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We know that businesses want website search solutions that are easy to implement, require little maintenance, and consistently return the best search results, without requiring time-consuming manual refinements. We also know that there can be times when businesses want additional control over the search they offer on their websites. That's when two important features in Google Site Search come in handy: "top result" and "date biasing." We want to highlight those today.

Google Site Search lets you customize search results in several ways to make sure items you want featured reach the top of the results list. With top result biasing, you can target the top search results from specific sections of your website (such as your product catalog or newsletter sign up page) to make sure visitors can find the most relevant pages within your site.

Site admins can also choose to organize search results based on the age of the documents with something we call date biasing. If you want to make sure that, say, a new PDF makes it to the top of the results rather than an outdated version, you can switch on date biasing and decide the level of influence (low, medium, high or maximum) so visitors can easily find the most recent version.

These are only two of the suite of customization features that are available with Google Site Search. To learn more, visit google.com/sitesearch.

Posted by Anna Bishop, Google Enterprise Search team
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Everyone benefits from cloud computing, though few stand to benefit more than government. The cloud helps agencies at all levels increase productivity, cut costs, keep pace with technology innovation, and become more open and transparent with their citizens.

That's why we were pleased to join other industry leaders today at NASA's Ames Research Center to hear Vivek Kundra, the CIO of the US Federal Government, announce the launch of Apps.gov. Apps.gov is an online storefront that makes it easy for federal agencies to browse and purchase cloud-based IT services from a variety of service providers, including Google. The cloud is coming of age, and we applaud the Obama Administration's efforts to ensure our government realizes its many advantages.

We also want to do our part to make it easier for government to transition to cloud computing. We recognize that government agencies have unique regulatory and compliance requirements for IT systems, and cloud computing is no exception. So we've invested a lot of time in understanding government's needs and how they relate to cloud computing. To help meet those requirements we're taking two important steps:
  • FISMA certification for Google Apps. In July, we announced our intent to secure certification for Google Apps to demonstrate compliance with the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), the law defining security requirements that must be met by all US Federal government information systems. Our FISMA process is nearing completion. We will submit a Certification and Accreditation (C&A) package to the U.S. Government before the end of this year. Upon review and approval of the Google Apps C&A package, agencies will be able to deploy Google Apps knowing that it is authorized to operate under FISMA.
  • Dedicated Google cloud for government customers in the US. Today, we're excited to announce our intent to create a government cloud, which we expect to become operational in 2010. Offering the same services and features as our existing commercial cloud (such as Google Apps), this dedicated environment within existing Google facilities in the US will serve the unique needs of US federal, state, and local governments. It is similar to a "Community Cloud" as defined by the National Institute for Science and Technology. The government cloud will allow Google to manage and meet additional government policy requirements beyond FISMA.
We look forward to working with governments across the country on these exciting initiatives in the months ahead.

Posted by Matthew Glotzbach, Director, Product Management, Google Enterprise
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Editor’s note: Brent Hoag is Senior Director, IT for JohnsonDiversey, formed when Johnson Wax Professional acquired DiverseyLever. Its focus is on providing products to commercial businesses for food safety, housekeeping, and industrial cleaning. Throughout its history, the company has been dedicated to leadership in environmental issues, health, and safety. You can read more about the company's work in these areas in the post we shared a few days back.

Please join Brent and members of the Google Enterprise team for a live webcast this Thursday, September 17, at 2:00 p.m. EDT / 11:00 a.m. PDT.

When we first decided to switch to Google Apps from Lotus Notes/Domino, we planned on using a typical IT deployment process. As a global company, JohnsonDiversey (JDI) conducts "go-lives" in its IT environment almost weekly, and therefore we are all old hands at managing rollouts to achieve a smooth technical transition and minimize business disruption.

Given that Google Apps would impact all of our 12,000 global users spread across 168 locations and 70 countries, we made two assumptions. First, we thought a phased migration would be best. We planned to migrate employee data and continue to support our two legacy local email clients at the same time. Second, we’d staff a command center to handle the flood of calls from employees trying to learn the new system.

Both assumptions proved totally wrong.

As we delved deeper into our migration planning and learned from our early adopters, we realized that we would be better off using a big bang approach. One major reason is that getting everyone onto a single system faster reduces the largest pain of having co-existence of two systems for any amount of time.

Google Apps is helping JDI, as a global company, communicate and collaborate better from a single platform. Under our old Lotus Notes/Domino system, even simple tasks like booking meetings were difficult, because employees could not easily see the details of someone's availability, an agenda or other participants. People’s inboxes were also filling up when they were traveling. With Google Apps, we realized we would solve many problems at once (read Part I of our story here).

What did we actually end up doing? We provided Apps to early adopters who became business champions – and ultimately helped others if they ran into issues. We decided to support only the web interface and provided early access prior to go-live to mitigate login issues. We also provided tools for self-service migration and put up a Google Site providing a centralized point of information. We offered global deployment support for the first two days after go-live.

Since deploying, we've received some nice feedback and results:
  • one employee told us "this is the first project that IT did for the users rather than to the users"
  • our help desk volume has substantially dropped from our legacy steady state call volume and most of the questions are "how-to"
  • our department has more time to work on strategic initiatives
You can watch a bit more about our success with Google Apps here:



Moving 12,000 people over to any new solution can be daunting – but it can also be painless. We found that out the easy way. We would be happy to share our experiences with you. Join us for a webinar:

Migrating 12,000+ users from Lotus Notes/ Domino to Google Apps in 48 hours
Thursday, September 17, 2009
2:00 p.m. EDT / 11:00 a.m. PDT

We'll share our story and be happy to answer your questions.

Brent Hoag, Director, IT, JohnsonDiversey

Posted by Serena Satyasai, The 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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As part of our continued outreach to find leading solution providers and MSPs for our Google Apps Authorized Reseller program, the Google Apps Partner team will head to Las Vegas on October 2, 3, and 4 for "SMB Nation Fall 2009." This conference, focused on technologies for small and medium businesses, is designed for consultants, channel partners and VARs, and offers the community a chance to engage in conversations around hosted, cloud-based solutions. It's targeted at both technical and business audiences, with an emphasis on managed services.
Program managers from Google will speak about opportunities for Google Apps Authorized Resellers. They'll also be listening to feedback from the community on areas for further improvement to the program. Google's partners often play a critical role in helping customers get the most out of Google Apps, and building a strong partner network will be key to keeping up with the accelerating adoption of Google Apps.

Learn more and register at smbnation.com, and be sure to find members of the Google team when you're there.

Posted by Jeff Ragusa, Google Apps Partner team

Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our RSS feed or email alerts.
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Earlier this morning, you may have seen Google's Data Liberation announcement, which stemmed from our core belief that it ought to be easy for users to move their data into or away from Google's cloud.

This principle not only applies to individual users, but also to businesses, schools and other organizations that choose Google Apps to provide better tools at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions. It should be easy to bring legacy data into the cloud, share data between Google Apps and other IT infrastructure, and get data out of the cloud if it ever makes sense to stop using our service. I invite you to read more about Google Apps data portability on the Data Liberation site.

And while we're on the topic of data portability, stay tuned here for information about moving content to and from Google Sites. We're looking forward to sharing more about this with you soon.

Posted by Brian "Fitz" Fitzpatrick, Engineering Manager

Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our RSS feed or email alerts.
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Editor’s note: John Matthews is Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs and Director, Office of the President, for JohnsonDiversey. The company is a global provider of commercial cleaning, sanitation and hygiene solutions and serves customers in the lodging, food service, retail, health care, and food and beverage sectors. One of four companies founded by the Johnson Family, JohnsonDiversey is located in Located in Racine, Wisconsin and has a long-standing history of dedication to environmental, health, and safety leadership.

Our CEO, Ed Lonergan, has challenged all employees to live by strong sustainability principles in everything they do. Last spring, we migrated over 11,000 global employees to Google Apps from Lotus Notes/Domino and Microsoft Outlook, moving us 73 tons closer to our goal of achieving an 89,000-ton reduction in carbon emissions by the year 2013. When we achieve our 89,000-ton reduction in carbon emissions, it will place us back at where we were in 2003, even as we continue to grow our business and add additional resources.

In addition, optimizing our IT infrastructure by moving to Google Apps has allowed us to decommission eight servers and avoid buying four more. As we reduce this reliance on hardware, we also gain a better and easier messaging and collaboration platform.

Google’s innovation in data center design and maintenance means that Google achieves more energy efficiency than our company could on its own – and Google’s commitment to carbon neutrality also reinforces our goals as a member of the World Wildlife Fund's Climate Savers program. The alternate IT solution would have increased our server count by 12, more than doubling our server count. This would have raised our CO2 emissions by 111 metric tons.

Beyond helping JohnsonDiversey achieve sustainability goals, Google Apps also helps us better communicate and collaborate. Our employees and contractors speak more than 26 languages across approximately 170 locations in 70 countries. Now, we all have the ability to literally work off the same page – wherever we are – with tools like Google Docs and Google Sites.

We also avoided significant capital outlays in upgrading from our on-premise Lotus Notes/Domino solution while improving our internal service levels with Google's commitment to be up and running 99.9% of the time.

Environmental stewardship is not only the right thing to do. It also makes good business sense. Our choice of Google Apps is a case in point. It's helped us reduce costs and advance our IT efficiency. If your enterprise is striving to reduce its environmental footprint and streamline IT infrastructure, hear how we did it at a livewebcast featuring our IT team.

You can learn more about our company and our use of Google Apps here:



Our IT team will host a live webcast next week on Thursday, September 17, 2009, 2:00 p.m. EDT / 11:00 a.m. PDT on how Google Apps is helping us meet both our sustainability and business goals.

We'll also share perspectives from our IT team on the deployment in a blog post we'll publish next week (update: now published).

John Matthews, SVP, Corporate Affairs
Director, Office of the President, JohnsonDiversey

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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In the past month, many of you told us how you've "gone Google" with Google Apps in your workplace. We're excited that the #goneGoogle movement continues with the millions of students who have switched to Google Apps in schools, as well as growing adoption of our Postini email security and archiving services.

More than 5 million students in 145 countries around the world have gone Google at school with our Google Apps Education Edition. To celebrate this milestone, Google's "EDU" team has created a new site that highlights many of the schools that have gone Google, as well as tips for students and educators.

Schools as well as businesses of all sizes have also chosen to protect their on-premise email systems with our hosted email security and archiving services – more than 3 billion email messages are protected by Postini each day. Postini helps your organization keep email secure, spam-free and centrally archived, without the need for hardware or software installations and upgrades. If you're still dealing with tuning your spam appliance and searching your backup tape drives, now is a good time to go Google with Postini.

We've loved hearing your feedback and encourage you to continue the conversation with us via Twitter (hashtag #gonegoogle) as well as through our Spread the Word site. The billboards may be complete (you can check out the recap video here), but we're not finished yet. Look for more "gone Google" initiatives in the US and abroad in the next few months – and don't forget to sign up for free Gone Google goodies!

Posted by Vivian Leung, Google Apps Team

Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our RSS feed or email alerts.
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This month, Google Earth Pro and Google Maps API Premier customers will see new aerial and satellite imagery updates across the world and through time.

Let's say you want to do Real Estate research in Portage, Michigan (image below) and you have Google Earth Pro 5.0 installed. You can use the historical imagery feature to research imagery dating back to the 1950's. For example, Engineering firms doing land surveys near McMurdo Station now have imagery updates on this point in Antarctica. This allows them to complete better land assessments.

Below is a list of all the imagery updates to Google Earth Pro and Google Maps API. To find out where the new aerial and satellite imagery might help your spatial business, here is a KML outlining all the areas receiving new data.


Americas
United States: Alburqurque, Beaumont (Texas), part of the Mississippi River, Jefferson County (FL), Cass County (MO), Hamilton County (IA), Western Michigan, Portage (MI), Clinton County (MI), Eaton County (MI), Ingham County (MI), Greenville (SC), Baltimore (MD), Charles County (MD), Calvert County (MD), Dorchester County (MD), Carroll County (MD), Frederick County (MD).

Canada: Surrey (BC)

Peru: Talara

Argentina: Salta, Santiago del Estero, Villa Mercedes, Bahia Blanca

Brazil: Santa Maria, Joinville, Santos, Montes Claros, Petrolina, Araguaina, Parnaiba, Belem

Europe, Middle East, & Africa
France: Manche, Mayenne, Maine-et-Loire, Marne, Haute-Marne, Meurthe-er-Mosselle, Lozere, Herault, Pau

Lithuania: Vilnius

Poland: Krakow, Lodz, Auschwitz

Slovakia: Bratlsavia

Bosnia and Herzegovina: Sarajevo

Serbia: Belgrade

Moldova: Chisinau

Russia: Perm, Chita, Avacha

Libya: Benghazi

Syria: Aleppo

Iran: Mashad

Turkey: Antalya

Pakistan: Lahore

Guinea-Bissau: Bissau

Guinea: Conakry

Liberia: Monrovia

Kenya: Mombasa

Swaziland: Mbabane

Asia & Oceania
China: Nanchang, Yumen, Altay, Taizhou, Huaian, Chuzhou, Xingtai, Shijiazhuang, Leting, Baotou

New Zealand: Christchurch, Wellington, Bay of Plenty, Waipa

Antarctica: McMurdo Station

New 2.5m base imagery for: Mexico, Argentina, and India

Posted by Natasha Wyatt, Google Earth and Maps Enterprise team
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Around 12:45 PM PDT, a majority of Gmail users began having trouble accessing their accounts. During this interruption, users were still able to connect to their accounts via IMAP and POP. At approximately 2:15 PM PDT, the issue was resolved and access was restored.

We use Google Apps here at Google, and our email accounts were among those that were impacted. I understand how disruptive this service interruption was for our users and customers, and I'm very sorry for the inconvenience.

The team is investigating the root cause so we can prevent this kind of situation in the future, and we will share a detailed incident report with our customers. The full incident report will be available on the Google Apps Status Dashboard within 48 hours.

Posted by Matthew Glotzbach, Product Management Director, Google Enterprise

UPDATE (7:46 pm): We've shared more information on today's issue on the Gmail blog, here. We'll also be proactively crediting affected Premier and EDU customers with three days of service, and posting a full incident report on the Google Apps Status Dashboard within 48 hours. Thank you again for your patience and understanding.
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Google Wave has been generating lots of interest among Google Apps users since we unveiled it in May at Google I/O, our annual developer conference. Today we're pleased to announce that we'll be opening up access to Google Wave for some schools and businesses as part of the preview this fall. And while we won't be able to open it up to all Google Apps users just yet, we hope to bring Google Wave to all Google Apps users next year. If you're a Google Apps administrator and you're interested in testing Google Wave, you can sign up here.

Over the last couple of months, we've been very busy developing the product, opening the protocol and learning from the thousands of developers who are using and contributing to Google Wave. While the product, platform and protocols are still being developed, we're extending access to some of the highly collaborative people and communities we hope to benefit in the future – businesses and schools. In turn, we look forward to learning from these Google Apps users, so we can continue to tweak and develop the product as we gain insight from their experiences.

A wave is equal parts conversation and document, where individuals communicate and work together in a multimedia environment – the wave itself. You can check out the video below (it's long – lots to see!) and it's easy to imagine its utility for groups within a business or academic environment. Whether there's a report to write, an event to plan, research to do or communications to conduct, we're building Google Wave so people can be more productive and collaborate more effectively in a real time environment. Users can insert text, photos, gadgets, maps, web feeds and edit instantaneously. Organizations can extend Google Wave using APIs to tightly integrate with existing tools and workflows. It's communication and collaboration, conversation and document, in one unified, cloud-based space.



To learn more about Google Wave check out wave.google.com, and to sign up for Google Apps so you're ready when Google Wave rolls into businesses in the future, visit google.com/a.

Posted by Matthew Glotzbach and Stephanie Hannon, Google Enterprise and Wave teams
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