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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.
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Posted by José Olalla, CIO at BBVA

Editors note: Today, our guest blogger is José Olalla (@PepeOlalla), CIO at BBVA. BBVA is one of the largest financial institutions in the world who today have announced they are adopting Google Apps for Business to increase productivity and drive innovation.

BBVA is a customer-centric global financial services group founded in Spain in 1857. We now have over 110,000 employees in more than 30 countries across the world.

At BBVA we see technology as a key sustainable competitive advantage, and staying at the forefront of technology and business practices is key to our success. Today we’ve announced that we’re migrating our business to Google Apps to increase efficiency and to help our teams to collaborate more easily, regardless of location.

We were looking for a technology that would transform our business operations - not just make our workers more efficient. Integrating the Google Apps for Business suite with our own tools will allow us to introduce a new way of working where employees have access to all the information they need with just one click, no matter where they are or what kind of device they use, and can reap the benefits of using advanced collaboration tools.

We will migrate our old email systems to the cloud with Gmail. Google Talk, Google Sites and Google Docs will allow our teams to communicate and share ideas more easily - working in a way that they have never experienced before.

With Google Docs, for example, we’re excited about the real-time collaboration benefits - and we expect to increase productivity by removing the need to constantly update different versions of a document. We are developing our new global intranet (we call it High Performance Desktop) taking advantage of Google’s collaboration tools, changing it from a corporate communications and process management site to a place where all employees will be able to share, contribute and manage knowledge globally.

The roll-out of Google Apps will be staggered, with more than 35,000 BBVA workers in Spain initially using the Google Apps productivity tools. By the end of 2012 we expect to have migrated 110,000 employees across our global network.
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Posted by Scott Lawson, director of IT architecture, QAD

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Scott Lawson, director of IT architecture for QAD, a 1,300-employee company that delivers supply chain collaboration software to 5,500 manufacturers in 93 countries. QAD turned to the Google Search Appliance (GSA) to enable employees and customers to search across multiple databases and content repositories such as Lotus Notes.

At QAD, we span 30 different locations around the world, from the corporate office in California to operations in South Africa and Thailand. We pride ourselves on the quality of support we deliver to thousands of manufacturers in 27 languages. We offer more than 50 product modules that are installed in building blocks to support different rules, industry regulations, and manufacturing styles of various countries.

QAD must provide complex, detailed product information to customers, customer service representatives as well as other employees within the organization. We offer a secure extranet where customers can find information such as white papers, data sheets, support ticket status, and technical updates. As an additional resource, our public-facing Internet site provides everything from case studies to product demonstration videos and access to an online support center.

Historically, internal and external users found it challenging to find the right product and service information. Data is stored in many different repositories: Lotus Notes, an enterprise content management and collaboration system, knowledge bases, file shares, QAD’s own customer service and support system, and internal websites. Our content sources had grown organically and were somewhat disorganized, and we had millions of documents that needed to be indexed.

We were using an Autonomy search system for our intranet and public facing site, but it was not meeting user expectations for usability and search relevancy. Autonomy was also time-consuming and expensive to maintain.

In 2010, our employees began working with Google Apps, and wanted Google’s signature ease-of-use and power for search as well. We decided to evaluate the Google Search Appliance (GSA) and consider abandoning the Autonomy solution. The GSA can connect legacy enterprise systems and provide advanced security and multiple language support—all-important priorities for our business.

We worked with Google partner Perficient to develop a search roadmap, proof of concept, and ultimately a streamlined implementation. The GSA was simple to deploy and has been easy to maintain because the appliance features a one-stop administrative interface for configuration and index controls.

For QAD, costs related to search are down, search relevancy is up, and IT is doing less maintenance work. Customer service representatives and customers can locate details about products and services with ease.

Users are able to search through a massive, rich content library housed in many different repositories, all from a single search box. With the GSA, we are linking communities of employees and customers together with content into a cohesive experience. It has made us even more of a unified global company.
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Posted by Chris Farinacci, Global Marketing Director, Google Enterprise

One of the most rewarding aspects of my job is meeting with customers and learning how they’re using our products to change the way they work on the web. In this spirit, today I’m excited to introduce our official Google Enterprise page on Google+, the latest way for us to stay connected.

By adding +Google Enterprise to your Google+ circles, you’ll be able to read about our latest product features, hear directly from some of our customers, and share your thoughts with the community.

We’re really looking forward to hearing what you have to say. To join the conversation, mention +Google Enterprise in your post, or comment directly on our page.

Haven’t had a chance to turn on Google+ for your account yet? With last month’s announcement of Google+ for Apps, you can now enable Google+ for your organization.


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Posted by Roth LaFleur, Product Manager for Amirsys

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Roth LaFleur, Product Manager for Amirsys, a company specializing in delivering useful, timely medical information to physicians and other healthcare providers.


We have 40,000 users in 50 countries—top physicians, surgeons, and residents for STATdx—our imaging point-of-care, diagnostic clinical decision support portal. As you can imagine, time is a important to them and affects both the cost and quality of patient care. For busy radiologists, time spent performing diagnoses is tracked and billed on a per-minute basis and can be a critical factor in delivering care. This makes fast, relevant search a key element of STATdx. Working with Search Technologies, we integrated the Google Search Appliance (GSA) into the STATdx diagnostic support portal.

We were expending a high degree of effort to support the search capability in our STATdx portal. Even with a full-time employee dedicated to the effort, the relevance of search results continued to be unsatisfactory. The existing system lacked the ability to “learn” based on user interactions. Features such as spell correction, a “did you mean” function to recommend different terms, and translation of search terms needed to be accomplished through programming and constant tuning.

After a comparison of several service providers, we engaged Search Technologies Corporation to help us implement the Google Search Appliance. Search Technologies partnered with our team to identify the unique search needs and find an optimal approach to provide fast, relevant search for the STATdx decision support portal quickly and cost-effectively.

The Amirsys development team integrated the Search Appliance into STATdx, where now search is a central feature, accessible in every part of the user interface. Capabilities from Google such as automatic query completion greatly enhance decision-making due to improved usability, relevance, and speed. Before implementing the GSA, average response time for searches was five to seven seconds, with some very general searches taking up to 15 seconds. After integration of the GSA into STATdx, query time has been reduced to milliseconds, saving valuable time for Amirsys clients and the healthcare professionals and patients who rely on their diagnoses.

For us, integration of the Search Appliance into STATdx has enabled us to provide better, faster services and reduced costs by eliminating the need for someone dedicated full-time to the task of special programming and tuning. And for the radiologists who use the STATdx system, we are helping them by increasing speed, accuracy, and diagnostic confidence in complex cases—and most importantly elevating the quality of care.
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Posted by David Watson, Executive Project Sponsor for Calgary.ca for The City of Calgary.

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is David Watson, executive project sponsor for calgary.ca for The City of Calgary. He sponsored a sweeping program to bring greater efficiencies to operations and provide enhanced and broader services to citizens. At its heart is a new search-centric website launched today, and powered by the Google Search Appliance.

Many municipalities today are under increasing pressure to reduce overhead while providing a wide array of services to citizens. In The City of Calgary, we looked to the Internet to enable us to provide enhanced citizen services as efficiently as possible. Our research showed several interesting facts:
- Over 93% of Calgarians use the Internet.
- Only 18% of traffic came directly to our home page - 55% of people came from search engines, primarily Google.
- Citizens want to interact with us online, instead of spending time on the phone or in-person - 60% noted better convenience, such as not having to drive to a city facility. Others noted speed and 24/7 availability.
- More than 40% of Calgary citizens said they wanted more services online.

Our public-facing web presence, which has 16,000 pages of content, across 28 business units, with a wide variety of applications, functionality, documents and information for our citizens, handled 9 million visits in 2010. The major drawback was that the information was difficult to find.

Forty-seven percent of Calgary citizens surveyed reported that the incumbent search engine on Calgary.ca did not work well. It required knowledge of city acronyms and terminology, something many citizens, understandably, don’t possess. Our content and our site was cluttered, out-of-date, and difficult to weed through. We struggled with maintenance as individual business units continued to add to our already packed site.

In response, we formed the Web Leadership and Renewal Program in 2007. Among the chief goals was to provide citizens with easy-to-use search and better access to city programs and services. This led us to create an entirely new, search-centric site which was first concepted and tested in November 2009, and finally launched today.

The Google Search Appliance (GSA) is the cornerstone of this new site and our efforts to improve access to services and programs and increase government efficiency. It is linked to a content management system, ESRI for interactive mapping, and to websites such as calgarymayor.ca to provide a holistic, integrated search experience.

Now, citizens can search for everything from YouTube videos on saving water to animal services and permit information, and they can easily serve themselves by finding answers to everyday questions. Calgary.ca is just as easy and effective as searching on Google.com. The search-based concept lets Calgarians type in common keywords or phrases to find what they need, without specific knowledge of city acronyms or terminology.

We can conserve phone and in-person resources for more complex requests and apply valuable government resources more strategically. Citizens benefit from the convenience of finding most of what they need online. They can avoid unnecessary driving and parking fees and have 24/7 access.

Certain search features of the GSA were very important to us. Topping the list were best bets, synonyms, and spelling correction. Related searches and content rating were also vital, as well as the ability to easily promote the relevance of a search result based on its popularity. The Google Search Appliance provided all of these capabilities, plus it had a reputation for being very easy to install and maintain.

Citizens are rapidly adopting search now. Early metrics show that only 4% of visits to the old calgary.ca used the internal search engine. In comparison, 65% of visitors to the new calgary.ca used the the GSA, and the search results page is the second most visited page after the home page.

Ultimately, our job is to provide city services as efficiently as possible. We strive to do more with less. By making the right content easy to retrieve, citizens get the convenience they seek—and we can reduce unnecessary overhead and increase the value and variety of our services and programs.
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Posted by Ivan Chou, Web Applications Engineer for the American Red Cross

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Ivan Chou, Web Applications Engineer for the American Red Cross. When the American Red Cross was struggling with sub-optimal search functionality, it turned to the Google Search Appliance (GSA) to improve information “findability,” both for internal and external users.

Since its founding in 1881 by visionary relief coordinator Clara Barton, the American Red Cross has been the nation's premier non-profit emergency response organization. Today, in addition to domestic disaster relief, the American Red Cross offers compassionate services, from help for the needy to educational programs.

As one of the world’s largest non-profits, we rely on our public-facing websites and our intranet to keep millions of people and tens of thousands of employees and volunteers informed about our activities. On any “normal” day, we get up to 200,000 hits on our main website – but that number swells to millions during any disaster. The main external website, www.redcross.org, receives significant traffic from people seeking everything from CPR class schedules and Blood Drive locations to information about disasters, such as the 2011 U.S. tornadoes.

With such a heavy reliance on the web for delivering information, the American Red Cross needed a faster search system that would deliver better results. We had been using a solution that came bundled with our content management system (CMS), which we implemented in 2009. That search system used a meaning-based context model, which means results were driven by questions, phrases or sentences rather than keywords – but this approach often failed to deliver relevant results. People had to know in advance, for example, if they needed to search about community services, educational programs, international relief, and so on – it was a lengthy, and not very successful process.

Slow performance and lack of relevant results prompted us to investigate search alternatives – an initiative that coincided with a redesign for www.redcross.org and creation of www.measlesinitative.org, a new site supporting a multi-agency push to help halt the spread of measles worldwide.

Working with one of Google’s solution partners, Fig Leaf Software, we began evaluating our options and calculating the costs and benefits of deploying a new search solution. We were at a tipping point – we would have to pay more in licenses for our CMS to support our sites, but we saw in evaluating different options with Fig Leaf that we could save IT costs and achieve better results by setting up two Google Search Appliance (GSA) systems rather than staying with siloed CMS-based search systems. After substantial evaluations, our outsourced data center deployed two GSAs: one for production and the other as a backup – we wanted a redundant solution so that people could reliably find information in the event of emergencies.

The Google Search Appliance systems were implemented over a single weekend, and they now power search across our employee intranet as well as on the public redcross.org and measlesinitiative.org sites.

Right away, the search results from the GSA were excellent. We did almost no tweaking on our end, and our internal and external users comment on how pleased they are that the right search results come straight to the top, whether the query is about CPR class schedules or disaster relief. Visitors to the intranet as well as to the two public websites now have ready access to information through a powerful, intuitive and familiar search experience.

When we moved to the Google Search Appliance, search just started working, and working very well. We predicted that we could save IT costs and achieve better results by setting up the Google Search Appliance, and that’s exactly how it turned out.
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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
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Editor’s note: Today’s guest writer is Timothy Moore, Website Manager for Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART). Here he discusses how they use Google Maps API Premier v3 to power searches and biking directions on BART.gov. BART serves the San Francisco Bay Area covering 4 counties, 43 stations, 104 miles (167 km) of track, and has an average weekday ridership of 335,000 passengers. It is the 5th busiest heavy rail rapid transit system in the U.S.

Recently the BART website (www.bart.gov) launched some cool new trip planning services, including bicycle directions and station area points of interest, using the Google Maps API. The BART QuickPlanner is one of the most popular features on our website. If you live in the Bay Area, chances are you’ve used it. The QuickPlanner has traditionally offered a mix of BART trip plans, directions for walking and driving to the station, connecting transit information, carbon savings and more.

We're always looking for ways to improve the QuickPlanner, so when Google Maps started offering bicycle directions we were green with envy. Our latest research shows that only 4% of BART customers ride a bicycle from their home to a station. With ongoing cuts to connecting transit services and many BART station parking lots filled to the brim, adding bicycling directions to the QuickPlanner will help us promote the option to more than a million website visitors every month.



Frankly we've struggled with the integration of other mapping products into our custom-built BART scheduling application; weak documentation, limited real-world examples, and cumbersome programming requirements. Developing with the Google Maps API was a whole different world. As our lead programmer, Robert Falconer, noted, "It was easy to learn and quick to implement. And the ability to use free-form input terms for addresses, locations and points of interest was a major plus.”

If you've ever had to trap address or landmark input errors you know what he’s talking about. For example, if a user enters in “Frrey Blding” to the QuickPlanner, Google's geocoding service can recognize the user's intent and return the proper term "Ferry Building" with the correct corresponding address. All of this is done seamlessly behind the scenes so that all user sees is the address they are looking for when their trip is mapped out.



Again, using the Google Maps API, we’re able to provide more information about points of interest near BART stations, including directions. If you visit the neighborhood map section you can now use freeform search for station area destinations, and we’re no longer limiting you to searches based on standard address formats or a preset pull down menu. We also use the Google Maps API for services like “Find Closest Station” and for the map images presented on our station landing pages.

Overall this was a really fun project for us. I hope our use of the Google Maps API on bart.gov will encourage more bicycling to BART and I also hope people will use it to discover all of the awesome things that BART station area neighborhoods have to offer.

Posted by Carlos Cuesta, Google Earth and Maps Team
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People should have the power to conduct searches from everywhere. This is why we provide users with numerous options beyond Google.com, such as typing in a search query directly in the address bar in Google Chrome, or through Google Toolbar, or Google Desktop.

However, when it comes to searching information on their corporate intranet, most users’ choices are limited. Corporate users typically have to go to a special URL or open up a special portal application to search their intranet. To alleviate this limitation, we have integrated the Google Search Appliance with the OpenSearch protocol. OpenSearch is a collection of simple formats for the sharing of search results. So for instance, integrating with OpenSearch enables accessing the Google Search Appliance directly from the browser:

Or, as shown below, you can search directly from Windows Explorer within Windows 7:

Ultimately, we are trying to provide as many options as possible to the end user. And by supporting OpenSearch, these options will increase as more platforms connect with OpenSearch.

You can immediately download this feature on Enterprise Labs, or learn more about it in our technical documentation.

Posted by Alexander Kerschhofer, Google Search Appliance team
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Thousands of organizations deploy Google Apps every day, and a challenge for some large businesses has been migrating employees on multiple domains. Until now, companies that ran into this issue could either set up other domains as domain aliases or set up different Google Apps accounts for each domain, neither of which was an ideal solution. Now there’s a better way: multi-domain support in Google Apps.

Multi-domain support is a new admin control that allows organizations with two or more domains on Google Apps to manage them from a single control panel. Users belonging to different domains within an organization keep their domain-specific email address but can see coworkers from other domains in the organization’s global address book. It’s also easy for users to share across domains in Google Docs, Sites and the rest of Google Apps. Matt Vandenbush, director of IT strategy and architecture at Brady Corporation, says, "Multi-domain support in Google Apps lets us administer our entire organization from one central place. Considering that we have users on 88 different domains, this is a big time-saver for our IT department, and it lets employees from different parts of our organization share information much more seamlessly than before.”
This feature is available now to Premier and Education edition users at no additional charge. To learn more about multi-domain support on Google Apps, please visit our Help Center or join us for a live webinar on Tuesday, July 13th at 9am PST / 12pm EST / 5pm GMT.

Posted by Will Smit, Software Engineer, Google Apps
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MWV (formerly MeadWestvaco), a global packaging company based in Glen Allen, Virginia, has migrated its 12,000 technology-enabled employees to Google Apps. A 165-year-old company with a diverse set of commercial and consumer solutions, MWV products are ubiquitous in everyday life – Mead Five-Star notebooks, coffee cups from your local barista, canned beverage FridgePak cases you see in your grocery store, collectors edition DVD cases, and fluid dispensers for luxury perfumes and lotions – among many others.

MWV has grown extensively through acquisitions, which left it with twelve siloed email systems, including multiple instances of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes across the globe.



MWV embarked on a journey to unite its global workforce on a single email platform. Critical to their "One MWV" initiative was to enable users in 34 countries and speaking a wide variety of languages to collaborate and easily communicate as one global team.

Mark Gulling, MWV's CIO, explains that "The shift to Google has enhanced our ability to effectively collaborate by simplifying our email infrastructure, and delivered a richer set of communication tools. Google provides not only a rich collaboration suite, but a constant stream of innovative, market-defining products that enhance and constantly evolve our user's working experience." Gulling reports a number of benefits since switching to Google:
  • Increased productivity. Users, from executives to individual contributors, have reported increases of over 30 minutes per day, thanks to powerful search capability and the organization features of Labels, Filters, and more.
  • Online information sharing. Users have rapidly adopted Google Sites to share information and media. Approximately 200 group, product, and project collaboration sites have been created since MWV switched to Google Apps.
  • Real-time communications. MWV has used Google Docs and video chat to help people stay in touch and collaborate in real time, avoiding unnecessary travel or videoconferencing costs.
  • Innovation. MWV's product sales team was able to quickly roll out a new quote management framework based on Google Forms and Google Docs with the help of Google Apps Script.
MWV's users are excited about the switch to Google and the new features available to them. As Mel Shaffer, VP of Global Service Delivery, says, "Moving to Google has givenMWV the ability to ride a wave of collaboration and technology features that would be difficult to duplicate in any other product."

Continuing, Shaffer adds, "Google's innovative product design and commitment to user experience translate into a feature-rich user experience that is unparalleled in the IT marketplace today. Additionally, Google's price point enables IT to reduce costs and minimize or eliminate capital investment – a true win for our enterprise and our users."

Join us in welcoming MWV to the growing ranks of businesses who have gone Google.

Posted by Colleen Horan, Google Enterprise team
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In large enterprises today, employees and administrators are trying to make sense of the volumes of content created by and living inside their companies, and quite a few of these organizations are turning to enterprise content management (ECM) systems. According to Forrester Research, ECM license revenue was projected to reach $3.9B in 2008.

Yet, over the past few years, as companies have spent significant dollars on their ECM systems, they've come to realize one thing. Content management systems are great at being repositories of information, yet individual employees still struggle to find the exact document they are looking for – even if they know it's in the ECM system. In other words, finding information can be a painful process.

Which leads us to the latest thinking from AMR Research, which provides comprehensive research and advisory services for supply chain and IT executives. Jim Murphy, Research Director for Knowledge Management at AMR Research, is looking at effective search as the missing element of a content management solution. While many content management systems have a built-in search feature, the capability and relevance of this functionality is typically not up to par. Murphy has been talking to many enterprises who are increasingly looking to separate enterprise search solutions to provide high quality search across not only their ECM system, but across other major repositories in their companies as well.

One such enterprise Murphy has spoken to is Mercer. As a global services company in 180 cities and 40 countries, Mercer has 19,000 employees, many of whom need to access information instantly to effectively serve their clients. Their business depends on leveraging intellectual capital and sharing best practices. So even though their intranet linked to Livelink, an ECM system which stored 1.5 million documents, there was no comprehensive search tool spanning all of the companies. After evaluating many different search technologies, Mercer made the choice to bring in the Google Search Appliance to provide universal search across their intranet.

As Haroon Suleman, Mercer's Lead Enterprise Architect for enterprise search, explains, "The Google Search Appliance won hands down. The fact that the Google Search Appliance provided a bridge to Livelink, and can provide future SharePoint connectivity if needed, was a major selling point."

Both Murphy and Suleman will join us on Thursday, October 8 for a webinar titled "Search: A Vital Element of an ECM Strategy." Murphy will present AMR's views on the ECM and enterprise search space, and Suleman will share the Mercer story, discussing Mercer's business needs, needs behind enterprise search, and specific metrics from users on how the Google Search Appliance has been increasing productivity. Register for the webinar and join the conversation – and the question and answer session at the end of the session.

Thursday, October 8, 2009
11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT

Maybe ECM systems need good search too, after all.

Posted by Vijay Koduri, Google Search Appliance team
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Providers of cloud computing services like Google are equipped to protect millions of users' data every day – it's core to how we run our business. Our users enjoy our economies of scale at minimal expense. We also employ some of the world's best security experts to help to make sure that your data stays safe.


On October 1, join us for a live webcast with some of our top security experts who are on the front lines of fighting spam, malware, and phishing for Google Apps users, designing identity management systems for hosted web apps, and monitoring the Google network for potential threats. Register for this live webcast, “How Google Tackles IT Security – and What You Can Learn From It,” to learn about security in the cloud and get your questions answered by members of Google's Security team. Participants include:

Eran Feigenbaum – As the Director of Security for Google Apps, Eran Feigenbaum defines and implements security strategy for Google's suite of solutions for enterprises. Prior to joining Google in 2007, Eran was the US Chief Information Security Officer for PricewaterhouseCoopers.

John Flynn – John “Four” Flynn has an extensive background in network monitoring, intrusion detection, and incident response. John currently leads Google's Security Monitoring program and is a founder of Google's Security Metrics group.

Bradley Taylor – Gmail's “Spam Czar,” Brad Taylor leads Gmail's technical anti-spam, anti-abuse, and email delivery engineering efforts. Brad has played a key role in the development of Gmail's spam filter since Gmail launched in April, 2004.

Eric Sachs – Eric Sachs has over 15 years of experience with user identity and security for hosted web applications. During his years at Google, he has worked as a Product Manager for many services including Google Accounts, Google Apps, orkut, Google Health, Google Security, and Internal Systems.

While circumstances may vary, most IT departments face similar security challenges. Find out more from the people who confront these issues every day here at Google.

Join us for our live webcast to learn about the people, best practices, and technologies that we have in place to minimize security threats.

How Google Tackles IT Security – and What You Can Learn From It
Thursday, October 1, 2009
11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT

We hope to see you there.

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps team

Find customer stories and product information on our resource sites for current users of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino.
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What do Fairchild Semiconductor, Hamilton Beach, JohnsonDiversey and Valeo have in common? Together they migrated nearly 50,000 Lotus Notes users to Google Apps.

Today we're making it easier for Lotus Notes users to switch to Google Apps. We're releasing a new tool, Google Apps Migration for Lotus Notes, that migrates mail, calendar and contacts quickly and easily. The tool is a native Notes application and key features include:
  • Easy deployment Centrally administered server side migration process. No user intervention needed
  • No downtime Users can continue to use Notes even during the migration process. After they're migrated, Gmail will open Notes links in Lotus Notes
  • Global efficiency Migrate multiple offices simultaneously or separately. Assign administration controls at the organization and the office level as needed
  • Trackable reports Centralized event logging to manage & monitor migration across any number of Domino servers and sites
See it in action in this short video:
These features and more make Google Apps Migration for Lotus Notes a simple and complete way to quickly switch your users to Google Apps. JohnsonDiversey used the tool in its recent migration of 10,000 employees, and the video below captures CIO Brent Hoag's satisfaction with the deployment process.

Google partner CapGemini relied on the tool to migrate Valeo, a 30,000-employee automotive supplier. As CapGemini IT Project Lead Philippe Bonnemains says, "We used it for Valeo and for several other enterprise customers. Google Apps Migration for Lotus Notes is clearly a great solution for Notes-based companies that want to quickly and efficiently provide users with continuity of mail archives, contacts and calendars, while moving to Google Apps."
If you'd like help with the migration process, or with overall project planning, deployment and training, several Google partners are ready to provide products and services to address your specific needs. If you're thinking about migrating your Domino applications to the cloud, this migration whitepaper will help guide your analysis.

If you're considering switching your users from Lotus Notes to Google Apps, talk to our sales team or sign up for a trial now. Or, if you're already a Google Apps Premier or Education Edition customer and want to migrate today, you can can learn more or download the migration tool here.
Posted by Chris Vander Mey, Senior Product Manager, Google Enterprise

Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our RSS feed or email alerts.
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We're constantly adding useful and interactive functionality to our enterprise products, and Google Earth Enterprise is no exception. Today we're announcing the latest release of Google Earth Enterprise: version 3.2. Google Earth Enterprise allows customers to build private globes on their secure networks using the same technology that powers the public Google Earth. Version 3.2 delivers new features that allow government agencies and other organizations to apply the recent advances in the public version of Google Earth, such as historical imagery and underwater terrain, to their own data and operations.

Version 3.2 gives Google Earth Enterprise users the option of using a browser to view and interact with their private globes using the Google Earth API. This delivers the same fast, familiar, 3-D navigation that users get from Google Earth – but within a web browser rather than the standard client.

Another new addition is historical imagery in Google Earth Enterprise, making it easy for employees to view how a place or region has changed over time. Many of our customers have archives of imagery of a property or point of interest taken over a series of days, years – even decades. The 3.2 release allows customers to time-stamp the imagery, tracking changes over time to provide a handy historical reference.

With the new release, customers also have the option to build Mercator imagery tiles for any 2-D maps they create with Google Earth Enterprise. Mercator is a commonly used conformal projection for viewing tiles in the browser. The new release allows customers to easily overlay their tiles on top of Google's basemap for a 2-dimensional mashup of their own internal data and Google's. (Thanks again to Gerardus Mercator and his great work on the Nova et Aucta Orbis Terrae Descriptio ad Usum Navigatium Emendate in 1569!)

We've also added support for Enterprise users to process their own sub-surface terrain data, also known as bathymetry – something we shared in the public Google Ocean launch in February 2009. Using the Earth API or latest Google Earth Enterprise client, you can now navigate below sea level to visualize that data in your organization's globe too.

Customers who want to access Google Earth Enterprise 3.2 can email enterprise-operations@google.com for upgrade information. Not using GEE yet? See what Google Earth Enterprise has to offer.

Posted by Dylan Lorimer, Product Manager, Google Earth Enterprise
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Last week, I looked up directions to the hotel in Sacramento that I had booked for the Fourth of July weekend. As I had never been to that part of the state before, I was puzzled by the limited directions offered by their website - I had no idea whether I was approaching from the North, South, East or West or where the major highways were. What I needed were step-by-step directions from my exact starting point to the hotel that I could easily print and go.

With the new directions gadget from Google Maps, any business can offer just that. This simple gadget allows webmasters to add customized Google Maps directions to their business locations. With the directions gadget, you no longer need to type and update multiple sets of text directions. Let's face it: customers are only looking for directions from their specific location.


Google has made this process easy for you. The gadget allows you to pre-fill the "To" field with one or multiple addresses, a generic zip code or even a specific set of latitude-longitude coordinates. Customers are able to print their directions with a single click. And if they would prefer not to drive, the gadget also provides walking and public transit directions.


 Take a look at how Legoland California, Emeril Lagasse, and Harvard University are using the gadget. And then test and create your own directions gadget here. For the many locations outside of the US, the gadget is available in 23 different languages.

If you're interested in learning more, head over to the Google Lat Long blog for a more detailed walk-through of the gadget's features.

Posted by Julie Zhou, Product Marketing Manager, Google Maps team
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Google Apps has always been a compelling offering for small and medium sized companies, and they've accounted for much of our growth to 1.75 million businesses. Large enterprises can also get great results with Apps, as Fairchild Semiconductor and the dozens of other big companies that have Gone Google have discovered. Still, we appreciate that there have been some boulders along the road to adoption for the largest businesses in the world.

Since the beginning of the year, we've focused on making it as easy as possible for those large enterprises to switch to Google, and offline access, BlackBerry and Microsoft Outlook support, and enterprise contact management were the dynamite that cleared the road to Apps.

Today we're paving the road. We're taking the beta label off of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk to remove any doubt that Apps is a mature product suite.

We're also launching a tool that will be particularly useful to administrative support staff to screen and send email on behalf of others – a feature called email delegation. And to help customers comply with regulations that may exist specific to their industry, we're adding email retention so that IT administrators can set up policies to determine when email will be purged. Both retention and delegation are in testing with customers, and will start rolling out to all Premier edition domains over the next weeks.

Finally, we're continuing to implement additional procedures to ensure that our business customers enjoy even greater reliability: live replication of data to other locations for near-instant disaster recovery, and special handling of business users' data in our data center operations.

While we believe these features will be most useful to big companies, we hope they'll also help today's small business grow into tomorrow's global enterprise. To complement these new features, enterprise IT managers can access tools for switching to Google Apps in our Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes resource centers.

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps

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Editor's Note: The spam data cited in this post is drawn from the network of Google email security and archiving services, powered by Postini, which provide email security to more than 50,000 organizations, including businesses of all sizes, government agencies, and educational institutions. To learn more about what the Gmail team is doing to keep spam out of your inboxes, check out this post.

Our "Spam Trend" update last quarter summarized the rise in both levels and types of spam, with new players and techniques entering the market. This quarter, proliferation continues, with an unpredictable pattern of drops and spikes as 2009 moves along. Overall, spam is measurably up: Q2'09 average spam levels are 53% higher than in Q1'09 and 6% higher than in Q2'08.

After last November's McColo ISP takedown, when spam volumes dropped by 70%, spammers worked overtime to fill the void. They succeeded: Within four months, spam levels rose back to pre-McColo levels. This upward trend continued through June 4, when another large ISP spam source, 3FN, was reported to have been dismantled. Spam volume immediately dropped 30% – not as extreme as McColo, but still significant. Although this created a sudden dip in spam levels, it also created an open invitation for opportunistic spammers to once again seize a market opportunity.

Over the coming months, we anticipate watching new players once again drive spam levels back up. Since June 4, spammers have already made up a significant amount of ground, climbing 14% from the initial drop.

Here's what the trend looked like, as tracked through Postini filters, over the past six months:


"Unpredictability" summarizes the overall trend as Q2'09 winds down and spammers test both new and "retro" techniques. For example, on June 18 we tracked a new attack that unleashed 50% of a typical day's spam volume in just two hours' time. This attack used a simple "newsletter" template – somewhat "old school" by today's spam standard – with malevolent links and images inserted into the content. Google's Postini filters detected more than 11,000 variants of this spam during those two hours. Because this spam enabled spoofing of the recipient domain (meaning the "from" field was falsified), distribution lists were especially hard-hit by this attack.

Resurgence of image spam

One of the other trends we're watching closely is the sudden popularity of "image spam" – a form of spam that rose to prominence in 2007, before most anti-spam filters learned how to block it. It's simple stuff: basic email with advertising content, usually containing a related image. They can also include malicious links or content – and either way, the large file size of an image spam can place a heavy load on an email network.

An image spam email might look something like this:


Evidence of the resurgence in image spam can be seen in the graph below, which shows that the actual size of spam messages, measured in bytes, is back on the rise:

There are a couple of possible explanations for the resurgence in image spam, despite the fact that most spam filters out there have adapted to the technique. One theory is that this wave is designed to test the defenses of the different spam filters out there, so that spammers can do statistical analysis on what subject lines and content have the highest probability of success.

Another is that there may be some new players entering the spam game, following the McColo and 3FN takedowns, and these new players are opening with some well-tested techniques. Either way, we're watching this trend and will share insights as we gain them in the weeks and months ahead.
Spike in payload viruses

June was also an active month for viruses sent as email attachments, otherwise known as "payload viruses." Volumes rose to their highest level in almost two years as spammers returned to yet another tried-and-true technique to expand their botnets.

As you can see in the chart below, June's activity is almost as high as the two-month payload virus surge seen in Q3'07. Fortunately, Google's Postini zero-hour heuristics detected this uprise early and kept payload attacks in the cloud and away from users' email networks.


Everything old might be new again

In summary, Q2'09 saw continued unpredictability and the resurgence of old-style spam attacks. Are spammers finally running out of original ideas? And if so, like Hollywood, are we now starting to see spam "remakes," based on originals of a few years ago? And what are spammers looking to accomplish as they unleash these remakes? Only time will tell.

For more information on how Google email security services, powered by Postini, can help your organization provide better spam protection and take a load off your network by halting spam in the cloud, visit www.google.com/postini.

Posted by Amanda Kleha, Google message security and archiving team

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Editor's Note: We're pleased to welcome Ron Brister, Senior Manager of Global IT Operations, and Arron Privatsky, System Administrator, of Serena Software as our guest bloggers today. Serena Software, a leading provider of software to accelerate application development, helps IT departments keep pace with the demands of the businesses they support. Serena’s tools automate software development processes and help business users create powerful mashups – without requiring any coding. Serena is a privately owned company with 29 offices in 14 countries and 800 employees. Founded more than 25 years ago, Serena has more than 15,000 customers including 96 of the Fortune 100.

Serena Software recently selected Google Apps Premier Edition for its messaging and collaboration needs, saving more than $750,000 and countless IT hours. Members of Serena Software will be on hand next Thursday, June 18, to talk about that experience in a live webcast. Register here.

My name is Ron Brister, and I’m Senior Manager of Global IT Operations at Serena Software. I'm here with Arron Privatsky, System Administrator for Serena. Serena is a leading provider of software to accelerate application development. Because we are software experts, it’s no surprise that we are always looking for the best solutions.

For us, it was becoming increasingly clear that our messaging infrastructure was lacking. Inbox storage space was a constant complaint. Server maintenance was extremely time-consuming, and backups were inconsistent. Then we found that – calculating additional licenses of Microsoft Exchange, client access licenses for users, disaster recovery software, and additional disk storage space to increase mailbox quotas to 1.5GB – staying with our existing provider would have cost us upwards of $1 million. That was a nearly impossible number to justify with executives.

We thought about replacing our on-premise solution, but to tell the truth, we were skeptical. I, personally, had been a Microsoft admin for 15 years, and Microsoft technologies were ingrained in my thought processes. But Google Apps provided many pluses: Gmail, Google’s Postini messaging security software and 25 GB of mailbox space, as well as greater uptime and 24/7 phone support.

Apps also offered reliable mobile access and included other Google productivity and collaboration applications, such as Google Docs for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations – all at $50 per user per year. The cost savings would amount to a whopping $750,000 per year. All this added up to the ability to save the company money and to transition to a more advanced, flexible infrastructure.

Once we selected Google Apps, we decided on a “Big Bang” migration. Employees would switch over on their own, migrating their old emails to Gmail if they chose to, or simply starting with a clean inbox. We did not support local email clients, opting to support only the Gmail web interface through Mozilla Firefox to best accommodate the company's mixed Linux, Mac and PC environment.

We also enlisted four small groups of early adopters who would try the Google solution first, and then assist IT and support their peers during the full-scale migration. We used a lot of Google’s existing support documents to help us during the migration.

The overall move to Google Apps took all of six hours. We waited for the phones to ring, but all we heard was silence – in fact, we sat there playing meebo for quite a while – and still, nothing happened. We cut the cord all in one stroke to avoid the hassle of living in two environments at once. We made the switch globally, all in one day – and, due to the advantages of this cloud computing solution, we’ve never looked back.

I expect that what I am saying is probably setting off a lot of questions in your head. We welcome you to join us for a live webcast to learn more:


Thursday, June 18, 2009
1:00 p.m. EDT / 10:00 a.m PDT / 5:00 p.m. GMT

We'll give you more details and take questions on our recent switch to Google Apps. We hope that you'll join us.


Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps team

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