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Posted by Ian Kilpatrick, Google Drive Engineer

(Cross-posted on the Google Drive Blog.)

It may sound obvious, but sometimes the best way to find something is to start looking. Beginning today, Google Drive will let you quickly preview more than 30 file types and quickly flip between files until you find the one you want.

You’ll see the new preview automatically if you open a photo, video, or PDF. To see a preview of a Google document, right-click on the file name and select “preview.” Once the preview window is open, you can click on the arrows on either side to flip to other files. And right from within the preview, you can watch video files or scroll through multi-page documents.


You can select and copy text from the preview -- even for a PDF or Microsoft Word document -- or use the zoom buttons to see a file in more detail. Each file preview also gives you one-click access to share, download, print or open a file for editing.


This feature will roll out over the next few days to Rapid Release customers.

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Posted by Carl Haverl, Software Engineer

We’re always listening to your ideas about features you’d like to see in Google Apps, and many of you have asked for a better way to track your email communications in Gmail. Consider your message to us delivered: today we’re introducing read receipts as an optional feature for Google Apps for Business and Google Apps for Government accounts.

Read receipts allow senders to monitor the status of the messages they send and allow recipients to acknowledge receipt of mail. Let’s say John works in sourcing for his company and wants to make sure that his suppliers receive his purchase orders. As he sends each one out, John can request a receipt and later check that the recipients have received the orders. Conversely, if someone sends John a message with a request for receipt, Gmail can send a receipt to the sender when John opens the message. Read receipts work both internally within your organization and externally, so they can help improve communications with customers and partners.


Google Apps admins can now log in to the control panel to enable read receipts for their domain. Administrators can choose whether users need to manually approve receipts or whether receipts can be sent automatically. Automatic receipts can only be sent to users within the same domain and to a list of email addresses defined by the administrator.

To activate read receipts, log in to the administrative control panel of your Google Apps for Business or Government account and look for “Email read receipts” on the Settings page for email. For more information, please see our Help Center. As always, we welcome your feedback in the comments below.

Update: Read receipts is now also available as an optional feature with Google Apps for Education.
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As we near the end of the March, we want to highlight some of the many recent updates made to Google Docs. You’ve already heard about Discussions in Google Docs, which introduced a better way to provide document feedback. Here are some of the other features that have been released in Google Docs over the past couple months:
  • Filter your data in spreadsheets: We made it easier to analyze and view your data with the addition of filtering in Google spreadsheets. Applying a filter to a set of data can help you quickly narrow down the data set to find the data you need. By selecting a data set, you can filter and sort amongst many rows at once.
  • 12 new file formats in the Google Docs Viewer: The Google Docs Viewer is used by millions of people every day to quickly view PDFs, Microsoft Word documents and PowerPoint presentations online. Not only is viewing files in your browser far more secure than downloading and opening them locally, but it also saves time and doesn’t clutter up your hard-drive with unwanted files. We recently added support for:

    • Microsoft Excel (.XLS and .XLSX)
    • Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 / 2010 (.PPTX)
    • Apple Pages (.PAGES)
    • Adobe Illustrator (.AI)
    • Adobe Photoshop (.PSD)
    • Autodesk AutoCad (.DXF)
    • Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG)
    • PostScript (.EPS, .PS)
    • TrueType (.TTF)
    • XML Paper Specification (.XPS)

  • Multiple chart ranges and hidden sheets in Spreadsheets: We added the ability to chart multiple ranges and hide sheets in Google spreadsheets. In charts, you can now add extra ranges by clicking on “Select ranges...” and “add another range.” You can also manually add new ranges separated by commas. In addition, we introduced the ability to hide your sheets. You can now click on a sheet tab and select “hide sheet” to remove a sheet from view.
  • Revisions, presence, and format painter in Drawings: We’re making it easier to work together in drawings. First, we’ve added presence highlights around shapes so you can keep track of which object each person is editing. Second, we added revision history which lets you see who made which change as well as go back to previous versions. Third, the new format painter lets you choose a source shape, press the format painter icon to copy its formatting, and then click on another shape to apply that formatting to the destination shape.

  • Quick starring and improved sharing invitations: Now you can star documents while editing them. Once a doc is starred, you’ll be able to find the doc by clicking on the starred link in your document list. We’ve also updated document sharing so that when you share a doc with others, all new collaborators are now included on the email.
  • Cloud printing on the go: now you can print from your smartphone with Google Cloud Print for mobile documents and Gmail for mobile. Just open a document in Google Docs or an email in Gmail in your mobile browser and choose “Print” from the dropdown menu in the top right corner. To get started, you’ll need to connect your printer to Google Cloud Print.
As with all updates in Google Docs, users get access to new features each time they open their browsers, and improvements roll out to customers with no need for administrators to manage patches or install software. Stay tuned for more updates to Google Docs.

Posted by Jeff Harris, Product Manager, Google Docs
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Update: We're excited to announce that the new Gmail Contacts for Google Apps has launched for all Rapid Release users as of 4/7/11. Please continue to give us your feedback in the Comments below.

In our ever-connected world, working revolves around collaborating. It’s important to be able to quickly reach people in your network, speeding up the tasks you perform daily, like making a phone call or sending an email – whether you’re at your desk or on the go. To help with this, we’re rolling out an updated version of Contacts that makes it easier to use, organize and edit your work contacts in Gmail.

In addition to all of the improvements we made to Contacts for individual users, we’ve been hard at work on bringing additional, business-specific features to help you and your colleagues get in touch with contacts more easily. Now, you can:
  • Add new contact information that will default to “Work” instead of “Home” field types
  • View contact details from the domain directory together with the contact details that you’ve added yourself
  • Add contacts from the domain directory to your “My Contacts” list in a single click
  • Manage groups more easily by quickly adding email addresses to groups, and picking from a contact’s multiple email addresses to use on a group-by-group basis
  • Revert changes to your Contacts for up to 30 days in case you need to restore deleted or merged contacts, or undo an import

If you’re the Google Apps administrator for your organization, you can enable the new Contacts interface in Gmail for your users from the Service Settings > Contacts area of the next generation administrative control panel. It may take up to an hour for users to see the difference once you make the change.

Make collaboration easier today by switching to the new Gmail Contacts (and once you do, be sure to contact us with your feedback).

Posted by Sean Purcell, Product Manager, Google Contacts
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Over the last few years, saving money on an email solution has been the most common driver for companies switching from legacy on-premises systems to Google Apps. But customers aren’t just using Google Apps for email. They’re also adopting innovative teamwork tools like web-based documents, spreadsheets, presentations and project sites, and we now know the value of improved productivity by “going Google” is actually even larger than the substantial cost savings.

To quantify the complete value of Google Apps including collaboration and productivity benefits, we enlisted the help of Forrester Consulting to measure the “Total Economic Impact” that a typical company can expect over three years, moving from legacy on-premises infrastructure to Google’s web-based solution. After dozens of in-depth customer and stakeholder interviews and hundreds of survey responses from IT administrators and end-users, we're excited to share the research results, and we invite you to download and share Forrester's report.

The key findings of Forrester’s analysis bring the benefits of Google Apps into sharp focus. The following results are what a typical large customer with 18,000 employees and several offices around the world can experience by making the switch.
  • Over 300% ROI
    The return on investment of switching to Google Apps is 391%. (307% after adjusting for risk.) In plain English, for every dollar spent on Google Apps, the system pays back the initial investment and more than three more dollars in additional business value.

  • Dramatically improved productivity
    The value of improved productivity from Google Apps is even greater than costs saved by making the switch. Features like fast email search, integrated IM, message threading, great spam filtering, collaborative sites and real-time, multi-person collaboration in documents, spreadsheets and presentations all contribute to the productivity improvements quantified by Forrester.

  • Break-even under 7 months
    The break-even payback period of switching to Google Apps is very short – faster than seven months. After the investment quickly pays for itself, the productivity gains from Google Apps continue to grow year after year.

  • NPV over $10,000,000
    The risk-adjusted Net Present Value (NPV) of switching to Google Apps is over $10,000,000 for the typical large business. Productivity gains contribute over $7,000,000 to this amount.
Of course, both Google and Forrester strongly advise readers to conduct their own impact analysis when evaluating Google Apps, but this research solidifies what the Google Apps team has been hearing loud and clear from customers about the business benefits they’ve experienced. If you’re already using Google Apps, we’d love to hear your story too, and maybe even feature your organization in the future.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager
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Editor's note: Continuing our “Going Google Everywhere” series, we’ve invited Stijn Van Vreckem, Founder and Managing Director of XAOP, a small Belgium-based software development company specializing in content integration, to talk about a quick and easy way his company has utilized APIs with Google Apps Premier Edition. XAOP builds software solutions, information integration products and related services for the life sciences industry.

Learn more about other organizations that have gone Google on our community map.

Filling in timesheets is a task that needs to be performed monthly or weekly in most service-oriented organizations. For years, I used to write everything down in my notebook to keep track of things.

Because the XAOP team has grown to seven people in the last year – who are usually working in small teams of two or three developers – it became more and more difficult to manage the billing for different projects. It was time to look for a better, more transparent solution to keep track of everyone's time.

After some internal discussions, we introduced a timesheet process based on Google Calendar. We created a calendar in our Google Apps Premier environment for each billable project we want to track. These calendars are shared with the team members working on the project.

Each team member registers his or her activities by simply putting them on the correct project calendar. As a result, everybody on the team can see who is working on which task in the project. At the end of the month, all invoices are created based on the activities of the project calendar.


Users track their time using project calendars in Google Apps.

Now, generating timesheet reports and invoices for clients is easy. Here’s how it works:
  • A background Ruby application connects each Google Calendar with the Google Data API to collect the activities.
  • The Ruby application then generates a monthly PDF report of the project calendars.
  • These reports provide a detailed overview of the activities for each person in the project.
The main disadvantage is that we need a lot of calendars, so cleanup is sometimes necessary. We also wish we could see who created which event so we could more easily manage larger projects. For example, you can see who created an event via the tooltip when you rollover it with the mouse, but this becomes difficult to read easily when more than 3 users fill in the timeslot on the same calendar. Therefore we implemented a convention on some projects to start the title with a person's initials.

But there are many advantages. We now have a lightweight timesheet application that lets everyone fill in their calendars when they have the time. The Google Calendar user interface is very simple and accessible for everybody. Freelancers or other external people working on XAOP projects can be added to the calendar of the project without complexity. This is a web-based solution that can be used via a PC or a mobile phone.

Today, XAOP team members don’t need to keep track of the projects. They only need to keep their calendars up to date. Invoices are now generated automatically and we can provide transparent reporting on each hour of work.

XAOP recently invested in new mobile phones and our time management solution worked without any changes. Because these HTC devices (Hero and Magic) integrate seamlessly with Google Apps, we can fill in our timesheets from anywhere.

Posted by Serena Satyasai, the Google Apps team

Do you have an informative and fun Google Apps story to share? Please submit it here.
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Editor’s Note: We launched our Google Apps community map in March 2010, and have since received thousands of Gone Google stories from organizations around the world. We’ll be showcasing some of these stories in a new series of blog posts, Going Google Everywhere.

Today we welcome Mark Goble, COO of Goble & Associates, an integrated marketing agency servicing the healthcare industry. Has your company “Gone Google” and interested in sharing your story? Add your marker to the map!

Goble & Associates is a 27 year old global marketing agency with clients in the medical device, diagnostic, and pharmaceutical businesses. Our commitment to collaboration and communication has been the cornerstone of our success, with client relationships that average over eight years, which is rare in our business. As our agency has doubled in size over the past four years, our IT resources were increasingly consumed with managing our outdated systems, and we needed solutions that would enable us to continue to deliver the same levels of customer service that our clients had come to expect.

Our IT challenges were considerable. Our expansion to nearly 100 employees – including offices in Chicago and San Diego, plus mobile workers – had left us without a central calendaring system, and our in-house email support was costly and time consuming to maintain. When we added mobile access by rolling out iPhones to more than 20 employees, we realized our infrastructure was unable to support mobile solutions, and we knew it was time for a change.

Enter Google Apps. We migrated to Apps in early 2009, and have subsequently converted an additional organization we acquired. The results have exceeded our expectations. Six months after going Google, we saw an 80% reduction in IT issues related to email, while saving more than 23% in hardware costs. Additionally, we estimate our mobile efficiency has increased more than ten-fold.

While our initial pain points were focused on email and calendaring, we’ve experienced huge benefits from Docs and Sites. Docs has become the centerpiece of our daily communications regarding project status, and we’re actively using Google Sites to help manage our business, including a company-wide start page with integrated calendar and Twitter feed:


We’ve also found ways to utilize Sites to assist in our continued focus to be the best partner to our clients. We recently developed a Site to provide a potential client insight into our immersion and research process, which was instrumental in helping us prepare to win this business. Going Google has also reinvigorated our client-centric focus, as our IT team now has the resource to assist our development team in building new client solutions.

Using cloud-based solution like Google Apps has greatly enhanced our business operations; so much so that we’ve extended our cloud computing initiative to include Google Apps Marketplace providers such as TripIt. We eagerly await the adoption of new technologies like Google Wave that will continue to place Goble & Associates at the forefront of the technology and communications curve.


Posted by Colleen Horan, Google Enterprise team
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Editor’s Note: Rob Salvatore is CEO of Tongal, a cloud-based entertainment company. Tongal facilitates creativity in the cloud by crowdsourcing video content through Internet-based collaborations. The company marries its professional network of content creators to businesses that need video content. Tongal’s focus is on video advertising, music video, instructional video, and brand integrated short films. Customers include the New York Knicks and Kiva.org.

Our business is built on collaboration, and we wouldn’t be able to do this without the power of cloud computing. On average, each project at Tongal involves more than twenty separate contributors.

Thanks to Google Apps and SlideRocket – an integrated presentation app available on the Google Apps Marketplace – we’re no longer prisoners of desktop software and we're able to easily work across time zones and oceans.

Efficient & effective communications
For months we struggled with effective ways to share our high-definition video content. We’re dealing with very large files and it’s critical for us to exhibit and present our work online, not to mention the need to maintain the integrity and quality of the video. The combination of Google and SlideRocket made it possible for both us and our community to create, manage and share video files with a few simple clicks.
  • When users submit video content to a Tongal collaboration, Google converts it ad hoc. So, we're free of heavy conversion software licensing agreements and only pay for what we use, when we use it.
  • After the Tongal community and platform complete the video product, SlideRocket helps us show it off. We can easily embed the finished video product into our presentations without worrying about diminished video quality or file size.

SlideRocket has eliminated the need for us to burn videos and presentations to disks in order to send our content to customers and prospects. Plus, SlideRocket’s platform generates unique URLs for each presentation that we can immediately send to prospects via email without worrying about file size.

100% accurate, integrated information
Another benefit of working in the cloud is that we've linked our Google Docs and information from Google Analytics directly into our presentations, ensuring our slides are accurate and up-to-date every time the presentation is viewed. When we make a change to our Google Spreadsheet, that change is immediately reflected in our SlideRocket presentation. This saves us a lot of “busy work” updating our marketing presentations. As a start-up, every employee and each hour is important, and any application that saves us time and effort is invaluable.


Insight and analytics lead to shorter sales cycles
Not only did SlideRocket solve our technical issues, it also brought insight and intelligence about our customer’s behavior through the statistics and analytics that we would not be able to get with any other application. This has significantly shortened our sales cycle, and help us target our efforts.

For example, if one potential customer spends a lot of time on a slide about cost, we know that might be an issue for them. If another spends time on a slide that showcases a particular video, we know that their interest is truly piqued. If they spend no time at all – well, we can take a hint...

The viewership statistics and analytics that SlideRocket provides for each presentation have a direct effect on the success of our business. We’re gaining valuable insight into our customers’ experience with the content we’ve developed. Not to mention the fact that we can secure our presentations with password protection, especially if we’re dealing with sensitive content. SlideRocket is the only presentation solution out there that offers this kind of intelligence and control.


Posted by Chris Kelly, the Google Apps Partner team

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Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is notable technology expert and futurist Geoffrey Moore. He is an author, consultant, and venture capital partner, with a background in English literature. He is the author of Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, The Gorilla Game (with co-authors Tom Kippola and Paul Johnson), and most recently Living on the Fault Line, which deals with a set of management or investor challenges posed by fast-changing, technology-enabled markets.

Geoffrey is a frequent contributor to business periodicals and a speaker at industry conferences. He is also a venture partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, providing strategy advice and consulting services across MDV's entire portfolio of early-stage investments.
Please join Geoffrey this week at a live webcast this Thursday, May 27, at 2:00 p.m. EDT, 12:00 noon CDT, or 11:00 a.m. PDT. Register today.

Tectonic shifts are occurring in today’s enterprise IT environment, powered by mega-forces such as globalization and commoditization—and also driven by consumer technologies like social networking, video, and mobile devices. In enterprise IT, static databases and servers no longer suffice, and it really makes no sense to build another data center.

So what’s next? How do you thrive in the brave new world of enterprise IT?

Many enterprises are holding their own by consolidating, virtualizing, and attempting to do more with less. But over the next few years, enterprise IT will have to adapt more dramatically, and do so quickly and nimbly. Whether dealing with huge volumes of transactions in a business-to-consumer environment or handling lower-volume, more complex operations in a business-to-business situation, enterprise IT professionals must understand that consumer technologies are now in the driver’s seat.

Fortunately, there are many insights and tools you can use to guide your infrastructure in the right direction. By making shifts in your IT strategies, you have the opportunity to increase profit margins while providing advanced services and systems that are truly user-centric, beneficial to the business and more secure than ever.

Join me in a lively discussion to share insights and actionable tips about how to turn your IT challenges into competitive advantages and thrive in an era of disruptive yet ultimately beneficial technology change.

Geoffrey Moore

Geoffrey Moore on the New Face of Enterprise IT
Thursday, May 27, 2010
11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT



Posted by Serena Satyasai, the Google Apps team

Do you have an informative and fun Google Apps story to share? Please submit it here.
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Editor's Note: Tom Hippensteel is the Vice President for LiquidConcrete, a medium-sized Seattle-based manufacturer of high-performance concrete coatings and flooring systems for industrial and transportation markets. LiquidConcrete relies on Google Apps for email, calendar, and document collaboration, and on Smartsheet, an integrated app from the Google Apps Marketplace, for online project management, general work management, and team collaboration.

Smartsheet's integration with Google Apps enables businesses to transform the work they routinely track in spreadsheets into a complete solution for managing business operations. Smartsheet currently offers three versions in the Google Apps Marketplace: online project management, sales pipeline management, and crowdsourcing.

Below, Tom explains a bit about LiquidConcrete and the steps they took to get the entire business – from the front office to the warehouse – to operate in the cloud.

To learn more about LiquidConcrete's success with Google Apps and Smartsheet, please join us for a webinar on Tuesday, May 11 at 11:00 a.m. PDT.

We win business because we have great products, and because we run a lean operation that differentiates on quick turnaround of custom jobs with high levels of customer service. Everything about our operation is focused on efficiency, so we’re always looking for software solutions that fit that model. We’ve had successes and setbacks in getting our operations into the cloud in a way that works for all of our employees. We needed tools that "just work the way that we work."

We use Quickbooks for accounting and have had great success with Google Apps for email and calendar, but had trouble finding a tool that combined the ease of use, power and flexibility we needed to manage the rest of our operations. We tried various CRM, ERP and manufacturing solutions but they made us work in a certain way and were difficult to use – people just went back to how they were doing it before.

Then we found Smartsheet, a cloud-based project management tool. It was already integrated with Google Apps, and as we began deploying it more broadly, made Google Docs much more useful. Smartsheet and Google Apps are the only tools that have been readily adopted across our whole company, all the way out to the guys on the warehouse floor.

Here’s how we use them:

Project & task management We started tracking various projects and shared task lists in Smartsheet. User adoption was not a problem and the ability to launch Smartsheet from Gmail (the first app we open every morning) might sound simple, but it was a big win. Most of us check into Smartsheet dozens of times per day and we all have it added to the first screen on our iPhones.

Order-to-ship process We then realized that Smartsheet and Gmail could help with our order entry and shipping process. It was easy to set up and quickly adopted by reps on the phones with customers as well as people in the factory and at the warehouse. Here's our new streamlined process:

1. New orders are entered in a Smartsheet with the packing slip attached to the order and special instructions added as discussion notes


2. The people at the warehouse are automatically notified by Smartsheet (via Gmail on their iPhone) that a new order needs to be shipped


3. They access Smartsheet from their email, download the packing slip and prep the order

4. Once the order is shipped, they fill out the "tracking number" field for that order in Smartsheet and change the dropdown status from "waiting" to "shipped"

5. The right people receive a Smartsheet notification that a new order has been shipped with the tracking number available


Inventory tracking We also track raw and finished goods inventory in Smartsheet, giving salespeople instant access to the latest information online or via their iPhone.

Sales pipeline We have recently started using Smartsheet to manage the sales pipeline. It's been great to have all of our client projects and potential leads tracked in one place with their relevant documents attached to their record. We have instant status updates, forecast amounts and recent call notes at our fingertips and use reminders to make sure follow up happens.

Specification document management Since we are able to easily attach Google Docs to our Smartsheets, we decided to go forward with converting hundreds of specification documents into Google Docs. Google Docs gives us collaborative writing and review to get the specifications right, and Smartsheet organizes them conveniently right inside the project workflow. Accessing files directly from our sales, inventory and order processing sheets has been a big productivity win.


Smartsheet and Google Apps are changing the way our company communicates. Our CEO loves it because he gets an update on order status or a key customer in real time. Our reps love it because they can quickly pull up an order while on the phone with a customer and give an instant answer without waiting for someone at the warehouse to call them back. This saves us a tremendous amount of time.

The two keys for us are ease of use and the flexibility, and we've yet to come across a type of work that can't be managed in Smartsheet and Google Apps. We also love that it's a fraction of the cost of many of the other solutions we've looked at and we don't have to hire expensive consultants to customize it.

Bottom line is that we serve our customers better than bigger competitors because we're nimble and agile, and we feel the same way about Smartsheet and Google Apps.

Tom Hippensteel, VP, LiquidConcrete

Join Tom and the Smartsheet team for a webinar to learn more about this customer success story. This online discussion will include a question and answer session.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010
11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT

You can watch it at work here:


To learn more about Smartsheet's experience selling their app in the Google Apps Marketplace, please read their post on the Google Apps Developer Blog. To learn even more about Smartsheet, check out their Google Apps Marketplace listing.

Posted by Chris Kelly, Google Apps Marketplace team


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Picture this: you're working on a new project with your team. You ask your IT admin to create a new group that includes all of your team members, keeping in mind that you must ask them to update the group every time people join or leave the group. Maybe you're even wishing that (a) you had a secure, central place to manage this group and communicate with it, and (b) you could easily search group archives for information somewhere other than your inbox.

That's when your admin gives you the good news: creating, managing and sharing with groups just got a whole lot easier. Today, Google Apps is giving business and school IT administrators the ability to let users create, manage and collaborate in groups without needing IT help. This launch is a major expansion to the mailing list functionality and content sharing we released earlier this year.

The following Google Groups features are now included in Google Apps Premier and Education Editions:
  • Fast set-up. Employees and students can now create collaborative groups instantly without burdening IT, and manage the group settings to fit their needs.
  • Searchable archives. Group discussions are archived by default, allowing users to easily search and view past and present discussions via the web.
  • Sharing with a group. Once a group is set up, employees and students can easily share a document, spreadsheet, presentation, shared folder, site, calendar, or video with that group. No need to type in individual email address manually, or remember who joined or left the group. Plus, the shared items will only be accessible by the appropriate people, even as people join and leave the group.
  • Reply on behalf of a group. In addition to communicating via email or the web interface, the new functionality lets group managers send a message on behalf of a group.
  • IT capabilities. IT administrators still manage if and how users can create groups from the administrative control panel.


Google Apps Premier and Education Edition administrators can now enable the new groups functionality from the control panel by enabling the "user-managed groups" service. You can read more about this announcement on the Official Google Blog. Google Groups will be rolling out to Google Apps Premier and Education Edition domains over the next day, so if you don't notice these features right now, you should see them soon.

We're always developing new features to help you get your job done faster and more efficiently with Google Apps. Stay tuned to this blog for the latest updates as new features continue to come your way, or subscribe to our Google Apps update feed and get the news as it happens.

Posted by Shimrit Ben-Yair, Product Manager
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Finding your business information within Google Docs should be as easy as finding information on google.com. To meet that goal, over the next few days, we will be enabling new search features in Google Docs that provides better relevancy as well support for stemming and synonyms.

Sort by relevance. The first change is the addition of relevance ranking in Docs search results. Until now, when you searched for a document, spreadsheet, or presentation, results were sorted by "last modified" date.

Now, search in Google Docs will look at various "signals", including whether you've authored a document, whether they've been explicitly shared with you, and other factors to present the most relevant items at the top of your results list. This personalization improves search across shared files, and each user gets the results that are most relevant for them.

Adding to this personalized approach, we've also added a new menu on the right side of the toolbar to let you view, and fine-tune, your search results by "Relevance," "Starred," or "Last Modified" results.

Stemming and synonyms. Search in Google Docs now also includes automatic stemming and synonyms, so that your results are good even if your typing is off. If you search for "meeting note," results will include a few variations of those words, including "meeting notes" (which is what you probably meant to type).

Posted by Balazs Racz and Liviu Panait, Software Engineers, Google Apps Search


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Do you know how much your email system is costing you? More than just the necessary hardware and software systems, email also requires substantial time and money for maintenance and upkeep. In-house email calls for patches, precautions to maintain high availability and disaster recovery, and the never-ending work it takes to secure and protect email from spam, phishing, and malware.

In a September 2009 study, Osterman Research found that decision makers typically underestimate the cost of providing messaging services. According to Osterman, one-quarter of decision makers believe that their organizations spend less than $10 per seat per month to provide messaging services, while another one-third believe they spend anywhere from $10 to $15 per seat per month – but this cost estimate leaves out several important factors, particularly maintenance.

The research firm also found that the use of cloud-based email can allow organizations to focus more on their core business rather than devote resources to managing the messaging infrastructure.

Another analyst firm, Forrester Research, found that for a 15,000-person firm requiring archiving, the fully loaded cost of on-premise email was $25.18 per user per month compared to a cost of $8.47 for Google Apps.

But it's not all about cost savings – you need more than just a cheaper messaging solution. You also want one that can help your workforce achieve more. Moving to the cloud and Google Apps can help you streamline your IT infrastructure and provide a platform for innovation and increased employee satisfaction.

On October 8, join us for a live webcast as Google Apps expert, Rhonda Stites, walks through a simple financial model that evaluates the savings in adopting Google Apps. You will hear about real customer experiences, get your questions answered and have the tools you need to bring substantial value to your organization.

Register now to learn more about the potential cost savings for your organization.

Save Money with Cloud Computing and Google Apps
Thursday, October 8, 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

*Note: The pricing and features available in each architecture vary by provider. Download the full independent research report, “Should Your Email Live In The Cloud? A Comparative Cost Analysis,” Forrester Research, Inc., January 2009.

Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our RSS feed or email alerts.

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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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Have you ever wanted to create a form that changes which questions to show next based on an answer received earlier in the form? The two features we launched today make that easy.

First, we've added one of the most requested features for forms: page breaks. Now it is easy to create a form with multiple pages by going to "Add item" and selecting "Page break."

We've also added another highly requested feature, logic branching. Once you've created a form with multiple pages, you can select "Go to page based on answer" to control the flow of your form based on the user's answers. For example, you can create a form asking for feedback on your product's new features.

To see both of these new features in action, fill out this feedback form.

Pagination and logic branching open up a whole new realm of possibilities. For example, you can create a product survey that asks a different set of questions based on whether someone has used the product before, a conference feedback form that branches based on the session someone attended, or a lead capture form that branches based on the customer's location. We hope you like these new Google form features.
Posted by Dan Ferrara and Jackie Tsay, Bold Practicum Interns, Google Apps team

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Colleen Horan, Google Maps API Premier Team
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We'd like to give you a heads-up on the recent announcement of the standalone version of a contact manager that lets you manage contact information across Google Docs, Google Calendar, and more – even if you don't use Gmail.

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


Debbie Leight, Google Apps team
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The Google I/O Developer Conference is coming up in just four weeks, on May 27 – 28, 2009 in San Francisco, California, so we thought now would be a good time to give you a sneak preview into some of the exciting Enterprise sessions we have planned.

Growing a SaaS-based services business reselling Google Apps
presented by Jeff Ragusa

Traditional value-added resellers are looking for ways to adapt their business for the world of cloud computing and the new Google Apps Authorized Reseller program provides the perfect framework for moving a services business in this direction. This session will focus on revenue opportunities for partners in this area ranging from assisting with SaaS product selection, to guidance on best practices, to custom application development, deployment & integration work, and managed services. Learn how Google's reseller program can enable service providers to take advantage of these opportunities through marketing, sales and technical tools and resources. See Jeff's video invitation to his session here.

Extending the Google Search Appliance to Crawl Valuable Data Behind the Firewell
presented by Nitin Mangtani

The Google Search Appliance is an on-premise hardware and software solution that brings Google search into the enterprise, so users can find content quickly and securely. In this session, learn how partners today are plugging enterprise data sources into the GSA through Connectors and displaying results using OneBox. See Nitin's video invitation to his session here.

OpenSocial in the Enterprise
presented by Chris Schalk, Mark Wentzel, Dave Carroll, Rich Manalang, and Tugdual Grall

With OpenSocial's proven global success in traditional social applications, the enterprise software community has begun to realize its potential and build innovative solutions that cater to the enterprise. Join us for a session centered on how the enterprise software development community is successfully bringing social concepts and technology into the enterprise. Key enterprise players will present and demonstrate how they've successfully used OpenSocial software to build new social solutions.

One last thing to remember: even though Google I/O will be primarily geared around breakout sessions, there will be a ton of other interesting stuff going on, including the Developer Sandbox, Fireside Chats, Tech Talks and After Hours Playground. Click here to register.

Posted by Chris Kelly, Google Apps Partners team
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Editor's Note: We are pleased to welcome Michael Cohn, CEO of Cloud Sherpas, as a guest blogger. Cloud Sherpas recently helped TechCFO, a Google Apps customer, build 3 types of Google Sites - a knowledge base, a customer workspace for collaboration, and a company intranet. For this project, Cloud Sherpas developed the Google Sites Bulk File Uploader and worked out a transition plan to meet TechCFO's collaboration needs, while planning for mail migration down the road. Along with TechCFO's Neal Miller, Michael will speak at a webinar – "How Google Apps Can Unlock Information, Increase Innovation, and Streamline IT, " next Thursday, March 26.

As a Google Apps Authorized Reseller and enterprise deployment partner, most of Cloud Sherpas' work focuses on helping clients migrate legacy enterprise messaging environments – Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange, Novell GroupWise, and others – to Google Apps. These migrations can take a long time depending upon the number of users, amount of data to be migrated and complexity of the legacy systems.

When Neal Miller, a Partner at TechCFO, came to one of our Google Apps demos, he had a more pressing problem to address: how to help the firm's partners located across the country more easily share their expertise as CFOs to benefit all of their clients. This problem was concerning to them since the company's prime asset is the partners' financial knowledge – unlocking its potential would pay dividends to TechCFO. TechCFO's solution at the time was to upload documents to the public folders in their hosted Exchange server – but it was really difficult to search for information. The partners needed something that was simpler to search, simpler to access and provided better performance. Google Sites provided us with the tool to address their needs. Additionally, we developed the Google Sites Bulk File Uploader to help manage the migration of 100's of documents into a unique nested Google Site format.
Google Sites has proven to be a tool that TechCFO can use for multiple purposes. Since the firm needs to share information and collaborate on financial strategy and planning with its clients, we also created Sites they could easily use with people outside their firewall. Each client Site provides a secure "workspace" that is only shared with that client since they may post financial models or legal documents to it. We also built TechCFO a company intranet to share HR information, announcements of new team members and other company news.

Working with TechCFO opened my eyes to another way that companies interested in Google Apps can get started – through Google's collaboration apps. Using Google Sites, TechCFO saved thousands of dollars over other collaboration options – and the firm will save even more when it moves over other applications such as Gmail and Google Calendar. Google Apps has opened up a mountain of possibilities – though sometimes you need the help of a Sherpa to get you to the top.
I invite you to join us on an online seminar exploring "How Google Apps Can Unlock Information, Increase Innovation, and Streamline IT, " where Neal and I will be on hand to show you examples of what we built, and how we did so. We'll also be happy to answer your questions online.

How Google Apps Can Unlock Information, Increase Innovation, and Streamline IT
Thursday, March 26, 2009
1:00 PM ET / 10:00 AM PT / 5:00 PM GMT
Register here.
Michael Cohn, CEO of Cloud Sherpas

Cloud Sherpas (www.CloudSherpas.com) is a cloud computing systems integrator and application developer. As a leading Google Enterprise partner, Cloud Sherpas helps organizations leverage Google Apps and Google App Engine to dramatically reduce IT expenses. The company delivers deployment, change management, support and development services to commercial, enterprise and educational institutions seeking to adopt cloud computing. Cloud Sherpas is a Google Apps Authorized Reseller and enterprise deployment partner. The company also supports cloud computing solutions from EMC/Decho, TriCipher and other best-in-breed vendors.

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps Team
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What if we told you that a 35 minute tutorial would teach you everything you needed about keeping your Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, or other on-premise email system safe from spam, malware, and viruses? We hope that you'd believe us, and that you'd give our new "Nuts to Bolts" on Google Message Security, powered by Postini, a view.

Don't have 35 minutes? We know the feeling. The topic overview (on the left) lets you pinpoint the subjects that interest you most.

This tutorial is just one from a growing library of information and resources in our Security and Archiving Learning Center. Find a moment to come in and look around.

Posted by Ellen Petry Leanse, Google Enterprise Team
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