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I like to think I can do practically anything in a spreadsheet. But it's probably more accurate to say that I like to *try* to do anything in a spreadsheet whether or not I can succeed.

Of course, my spreadsheet of choice is the kind I can access from anywhere and share in real time – in Google Docs. So, some would say that even when it makes no sense, I try to do things in a spreadsheet (case in point – my poker simulator – why'd I do that?) But there are some things I never thought possible, like sending an email or reading my calendar.

That's why we're excited to announce a limited test of a new feature which lets people add customization and automation to Google Apps, starting with spreadsheets in Google Docs. We call this feature Google Apps Script.
Google Apps Script provides the ability to automate a variety spreadsheet actions, such as reading and changing values in cells and ranges, changing formats and formulas, and creating custom functions. It also reaches outside of spreadsheets to allow you to send email or create calendar entries.

Check out the Google Apps Script overview, below, and watch our example of sending email from Google Spreadsheets.



As Google Apps Script is in limited test, we see it as a puppy who's still in training. In fact, just this week, he learned to fetch (URL content) and speak (translate to other languages). But we think he's ready now for some time outside his yard.

So we're inviting a limited number of Google Apps domains – about a thousand organizations – to start playing with Google Apps Script and giving us feedback so we can quickly understand which tricks would be the most beneficial to learn next.

If you're like me and like to stretch spreadsheets to their limit, and don't mind working with early release features, you can get involved in Google Apps Script now by applying to join this limited test phase.

Posted by Jonathan Rochelle, Product Manager, Google Docs

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Yesterday we released a complete data source implementation for the Google Visualization API open wire protocol in an open source Java library. This enables users of the Visualization API, including enterprises, SMBs and other web application providers, to easily customize their data sources and make them compatible with the Visualization API Open Wire protocol. For some data sources, integrating this library could be an order of magnitude faster and require less resources than having to do a full implementation out of the protocol specification.

As business data continues to grow, so, it seems, does the challenge of understanding it. Visualization, or the presentation of data in charts, graphs, tables, and other visual representations, is often the missing piece that people need to make sense of this information.

To address these growing needs, last year we introduced the Google Visualization API, a powerful API that enables anyone to build apps and display data from Google spreadsheets, as well as enabling visualization in the cloud from any data source connected to the web.

Companies can create and use reporting applications from the Google Visualization Gallery that can be integrated anywhere on the web. The gallery offers dozens of visualizations, from pivot tables and heat graphs to the celebrated motion charts and timelines.

We have also opened up the gallery so that any developer can include their new innovative visualizations and make them available to others. To facilitate multiple data sources, we have published an Open Wire protocol that specifies how to make any data source ready for use by the Visualization API. And we recently announced the Google Secure Data Connector (SDC), which enables to keep the data sources behind a company firewall, while serving visualizations and other apps in the cloud.

All of these abilities bring us closer towards Open Visualization in the cloud, and today we take one more big step in this direction. We believe that these enhancements will facilitate innovative and more accessible visualizations of business information, helping enterprises communicate with information in ever-better ways.

Posted by Nir Bar-Lev, Head of Analytics, EMEA, and Yossi Matias, Head of Israel Engineering Center



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Most webmasters would agree that hacking and spamming are a real problem, but many may not be aware of how vulnerable their websites might actually be. Even more importantly, many webmasters may not know where to go to find resources that can help them protect their site, or show them what to do if their site has been hacked or spammed.

I want to share some examples that might help build understanding of the problem and motives behind hacking and spamming, and also offer some online resources to help organizations avoid these problems as much as they can.

If we look at [site:.edu free ringtones], we will see a lot of examples of different educational institutions being exploited by hackers for their high traffic and well-known names. For a spammer, acquiring links from a high-traffic site can artificially give their sites more worth and manipulate search results in their favor.

An example we often see is hackers using an exploit in a sites database (SQL Injection) or in sites that have unchecked areas for user input (XSS). A way to look for this is to run the site: query mentioned above (site:.edu free ringtones) and take look at the URLs of the sites that show up. If you see some trailing parameter like [/?p=ringtones], then your site is most likely hacked. Here are some steps you can take to prevent your site from getting hacked:

  • One way to avoid SQL injection hacking is to escape all dangerous characters from input fields, with "dangerous characters" being those that can access and change the database behind your site.
  • For both SQL injection and XSS hacking, creating a layer between the user input data and your back-end systems creates a space where you can check inputs and make sure that a user is not entering malicious code.
  • Another potential exploit can occur if the root or any subdirectory of your site uses an open source CMS like Joomla or WordPress. In this situation, it is really important to make sure the CMS software is updated with every new release to make sure you are using the most secure version.

For more on hacking, check out this Google Webmaster Central Blog post: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/best-practices-against-hacking.html.

Forums can also be points of access for hackers and spammers. Does your site have a forum? If so, do a quick site search on your forum section [site:example.com/forum/]. Do you see anything fishy in the snippets, like "freeringtones"? If your forum is not about ringtones , this may very well be a case of comment spam. Any sort of platform where users can freely post their own comments, including hyperlinks, is a target for comment spam – especially if your website ranks high in the search results. The main reasoning behind comment spam is aspammer wants to get as many people as possible to visit their site and spend money there. The spammer can post several links on forums, guestbooks, etc., pointing to their own site, to help artificially boost their ranking in search results. Here are some precautions you can take:

  • Every time a user wants to add a profile or comment on the forum, require them to complete a CAPTCHA. This creates an obstacle for automated software to generate profiles and comments.
  • Add spammy keywords like "free ringtones" and "online casino" to a blacklist to block comments like this from showing up.
  • Install a plug-in that automatically detects and blocks spam posted to the forum. Akismet is an example of this.

For more on comment spam, check out this Google Webmaster Central Blog post: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/keeping-comment-spam-off-your-site-and.html.

Resources
Staying aware of the latest spam and hacking trends, regularly monitoring the activity on your site, and being vigilant about updating your applications and plug-ins are key to keeping your website safe fromspammers and hackers. We've provided some Google resources here:

Webmaster Central Blog (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/) – Search for blog posts written by Googlers about how to secure your site.

Webmaster Central Channel on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/googlewebmasterhelp) – See video tutorials on all things webmasters.

Webmaster Help Center (http://google.com/support/webmasters/) – Find help articles on various webmaster concerns, including what to do if your site has been hacked.

Webmaster Help Forum (http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters) – Chat with your fellow webmasters about past and present experiences with being spammed or hacked, and get a variety of perspectives on how to protect your site.

Webmaster Tools (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/) – If you're not already registered, this is a great way to monitor how your site looks on Google. You can see what kind of sites are linking to you, and the top queries users type in to get to your site.

In addition to the links provided above, it's also a good idea to seek out more knowledge that is specific to your web server, applications, and plug-ins.

Posted by Adi Goradia and Charlene Perez, Search Quality Team
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Our ongoing partner momentum is directly benefiting the people and organizations who use Google services in the workplace. Examples and of these successful engagements can be found in our Solutions Marketplace Customer Success Stories Blog.

A recent post shows how one of our partners, LTech, helped migrate The Huffington Post to Google Apps Premier Edition in just four days. Whether you're a potential partner looking to learn more about our Apps Authorized Reseller program or a professional who wants to know more about what Google solutions deliver in the workplace, we hope you find LTech's story interesting.

For small and medium-sized businesses interested in learning more about the benefits of Google Apps and cloud computing, we invite you to join our webinar, co-hosted with Salesforce.com, on June 4.

How to Go Beyond CRM with Salesforce for Google Apps
Thursday, June 4, 2009
10:00 a.m. PDT / 1:00 p.m. EDT

The webinar is one in a four-part series on how organizations can get started with, and benefit from, cloud computing.

Partners or organizations interested in the latest plans for the Channel 2.0 Conference: visit their website for information.

Posted by Michelle Lisowski, Google Apps Partners team
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Google is truly a global company. With offices in more than 30 countries around the world, I find myself exchanging emails almost everyday with someone whose native language is different from my own. Many of our customers – from small ten-person companies to large global multinationals like Valeo – work in the same way and use email to communicate with co-workers or customers from all over the world. That's why I'm really excited about a new feature in Gmail that will help to break down the language barrier.

Today we're announcing automatic message translation between 41 languages in Gmail Labs. If you receive a message in a language you don't understand, Gmail will translate it into your language with just one click.




Better yet, if your entire company uses Gmail, email communications between people in your company can take place in the language that's most comfortable for them – each person can write messages in their native language and the recipients can translate the messages into their respective native languages.

While our translation system is quite good, machine translation is a challenging problem and we know it's not perfect. However, it can be quite useful in providing a quick gist of a message, especially if you receive a lot of emails that aren't in your native language. If the translation is awkward or not quite right, you can quickly return to the original message by clicking "View original message" link.

With the power of cloud computing, this feature is available to all Gmail users – without having to buy servers, install software, or write code to integrate translation into email applications. The cloud also makes possible our approach to machine translation in which thousands of computers process billions of words of monolingual and bilingual text to build statistical language and translation models.

The cloud has enabled us to not only achieve very good results with our approach but also to quickly scale to more than 40 languages in just a few years and support millions of users. In addition, we're constantly working on improving translation quality and adding new languages, so Gmail instantly benefits whenever we update our translation system.

This is a Labs launch, so to get started, click "Settings" within Gmail, then the "Labs" tab, and enable "Message Translation." Standard Edition users can follow these instructions immediately, while Premier and Education Edition users will first need their domain admins to enable Gmail Labs from the Google Apps admin control panel.

Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager, Google Translate

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Studies consistently show that good website search keeps people "on site" longer and improves conversion rates when it's time for business. But even without the evidence, common sense suggests that people get more satisfaction out of their web experience when they find what they're looking for – the information that's most relevant to their search. Algorithms do a great job with this, but sometimes, site owners and admins know their customers – and their content – well enough to think beyond the algorithm and help searchers find that one link that delivers the goods.

That's where Google Site Search Promotions – the latest enhancement to Google Site Search – comes in, starting today.

Google Site Search Promotions allows website owners and admins to create special results that appear as the first result to a user's search, and define the search terms for triggering those results. That raises a specific page, or URL to the top of the search results when those search terms are used, presenting viewers with a more detailed, illustrated link that stands out among the other results. Any URL can be promoted – it doesn't need to be specified as an included site or page in your Sites tab.

Promotions are easy to manage, simply by creating and uploading a promotions file or using the promotions page in the GSS control panel. You can include of a brief description and image for each promotion, and you can add or edit these additional items as well as appearance elements such as border and background color, just by using the Promotion Design Settings menu.

As this screenshot shows, Promotions make it easier to highlight key events, announcements, services or product launches on your visitors' search results. In this example, eHealthInsurance.com's administrator "promoted" the most relevant link, added an image and a two-line description, and enabled the most relevant search result to be displayed first.





Although this functionality has been available to GSS users through subscribed links, today's changes make promoting the best links more speedy and intuitive, and allow admins to add multiple promotions for the same query.

Stay tuned to this blog for upcoming enhancements to Google Site Search (and more). We hope you like the business results that this new Promotions feature delivers.

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Lead Product Manager, Google Enterprise Search










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Tens of millions of people around the world have transitioned from software-based email and personal productivity tools to powerful web-based applications like Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Sites.  Over the last couple years, businesses have been making the switch to our hosted solutions too, putting complex, expensive on-premises IT systems in the past.  With Google Apps, employees are equipped with work productivity tools that they can access from anywhere, that provide enough email storage to keep everything important, and that enable more natural collaboration like document sharing without the hassles of attachments and integrated voice and video chat.

More than a million businesses have moved to Google Apps, and Valeo – an auto parts manufacturer with 30,000 Internet-connected employees in 27 different countries – has joined the movement.  You can read more about Google Apps and their deployment on the Google Blog and in Valeo's own announcement.


Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing manager

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Editor's Note: We're pleased to welcome guest blogger Louis Gary, Manager of Client Services, Information Services Department, Hamilton Beach Brands, Inc. Louis recently completed a global migration to Google Apps from Lotus Notes/Domino. Louis has been a technology manager at Hamilton Beach for 14 years. During this time, he introduced PC networks and WAN connections to the various operating locations worldwide, was an early adopter to VPN technologies, migrated the company from cc:Mail to Lotus Notes, and expanded VoIP into their customer service center.

He currently manages the desktop support team which provides employee support for PC, phone, multi-function (print, scan, fax) devices, e-mail, and application training.

I've done many migrations in my years in IT and, although they can be fun as a technologist, they're never easy. But I'm getting out of the upgrade business altogether now that my company, Hamilton Beach, recently switched to Google Apps. Many of you may know Hamilton Beach for the coffee makers, blenders, toasters or the panini grills that sit on your kitchen countertop. As a global brand with design, engineering and manufacturing operations located around the world, our IT department supports diverse functions. We recently had to deal with an upgrade to our Lotus Notes/Domino messaging system to keep up with growing business needs.

Because of the complexity, we upgrade our Lotus Notes/Domino environment about every five years. Our current version was coming to an end of life. Since the software would be free, under maintenance, we certainly looked at upgrading to a newer version of Lotus Notes/Domino. We were looking at old servers that would need to be replaced, all of the desktop client software requiring an upgrade, as well as training for employees on the new look and feel. We had so much e-mail, we estimated the upgrade might take more time than a three-day weekend to complete, with the email system shut down. So we took a look at Google Apps and found that it had all the enterprise features we needed.

Key features include the instant global access, support for different languages across our world-wide operations, virtually limitless storage, and speed. We really did not anticipate how much faster the e-mail system would be. Additionally, we will put be adding the Postini archiving solution and will look at how we can leverage Google Docs and Sites to improve our global collaboration.

And we never shut down the e-mail system!

Moving to Google Apps has reduced our total cost of ownership by 60% over a 5 year-period. But it also gives me the great pleasure of turning off all of our Lotus Domino servers that were dedicated to email! And since Google Apps is delivered as a cloud-based solution, I don't have to worry about the next upgrade.

We learned a lot from this experience and I'm happy to share with you some insights I've learned about making a successful migration. Please join me for a webinar covering our migration. Details follow:


Wednesday, May 20, 009
10:00 a.m. PDT / 1:00 p.m. EDT

I'll be on hand to answer your questions about how we deployed Google Apps to our global employee base.

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps Marketing Team

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Today, we announced Rich Snippets for Google web search, a new presentation of snippets that highlight structured data embedded in web pages. Rich Snippets provide summary information, including important page-specific attributes, to help users quickly identify result relevance. Experiments on Google have shown that users find the additional data valuable – if they see useful and relevant information from a web page, they are more likely to click through to it. Our web search team is currently experimenting with a limited set of attributes for reviews and user profiles that webmasters can provide through in-line markup in their web pages by using open standards such as microformats or RDFa.

Since Google Site Search leverages our web search platform, Google Site Search customers can benefit from this new functionality as well. In fact, Google Site Search customers can define their own custom attributes that we'll index and return with your site search results. In addition to microformats and RDFa, you can also provide custom metadata within your webpages via special markup called page maps. A page map identifies specific attributes that are recognized and preserved by Google at index time, and returned along with search results for presentation to the user.

So if you're using Google Site Search on your website, you can now control further how your content appears in search results. You can showcase key information, such as image thumbnails, summaries, ratings in your result snippets if you provide the appropriate markup on your pages.

Rich Snippets attribute information for Google Site Search is only returned in XML (via <PageMap> tags), so you can use your own customized presentation controls. Indexing of the rich snippets information can have unspecified latency, as some pages are indexed and refreshed more frequently than others, and page map attributes may not be indexed from all web pages.

As an illustration of Rich Snippets, the web page featured in the following example provides custom information about an image thumbnail that is displayed in the rich snippet of the result along with date, author and category information.


If you are getting results back via XML, then the custom attributes are returned in the results within the PageMap tag, as shown below. You can parse the DataObjects within the PageMap tag and provide customized presentation of the relevant attributes.

If you are new to Google Site Search and would like to provide Google quality search results on your website, visit www.google.com/sitesearch
Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Lead Product Manager, Google Enterprise Search


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Google I/O is coming up on May 27 – 28, 2009 in San Francisco, California, and will feature many sessions on enterprise adoption of the cloud. Come hear how companies like Salesforce.com and ThoughtWorks partner with Google and leverage technologies like App Engine and Secure Data Connector to pioneer applications and help businesses realize the benefits and efficiencies of cloud computing.

Sessions will include:

Connecting the Clouds: Integrating Google App Engine for Java with Force.com, presented by Ron Hess of Salesforce.com and Iein Valdez of Appirio

This session will focus on connecting the Salesforce SOAP Web Services API to Google App Engine for Java, including a demonstration by Appirio of an advanced casino host application blending App Engine and Salesforce.

ThoughtWorks on App Engine for Java: An Enterprise Cumulonimbus?, presented by Martin Fowler and Rebecca Parsons of ThoughtWorks

Presenters from ThoughtWorks will discuss applications they've built for App Engine, as well as strengths and weaknesses they've encountered with the platform. The session will also include a discussion of the role of Big Table in App Engine.

Using the Google Secure Data Connector to Access Behind-the-Firewall Data from Google's Cloud, presented by Jun Yang

This session will demonstrate how enterprises can bring their own data into Google Apps using the Google Secure Data Connector. The presenter will share an example of using data stored in a behind-the-firewallSQL database in App Engine, a spreadsheet and a gadget.

Lots of other fun and interesting things are happening at Google I/O, including the Developer Sandbox, Fireside Chats, Tech Talks, and After Hours Playground. Sound good? Registration is still open. Check it out!

Posted by Chris Kelly, Google Enterprise Partner Team
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I was among a team of Googlers who recently attended the Mid-sized Enterprise Summit in Miami, Florida. We enjoyed the sunshine, industry speakers, and above all the chance to talk with CIOs and IT leads from companies across a range of industries. Given the economy, the cost savings available through Google Apps gained a lot of interest.

But we probably got the most "oohs" and "aahs" when we demoed our collaboration apps (Google Docs, including data processing and spreadsheets, Google Sites, for easy web publishing, and Google Video, for secure video sharing). We're always satisfied when we see "the light go on" as newcomers to these products realize what they enable that just isn't available with traditional desktop apps.

Geoffrey Moore set the context for the conference, and indeed, for our message with Google Apps. The well-known author of Crossing the Chasm discussed how the internet has changed the way we can do business. He encouraged audience members to rethink work that doesn't provide any strategic business differentiation for companies – email administration, software upgrade management, things like that. Instead, he emphasized that IT's unique opportunity to help their companies fuel innovation and gain productivity by "investing in the core business to amplify differentiation." According to Moore, this differentiation, and the innovation it enables, is a key lever for doing well during a downtown.

In one of our breakout sessions, we shared one example of how a business might invest in its core by showing resource site built by Home Care Assistance (HCA), an internationally-franchised provider of in-home caregivers. Using Google Sites, HCA created a series of pages that help new franchisees come on board with the information they need to become effective representatives of the HCA brand and philosophy.

HCA's online resource center consolidates knowledge
and spreads best practices.

Instead of spending time getting new offices set up on standalone technology – servers, local IT teams, things like that – HCA corporate has leveraged the power of cloud computing, using Google Apps, to focus its effort on sharing business strategies, techniques for recruiting and screening of caregivers, and refining leading-edge online marketing techniques. Home Care Assistance has not only consolidated its knowledge into this secure intranet but also provided the means for its field offices to share best practices with eachother – blogging about how best to optimize an AdWords budget, for example. This type of collaboration would be resource-intensive, or maybe even impossible, with a static-intranet model where IT would push information out to end users. Home Care Assistance hasaccelerated productivity with this approach and has also fostered wider collaboration amongst its field offices. Using Google Apps, Home Care Assistance has grown 15-fold in less than four years, and has recently expanded into Canada (giving the firm even more ways to integrate Google products!).

HCA makes it easy for people to find office locations
by listing them in a Google Docs spreadsheet and inserting a
Google Maps Gadget into a Google Site.

In another session, we asked people to go hands-on to demonstrate the easy productivity available with Google Apps. Using the forms that are built in to Google Spreadsheets, we captured input from the audience in a survey covering things like the how they communicate with users, responses to presentations, and input on topics and content. This let us show easy, visual summaries of information, displaying answers in charts available to audience members as easily as opening up a browser.


Mid-sized Enterprise Summit attendees filled out a form and saw
how the data filled a spreadsheet and displayed in a graph

We had a great time meeting with customers and understanding how Google Apps can help mid-sized businesses achieve their objectives. We were also grateful to conference participants for voting us the "Best Mid-Market Solution" in Services. The event organizers did a great job and we look forward to seeing you in the fall at the west coast version of the Summit.

Posted by Ben Salzman, Enterprise Sales Team


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If you've ever checked out the nearest store with Trek bikes, planned a trip to a Crowne Plaza Hotel, or looked for the best local anything on Yelp, you know that many businesses use Google Maps to help people find where they're located.

Maps can be deployed within your organization to help your employees make fast, informed decisions – such as assessing the location and performance efficiency of your vehicles and other mobile assets. Tracking your assets on Google Maps became easier yesterday when FleetMatics announced that its GPS fleet tracking software is now integrated with Google Maps API Premier.

The FleetMatics solution provides real-time vehicle data, such as start/stop times and speed, to help its users efficiently dispatch to reduce vehicle mileage and downtime. With the addition of Google Maps, FleetMatics now offers the ability to visualize entire fleet locations and easily identify the closest vehicle to a given location.

View the positions and status of an entire fleet on a single screen.

FleetMatics customers can also use Google Maps to find driving directions and optimized routing information, including real-time traffic reports and nearby points of interest.

Drill into a specific vehicle's data, including start/stop times,
mileage, and routing information.

According to Jamie Sene of FleetMatics, "Selecting a new mapping provider is not a trivial task. We need an engine that can handle our massive demand across the US and Europe, and we want a partner on the cutting edge of location-based technologies to mirror our own product development. After thorough research, it was clear that only Google Maps satisfied all of these requirements."

Google Maps' familiarity and speed have sparked feedback from Fleetmatic customers, leading to emails like this one: "How do you take an existing product that is miles ahead of its competition and make it even better? By adding Google Maps, of course."

Here's more information on how businesses can use Google Maps API Premier.

Posted by Colleen Horan, Google Maps API Premier Team
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In early April we unveiled App Engine for Java as a preview release. With the goal of providing an end-to-end Java solution for web applications, this release includes an early look at our Java runtime, integration with Google Web Toolkit, and a Google Plugin for Eclipse.

We're excited about the potential to use these tools to build scalable applications that complement the Google Apps suite of messaging and communication services. We're eager to share what we've learned so far, and encourage you to try it out and give feedback.

To help with that, we hope you'll join us for two upcoming events focused on developers, where you'll hear about our experience and that of partners who've begun development with App Engine and Google Apps. Then, give App Engine a try and join the conversation in our developer and partner communities and let us know what you think.

Details:
  • Partner Event May 14: Partner with cloud leaders Google and Salesforce.com. Google and Salesforce.com are jointly hosting an ISV-focused event on Thursday afternoon, May 14 in Sunnyvale, California to discuss building a cloud computing strategy. If you're in the area, register here for this free event to test drive the latest cloud technologies, meet Salesforce.com and Google partner representatives, and network with cloud experts, fellow entrepreneurs, and developers.
Also: Google I/O May 27-28th: The Google I/O Developer Conference is May 27–28, 2009 in San Francisco, California. Learn more about the enterprise-focused sessions and sign up.



Posted by: Maureen Bradford, Enterprise Partner Marketing Manager
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More than 3,000 businesses adopt Google Apps every day. They range from ten-person companies who switch in a few hours to large companies and universities that plan their move from on-premises servers over weeks and months. Ensuring a smooth change is a big priority for us, and we're making the transition a little easier for mobile users.

We're pleased to announce the upcoming release of the Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry® Enterprise Server. This new software component will make it even easier for mobile users to use Google Apps on BlackBerry® smartphones. It allows users to access Gmail, Google Calendar and Contacts using the built-in BlackBerry smartphone applications they already know and love.

For instance, users can instantly receive Gmail messages within the built-in email client on their Blackberry smartphones. And they can continue to use the same shortcuts to manage their BlackBerry messages.

New meeting invites and event changes in Google Calendar are immediately updated on the BlackBerry Calendar, keeping both calendars in sync. Users can also access the email addresses and phone numbers of their co-workers using a company wide Global Address List. Both personal and business contacts saved on Google Apps are automatically synchronized over the air to users' BlackBerry smartphones and integrated into the native Blackberry smartphone applications.

The transition for IT administrators is also seamless. Admins are given full control of the solution and can continue to manage BlackBerry smartphones using BlackBerry Enterprise Server. Google Apps Connector installs on BlackBerry Enterprise Server, connecting it to the Google Apps cloud and synchronizing email, calendar and contacts for all BlackBerry smartphone users.

Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server is currently in beta testing with select companies and universities, and will be available free of charge to all Premier and Education Edition customers this July. Those of you who enjoy the Gmail experience with conversations, labels and full search capabilities can continue to use Gmail for mobile.

Learn more: The Google Apps Connector team is at the Wireless Enterprise Symposium (WES) in Orlando, Florida this week. If you're also attending this conference, come visit us at Booth #105. We'll also be giving a live demo at our breakout session on Tuesday, May 5, 2009 at 11am EST. Hope to see you there.

Posted by Raju Gulabani, Product Management Director
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We'd like to give you a heads-up on the recent announcement of the standalone version of a contact manager that lets you manage contact information across Google Docs, Google Calendar, and more – even if you don't use Gmail.

To enable this service, just click on the link that says "Add more services" in the "Settings" section of the control panel. You'll then have the option to add this service. Here's a screenshot so you can see what it looks like:


Debbie Leight, Google Apps team
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