Posted by Navneet Joneja, Product Manager for Google Cloud Storage

Google Cloud Storage enables developers to store and access massive amounts of data on Google’s infrastructure with high reliability, availability and performance. Since Google Cloud Storage graduated from preview last year, many developers have tapped directly into Google’s storage capabilities.

We are also seeing lots of technology providers integrating Google Cloud Storage directly into their offerings. For example, several providers of enterprise storage solutions have integrated with Google Cloud Storage to make their products and services even better.

Here’s how a few of these companies are helping their customers build a bridge to the cloud with Google Cloud Storage:

• Panzura allows globally distributed enterprises to store, collaborate and backup files in the cloud using Panzura File System and Google Cloud Storage.
• StorSimple offers a single integrated appliance for primary storage, data protection and disaster recovery. Now, you can connect your StorSimple appliances to the cloud with Google Cloud Storage.
• TwinStrata’s storage gateway can now be used in conjunction with Google Cloud Storage for data storage, backup and disaster recovery in the cloud.
• Zmanda provides backup and disaster recovery solutions for businesses. You can now use Zmanda’s software to backup your on-premise data to Google Cloud Storage.
• Gladinet makes it easy to upload a file from your desktop to Google Cloud Storage, share it with your team and manage access controls using a web-based interface.

I'm thrilled to see other companies building innovative products using Google Cloud Storage. Today, we're also announcing lower storage prices to make it even more affordable to store your data in Google's cloud. The new pricing will be effective retroactively from March 1st, 2012.

If you’re interested in learning how you can tap into Google’s cloud storage capabilities to serve your company’s storage needs, we’d love to have a conversation or you can get started online.

Posted by Saurabh Gupta, Google Developer Relations

Google Apps Script lets you automate and extend Google Apps. Using Apps Script, businesses can build efficient solutions to meet their requirements such as:

• Content Approval Workflow
• Vacation calendar management system
• Helpdesk Workflow
• Time Booking system

Join us on August 18th, 2011 for the Google Apps Script Hackathon. If your organization uses Google Apps and you want to explore how you can use Google Apps Script to create custom functions or automate repetitive tasks, then this hackathon is a perfect opportunity to learn. Google engineers will be available to answer your questions and help you learn Apps Script throughout the day’s agenda. We’ll provide food, refreshments, and experts to help you learn to use Apps Script and write your own scripts. Just bring your laptop, ideas, and enthusiasm to complete the mix. We hope to see you there!

What: Apps Script Hackathon
Date: Thursday, August 18th, 2011
Time: 2pm to 7pm EST
Where: 76 9th Avenue, New York, NY
Register: Space is limited, register here.

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.

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.

Posted by Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead

Over a year ago, we created the Google Apps Marketplace to help you easily discover, evaluate, and deploy integrated web applications for your business or school. In that time, many of you have told us that evaluating apps can be particularly tricky, as you need to consider questions like:

• who already uses the app, and why do they like it (or not)?
  
• will the app’s features address my particular needs?
  
• can I trust the vendor who created the app with my data?
  

We want to make it as easy as possible for you to answer these questions. For example, we offer verified app reviews to highlight comments from customers who we know to be using the app.

Today we’re announcing a feature designed to help address the trust question — a TRUSTe administered data privacy certification program for Marketplace apps. TRUSTe has created a certification program for installable Marketplace apps to verify that they clearly communicate their data handling and privacy practices. This program, which is optional for vendors, displays a green TRUSTe logo on a certified app’s Marketplace listing page as well as search results pages. The logo links then to a certification summary with more specific information about the app.



TRUSTe certification makes it easier for you, as a buyer, to verify the following about an app:

• the vendor has been contacted and certified by TRUSTe personnel
  
• the purpose for data collection and sharing, and the security used for sharing (https)
  
• there is an easy-to-read privacy policy available
  

Since certification is optional, the absence of a TRUSTe seal does not imply the app has unacceptable or difficult-to-understand practices for data handling and privacy. In fact, the program just launched today, so most apps have not yet applied for certification.

If you have additional questions about what this particular certification covers, please see the TRUSTe customer FAQ. If you’re a vendor with installable Marketplace apps and are interested in certification, please review the application process.

Posted by Joanne Schneider, Google Apps Small Business Team

In honor of National Small Business Week, we’d like to take time this week to share ways that Google Apps and the Google Apps Marketplace can help small businesses work more productively and efficiently.

Today, we’re highlighting a few of the Small Business Web apps in the Google Apps Marketplace, and how our customers run their businesses on them every day. Google shares the Small Business Web’s dedication to providing tools that have enterprise-grade functionality, as well as align with small businesses’ priorities.






These are just a few examples of the many Small Business Web app vendors in the Google Apps Marketplace who provide the functionality and integrations a small business needs. Over 30 Google Apps Marketplace apps have already joined the Small Business Web and declared their commitment to helping small businesses focus on what they do best. They include:

Finance Bill.com billFLO EchoSign Expensify FreeAgent Freshbooks Harvest Kashoo Outright Shoeboxed

CRM Assistly Batchbook CRM Capsule CRM Connect2Field Disqourse CRM Get Satisfaction PipelineDeals SAManage Solve360 CRM Tactile CRM WorkETC

Doc Management Box.net FormLizard OfficeDrop Collaboration MindMeister Teambox uberVU YoolinkPro

Sales and Marketing Mailchimp Olark SiteKreator VerticalResponse zferral

Posted by Navneet Joneja, Product Manager, Google Storage for Developers

Editors note: Today we’re at Google I/O, and we have a few announcements about how we’re making our developer tools more available and better for businesses. The second, below, summarizes important improvements to Google Storage for Developers.

Last year we introduced Google Storage for Developers, a cloud service that allows businesses to store their data on Google’s infrastructure. Google Storage for Developers’ high responsiveness, flexible sharing and multiple layers of data replication make it a great choice for any scenario that requires web-connected storage, including data sharing, storage for computation, static content hosting, data for web applications, backup/recovery, and more.

Starting today, you no longer need an invitation to sign up for Google Storage. Along with opening the doors, we’ve also implemented several significant product enhancements including:

• OAuth 2.0 support - This authentication mechanism provides your applications with a great combination of enhanced security and flexibility.
• Simplified sharing - Share data with anyone who has a Google account, regardless of whether or not they have a Google Storage for Developers account.
• A new European storage region - Choose to store your data in Europe if it’s closer to your customers, with the same high levels of availability and reliability as our US storage region.
• Team-oriented accounts - A more natural development and management model, which more closely aligns with the way other Google APIs are managed.
• Streaming uploads - Stream data directly to Google Storage without buffering it on your own servers.
• Larger data object support - Upload objects of up to 5 terabytes in size. 
• Free trial plan - Try Google Storage for free with up to 5 GB of free storage and 25 GB of free bandwidth into and out of Google’s data centers until December 31, 2011.

These new features advance our commitment to offering highly available, scalable, and flexible business-focused storage in the cloud. Now, with our new free trial plan you can easily get started. Learn more on the Google Code Blog.

Posted by Greg D’Alesandre, Senior Product Manager, Google App Engine

Editors note: Today we’re at Google I/O, and we have a few announcements about how we’re making our developer tools more available and better for businesses. The first, below, summarizes important improvements to Google App Engine.

Google App Engine, which provides the ability to develop and host applications on Google’s infrastructure, has gained momentum quickly since it launched as preview status in 2008. More than 100,000 developers use App Engine every month to deliver apps that dynamically scale with usage without the need to manage hardware or software. App Engine now hosts more than 200,000 active apps that serve over 1.5 billion site views daily.

Over the last three years, we’ve collected great feedback from our customers and now believe that the biggest thing we can do to help them is to graduate App Engine from preview status. When App Engine graduates from preview status, which we expect to do in the second half of this year, we’ll add additional enterprise-grade features that allow us to support many more business application scenarios. Graduation from preview status also indicates Google's a longer term commitment to the product and establishes a deprecation policy whereby we will support prior versions of product APIs for a guaranteed amount of time, allowing applications written to prior API specifications to continue to functioning.

Today, we’re moving forward with our business focus with the release of App Engine 1.5.0 which includes Backends, improved Task Queues, and more:

• With Backends, App Engine can now support applications that require long running and high memory processes. This feature allows for new classes of applications such as report generation apps and custom search engines to be hosted on the platform.
• The improvements to Task Queues allows for applications to control how tasks are executed and easily share the work using the new REST-based APIs. This API access expands App Engine’s compatibility with other on-premise and cloud services, furthering our commitment to an open development platform.

In addition, when we take App Engine out of preview in the second half of this year, we will provide a 99.95% uptime service level agreement, operational and developer support, offline billing, and a new Terms of Service agreement geared towards businesses. We will also introduce a new billing structure for App Engine based on more transparent usage-based pricing.

We’re announcing these features and pricing changes in advance so that our customers have time to review. Adding business features will help App Engine meet a broader set of needs and the new, more transparent pricing model will help customers better align their App Engine investment with their business goals. Learn more about these changes on the App Engine Blog.

Posted by Steve Bazyl, Google Apps Marketplace team

As the Google Apps Marketplace continues to grow, finding the right apps to run your business among the hundreds available becomes more challenging. Today we’re kicking off a new effort to help make that process a little easier, and offering some of our own personal picks of apps we think are worth checking out. A few times each month via Twitter, we’ll highlight an app that offers a combination of great functionality, ease of use, and deep integrations with Google Apps that can save valuable time. We’ll use the Twitter hashtag #mpstaffpick to make these easy to find.

Our first staff pick is Mavenlink, a custom-branded project management solution that allows teams to collaborate online, share files, track time, invoice, and make or receive payments, all inside one end-to-end app. Google Apps users can also easily share documents, access contacts, and track projects on their calendars.



If you’re in need of a great project management app, give Mavenlink a try. And if you happen to be at Google I/O next week, you can meet the Mavenlink team in our Developer Sandbox.

To stay up to date and hear about our next pick, follow us on twitter at GoogleAtWork.

Last month, the Google Apps Marketplace turned 1 and we looked back on our first year providing integrated web applications for Google Apps users. To kick off our second year, we welcome you to this month’s App Tuesday to explore the many new apps we have we have to offer.

To help make application discovery easier, last week, we also introduced a Marketplace feature that allows any Google Apps user to request that their administrator install an application for their organization. This new feature means that every Google Apps user can now help their organization discover and deploy the right web apps.




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

This month we welcome more apps from long-time vendors, Zoho and SADA, as well as fresh apps from many new ones:

• Assistly is a helpdesk tool that allows teams and entire companies to support customers via email, phone, chat, web, Facebook and Twitter.
• WorkETC combines CRM, project management, billing, sales and more with a powerful automation engine to help small businesses.
• Orangescape is a visual development platform for building and deploying business applications on Google App Engine.
• SADA Audit Tool is a centralized admin tool that gives you an overview of how resources (Docs, Sites, etc.) have been shared externally.

You can browse all of our newest apps in the Google Apps Marketplace. Now everyone can use the Marketplace to discover new apps — and directly install an app if you’re the domain admin or send a request if you’re not.

Posted by Harrison Shih, Google Apps Marketplace Team

Today, Google announced Google Exacycle for Visiting Faculty, a new academic grant program that will provide 1 billion hours of computational core capacity to a small group of qualified researchers. These researchers are tackling a variety of problems that require massive amounts of computational power to advance their disciplines.

In the future, we think that Google Exacycle could also help companies create new business opportunities in a variety of industries, including human genome sequencing in biotech, Monte Carlo simulations in financial services, and complex rendering and CGI in entertainment, as well as address other challenging issues in energy, agriculture, and manufacturing.

If your business can benefit from access to large amounts of computing power (hundreds of millions of autonomous core-hours) to solve complex technical challenges, and you want to discuss potential applications, you can reach us here.

Posted by Jordan Breckenridge, Google Exacycle Team

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

Editor’s Note: Guest authors Lynn Jaber and Romain Vialard work at Revevol, the first international service provider dedicated to Google Apps. Each day, they imagine new ways to improve their business processes with Google technology!


At Revevol, we train clients’ employees who have just migrated to Google Apps, to help them get the most out of their new system. The more Revevol grows, the more customer trainings we have to handle, so we need to quickly find available trainers depending on parameters like the training date, language, location of trainers and trainer skills.

Google Apps Script, a cloud scripting language based on JavaScript, is wired into almost every Google product, so it’s a perfect solution for checking calendars and spreadsheets, and solving our scheduling problems. In the early days, we were using a simple Google Form. It was really easy to put together and simple to use, but one thing was missing: the form just collected data -- there was no way it could automatically take action based on information submitted. Someone had to manually process the information.

This is where Apps Script came to the rescue -- with a little JavaScript code we could build an interactive form that we so badly needed. In a single day, Apps Script let us build a shiny new graphical user interface for our tool, which lets let us dynamically search for available trainers across all skill levels and categories.

How did we do it? We recreated our form using Ui Services in Apps Script. We added a panel next to the form, to show the search results of trainers that match our queries. By using Spreadsheet Services in Apps Script, we could search and fetch data from a spreadsheet that serves as our database of trainers. We also added the ability to sort the search results of trainers by skill level and distance from the training location.




Thanks to integration with Google Maps Services in Apps Script, we're even able to display a map to help our project managers find the closest trainer. Project managers can select more than one trainer from search results and each selected trainer will receive a calendar invitation. The first to respond “Yes” gets the training assignment. It was incredibly easy to build and deploy this application. In one click, we published it so anyone at Revevol can access the tool in their browsers. Apps Script helped us automate this tedious business process!



Posted by Romain Vialard and Lynn Jaber, Revevol

Editor's Note: This is a guest blog post from Tom Allebach, Executive Director for Manna on Main Street, a community service organization that serves the needy in the greater North Penn community outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (USA).

Manna on Main Street was founded in 1981 and provides a soup kitchen, food cupboard, and a variety of other programs to help individuals in need. Our vision for Manna on Main Street is "that everyone might be fed." As we need to have every dollar possible directed to helping people, software to support our organization needs to be affordable, work with our existing applications, and be easy to access and use for our staff and 1000 volunteers.

Two solutions that have changed the way we work with our volunteers are Google Docs for creation and sharing of documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, and SAP StreamWork, a collaborative decision making application available from the Google Apps Marketplace. They have access whether they're in a soup kitchen, the office, home, or on the go. These tools have helped Manna on Main Street to work more efficiently and collectively, thus allowing us to create and deliver more programs to help those in need.

After experiencing the value of Google Docs, we learned about the integrations with SAP StreamWork through the Google Apps Marketplace. With SAP StreamWork, we can apply structure to our discussions including tracking activities, pro/con tables, SWOT analyses, send out e-mail alerts and polls to drive fast, meaningful results. It provides a way for our staff to connect with the board of directors and supporters for key committees, and has many features for managing private, directed activities that drive participation, planning, and decisions with our volunteers. Like Google Docs, it’s easy to use and has been adopted by participants with varying levels of technology experience.

Google Docs is integrated directly into SAP StreamWork, making it even easier for Manna on Main Street and its volunteers to work seamlessly, collectively, and from anywhere. With these new capabilities our board of directors and building and resource committees are now driving a fundraising program to help Manna move to a new facility, dramatically increasing our ability to feed and serve more people in need.

We realize that much work remains to be done to continue to serve those in need, and we continue to give thanks to all of you who help in that service. We also thank Google and SAP for helping small organizations with big goals such as ours.

Posted by Tom Allebach, Executive Director for Manna on Main Street

Editor's note: This is the latest in a series of posts on apps or topics in the Google Apps Marketplace that have caught our eye here at Google. We’ll do this every so often as we see things we'd like to share. Look for the label "marketplace highlights" and subscribe to the series if you'd like to stay tuned.

As we work our way into the new year, we recognize that tax season can be very difficult for businesses. Face this tax season with ease and confidence by attending a live webinar and Q&A on using integrated finance apps from the Google Apps Marketplace - featuring Shoeboxed, Harvest, and Outright.

   Using applications from the Google Apps Marketplace to conquer tax season
   Wednesday, January 26, 2011
   11:00 a.m. PST / 2:00 p.m. EST
   Register here

With dozens of Marketplace accounting and finance apps, you can customize solutions to your business’s specific needs. Each application integrates with Google Apps and provides single sign-on convenience and access through the Google universal navigation bar.

For example, here’s one way your business might cut down the work of tax season this year by using Marketplace apps to organize financial documents, streamline invoicing, and aggregate accounting information.

Digitize your important documents
If you’ve been putting off the tedious task of organizing your receipts, Shoeboxed can help. Send your receipts to them inside a provided postage-paid envelope and within a few days, Shoeboxed will transform your paper clutter into a secure, searchable, IRS-accepted online database. Shoeboxed also offers a variety of export options and integrates with various tax applications. By using Shoeboxed now, you can get your receipts in order before the April 15th tax deadline.

Simplify invoicing and billing to easily monitor cash flow
It’s also easy to seamlessly manage your accounts payables and receivables with the Apps Marketplace. For example, Harvest helps you create and track invoices and set up retainers for clients and projects. Other features such as multi-currency support, automated reminders and online payment help you get paid faster. Harvest also offers a contextual gadget in Gmail to streamline invoicing activities.

Prepare your finances for tax time
When it comes to aggregating your financials to prep for tax time, there are several options, including Outright. Outright automates the accounting process, provides key financial reports and tracks where your money is going by integrating with Google Apps, Shoeboxed, Harvest, your bank account and other sources. At tax time, Outright calculates any estimated taxes you owe and pre-populates your annual tax form, the IRS Schedule C. It also provides helpful alerts that integrate into your Google Calendar to keep you apprised of upcoming deadlines.

In addition to Shoeboxed, Harvest and Outright, the Apps Marketplace offers your business many other applications that can satisfy your accounting and finance needs.

Invoicing/Billing Freshbooks Zoho Invoice Invoicera Bill.com Invoic€xpress WorkingPoint Harvest

Accounting Yendo Accounts FreeAgent Rhino Accouting Kashoo.com Outright

ERP MyERP.com Brightpearl ERPLY

Expense Reporting Expensify Concur Breeze Yendo Expenses Shoeboxed

Try out these apps Google Apps Marketplace and make this tax season a breeze.

Posted by Harrison Shih, Product Marketing, Google Apps Marketplace

Closing out 2010, we are excited to offer over 250 installable applications in the Google Apps Marketplace that work seamlessly with Google Apps. The Apps Marketplace has grown rapidly, now with over 4 million users with at least one Marketplace app installed on their domains.

With Google Apps and the Apps Marketplace, you can finally go 100% web with your business, realizing greater functionality and flexibility at a lower cost. For example, you can manage your entire sales cycle anywhere you have access to a browser – send marketing and lead generation emails through MailChimp, manage and track responses with Zoho CRM and even close the sale with an e-signature from EchoSign.

Every month on App Tuesday, we aim to give you a break from patching your systems by introducing even more apps to help you move to the cloud. To wrap up the year, we wanted to give you a recap of what’s been big in the Marketplace, the top categories and apps of the year as well as a preview of 2011.

Top Installed Categories

1. Project Management - with over 30 project management apps, businesses can find applications that address key project needs including cross-functional collaboration, task list management, and time tracking.
   Top 3 installed: Manymoon, Mavenlink, RapidTASK
2. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) - the most popular searched for category in 2010, businesses can find all types of CRM apps, including those related to end-to-end sales cycles, social and project-based.
   Top 3 installed: Insightly, Zoho CRM, Applane
3. Accounting and Finance - bring simplicity to your accounting and finance needs with Marketplace apps that manage your cash flow, billing and invoicing, and expense tracking.
   Top 3 installed: Outright, myERP.com, Freshbooks

Top Recently Installed Apps of 2010

1. Manymoon
2. Insightly
3. Zoho CRM
4. Aviary Design Suite
5. Mavenlink
6. Outright
7. MailChimp
8. RapidTask
9. Insync
10. myERP.com

Best Integration
Gmail contextual gadgets - This integration, offered by many Marketplace apps, allows you to access your most relevant and important data streams right where you need it, inline with your emails. For example, many CRM apps provide gadgets that populate information about contacts in an email thread to add context to your communications.

Looking forward to 2011, we have a number of new ideas in the pipeline. We have plans to help improve your shopping experience, find the exact apps you need, and add additional integration capabilities to make users more efficient.

As you prepare for 2011, consider making a new year’s resolution to go 100% web to capture the benefits of reduced costs, greater scalability and flexibility. Whether it’s switching your messaging and collaboration tools to Google Apps or augmenting your sales and marketing efforts with web applications from the Apps Marketplace, resolve to make 2011 the year your business moves to the web and boosts productivity.

Posted by Harrison Shih, Product Marketing, Google Apps Marketplace

Editor’s Note: This is a guest blog post from David Meyer, senior vice president for On-Demand, Productivity and Sustainability Solutions at SAP, the leading business software vendor to more than 100,000 customers in over 120 countries.

What did I miss at the last meeting? Why do I have seven different copies of a spreadsheet named “Final Version”? Where should we host the next event? These are all questions and problems that can easily be resolved through a new way of working in the cloud available through the integration of Google Apps and SAP StreamWork, now available in the Google Apps Marketplace.

SAP StreamWork brings together people and information - from the web, your desktop, or business systems - and applies structure to discussions with business tools including pro/con tables, SWOT analyses, and polls to drive fast, meaningful results. Think about how easy it can be to allocate resources, prioritize sales leads, or define new marketing campaigns in a single, well-organized location. With Google Apps integration, the SAP StreamWork environment will be joined with the tools you are already familiar with in the cloud.

SAP StreamWork will work with OpenID so you can use your Google Apps login to access your SAP StreamWork account and navigate to it through the Google universal navigation bar. Additionally, Google Apps will also be accessible directly from SAP StreamWork, providing you with the ability to use Google’s calendaring, email and document creation and management tools as part of your problem-solving process in SAP StreamWork. Direct integration will be available for users in the first part of 2011.

In joining the Google Apps Marketplace, we see a great opportunity to reach over 3 million Google Apps businesses who have already embraced the cloud and we invite them to try out SAP StreamWork.

Join us for a live webinar and Q&A session with Google and SAP at 11am on December 14th demonstrating the SAP StreamWork integration with Google Apps and discussing best practices for making decisions faster with distributed teams.

Posted by Harrison Shih, Product Marketing, Google Apps Marketplace Team

Cross-posted on the Google Apps Developer Blog

The Google Apps Reporting API lets administrators programmatically get information about their Google Apps environment, and today we're expanding access to the API for Google Apps Authorized Resellers. Resellers can use the API to gain a better understanding of how their customers are using Google Apps, so they can better personalize the service they provide to their customers.

Specifically, resellers can retrieve the following usage reports with the API:

• Accounts – Contains a list of the customer’s end-user accounts on a particular day.
  
• Activity – Identifies the number of customer end-user accounts as well as the number of active and idle accounts over several different time periods.
  
• Disk Space – Shows the amount of disk space used by a customer’s mailboxes.
  
• Email Clients – Identifies how the customer’s end-users access their accounts on a day-by-day basis.
  
• Summary – Contains the customer’s total number of accounts, total mailbox storage usage and total mailbox quota.

The Reporting API is one of several features we’ve been working on to let Google Apps resellers – over 2,000 and growing – understand and serve their customers better. If you’re an IT solution provider, we invite you to learn more and get started building a practice around bringing Google Apps to your customers. The Google Apps Authorized Reseller program is designed to help you enhance and strengthen your customer relationships.

Posted by Namrata Gupta, Google Apps Engineer

Editor's note: This is the latest in a series of posts on apps in the Google Apps Marketplace that have caught our eye here at Google. We’ll do this every so often as we see things we'd like to share. Look for the label "marketplace highlights" and subscribe to the series if you'd like to stay tuned.

Today, more than 3 million businesses and thousands of universities not only have access to Google’s core suite of applications, they also get easy access to 200+ of the best apps on the web through the Google Apps Marketplace. These installable Marketplace apps are easy to try and buy, and offer single sign-on and hassle-free access from the Google universal navigation bar. Beyond the convenience of single sign-on, many apps integrate with users’ Gmail inbox, Google Docs, Google contacts, and Google calendar to improve productivity even further.

Across these businesses and schools, there’s one thing all users likely have in common: they have projects to complete. The good news is whether you have a product to build or market, a research study to publish, or an internal project to deliver, there's likely an app in the Marketplace to help you and your type of project succeed.

And since projects come in all shapes and sizes, we’ve categorized the apps in to 5 groups based on their focus, and then further ordered them by most installed first. This should help you better understand which of these 30 apps are right for your projects.

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

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

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

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

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