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Today we're releasing two enhancements to Google Apps Directory Sync, a tool that helps businesses synchronize the user and directory information in their LDAP systems with Google Apps. These changes complement the improvements to contacts in Google Apps that we announced a few weeks ago.

Now Google Apps Directory Sync not only helps synchronize employee contact information, but also information for non-employees that are listed in the central LDAP directory. This way, employees can easily look up and contact important customers, partners and vendors, too.

This release also expands the list of contact fields that can be synchronized between an LDAP system and Google Apps. Rich user profile information like multiple phone numbers, addresses and job titles are now supported, making full profiles easily accessible by employees.

Companies and schools using Google Apps Premier and Education Editions can learn more and get started with Google Apps Directory Sync here:

http://www.google.com/apps/directorysync

Posted by Navneet Goel, Product Manager, Google Apps team

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We wanted to share a quick update regarding the Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server, which we pre-announced in May. We've been working hard to make this feature publicly available in Google Apps Premier Edition and Education Edition, and a significant number of our customers have been actively using and testing the Apps Connector over the last several months. The feature is very close to being ready for prime time, and as we move toward the finish line it's looking like the Apps Connector will be launched in August, not July as previously hoped.

We're sorry for this delay. We know many of you are excited about this integration with BlackBerry Enterprise Server, and we appreciate your patience as we continue to test and finalize over the next few weeks.

Posted by Raju Gulabani, Product Management Director

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Editor's note: Last Friday marked the third anniversary of the release of Virtual Alabama, an innovative information-sharing program in the state of Alabama. Built upon Google Earth Enterprise, Virtual Alabama has become a true leader in promoting collaboration among the different agencies that fulfill government's many roles – from disaster preparedness and response to the environment, from education to economic development, and much more. We invited Chris Johnson, program manager for Virtual Alabama, to provide an update.

July 24, 2009 marked the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 astronauts' return from the first successful Moon landing, and also marked the third anniversary of Virtual Alabama – the state’s implementation of Google Earth Enterprise technology to provide government agencies with a statewide common operating picture.

It’s hard to believe that in the three short years since Virtual Alabama went "live," our user base has expanded to beyond 5,000 users. More interestingly is that number represents users in more than 1,450 agencies at every level of government.

As we celebrate one of America’s greatest scientific achievements, I am reminded of a quote from Dr. Wernher von Braun (chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle which carried man to the Moon) when asked by a reporter, “What was the most difficult thing about going to the Moon?...” His reply? “The willingness to do so."I have to say that the same has been true about Virtual Alabama.

One of the most gratifying aspects of working on Virtual Alabama is the diversity of our audience. Virtual Alabama has leveled the playing field for users across all 67 counties in our state. But more interesting, it is the assortment of agencies that the program serves – literally everyone from high-level law enforcement to the local animal control specialist and everyone in between. This diversity is key to providing such a rich and robust data set. I am often amused when federal agency representatives tell me they have seen Virtual Alabama demonstrated by their counterparts at a state or local agency and they say, “I thought Virtual Alabama was a product of that agency." You see, every agency feels that Virtual Alabama is THEIR program and was created specifically with them in mind.

But the beauty is that collaboration on such a massive scale allows Virtual Alabama to serve us all equally – regardless of size, resources, technical background or geography.

Every day, agencies in every locality diligently collect, correct, and analyze data turning it into the most accurate, up to date and useful information on the planet.

We have learned from them that the best data resides at the local level. Without their willingness to collaborate, Virtual Alabama would not exist. These efforts continue to make a tremendous difference in the lives of our fire fighters, law enforcement, and first responders and their ability to protect the citizens of Alabama. Those efforts are also making a difference in our ability to manage our cities and communities more effectively.

Our federal counterparts are taking notice and today over 100 federal agencies use the Virtual Alabama system. Alabama led the way as the first state to have a statewide common operating picture. Our neighbors are now following that lead and establishing Virtual States. Virtual states include Virtual Louisiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Hawaii and Texas which all have similar programs to provide their respective government agencies with information to protect their citizens. Currently, we are working with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in a collaborative partnership with 8 other states to develop the Concept of Operations for Virtual USA.

Take a look at Virtual Alabama here:


It's exciting to think about what we might accomplish with Virtual Alabama as we celebrate future anniversaries. We're sure that progress will continue, as all on the Virtual Alabama team are "willing to do so."

– Chris Johnson, VP of Geospatial Technologies, US Space & Rocket Center

Posted by Dan Israel, Google Enterprise team
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Like many of you, I use tools like Google Reader to keep up with and share interesting tidbits on the web. These services deliver the content that matters most to me in a convenient and timely format. In that spirit, we're happy to announce that starting today you can add an RSS feed for the Apps Status Dashboard, letting you receive performance status updates for Apps products in any of the 25 languages the Dashboard supports.

Visit the Apps Status Dashboard at http://www.google.com/appsstatus and click on the RSS icon at the bottom right to get the feed in the same language you see when using the Dashboard. Every post to the Dashboard will trigger a post to the feed. To keep you updated, each post to the feed will include all the messages and updates pertaining to the corresponding Dashboard event. That way you won't need to dig through your feed history to piece together how things are progressing.

We know how much our users appreciate the transparency that the Apps Status Dashboard provides, and we hope the RSS feed enables them to get performance status information about the applications they care about in an efficient way.

Posted by Tony Scelfo, Software Engineer, Google Apps team

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Editor's note: We’re pleased to welcome Bryan MacDonald, Chief Technology Officer at the School Systems group of Pearson – an international media company specializing in education, business information, and consumer publishing – as our guest blogger today. Pearson has integrated Google Maps API Premier into their flagship student information systems, PowerSchool® Premier and Chancery® SMS. With Google Maps, districts and schools can easily and accurately identify geographic boundaries and assign students to the correct districts.

As a global leader in education and education technology, Pearson develops student information systems (SIS) used by district and school administrators and teachers to perform functions such as scheduling, enrollment, attendance, grading, and reporting. Here at Pearson, we've recently integrated Google Maps technology into PowerSchool Premier Version 6 and Chancery SMS Version 7, both of which were released last month.

Pearson's customers rely on our product to manage their student enrollment process smoothly and efficiently. With the integration of Google Maps API Premier, users can create their school and district boundaries within the system, and use information on students to easily confirm that these students are appropriately enrolled in the correct schools.

Unlike the technology used in most other SIS applications, which requires complex definitions based on latitude and longitude coordinates,Google’s technology makes boundary definition as easy as drawing lines on a map with a virtual pen. We’ve also created a process that will allow our customers’ existing student addresses to be entered into the system in one easy step. This is a significant breakthrough and timesaver for school districts across the country, and the data integration also helps ensure that the school system can communicate important information such as report cards and newsletters to students and their families.

You can see how it works in this video:

Google Maps will revolutionize the way our customers manage their address data. They'll now be able to easily manage it from within their Pearson SIS and won't have to maintain separate databases, which are frequently prone to error. Through our address verification process, customers will reduce returned mail and associated printing and mailing costs.

Additionally, access to Google Maps technology provides this critical functionality in an intuitive format, delivering an ease-of-use breakthrough compared to the typical address technology in other systems.

At Pearson, we believe that the integration of Google Maps will provide our products with the competitive advantage that truly makes a difference for today’s educators. We’re excited to partner with Google, and we look forward to more opportunities in the future. For more information on Pearson School Systems and our SIS products, visit us here.

Bryan MacDonald, CTO, School Systems Group, Pearson

Posted by Colleen Horan, Google Enterprise team
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Robert H.A. Moore recognized that he couldn't go it alone. As a student drafting proposals for the University of Southern California Undergraduate Student Government (USG), Moore realized that, even at the undergraduate level, collaboration was essential for politics and content. So Moore turned to multiple Google applications to help manage proposals, reports and projects developed with the input of more than 70 individuals in the USG offices. Moore, like other USC students, has used Google Apps Education Edition to communicate and collaborate with other students and faculty since USC launched Google Apps in late 2007.

USC isn't the only Los Angeles-area school that's using Google Apps. Today we'd also like to hail Pepperdine University, and Loyola Marymount University (LMU), which – in addition to USC – are all offering Google Apps for Education to students. While we see schools adopting Apps worldwide, this trend demonstrates LA schools are at the head of the class in regard to making the most of the benefits of cloud computing.

Universities choose Google Apps for a variety of reasons. Pepperdine University Chief Information Officer Dr. Timothy Chester echoes the importance of leveraging Google scale to run Pepperdine's communication and collaboration through Google Apps. "Google Apps allows us to tap into economies of scale that we simply can't create on our own," Chester notes. "Furthermore, it aligns our capabilities with the stream of innovation in the cloud." When Pepperdine's 10,000+ students arrive back at school this fall, they'll be able to use Google Apps with each other and with faculty and staff – just as Robert has been doing at USC.

In addition, when schools switch to Apps, Google takes care of all the hardware and security maintenance, so IT departments can focus on more interesting projects rather than fighting fires.

While universities and other schools represent some of the largest organizations using cloud computing suites like Google Apps Education, businesses and government agencies at all levels are moving cloud-ward as well. Large businesses including Genentech, Motorola, Fairchild Semiconductor, and Valeo are all in the cloud. The City of Washington DC rolled out Google Apps to 38,000 city employees last year and the Obama administration encouraged cloud computing in the FY2010 budget report as innovative technology that also helps save money.


Pepperdine, LMU, and USC are some of the pillars of higher education in Los Angeles and it's exciting to see them adopting cloud computing. It's great for Southern California, and is also a microcosm of the rest of the education world. The next generation of professionals is learning not only in the classroom, but in the cloud as well.

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Google Apps Education Team

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Updated 07/27/2009 to more accurately represent university partnerships.


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Today, we're thrilled to host more than 150 Enterprise customers and partners at Google headquarters for the second annual Google Earth Enterprise user forum. This event is an opportunity to hear the latest news about the 3.2 release of Google Earth Enterprise and other Google innovations directly from our product managers and engineers, to learn from customers like the US Army Corps of Engineers and Caltrans about how they're using the product, and to exchange ideas.


The people at this user forum come from the federal government, state and local governments across the country, and a range of companies, large and small. They've travelled from as far away as Asia and Europe (not to mention the east coast) to be here. All with one thing in common: putting the power of Google Earth to work to make information accessible within their organizations in an intuitive, visual way.

At Google, we have a firm belief that our customers are the most important source of feedback about our products. We look forward to a productive dialog about what's working with Google Earth Enterprise, and what we can do better.

Welcome to Mountain View, Google Earth Enterprise users! We're glad to have you here.

Posted by Dan Israel, Product Marketing Manager, Google Earth Enterprise
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Last week we announced we will begin globally offering email security free to current and new eligible K-12 Google Apps Education users that opt-in by July 2010 – and starting today eligible schools can learn how to opt-in to enable Google Message Security for their domain.
Google Message Security – powered by Postini – provides the capability for administrators to limit messages based on who they are from, where they are going, or the content they contain. Message rules can be applied to groups of users, allowing customization for different user sets (like younger students, older students, and teachers).

To further celebrate our support of K12, we launched the Google Apps Education Community site for educators and students to share and learn more about Google Apps, as well as the Google Apps Education resource center with more than 20 classroom-ready lesson plans – and we're committed to providing even more educational resources in the future, as the Google Apps Education community grows.

If you know of a K-12 school or educator who might benefit from this opportunity, please share this post with them. Many thanks for your ongoing support of Google Apps in education.
Posted by Dana Nguyen, Google Apps Education team
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We view Google Apps for Education as both a product and a platform. That's why we work hard to open up lots of integration points, letting our tools interact with other systems used by our Education customers.

For example, we've supported work that has integrated Google Apps into environments such as Moodle. We also share a large number of APIs to allow integration into our user management system, and many of our individual apps like Google Docs and Google Calendar.

Because we care so much about integration, we were excited to discover that Northwestern University has been working to integrate Google Apps Education Edition with Blackboard, one of the predominant providers of educational technology. Northwestern was one of the first schools to deploy Google Apps in 2007; it joined our Higher Education Customer Advisory Board as a founding member later that year.

This week at the BB World conference, Northwestern is unveiling a Blackboard Building Block called "Bboogle" that they have built and are releasing to the community as open source. Building Block includes single sign-on, automated account provisioning, and automated sharing of Google Documents and Calendars through Blackboard course sites.

According to Jonathan Smith, Software Architect at Northwestern, "I initiated our Google integration project because we were approached by a faculty member in anthropology who had been using Google Apps in his classes. In the past we had used wikis in history classes to allow students to work directly with primary source materials, and it occurred to me that Google Apps could support a much higher level of student and faculty collaboration. By integrating the applications into Blackboard we could make that kind of collaborative learning experience available to more of our students than ever before."

These images show the process of creating a link to a Google document....



...and the resulting link in the BlackBoard course site:


We love to see customers and partners innovating and integrating with our products. The power of Google Apps comes not only from Google's applications, but the ability to integrate them with other environments our customers use. Incorporating Google Docs and Sites into systems likeMoodle and Blackboard make it easier for student and professors to collaborate seamlessly.

Thanks to the team at Northwestern for this integration, and for opening it up for others to use. It's still early days, and Northwestern is still polishing the code, but check it out and let us know what you think.

Posted by Gabe Cohen, Product Manager, Google Apps team
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Over the last year, Gmail Labs has let Apps early adopters try out a range of experimental instantly translating emails in other languages to undoing send on a potentially regrettable email, Gmail Labs provides a home for features that aren't quite ready for prime time, and gives the Gmail team an opportunity to get users' feedback on different features, quickly iterate on feature designs, and see what's popular with users. One feature that's been popular with users is about to graduate from Gmail Labs today: Tasks.

Using Tasks no longer requires enabling from the Labs tab. Now, just click "Tasks" under "Contacts" in the left nav of your Gmail account. To learn about the latest updates to Tasks, check out the Gmail team's announcement.

Given the success and popularity of Gmail Labs, we're now making Labs available in Google Calendar. Google Calendar Labs will not only make it possible for us to release experimental Calendar features early and often to users, but the new Calendar API will also let Google Apps enterprise customers extend calendaring capabilities in highly specialized and custom ways that meet the needs of their business and employees.

For Apps domains that have the "Turn on new features" option checked in the Google Apps Control panel, users can see the new Labs page in "Settings" upon logging into Google Calendar. Today's launch of Calendar Labs includes six new features, and as with Gmail, there is a feedback link to discuss these features and suggest new ones.

Both Tasks and Google Calendar Labs will be rolling out to Google Apps domains throughout the course of the day, so if you don't notice these features now, you should see them later today.

Posted by Ken Norton, Calendar Product Manager, Google Apps team

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