In their recently released Magic Quadrant for Email Security Boundaries (published September 11, 2008), Gartner Inc., an information technology research and advisory company, placed Google in the "Leaders Quadrant." Quadrant leaders, as Gartner defines them, are "performing well today, have a clear vision of market direction, and are actively building competencies to sustain their leadership position in the market." Quadrant leaders also "offer a comprehensive and proficient range of email security functionality, and show evidence of superior vision and execution for current and anticipated customer requirements.

Leaders typically have relatively high market share and/or strong revenue growth, own a good portion of their threat or content-filtering capabilities, and demonstrate positive customer feedback for anti-spam efficacy, and related service and support." The report goes on to say that "The email security market is rapidly maturing, yet continues to show strong growth and remains a 'must have' security purchase."
The Gartner Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2008 by Gartner, Inc., and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Posted by Adam Swidler, Google Enterprise Product Marketing

Posted by Alex Rodriguez - Torres, Google Site Search Marketing Lead

When small businesses use Google Apps, it's easy for administrators to help employees configure user settings account-by-account. But this approach doesn't scale up very well for larger companies.

Now that we have a growing list of customers with hundreds and even thousands of employees apiece, offering a streamlined way for admins to configure account settings is essential. Today, with the release of the Google Email Settings API, Premier and Education Edition administrators can programmatically update Gmail settings for their users in bulk by making requests to a GData feed. Modifiable settings include labels, filters, signatures, vacation responders, "send mail as" aliases, interface language, email forwarding, POP, IMAP, and more.

For all the details, check out the Google Email Settings API documentation.

Posted by Andrew Olsen, Google Apps Engineer

A few weeks ago, a colleague of mine did something amazing: he displayed a Google Docs presentation on his iPhone!  Afterwards, I wanted to find out more information:  How can I view a Google Docs presentation on my iPhone?  What other mobile devices does Google Docs support?

I thought about searching Google Sites or Google's external website.  I also thought about searching my desktop, my email, and the hundreds of thousands of Google Docs that Googlers have shared with each other.  But luckily, thanks to Google Enterprise's Universal Search technology, I don't need to think because I can search all of these sources from a single search box.  You may have used Google Desktop Enterprise Edition to add desktop and email results to your Google Search Appliance search.  We have also announced a OneBox for your external website and the Google Sites Integration to include your domain's Google Sites.  But what about Google Docs?  Now you can search all of your domain's published Google Documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentations with your Google Search Appliance.

Google Maps just got more secure.  We've introduced a new feature for Google Maps API Premier, allowing our enterprise customers to access Google Maps API Premier securely over https.  This means all communications between the customer's website and the Google Maps servers are sent securely, and offers a better experience to people looking at the maps on secure web pages.

Previously, when a Google Map was embedded in an encrypted web page, users would get a pop-up message saying the page included both secure and non-secure content.  No one likes pop-up messages and the extra clicks they require.  We heard from several companies using Google Maps API Premier on secure pages who wanted to improve the user experience.   We value the product input we get from our customers and we're pleased to be able to accommodate this request.

Several companies have already started using the secure Google Maps API Premier.  For example, Thomson Reuters has started to implement secure Google Maps as part of their Healthcare website.  Other uses include ATM or branch locators for banking websites and secure websites with sensitive customer data.

This new feature is only available with Google Maps API Premier.  So, if you want to put fast, user-friendly maps on your secure website, contact us.  If you're already experiencing the benefits of Google Maps API Premier and want to start using this feature, please contact customer support.

Posted by Thor Mitchell, Technical Solutions Engineer, Google Maps API Premier

In July, we announced a milestone of 1 million active users on Google Apps for Education and our plans for the first-ever "App to School" cross-country road trip. Today, we hit the road in the Google Bus to visit 10 universities across the U.S.


To kick the trip off, we're announcing we've reached 2 million active users, and 17 new customers to add to the thousands of universities already on Google Apps. To make it really interesting, we also made Video for Google Apps available for educational institutions.

New customers include:

• Austin Community College
• Clark College
• Clovis Community College
• Delaware County Community College
• Illinois Central College
• Lewis Clark State College
• Maine Township High School District 207
• Oberlin College
• Old Dominion University
• Ottawa University
• Pierce College District
• Saint Ignatius High School
• San Mateo County Community College District
• Southeastern Community College
• St. Olaf College
• Universidad Cesar Vallejo Lima Norte
• University of Alaska

For the entire month of September, the bio-diesel fueled bus (see photo) will be visiting campuses to give students, professors and faculty a chance to play with our latest technology, talk with Google product experts and share how they're using Google Apps with our team.

We will post some of our stories from the road, so be sure to follow us across the country and visit us on our new student blog.

Posted by Jeff Keltner, Business Development Manager, Google Apps

Thanks to you, Google Apps has grown in numbers of users and diversity of products.  We're encouraged by the stories you've sent us on how you're using Google Apps to change the way you do business, save money for your company and improve service to your internal customers.  We're often asked to share ideas on how customers can use Google Apps to do things that they couldn't do before and so, we're kicking off a webinar series focused on Google Explorers such as yourself.  We'll shine the spotlight on IT evangelists, business owners and productivity gurus who have employed the suite of Google Apps - (which includes Sites, Video, Docs, Spreadsheets, Calendar, Gmail and Start Page) - to more broadly share information, organize projects and collaborate and communicate more effectively.  We'll also cover other topics from time to time, which we hope you'll find informative, such as demonstrating new functionality, hearing from industry experts and sharing tips on best practices.

Please join us at the following three events this month:

Run your business on Internet time! Lily Sarafan, COO of Home Care Assistance, discusses how her company has used Google Apps to grow nationally in a few short years on Thursday, September 18, 10AM PDT.  Learn how Google Apps and AdWords have helped boost profitability at this national staffing franchisor. Register here.

Use Google Apps to achieve rapid time-to-market. Three internal teams at Google delve into how they used Sites and other Google Apps to rapidly launch a new product on Tuesday, September 16, 11AM PDT.  Find out how Google product teams are able to release early and often.  Register here.

Introducing Google Video for business.  Get a demo of Google Video, the latest addition to Google Apps Premier Edition, on Tuesday, September 9, 11AM PDT.  Google Video provides secure, private video sharing for organizations.  Learn how other organizations are using Google Video and get your privacy, security and deployment questions answered.  Register here.

If you can't make it for the live presentation, you can find recordings of them on our Google Apps channel on Youtube. Also be sure to check out our Google Calendar gadget where we'll announce new webinars and other Google events.  And, always let us know if there are topics you'd like to see us cover.  Thanks!

People have been discussing the promise of corporate video for years. But to date it hasn't met expectations. Doing it well meant investing tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in specialized video hardware and software that are difficult to set up, maintain and use. It was out of reach to all but the largest companies, and even for them, justifying the ROI of an enterprise video deployment was a challenge.

Thanks to cloud computing these barriers are now surmountable. Today we're announcing Google Video for business, the latest addition to the Google Apps collaboration suite for Premier Edition customers. Now you can share videos securely and affordably within your organization. There's no need to deploy new hardware or software: your videos are securely stored, processed and managed in Google's powerful, distributed cloud computing infrastructure.

Video for business enables your users to upload and share videos with a few easy steps. Once your videos are uploaded, using them across Google Apps is a breeze. You can share your videos with the entire domain, or with specific users. Video sharing is not just about distributing official corporate videos to the whole organization. It's also about enabling your employees to use video easily as an effective medium for communication and collaboration. Create engaging training portals or team spaces using Google Sites with video embeds, or bring a complex financial spreadsheet to life with a video highlighting the key achievements for the quarter. As an admin, you have owner-level access to all the videos in your domain, which means you can monitor your domain for inappropriate content and remove videos where necessary. Admins can also track how much video storage the domain has used, and who the top uploaders are.

Here's how we're using video inside Google:



Learn how customers are using Google Video for business:



Video is another example of how cloud computing enables entire new ways of communication and collaboration. We believe that Video for business will transform the way you and your organization use video the same way that YouTube has transformed the consumer video space.

You can learn more about video sharing and other innovative collaboration apps for businesses at www.google.com/apps/collaboration.

Posted by Kuan Yong, Product Manager, and Nick Dower, Tech Lead for Google Video for business team

Posted by Amanda Kleha, Google Apps Security & Compliance Team

In July, our Postini datacenters saw the biggest volume of email virus attacks so far in 2008, with a peak of nearly 10 million messages on July 24. One of the more prominent attacks in the month involved a spoofed UPS package-tracking link that was intended to lure recipients into clicking on it and downloading malware. Our zero-hour virus protection technology first started catching these emails on July 20.



Many of the viruses we see follow a similar format, in which an email with an embedded website link in the message is changed from what the link displays. Another recent example was a spoofed CNN newsletter sent out by spammers. In this case, the content included current news stories with numerous links in the message. The majority of the links were valid, but there were some that were replaced with malicious links. As soon as our technology started detecting these messages, we implemented a filter to stop these elusive viruses and voila! -- all of our 14 million business users were protected. This network effect and rapid protection against these new tactics is why businesses are increasingly moving their email security into the cloud.

Viruses tend to increase during the summer months, and August is already showing some new types of viruses. On August 5, we saw a large inflow of messages with an encrypted .RAR attachment. The overall 2008 trend has been a decrease in the use of attachments, so this new virus is confirmation that spam doesn't follow trends for long.

We keep seeing Google Maps popping up in new places, helping businesses provide a more interactive experience to help their customers find what they're looking for, whether it's a store location, a property, a destination, or even a friend.

But don't take our word for it. Listen to our customers themselves. With more than 150,000 websites using the Google Maps API, we hear new stories every day about how they're putting Google Maps to work.

Like this video from the New York Times, which developed 1,600 maps for their website in just 3 days with Google Maps API Premier. Today, over 50% of the pages in the New York Times travel section feature a Google Map.



Those of you in the market for contemporary home design may have seen Crate & Barrel using Google Maps API Premier to provide all-new interactive store locators for stores across the US, as well as its new brand, CB2. The company plans to open its first store in Canada next month, and they're bringing Google Maps along to help Canadian shoppers locate the new stores.

One of the world's largest providers of online real estate listings, Real Estate Australia, has seen a substantial lift in the volume and quality of customers since introducing the Google Maps API to its property search. Also in Australia, an innovative service from Mapmates helps people locate their friends and colleagues in real-time using the GPS capabilities of their mobile phone. Mapmates is taking advantage of the continuous innovation our customers get with the Google Maps API. They have already embedded Google StreetView for cities around Australia, released just last week.

You might say that Google Maps is spreading like wildfire -- which brings to mind another interesting story about San Diego radio station KPBS using Google Maps to keep citizens informed about the spread of wildfires last October.

Posted by Dan Israel, Product Marketing Manager