Back in February we announced a contest challenging our customers to show us their Google Search Appliances and share a picture of where their yellow GSA boxes fit into their organizations. The prize? Tickets to the upcoming upcoming Google IO conference, to be held in San Francisco on May 27-28. We had some great entries – but when we saw this picture, from the Web Dev team at Atlanta'sWellStar Health System, we knew we had a winner.



WellStar's GSA keeps "operations" running smoothly

Congrats to Rob and the Web team at WellStar in Atlanta, Georgia. Here's their story:

Before GSA: With five premier hospitals in the Northwest suburbs of Atlanta, 11,000 employees and the largest nonacademic Physicians Group in the State,WellStar Health System has become one of the biggest not-for-profit health care systems in the Southeast. As WellStar grew, it became increasingly difficult for folks to find our stuff. WellStar’s intranet houses a physician portal containing content from over 70 different clinical sites – along with unique portals for 60+ supporting enterprise departments – andeveryone's generic material permeated our content management systems (CMS ). Employee and patient volumes intensified, organically creating a nightmare of a file library, and it seemed that our system needed 20CCs of Findability Stat! The challenge was to efficiently serve everyone at once while minimizing the impact on our own busy environment.

After GSA: Our previous intranet search limited employees to each of our internal .Net portals, meaning employees would have to be sifting through the right haystack to find a specific needle, which gave them a whopping 1.4% chance of starting in the right place. This all changed with the GSA. The GSA crawls from a central location and provides a single URL to hit when employees need fast results. Its active replacement of cached, dead-end links diminishes wasted search time, and the “Text Only” document display feature is an essential business asset for clinical employees without specific readers.

After purchasing the GSA and performing a minimal setup, our team found that the appliance was pulling several hundred rabbits out of its hat every eight hours. It was finding the one-of-a-kind policy, form, safety, and class information details from long forgotten documents – all without requiring someone to organize the material. Thin-air content was rediscovered, removed, and replaced with current information, and incoming help calls starting with “Where do I find…” have been eliminated.

We had a few other standouts. Here's one.



Two GSAs were all it took to change the "State" of search

Meet Chris with the State of Missouri in Jefferson City, Missouri.

Before GSA: The State of Missouri is made up of 16 executive agencies and various other non-executive agencies, boards and commissions. Prior to the purchasing the GSA, the state was simply a collection of data silos that provided no unified search for our citizens or the companies who wanted to do business with us. The bottom line: it was difficult (at best) for tax-paying citizens or businesses to find the information that they needed on the various State of Missouri web sites.

After GSA: After implementing the GSA as a centrally-managed device, we made search available to all of our executive agencies as well as to our other agencies, boards, and commissions. The GSA allowed us to index all the relevant information from across all of these entities and provide a unified search option to our citizens. The flexibility of the device also allowed each of the agencies to integrate the search onto their unique agency site and further refine the search capabilities they offered to their taxpaying customers. Not only have the search capabilities greatly increased, from the citizen’s perspective, the data silos are no longer there and results across each agency are much more relevant.

From all of us at Google: thanks, WellStar and State of Missouri.

In the next few weeks we will be releasing their full case studies and if you are interested in knowing how other customers are using their GSAs we have more success stories here. Thanks for your participation and don't forget to register for I/O. Congrats again to the winners!

Posted by Dave Kim, Google Enterprise search team

Recent commentary on channel growth around cloud computing and the emerging business scenarios for trusted IT advisors are good examples of the growing momentum around the ecosystem of channel partners like consultants, resellers and developers pursuing new models for doing business in the cloud. We're excited to share details of what we're seeing and are we're pleased to offer two ways to learn more about the benefits of cloud computing.

For solutions providers, developers, and resellers. Co-hosted by Google and salesforce.com, this live discussion is aimed at helping channel partners understand the business change that cloud computing drives, and how to build the services that help customers benefit from these changes. Participants can expect to gain a fuller understanding of what cloud computing is, how it transforms the way that organizations think about IT, and how to make the most of the opportunity "in the cloud" for business growth and development.

Partner with Google and Salesforce.com

Wednesday, April 29
10:00 a.m. PDT / 1:00 p.m. EDT

For organizations thinking of moving to a cloud platform for business productivity. We're participating with Daston Corporation, a Google Apps Authorized Reseller, to showcase Google Apps, Google's enterprise-ready communication and collaboration tools. This live webinar will feature an overview of Google Apps, and how the expertise of resellers like Daston can help organizations make the transition from traditional platforms to IT in the cloud.

Google Apps – a new way of communicating and collaborating
Wednesday, May 6
11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT

Posted by Maureen Bradford, Google Partner team

Listening to Google Apps admins talk – with us and with each other – made it clear: as IT professionals, admins wanted a way to connect online somewhere in the Google environment. We heard a clear call for a gathering place, or community – a meeting point where admins could meet one another, identify each other by business type or geography, discuss topics unique to their roles, and share learning and best practices in a way that helped in their professional roles.

A few weeks ago we held our first Google Apps Education Customer Summit here at the Googleplex (our Mountain View main campus), where we hosted 58 of the newest members in our Education Edition family. These customers represented 27 universities, community colleges, and K-12 schools from across the U.S. who recently moved over to Google Apps Education Edition. This Education Customer Summit provided these schools an opportunity to network with each other, hear from product specialists, and meet other customers who have been using Google Apps since the early days.

We kept the participants busy all day with many lively sessions kicking off with a customer panel that included Columbus State University, Boise State University, and San Mateo Community College District providing insights into Google Apps successes on their respective campuses.

Next, product managers and engineers led a discussion about products and features, answering a range of audience questions. This let everyone learn about some new features in detail, including improved contact sharing, the updated start page in Sites, and the new reporting in the control panel.

We hope this day was as fun and valuable for the customers as it was for us, and enabled the school representatives to go back to campus with new contacts and ideas about how to make the most of Google Apps for their students, staff, and faculty. Check out the pictures below, and maybe we'll see you at the next Summit.

The Google I/O Developer Conference is coming up on May 27 – 28, 2009 in San Francisco, California, and we want to see you there. Google I/O is a two-day developer gathering where you can speak directly with Google's engineering and web development teams, and learn about the products, tools and techniques which are moving the web forward as a platform.


Visit the Google I/O website to learn more (search for "enterprise" to find relevant sessions) and to register, and be sure to make use of the "early bird" discount, available to all who register before May 2.

We hope to see you there.

Posted by Chris Kelly, Google Enterprise Partners team

Every once in a while, we invite members of the developer community to visit Mountain View campus to talk shop, share news, and eat Google'sS'mores. We call these events "Google Campfire One," and we held a lively one tonight.

At tonight's Campfire One we announced some developer tools that we think will be pretty interesting to businesses: a new release of Google App Engine and the Google Secure Data Connector (SDC). Enterprise developers and IT professionals have been asking for tools like these to add custom applications to Google Apps and to connect Google Apps with their existing IT systems.

App Engine already lets Google Apps customers build apps just for their users. The new features make it even easier to build and deploy business apps that integrate with Google Apps, and SDC gives enterprises a way to help connect their firewalled data to their Google Apps domain. Ten other companies, including Oracle™ and IBM™, participated in tonight's Campfire One to announce new apps and services incorporating these tools.

Cron, Java^TM, and GWT for App Engine


We also announced an early look at App Engine's support for the Java language. We made this standards-based so Java developers can build apps with familiar APIs and move them to other application servers if the need arises. In fact, tonight's Campfire showcased IBM's demo of moving an app to IBM Websphere with just a few code changes (we're giving 10,000 interested developers an early look at our Java language support, so test it out and send feedback).

We've also integrated App Engine with the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and the Eclipse IDE so developers will be able write their apps from end-to-end in the Java language in a single IDE. During the Campfire, Appirio™, a Google Apps solution provider, showed how App Engine plus GWT and the Google Visualization API let them quickly write and deploy a complete recruiting management app without setting up servers or dealing with cross-browser compatibility.

Encrypted connection to firewalled data

We also talked about giving developers who work on cloud-based business apps access to behind-the-firewall data – previously a difficult issue to tackle. To help solve this problem, we built the Google Secure Data Connector (SDC), a downloadable agent which lets IT admins connect Google Apps to resources behind the firewall.

Today, you can use SDC with gadgets in Google Sites, App Engine applications, and spreadsheets in Google Docs. As part of tonight's event, Oracle showed how Oracle CRM gadgets will let their customers interact with sales and customer information from within Google Apps.

Several other companies announced support for SDC in their products tonight. Cast Iron Systems has added built-in support for SDC to their integration appliance, allowing Google Apps to integrate with hundreds of different systems through a point-and-click interface. Panorama Software has added support for SDC to their gadgets, allowing you to visualize and analyze business data right in the browser. ThoughtWorks™, Cloud Sherpas™, Sword Group™, Ping Identity™, and PivotLink™ also participated in this Campfire One event. You can learn more about their announcements on our Campfire One participants page.

You can visit Google Code to learn more about our developer tools, and if you're a developer, be sure to come to Google I/O in San Francisco, California, on May 27-28th.

By the way, we shared the highlights of tonight's Campfire real-time on Twitter. Visit us there at http://twitter.com/googleatwork to see the current stream.

Posted by Brandon Nutter, Engineering Manager

Java is a trademark or registered trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

It's important for business users to have fast, easy access to their email and calendars when they're on the go – even when cell phone reception is limited. That's why we're happy to tell you about new speed and functionality improvements for Gmail and for Google Calendar for the iPhone and for Android-powered devices. Click through the links to read descriptions on the Google Mobile Blog, and to watch a video overviewing the new features.

Posted by by Debbie Leight, Google Apps team

Editor's Note: There's never dull moment in the world of online security. Threat patterns evolve in volume, sophistication, and the types of exploits and sources. News about the recent Conficker virus got us talking with Scott Petry, founder of Postini (original developers of Google's suite of security and archiving services), and Wolfgang Kadek, CTO of Qualys. Their comments follow. To learn more about trends in spam, hacking, and ways of keeping email networks safe, join Google and Qualys in an on-line conversation, "In Cloud We Trust," on April 16, where we'll discuss these topics live.

Q: Ten years ago, packaged software was the norm. Yet Postini built a hosted service - what we today call cloud computing. Why did you drive a cloud architecture for Postini?

Scott: We believed that by offering a service infrastructure we could prove a lower TCO than an on-premise alternative. With that service infrastructure aggregating data, we'd also have insight into a wider sample of data, thus providing a more effective solution.

Q: How did the idea of having a "perimeter protection service" to protect email networks in the cloud first evolve? Is the right model for the future?

Scott: Postini's innovation was to see SMTP as an integration API and DNS as a way to access traffic, thus putting us "upstream" of the customers' infrastructure, alleviating integration challenges and stopping problems before they reached the firewall. We saw this as better for a number of reasons.

Email servers have a long shelf life, and customers typically add incrementally to their system, rather than get a complete replacement. This causes a management problem for IT, creating a heterogeneous environment into which they must layer in security and compliance services.

We never saw ourselves as just an anti-spam company, so we built infrastructure that allowed a business rule to be configured as tightly as a content string for a single user. This design decision is inherently linked to the cloud. It allows us to deliver a better anti-spam solution, and also expand into content compliance areas.

Q. Wolfgang, you've been keeping a tight watch on the latest vulnerabilities impacting networks worldwide via your Laws of Vulnerabilities research. What are some of the trends you're seeing in 2009?

Wolfgang: Our research into vulnerability trends has shown that the industry overall did not improve significantly its ability to address security problems in a timely manner At the same time attackers have been getting faster and more sophisticated. Proactive security by maintaining systems updated with the latest patches is the cheapest of all security tools, nevertheless it has not grown in the way I would have hoped.

The first three months of 2009 have been a great example. We've seen Conficker infect millions of machines. The simplest way of preventing the outbreak would have been to preventively apply a patch, if available, to stop the worm. But figuring out such patches takes time. In contrast to worms of the past which often gave us months to react, Conficker activated only two weeks after the official release of the patch, clearly showing that attackers have become faster in their timing. It's getting tougher for patches to keep up.

Q: As network security budgets continue to tighten, how can "security as a service" be advantageous to users?

Wolfgang: SaaS solutions have the advantage that they have minimal setup and are immediately usable. Companies can get their feet wet with a small pilot, show success, and then grow it at their own pace to address larger needs. Organizations of any size can take advantage of the functionality and the predictable steady cost of cloud solutions, while at the same time enjoying the usability brought through constant improvements.

Scott: Agreed. As IT faces more pressure from a changing threat landscape and increased compliance mandates, the cloud model gives maximum leverage to IT – always important, but especially in this economic climate.

Register here for "In Cloud we Trust"

Thursday, April 16, 2009 1:00 p.m. EST / 10:00 a.m. PST

Posted by Sundar Raghavan, Google security and archiving team