As part of a new series, “Gaining Altitude,” we’ve invited well-known productivity experts and thought leaders to provide their perspectives on managing information overload and tips for success in a world where real-time communication and overflowing inboxes have become the norm.

This week we've invited Douglas Merrill to give his perspectives on productivity in the cloud. Dr. Douglas C. Merrill is the author of “Getting Organized in the Google Era: How to Get Stuff Out of Your Head, Find It When You Need It, and Get It Done Right”, a book on personal and workplace organization. Douglas is also the Founder & CEO of ZestCash - a financial services technology company committed to serving the underbanked - and was previously CIO and VP of Engineering at Google. Prior to Google, Douglas spent time at Charles Schwab, Price Waterhouse, and RAND Corporation. He has a Ph.D. in Psychology from Princeton.

We are drowning in new information. For example, during the time it's taken you to read this far, people around the world have sent enough email to fill about 10,000 hardcover books.

However, the main barrier to getting organized is nestled between your ears: your brain. It weighs about three pounds -- roughly the same size as a roasting chicken. Your brain is amazing. You can recognize a person's face when you can only see their nose. Pretty cool, yes?

But your brain has limitations. You can't consciously remember more than about 9 items. To remember more items, you need to stick them into long-term memory and tag them with cues that you will use later to find the information. When you need the information you've learned, you "ask" your long-term memory by looking for information with matching tags.

But it's hard to predict what you will need a bit of information in the future. If you can't predict its use, it's hard to tag the information as you store it.

This is why filing doesn't work well. You mark a manila folder with a couple of words when you store it. However, since you can't be sure what you will use the information for, you don't know which words are best.

This is why many of us have drawers full of manila folders, all totally unused. We didn't mark them with the right tags, and so they aren’t stored where we actually need them to be. The same is true with email folders -- generally, people stick email in folders and never see them again.

Given how much information we face, and how much help our brains need to store it all, we need tools to help us. Enter Gmail. When you use Gmail, you leave your email in your Inbox and use search to find it. Instead of trying to guess what you'll need the email for later, so you can tag the email correctly, you just ask Google to find it for you.

Even though you search for your email, it still helps to tag them to improve your searches. Gmail will do some tagging automatically -- as in when it recognizes mails that seem important to you and puts them in your Priority Inbox.

Additionally, you could consider building your own filters to tag your mail. Unlike manila folders, with only a word or two as tags, Gmail can tag each mail with several labels, making it more likely you can find and use the email when you need it.

At the core, organization is being able to store and use information later. After all, the only reason you care about being organized is because it makes you more effective at what you are going to do tomorrow.

The combination of search and email labels let you do what your brain does well -- understanding -- and helps you do what your brain struggles with -- remembering.

Posted by Ashley Chandler, Google Apps team

Six months ago, the Google Apps Marketplace was born, and we’re excited to celebrate its growth in this short time. Today, more than 4 million Google Apps users have Marketplace apps installed on their domain. In addition, there are now more than 200 integrated apps available to Google Apps users, covering customer relationship management, accounting, finance, project management, and more. Almost every week, third-party applications are joining the Apps Marketplace to address an expanding range of business needs.

This App Tuesday, we’re celebrating our half birthday by launching 12 new apps to the Marketplace. If you are an Apps domain admin, you can extend your Google Apps functionality with just a few easy clicks. All of these installable apps offer single sign-on, so your users can start using them conveniently right from the universal navigation bar in Google Apps. In addition, many applications have implemented deeper integrations with Google Apps, such as Calendar sync or Gmail contextual gadgets, which present relevant information from third-party apps in-line within a Gmail message. Try out these apps and join the other 4 million Apps Marketplace users:

• Grockit - Social Learning Platform for Students
  A social platform for learning that provides students with collaborative, real-time study rooms and relevant coursework to achieve various educational goals.
  Integrations: Single sign-on, Google Calendar sync, Google Docs
• Elance - Talent Acquisition and Management
  An employment platform that offers talent-hungry companies instant access to qualified online workers and the tools to hire, evaluate, and compensate them.
  Integrations: Single sign-on
• ERPLY - Enterprise Resource Planning
  An ERP software that helps you easily manage your points of sale (POS), inventory, relationships and billing by providing real time information.
  Integrations: Single sign-on, Google Calendar
• Insync - Document Management
  A dropbox for Google Apps that bi-directionally syncs Google Docs to Finder and Explorer, allowing a user to work seamlessly across a desktop and browser.
  Intergrations: Single sign-on, Google Docs sync, Google Contacts
• Rainmaker - Social CRM
  A tool to supercharge your contacts by searching a user’s social networks to auto-populate critical information and merging it right into Google Contacts.
  Integrations: Single sign-on, Google Contact Sync
• Pipeline Deals - Customer Management
  A CRM tool to help manage your sales pipeline by overseeing deal flow, tracking leads, and running reports. Current PipelineDeals users manage a combined sales pipeline of $60 billion.
  Integrations: Single sign-on, Google Calendar Sync, Google Contacts Sync
• Idea2 - Customer Management
  A CRM tool that organizes data according to employees’ usage patterns and makes critical data available to them in the most relevant locations.
  Integrations: Single sign-on, Gmail, Google Calendar
• Kashoo - Accounting and Finance
  Accounting software that creates and sends invoices, manages expenses, reconciles bank statements, tracks cash flow, and generates financial reports.
  Integrations: Single sign-on, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Gmail
• SimplifyThis - Productivity
  A tool to help employees book appointments, manage billing, and track clients through a fluid interface with Google Apps.
  Integrations: Single sign-on, Google Calendar
• OffiServ - Productivity
  An application that supports administrative processes by automating various functions, such as purchase order approval, vacation management, and resource distribution.
  Integrations: Single sign-on
• Mindquilt - Productivity
  An internal question and answer platform for companies to help streamline the process of employee inquiries and knowledge distribution.
  Integrations: Single sign-on, Gmail, Google Talk
• RecMan - Security and Compliance
  A tool that provides transparent records management and compliance features, centralized document access control, and retention, legal holds and disposition policy management.
  Integrations: Single sign-on, Google Docs, Gmail

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

Posted by Harrison Shih, Google Apps Marketplace Team

Editor's note: From time to time, Google likes to highlight partners and customers who have developed interesting and unique applications using our products. Peter Rossiter is a founder and CEO of Integeo, a company whose product leverages Google Maps API Premier. With over thirty years experience in the IT industry, Peter has led many innovative commercial ventures and research projects.

Location-based services have quickly become pervasive in our everyday lives and maps are now widely used as a convenient and useful visual tool to present data in ways that people can easily relate to.

Business Intelligence (BI) covers a collection of techniques and tools that support an organization’s decision making process. The advent of Google Maps familiarized people with the concept of data points on a map and progressively more and more BI customers are expecting fully integrated maps and spatial analytics with their tools of choice. Seeing data in the context of its location often exposes information previously hidden in the raw data.

But a tool is only useful if it’s usable. You need to focus on solving your business problems not technology. Avoiding the need for specialist programming resources is a good start followed by ensuring the BI skills of a dashboard or report designer are sufficient even if the underlying spatial analysis is quite complex.


Google Maps API Premier is a solid platform for presenting a rich background context of street and satellite data for analysis of business data. The Google API also enables us to dynamically geocode address data and users can zoom to particular areas of interest using our enhanced Google Search facility.



There is a lot more to visualizing data on maps than just plotting points and icons. Integeo’s Map Intelligence comes out of the box with an extensible, easy to use palette of spatial analytical functions. These enable clear and immediate perception of data relationships, groupings, classifications, patterns, trends and variations that stand out when mapped. A summary of the features of Map Intelligence can be found on our website.

At the click of a button, the analytics currently being viewed by a user can be interactively viewed on Google Earth. The dynamic map layers are generated by Map Intelligence from the “facts and dimensions” in the dashboard or spreadsheet, offering the choice to either use KML (KMZ including images, legend, etc.) or a network link that will update from the Map Intelligence server whenever the user changes their Google Earth view. All the information and data relationship layers are dynamically available so that as filters are applied in the BI environment they are automatically applied to the view in Google Earth.

Please visit www.integeo.com if you would like to learn more about Integeo and see why Map Intelligence is the only BI product to rank top 10 among purpose built GIS solutions (Ovum Research 2009). We offer integrated mapping analytics incorporating Google Maps API Premier as an “off the shelf” solution for users of all the major BI platforms - currently these include (but are not restricted to) BI products from Cognos (IBM), Business Objects (SAP), Oracle, MicroStrategy, QlikView, Actuate, BIRT, Microsoft Excel and SQL Reporting Services.

Posted By Natasha Wyatt, Google Earth and Maps Team

Editor’s note: Over the past couple months, thousands of businesses have added their Gone Google story to our community map and even more have used the Go Google cloud calculator to test drive life in the cloud. To highlight some of these companies’ Gone Google stories, we decided to talk to Google Apps customers across the United States. Check back each week to see which state we visit next. To learn more about other organizations that have gone Google and share your story, visit our community map.

As the former VP of Technology at a major financial services firm, Ray Malone has spent most of his career focused on business intelligence, data warehousing, and development of web-based applications. So, when his wife, Tina Malone, decided to start a new business out of their home in West Virginia, Ray naturally helped her pick out the technology that best suited her needs.

Today, with Ray’s help, Tina is running MSaven.com, a successful marketing business that provides companies with text message marketing, print advertising, and the ability to offer online coupons. The technology that powers the company is an important part of its success, and Ray shares with us how Google Apps and Google App Engine play a pivotal role.

“In 2008, my wife Tina came up with the idea for MSaven.com, but there was a catch – she expected me to set up our IT infrastructure with little to no money. I had been using Gmail and almost every other Google product for a long time so it was an easy decision to use Google to build the business. Now, our entire operation runs using both Google Apps and Google App Engine, and the combination of performance and scalability has been awesome.


We use Google Apps for everything from emailing to creating online documents and spreadsheets. I recently used a Google spreadsheet to create a financial calculator showing advertisers how much they could potentially make with our firm – I shared the spreadsheet with a prospective advertiser and walked him through it over the phone. We were both able to tweak specific inputs on the spreadsheet and see the results in real-time. It was a powerful way to communicate without having to be in the same room.

I’m constantly using Gmail and Google Calendar, and access them extensively from my Android-powered device. Both allow me to coordinate with our sales reps and contractors. Some of our contractors are located internationally so the Talk feature, integrated in Gmail, has been the primary communication channel.

With Google App Engine, I’ve built our entire web application. Python was a new language for us, but within a few months we were building dynamic content and connecting to vendor systems. Here’s an example of how it works – when a consumer sends us a text message requesting a coupon, we connect to the vendor’s system through an API (this is the vendor that is providing the coupon), and the right coupon is dynamically generated and sent back. If this is the second time the consumer has contacted us, a different coupon or message is sent back. All of the logic, and the ability to generate and send coupons is built with Google App Engine.

I’ve developed many systems over the years and used other well-known email clients, and this type of performance can’t be beat. You can do everything better with Google Apps.”

Posted by Michelle Lisowski, Google Apps team

Cross-posted from the Gmail blog

It’s been a week since we launched Priority Inbox, and now that you've hopefully had a chance to try it out, we wanted to share some tips to help you manage your email more efficiently. Here are five ways you can make Priority Inbox work even better for you.

1. Customize your sections
By default, Priority Inbox has three sections: "Important and Unread," "Starred" and "Everything Else.” But that doesn't mean you have to leave them that way. You can make a section show messages from a particular label (like your “Action” or “To-do” label), add a fourth section, or change the maximum size of any section. Visit the Priority Inbox tab under Settings to customize your sections, or do it right from the inline menus.





























2. Train the system
If Gmail makes a mistake, you can help it learn to better categorize your messages. Select the misclassified message, then use the importance buttons at the top of your inbox to correctly mark it as important or not important.




For those of you who can't live without keyboard shortcuts, don’t worry, you can use the "+" and "-" keys to adjust importance as well.

3. See the best of your filtered messages
You can set up Priority Inbox to show you not just the best of your inbox, but also the best of messages you filter out of your inbox and might otherwise miss. Just change your Priority Inbox settings to “Override filters” and Gmail will surface any important messages that would otherwise skip your inbox.





With this option turned on, you can use filters to archive more aggressively and worry less about missing an important message.

4. Use filters to guarantee certain messages get marked important (or not)
If you read and reply to a lot of messages from your mom, Gmail should automatically put incoming messages from her in the “Important and unread” section. But if you want to be 100% sure that all messages from your mom (or your boss, boyfriend, client, landlord, etc.) are marked important, you can create a filter for messages from that sender and select “Always mark as important.” Similarly, if you regularly read messages from your favorite magazine, they should automatically get marked as important. If you’d rather they end up in the “Everything else” section, you can create a filter to never mark them as important.

5. Archive unimportant messages quickly
One of the features that can help make you more efficient is the ability to archive all of the visible messages in the "Everything Else" section at once. Just click on the down arrow next to "Everything Else" and select the "Archive all visible items" option. If you want to be able to archive even more messages at once, you can increase the maximum number of messages that show in that section from the same drop-down.

















Posted by Kristen Lemons, Gmail Support Team

Back in May we shared details about a big change so Google Apps accounts can start accessing dozens of Google services beyond the core suite of messaging and collaboration apps. This change will let users access many new services such as Blogger, Reader, Google Voice and calling-in-Gmail (US only), Picasa Web Albums, AdWords and iGoogle from their Google Apps accounts. This big improvement addresses 9 of the top 20 requests from customers in one fell swoop, so we’re thrilled that the new infrastructure is now open for early adopters! After accounts are transitioned to the new infrastructure, these customers will be able to tap into much more innovation happening all across Google, helping people be even more productive with a broader range of tools in the cloud.


Why just for “early adopters” you ask? We’re still working on a few important features, but after extensive testing we’ve found that what’s ready today is already tremendously valuable to many Standard, Premier and Education Edition customers. Here’s the functionality that early adopters won’t see before the new infrastructure is feature-complete:

• Administrators do not yet have the ability to turn off access to any of these additional services as they can today for applications in the core suite.
• A few applications are not compatible with the new infrastructure at this time including Google Health, PowerMeter, YouTube, Web History, Buzz and Profiles.

You should also be aware of two other details not specific to early adopters: support limitations and “conflicting accounts”. Additional applications beyond the core suite are not covered by Google Enterprise support or the 99.9% uptime guarantee. However, many services have self-service online help resources, and a subset (such as AdWords) offer enhanced support options. Finally, a small fraction of Google Apps users have created personal Google Accounts based on their organization’s Google Apps email addresses. Users in this situation will need to rename these “conflicting accounts” during the transition process, and we’ll help these users make the necessary changes.

So...if you understand the limitations and would like to transition users to the new infrastructure, sign in to the control panel. If you use the control panel in English and meet our other early adopter eligibility criteria, you’ll start seeing a notification in your dashboard in the next few days where you can get started. You can begin with a handful of pilot users, and then transition your whole organization once you’ve had a chance to kick the tires.


If any of the current limitations are problematic for you, or if your organization isn’t eligible yet, hang tight and keep an eye out here for the next phase of our roll-out. We’re excited to help you move to the new infrastructure too, and we’ll be ready for you soon! For more information, please explore our Help Center documentation for administrators and for end-users.

Posted by Denis Sosnovtsev, Product Manager

We’re excited to announce that Google Earth Pro 5.2 is now out of beta. With the initial launch two months ago, we detailed the new features that are available to all Google Earth users, including Multitrack and Elevation Profile, and outlined the new Google Earth Pro Data Layers.

Today we’d like to take this opportunity to highlight some of the most exciting new features that are exclusively available to Google Earth Pro customers. Vector and Image Regionation make it possible to integrate even more of your own data and imagery into the Google Earth globe, while maintaining the fast, 3D performance you and other professionals rely on.

Vector Regionation

Watch this video to witness the difference Vector Regionation can make when importing your data.



In a nutshell, Regionation allows Google Earth Pro to display huge amounts of data. It does so by breaking the data or imagery into the smallest necessary components. This means that only the data that is in view needs to be retrieved. You can think of Regionation as a hierarchical subdivision of points or tiles, which shows less detail from afar, and more detail as you zoom in to the globe. This dynamic loading creates clearer visualizations by minimizing clutter, while simultaneously speeding up the rendering process.

Imagine importing a long list of customer assets that are all geocoded to a small, heavily populated urban area, such as a neighborhood in New York City or Tokyo. It would be possible to have more than 100,000 assets within a single square mile radius. If you were viewing this area in the context of the rest of the city, all of the data would overlap, preventing you from making out individual points. However, Vector Regionation solves this problem.

Image Regionation

This U.S. Geological Survey image of Mineral Resources in Portsmouth, Virginia highlights the amount of detail that’s preserved through Image Regionation.



Image Regionation, otherwise known as Super Image Overlays, allows you to overlay your own high-resolution imagery and view it in varying levels of detail without taxing your system or degrading the quality. The addition of Super Image Overlays makes Google Earth Pro one of the most dynamic platforms for displaying your GIS imagery and can be useful for anything from environmental assessments to site planning. For example, you could import a 150MB preview of a new housing development and navigate it down to the smallest detail, without losing fidelity. In conjunction with Google Earth’s existing imagery and tools like Area Measurements and the Historical Imagery Slider, you’re now able to make more informed business decisions without having to go on site.

Try Google Earth Pro for free or buy Google Earth Pro today and give Regionation a whirl. There are countless applications for these tools, and we hope that the businesses we serve will benefit from their use.

Posted by Cristelle Blackford, Google Earth Pro Team

Editor’s note: Over the past couple months, thousands of businesses have added their Gone Google story to our community map and even more have used the Go Google cloud calculator to test drive life in the cloud. To highlight some of these companies’ Gone Google stories, we decided to talk to Google Apps customers across the United States. Check back each week to see which state we visit next. To learn more about other organizations that have gone Google and share your story, visit our community map.

This week we head to Maryland where StraighterLine is trying to level the playing field in education. StraighterLine’s mission is to disrupt the high cost of online education courses by directly partnering with colleges and vetting courses through national clearing houses. Joseph Thibault, Course Manager at StraighterLine, shares their story.

When we jumped into the world of online education head-first, our small staff was spread across the US. As a result, we decided to use Google Apps because of its ability to facilitate this virtual office. The ability to share docs, communicate synchronously, and work collaboratively on docs provided us with a quick and easy way to improve courses, our brand and website.


Google Apps has sped up the rate at which we collect information and communicate internally and with students. By using forms in Google Docs we can easily collect survey data from new students to help us focus our marketing efforts. We also use forms to collect course evaluations so that we can improve our courses and services quickly. Creating a form in Docs only takes a few minutes and the summary and charting features allow us to do a quick analysis with just a few clicks.

Gmail has also been a huge benefit to StraighterLine. Students can easily get in touch with us through Gmail and chat, allowing them to get help and continue learning in seconds rather than hours. At StraighterLine we’re happy to say we’ve gone Google!

Posted by Ashley Chandler, Google Apps team

Editor's note: Continuing our “Going Google Everywhere” series, we’ve invited Mark Burgess, IT Director of The Richmond Group - a UK based finance company with 350 employees and the recipient of numerous awards for growth, innovation and employee workplace. They migrated to Google Apps in January 2010 with the support of Insight, a leading global single source provider of IT products and services. Learn more about other organizations that have gone Google on our community map.

When I look back at the decision we made 12 months ago to migrate away from Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange, it was primarily to solve some of the common problems that come with rapid business expansion – our business has grown at over 50% each year for the past seven years. Reaching mailbox quotas were a way of life, disk capacity limits had been exceeded more than once, we had servers to patch, maintain and backup and it was all distracting us from doing what we do well – creating innovative and unique financial products for our customers.

In January 2010 The Richmond Group went Google. With support from our account manager Brinder Bhamra and the rest of the Google Apps team at Insight, a Google Apps Authorized Reseller, we migrated 350 users away from Microsoft Outlook and into the cloud with Google Apps. While I wish some of the Microsoft Exchange migration tools existed then that are available now, the migration went well and it didn’t take long for users to embrace the new system available to them.

During the migration we concentrated specifically on email, calendar and contacts. With users spread across several sites, Google Talk soon became invaluable, improving real-time communication and helping to speed up decision-making. Being able to access our email from any web connected PC, easily search and find our emails, and benefit from threaded conversations has made managing our emails a whole lot easier!

It’s quite exciting to see the product evolve week by week, rather than every three years which is what we were used to from our previous email solution. Highlights for me have been the rich collaboration that is now possible in Google Docs, contextual gadgets in Gmail and more recently the Google Apps Marketplace. It has really got me thinking about how we can integrate with Google Apps and launch our own applications in the Marketplace. Then, in addition to saving money on our email and collaboration systems, we could build new revenue streams as well!



Posted by Laura Quinn, Google Apps team

Editor's note: As part of a new series, Gaining Altitude, we’ve invited well-known productivity experts and thought leaders to provide their perspectives on managing information overload and tips for success in a world where real-time communication and overflowing inboxes have become the norm.

Our first guest post is about Gmail’s new Priority Inbox by David Allen, widely recognized as a leading authority on personal and organizational productivity. He has been named one of the "Top 100 thought leaders" by Leadership magazine and Fast Company hailed him as "one of the world's most influential thinkers" in the arena of personal productivity. He is the author of three books: international bestseller, Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress-Free Productivity ("GTD" as the method is popularly known), Ready for Anything, and Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and Business of Life.

The volume of email we’re experiencing is a great boon for mankind. In addition to providing chronic complainers with content to justify their lamentations, it’s forcing us to confront our need for a behavior that’s fundamental and necessary to sanity in the modern world. We actually need to decide what stuff means to us when it shows up rather than when it blows up.

That doesn’t mean that people are automatically and naturally stepping up to the plate. There’s still an almost universal resistance to doing what’s required to keep a minimal backlog of unprocessed inputs. I’ve seen more than 40,000 emails in one inbox. But the pain is mounting, and the cry for solutions grows louder.

Google has taken an interesting and potentially important step in coming to the rescue with the new Priority Inbox functionality they’ve added to Gmail. At first it seems like a practical little enhancement for traditional email management. And when I first got wind of what they had done, my first reaction was, “Oh no, not another way to just keep rearranging and avoiding making decisions or actually doing something!”

But after examining what they’ve done, I have to admit that it’s actually part of a really big idea. (Are these Googlers aware of just how big an idea they’re playing with...dunno!) It’s not a complete solution, but I think it’s an important step. They’ve begun to address two key things in how we manage our focus: (1) what kind of attention should I be paying to something, and (2) once I’ve put that attention on it, what do I do with it?

These are decisions – important ones, to maintain a manageable quota of relevant things in your life. And decision-support is one of the bright open vistas for technology. What attention should I give something to begin with? And once I’ve decided what something means, where do those kinds of things go?

Priority Inbox provides a simple way to determine and filter what email inputs I should pay attention to first, a way to group inputs that need dedicated time and focus, and a way to park the “if I have time and feel like it & might want to do something with…” stuff. It’s also not dictator-ware. You have the ability to customize these simple but important front-end sortings, based upon how you think and work.

For those of you who already are familiar with my Getting Things Done best practices, the new Priority Inbox provides an additional tool for dealing with email efficiently. For someone who is simply lost when it comes to navigating the sea of email overload, it provides a simple but elegant starting point toward the only viable solution: rapid clarification and categorization of potentially meaningful input.

The jury is still out on the effectiveness of the sexy, fuzzy logic Gmail has embedded to determine the importance of emails coming to you, but they’ve made a very cool step in the direction of a big, important idea.

Posted by Ashley Chandler, Google Apps Team