgets more portable.
We're looking forward to your comments in the Labs forum, so send us your ideas, let us know how you like the Calendar and Docs gadgets, and if you've written a gadget that you think works well in Gmail, post it and let us and other users try it out.
A couple of notes:
(1) Try out Anatol's Navbar drag and drop Labs feature so you can easily re-order all the boxes on Gmail's left hand side.
(2) Not all gadgets are fully compatible with https, so if you're connecting to Gmail via https, you may see mixed content warnings caused by parts of the gadgets being served over http. We're working on fixing this where we can.
Posted by Dan Pupius, Gmail engineer
To get you started, we've worked with the engineers from the Calendar and Docs teams on two highly requested features: a simple way to see your Google Calendar agenda and get an alert when you have a meeting, and a gadget that shows a list of your recently accessed Google Docs and lets you search across all of your documents right from within Gmail.
There's a third Lab that allows you to add any gadget by pasting in the URL of its XML spec file (e.g. http://www.google.com/ig/modules/youtube_videos.xml). We realize this isn't very user friendly right now; it's a sandbox mainly aimed at developers who want to play around with gadgets in Gmail. We're not tied to the left-nav as a primary way to extend Gmail -- in fact we think it is relatively limited and doesn't offer scalable real estate. There are also some downsides to the iframe-style Gadgets we're using today -- they can sometimes slow down the page. We're fanatical about speed, so we'll be keeping a close eye on performance.
This is also a chance for us to test the developer infrastructure involved. We're using common gadget infrastructure, such as the Apache Shindig project, and working with other gadget containers to make gadgets more portable.
We're looking forward to your comments in the Labs forum, so send us your ideas, let us know how you like the Calendar and Docs gadgets, and if you've written a gadget that you think works well in Gmail, post it and let us and other users try it out.
A couple of notes:
(1) Try out Anatol's Navbar drag and drop Labs feature so you can easily re-order all the boxes on Gmail's left hand side.
(2) Not all gadgets are fully compatible with https, so if you're connecting to Gmail via https, you may see mixed content warnings caused by parts of the gadgets being served over http. We're working on fixing this where we can.
Posted by Dan Pupius, Gmail engineer
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
More add-on in Google Apps
Google has launched Google Apps Labs, an experimental area that will enable Google Apps for Your Domain customers to place add-ons into popular Google hosted applications. These third-party applications will need to be added by the domain administrator of a Google Apps-enabled domain.
Google has thrown out 3 Labs add-ons as a demonstration of the type of functionality available from using Apps Labs including: Google Code Reviews, which will enable software developers to collaborate on code; Google Short Links, which makes it possible to shorten URLs; and Google Moderator, an app that allows you groups to have an online home for a question and answer portal.
It remains to be seen how popular it will be to create third-party add-ons for Google Apps, but it is refreshing to see Google open up and allow for the possibilities to be manifested.
Google has thrown out 3 Labs add-ons as a demonstration of the type of functionality available from using Apps Labs including: Google Code Reviews, which will enable software developers to collaborate on code; Google Short Links, which makes it possible to shorten URLs; and Google Moderator, an app that allows you groups to have an online home for a question and answer portal.
It remains to be seen how popular it will be to create third-party add-ons for Google Apps, but it is refreshing to see Google open up and allow for the possibilities to be manifested.
Custom Gmail link to calendar and alert via gadget
Google this week unveiled gadgets created by its Google Labs project that allow Gmail users to look at Google Calendar and Google Docs data without having to open the hosted applications.
For example, Gmail users can use one of the gadgets to see their Calendar agenda and get alerted when a meeting is scheduled, Google said. Another gadget could show users a list of recently accessed Google Docs and let them search across all documents from within Gmail.
Google Labs, which solicits user feedback as it develops products, also created the ability to add any gadget to Gmail by pasting in the URL of its XML file, noted Google engineer Dan Pupius in a blog post.
The new products are the latest in a series of offerings to come out of Google Labs in recent months.
Earlier this month Google Labs rolled out Mail Goggles aimed at preventing Gmail users from sending email that they might later regret. Last month Google Labs rolled out a test version of an audio search indexing system that's designed to find specific words in videos and let users jump to the portion of the video where the words are used. And In August, the company unveiled Google Labs-developed Google Suggest, which suggests search queries as users type words or letters.
Pupius said he hopes to get more feedback from users on the new gadgets. "We realize this isn't very user friendly right now; it's a sandbox mainly aimed at developers who want to play around with gadgets in Gmail. There are also some downsides to the iframe-style Gadgets we're using today -- they can sometimes slow down the page. We're fanatical about speed, so we'll be keeping a close eye on performance," he added.
He went on to note that not all of the new gadgets are fully compatible to Hypertext Transfer Protocol over Secure Socket Layer (HTTPS), so users connecting to Gmail via an HTTPS connection may see content warnings caused by parts of the gadgets being served over Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP.)
Rick Turoczy, a blogger at Read Write Web, noted that many users of Google Apps spend a lot of their time in Gmail, where the majority of activity happens. However, he noted that they likely are still interested in keeping tabs on their schedule and what is happening with their work.
"The new Gmail gadgets are designed to make your Gmail interface more inclusive by providing views into your other Google apps - without having to leave your Gmail inbox," he added. "While the real estate is constrained, the view manages to provide just enough detail, giving you access to upcoming meetings and appointments and a glimpse of the latest documents on file.
Turoczy went on to note that the Google Labs likely holds the key to future Gmail features.
"It will be interesting to see what users choose to install and adopt from Labs - and equally interesting what they choose to ignore - because that will determine what Google decides to bake into future features of Gmail, itself," he said. "I think it's safe to assume that these two latest gadgets from Labs are leading candidates for core Gmail functionality, especially given how simply and effectively they combine access to the most popular Google apps in the place where most users live and breathe - their inbox
For example, Gmail users can use one of the gadgets to see their Calendar agenda and get alerted when a meeting is scheduled, Google said. Another gadget could show users a list of recently accessed Google Docs and let them search across all documents from within Gmail.
Google Labs, which solicits user feedback as it develops products, also created the ability to add any gadget to Gmail by pasting in the URL of its XML file, noted Google engineer Dan Pupius in a blog post.
The new products are the latest in a series of offerings to come out of Google Labs in recent months.
Earlier this month Google Labs rolled out Mail Goggles aimed at preventing Gmail users from sending email that they might later regret. Last month Google Labs rolled out a test version of an audio search indexing system that's designed to find specific words in videos and let users jump to the portion of the video where the words are used. And In August, the company unveiled Google Labs-developed Google Suggest, which suggests search queries as users type words or letters.
Pupius said he hopes to get more feedback from users on the new gadgets. "We realize this isn't very user friendly right now; it's a sandbox mainly aimed at developers who want to play around with gadgets in Gmail. There are also some downsides to the iframe-style Gadgets we're using today -- they can sometimes slow down the page. We're fanatical about speed, so we'll be keeping a close eye on performance," he added.
He went on to note that not all of the new gadgets are fully compatible to Hypertext Transfer Protocol over Secure Socket Layer (HTTPS), so users connecting to Gmail via an HTTPS connection may see content warnings caused by parts of the gadgets being served over Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP.)
Rick Turoczy, a blogger at Read Write Web, noted that many users of Google Apps spend a lot of their time in Gmail, where the majority of activity happens. However, he noted that they likely are still interested in keeping tabs on their schedule and what is happening with their work.
"The new Gmail gadgets are designed to make your Gmail interface more inclusive by providing views into your other Google apps - without having to leave your Gmail inbox," he added. "While the real estate is constrained, the view manages to provide just enough detail, giving you access to upcoming meetings and appointments and a glimpse of the latest documents on file.
Turoczy went on to note that the Google Labs likely holds the key to future Gmail features.
"It will be interesting to see what users choose to install and adopt from Labs - and equally interesting what they choose to ignore - because that will determine what Google decides to bake into future features of Gmail, itself," he said. "I think it's safe to assume that these two latest gadgets from Labs are leading candidates for core Gmail functionality, especially given how simply and effectively they combine access to the most popular Google apps in the place where most users live and breathe - their inbox
Microsoft Sharepoint users moved into Google Apps
If you subscribe to Google Apps, you can now attach a Google Analytics account to features like Google Docs and Google Sites. This gives administrators a grasp on usage details for these services.
Have you ever wondered if your staff is actually reading the policies you spend so much time creating? Perhaps they are so boring that 99% of people that open your document leave right away. This type of information will help organizations measure how useful documents are, and how people within your organization are using Google Sites (Google’s take on Microsoft SharePoint)
Want to see how many employees checked out your company’s new travel policy? Curious if your European sales team is taking advantage of the same resources as your US team? Because you can slice and dice usage information for content by hour, day, week, month, user location, browser type and more, answering these kinds of questions is easy.
These are the kinds of things that could make Google Docs more compelling to businesses — measuring this information would be a lot more difficult if there are copies of a Microsoft Word document floating around as opposed to a centrally managed, and collaborative document.
Have you ever wondered if your staff is actually reading the policies you spend so much time creating? Perhaps they are so boring that 99% of people that open your document leave right away. This type of information will help organizations measure how useful documents are, and how people within your organization are using Google Sites (Google’s take on Microsoft SharePoint)
Want to see how many employees checked out your company’s new travel policy? Curious if your European sales team is taking advantage of the same resources as your US team? Because you can slice and dice usage information for content by hour, day, week, month, user location, browser type and more, answering these kinds of questions is easy.
These are the kinds of things that could make Google Docs more compelling to businesses — measuring this information would be a lot more difficult if there are copies of a Microsoft Word document floating around as opposed to a centrally managed, and collaborative document.
More and more companies moving into Google Apps
Google is spending a lot of time "in the clouds" so to speak. They've been emphasizing cloud computing a lot lately, even going so far as to make a 99.9% guarantee with regarding to up-time for Google Apps. Google also has been upgrading Google Apps APIs, and today have announced the expansion of capabilities for the Google Visualization API.
This API was introduced earlier this year as the product of Google's acquisition of Gapminder. The Google Visualization API was designed to make it quick and easy for people to use advanced visualization technology like that of Gapminder. The API allows users to build apps on top of Google Spreadsheets as a post on the Official Google Blog mentions. The post says that the API now enables developers to:
...display data from any data source connected to the web (any database, Excel spreadsheet, etc.), not just from Google Spreadsheets. From pivot tables and heat graphs to motion charts and timelines, the Google Visualization Gallery holds a growing set of 40+ visualizations that appeal to a multitude of businesses.
CRM giant Salesforce has released some tools that compliment the API. That company had a big day today at the Dreamforce conference. "They are announcing a way to build apps that connect the internal facing processes that drive and account for transactions with the external public web based apps," writes Bernard Lunn at Read Write Web. "This is a big move. The two examples they showed were travel and recruitment, but it does not take too much imagination to think of more."
Google points to their Force.com Apex Code classes for Google Visualizations.
"The enhancement of the Google Visualization API represents a significant opportunity for developers," said Adam Gross, Vice President, Developer Marketing, Salesforce.com. "We expect to see the creation of new tools for our users to quickly generate reports and dashboards for their Salesforce CRM data and in their Force.com applications. These enhanced analysis capabilities will provide our customers with greater productivity and deeper insight into their businesses."
The cloud is likely going to be a place where more and more companies find themselves residing moving into the future. Google API expansions will probably continue to fuel this.
This API was introduced earlier this year as the product of Google's acquisition of Gapminder. The Google Visualization API was designed to make it quick and easy for people to use advanced visualization technology like that of Gapminder. The API allows users to build apps on top of Google Spreadsheets as a post on the Official Google Blog mentions. The post says that the API now enables developers to:
...display data from any data source connected to the web (any database, Excel spreadsheet, etc.), not just from Google Spreadsheets. From pivot tables and heat graphs to motion charts and timelines, the Google Visualization Gallery holds a growing set of 40+ visualizations that appeal to a multitude of businesses.
CRM giant Salesforce has released some tools that compliment the API. That company had a big day today at the Dreamforce conference. "They are announcing a way to build apps that connect the internal facing processes that drive and account for transactions with the external public web based apps," writes Bernard Lunn at Read Write Web. "This is a big move. The two examples they showed were travel and recruitment, but it does not take too much imagination to think of more."
Google points to their Force.com Apex Code classes for Google Visualizations.
"The enhancement of the Google Visualization API represents a significant opportunity for developers," said Adam Gross, Vice President, Developer Marketing, Salesforce.com. "We expect to see the creation of new tools for our users to quickly generate reports and dashboards for their Salesforce CRM data and in their Force.com applications. These enhanced analysis capabilities will provide our customers with greater productivity and deeper insight into their businesses."
The cloud is likely going to be a place where more and more companies find themselves residing moving into the future. Google API expansions will probably continue to fuel this.
Microsoft Sharepoint vs Google Apps
SharePoint is a comprehensive solution that fosters collaboration across an organization but it can be expensive. Google Sites is hoping to swipe a piece of that wiki application business by offering a low cost, easily implemented solution.
A while ago Google acquired JotSpot which claimed to be the “first application wiki company.” It provided Google a running start in the wiki space and now with JotSpot reborn as Google Sites, the competition is about to heat up.
Google is the first to admit that Google Sites “is not a new innovation as much as a cheap and easy [solution] that takes advantage of so-called ‘cloud computing,’ or using an Internet browser to access products from a data center,” according to Forbes.
Microsoft SharePoint “costs about $4,400 for server software, and client licenses range from $94 to $187 apiece–though the Microsoft product does offer more functionality, including enterprise search and business intelligence features.”
The vast majority of Google’s revenue comes from search advertising right now, but that might change if the company can build relationships with larger organizations willing to invest in enterprise-wide solutions.
The product director for Google Sites, Matthew Glotzbach told Forbes “we’ve passed 500,000 organizations using Google Apps, and we’re adding 2,000 to 3,000 more a day. The vast majority have been small- and medium-sized companies, plus educational institutions, but the pace and interest from big companies is picking up.”
A while ago Google acquired JotSpot which claimed to be the “first application wiki company.” It provided Google a running start in the wiki space and now with JotSpot reborn as Google Sites, the competition is about to heat up.
Google is the first to admit that Google Sites “is not a new innovation as much as a cheap and easy [solution] that takes advantage of so-called ‘cloud computing,’ or using an Internet browser to access products from a data center,” according to Forbes.
Microsoft SharePoint “costs about $4,400 for server software, and client licenses range from $94 to $187 apiece–though the Microsoft product does offer more functionality, including enterprise search and business intelligence features.”
The vast majority of Google’s revenue comes from search advertising right now, but that might change if the company can build relationships with larger organizations willing to invest in enterprise-wide solutions.
The product director for Google Sites, Matthew Glotzbach told Forbes “we’ve passed 500,000 organizations using Google Apps, and we’re adding 2,000 to 3,000 more a day. The vast majority have been small- and medium-sized companies, plus educational institutions, but the pace and interest from big companies is picking up.”
Google extends reliability guarantee's SLA to all Apps
As many of you know, Google currently offers a 99.9% availability guarantee for Gmail for US$50 a year. But that has now changed as the search giant extends that same guarantee to the rest of its applications with Google Apps for business.
Click Here
For your hard-earned money you now get the guarantee for Google Docs, Calendar, Sites, and Talk, as well as the existing Gmail guarantee.
Matthew Glotzbach, product management director for Google Enterprise said in a Google blog post that:
Today, we’re announcing that we will extend the 99.9 percent service level agreement we offer Premier Edition customers on Gmail to Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk. We have been delivering high levels of reliability across all these products, so it makes sense to extend our guarantees to them.
Google experienced a Gmail outage in October, which affected some users for up to 24 hours and had some questioning the reliability of the service for business users. With that in mind Glotzbach went on to say:
More than 1 million businesses have selected Google Apps to run their business, and tens of millions of people use Gmail every day. With this type of adoption, a disruption of any size — even a minor one affecting fewer than 0.003% of Google Apps Premier Edition users, like the one a few weeks ago — attracts a disproportional amount of attention. We’ve made a series of commitments to improve our communications with customers during any outages, and we have an unwavering commitment to make all issues visible and transparent through our open user groups.
Read more at Silicon.com
Matthew’s Opinion
I think a lot of people will have been expecting this announcement from Google, especially after Microsoft’s recent announcements about cloud computing and Office going online.
For existing and new users it means their US$50 gets them better value every year and a better guarantee if you decide to use all of Google’s services. It did seem a bit strange to me that if you paid for the premium service your Gmail account had a guarantee, but if you wanted to write a document you didn’t have the same even though it was a Google service.
Microsoft trying to catch up on cloud services is only going to push other services, such as Google Apps and Zoho, to ensure their offerings are better. It’s very easy to switch services in the online space so quality of service is paramount going forward.
Click Here
For your hard-earned money you now get the guarantee for Google Docs, Calendar, Sites, and Talk, as well as the existing Gmail guarantee.
Matthew Glotzbach, product management director for Google Enterprise said in a Google blog post that:
Today, we’re announcing that we will extend the 99.9 percent service level agreement we offer Premier Edition customers on Gmail to Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk. We have been delivering high levels of reliability across all these products, so it makes sense to extend our guarantees to them.
Google experienced a Gmail outage in October, which affected some users for up to 24 hours and had some questioning the reliability of the service for business users. With that in mind Glotzbach went on to say:
More than 1 million businesses have selected Google Apps to run their business, and tens of millions of people use Gmail every day. With this type of adoption, a disruption of any size — even a minor one affecting fewer than 0.003% of Google Apps Premier Edition users, like the one a few weeks ago — attracts a disproportional amount of attention. We’ve made a series of commitments to improve our communications with customers during any outages, and we have an unwavering commitment to make all issues visible and transparent through our open user groups.
Read more at Silicon.com
Matthew’s Opinion
I think a lot of people will have been expecting this announcement from Google, especially after Microsoft’s recent announcements about cloud computing and Office going online.
For existing and new users it means their US$50 gets them better value every year and a better guarantee if you decide to use all of Google’s services. It did seem a bit strange to me that if you paid for the premium service your Gmail account had a guarantee, but if you wanted to write a document you didn’t have the same even though it was a Google service.
Microsoft trying to catch up on cloud services is only going to push other services, such as Google Apps and Zoho, to ensure their offerings are better. It’s very easy to switch services in the online space so quality of service is paramount going forward.
Labs for Google Apps: Will enterprises try new features?
November 3, 2008, 03:26 PM — CIO.com —
As Google takes steps to sell its Google Apps software to companies around the world, competing in a market long dominated by Microsoft and IBM, analysts say the internet giant must change business users' expectations of technological change, speed and development. That fight for hearts and minds could not have been made any more clear this week by the company's launch of Labs for Google Apps, a website where Google Apps users can try new features fresh from Google's engineers.
"There is a widely held belief that technology progress in the enterprise is slow and methodical, that adoption cycles are long, and that experimentation is inappropriate," Gabe Cohen, the Google Apps product manager, wrote in a blog post announcing the feature. "Here at Google we believe that experimentation is a good thing - even in the enterprise space."
But since February, 2007, when Google launched Google Apps Premier Edition, a Web-based software package aimed at businesses, the message Google has tried to convey hasn't always resonated with prospective customers. Though a brute force with consumers on the Web, Google has been dogged with reliability issues for the enterprise edition of Google Apps. Most recently, Google's Gmail service went down for as many as 30 hours for some Google Apps business customers.
"It doesn't reinforce their message that Google Apps is a mission critical application," says Oliver Young, an analyst with Forrester Research. "They aren't doing a good job of showing off high quality enterprise customers and showing that they're happy. Most of the customers they tout are universities."
Google is trying to shore up worries about Google Apps' reliability. Just Thursday, it announced a new service level agreement that guaranteed 99 percent uptime not only for Gmail, but for the other features of Google Apps service as well.
But the main issue for Google might be learning to speak the language of business customers. As the Labs for Google Apps announcement reveals, Google believes that business software development should mirror the consumer market by innovating quickly and soliciting constant feedback from users. Analysts say that strategy, though sound and well-conceived, might not resonate with perspective buyers.
"Normally, 'experiment' doesn't belong when we talk about enterprise software," says Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst and vice president with the Boston-based Nucleus Research. "Google needs to be careful that they don't scare people off."
Google Apps includes Gmail, a calendar, documents (a word processor), spreadsheets, instant messaging and Sites, a wiki-based technology that allows non-technical users to build websites.
Google Apps for businesses, which the Labs announcement this week pertains to, costs US$50 per user per year. In addition to the features in the consumer version, it has security from Postini (a security vendor Google acquired last year), more storage space per user, technical support and a customized look that includes a company's logo.
If a business customer feels adventurous enough to try Labs for Google Apps, there are three main apps being tested there, including Google Moderator. Moderator essentially allows Google Apps users to ask questions after a meeting and vote on those questions. In theory, questions that get voted up faster could be addressed by management faster.
One question that remains for Google: Will Google Apps business users want to take time out of their day to try the new features?
According to Wettemann of Nucleus Research, users of the consumer Gmail service who are already fans of the product may be more willing. On the other hand, people who have been tethered to Microsoft Outlook and Office for nearly two decades might not be as enthusiastic to test new Google technology.
"If you want broad adoption, you can't assume everyone is comfortable with your paradigm [for software development]," she says. "The people that don't have Gmail don't necessarily get it."
As Google takes steps to sell its Google Apps software to companies around the world, competing in a market long dominated by Microsoft and IBM, analysts say the internet giant must change business users' expectations of technological change, speed and development. That fight for hearts and minds could not have been made any more clear this week by the company's launch of Labs for Google Apps, a website where Google Apps users can try new features fresh from Google's engineers.
"There is a widely held belief that technology progress in the enterprise is slow and methodical, that adoption cycles are long, and that experimentation is inappropriate," Gabe Cohen, the Google Apps product manager, wrote in a blog post announcing the feature. "Here at Google we believe that experimentation is a good thing - even in the enterprise space."
But since February, 2007, when Google launched Google Apps Premier Edition, a Web-based software package aimed at businesses, the message Google has tried to convey hasn't always resonated with prospective customers. Though a brute force with consumers on the Web, Google has been dogged with reliability issues for the enterprise edition of Google Apps. Most recently, Google's Gmail service went down for as many as 30 hours for some Google Apps business customers.
"It doesn't reinforce their message that Google Apps is a mission critical application," says Oliver Young, an analyst with Forrester Research. "They aren't doing a good job of showing off high quality enterprise customers and showing that they're happy. Most of the customers they tout are universities."
Google is trying to shore up worries about Google Apps' reliability. Just Thursday, it announced a new service level agreement that guaranteed 99 percent uptime not only for Gmail, but for the other features of Google Apps service as well.
But the main issue for Google might be learning to speak the language of business customers. As the Labs for Google Apps announcement reveals, Google believes that business software development should mirror the consumer market by innovating quickly and soliciting constant feedback from users. Analysts say that strategy, though sound and well-conceived, might not resonate with perspective buyers.
"Normally, 'experiment' doesn't belong when we talk about enterprise software," says Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst and vice president with the Boston-based Nucleus Research. "Google needs to be careful that they don't scare people off."
Google Apps includes Gmail, a calendar, documents (a word processor), spreadsheets, instant messaging and Sites, a wiki-based technology that allows non-technical users to build websites.
Google Apps for businesses, which the Labs announcement this week pertains to, costs US$50 per user per year. In addition to the features in the consumer version, it has security from Postini (a security vendor Google acquired last year), more storage space per user, technical support and a customized look that includes a company's logo.
If a business customer feels adventurous enough to try Labs for Google Apps, there are three main apps being tested there, including Google Moderator. Moderator essentially allows Google Apps users to ask questions after a meeting and vote on those questions. In theory, questions that get voted up faster could be addressed by management faster.
One question that remains for Google: Will Google Apps business users want to take time out of their day to try the new features?
According to Wettemann of Nucleus Research, users of the consumer Gmail service who are already fans of the product may be more willing. On the other hand, people who have been tethered to Microsoft Outlook and Office for nearly two decades might not be as enthusiastic to test new Google technology.
"If you want broad adoption, you can't assume everyone is comfortable with your paradigm [for software development]," she says. "The people that don't have Gmail don't necessarily get it."
Google launches analytics tool for Google Apps
Google launches analytics tool for Google Apps
Google is giving IT administrators a wider range of tools to monitor employee use of the internet.
Google Analytics for Google Apps will provide administrators with data and graphs on how frequently staff log in to Google Docs and Google Sites, and the duration of their visit.
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The search giant suggested that organisations could determine whether employees have read the latest company policy, for example, or how adept they are at finding a particular web site.
"You can slice and dice usage information for content by hour, day, week, month, user location, browser type and more," said Google Apps engineer Nick Cooper in a blog posting.
The Google Analytics tool was first launched to give businesses more insight into the type of external web site traffic they receive in order to strengthen marketing initiatives. But Google now intends businesses to deploy the tool to monitor how staff respond to business decisions.
Google Apps Premier and Education Edition administrators will be able to link Google Analytics accounts to Google Apps through the Google Apps administrative control panel.
In a separate blog posting, Google also announced that it is expanding the capabilities of the Google Visualization API by enabling developers to display data from any source connected to the web.
The Visualization API was originally designed to allow developers to build applications on top of Google spreadsheets, but the applications can now be built on top of any database or spreadsheet.
Google is giving IT administrators a wider range of tools to monitor employee use of the internet.
Google Analytics for Google Apps will provide administrators with data and graphs on how frequently staff log in to Google Docs and Google Sites, and the duration of their visit.
Advertisement
Click here to find out more!
The search giant suggested that organisations could determine whether employees have read the latest company policy, for example, or how adept they are at finding a particular web site.
"You can slice and dice usage information for content by hour, day, week, month, user location, browser type and more," said Google Apps engineer Nick Cooper in a blog posting.
The Google Analytics tool was first launched to give businesses more insight into the type of external web site traffic they receive in order to strengthen marketing initiatives. But Google now intends businesses to deploy the tool to monitor how staff respond to business decisions.
Google Apps Premier and Education Edition administrators will be able to link Google Analytics accounts to Google Apps through the Google Apps administrative control panel.
In a separate blog posting, Google also announced that it is expanding the capabilities of the Google Visualization API by enabling developers to display data from any source connected to the web.
The Visualization API was originally designed to allow developers to build applications on top of Google spreadsheets, but the applications can now be built on top of any database or spreadsheet.
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