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Earlier this year we announced support for mobile device security policies in Google Apps to help administrators manage iPhone, Nokia, and Windows Mobile devices from the Google Apps control panel. These policies let employees access information from their phones while helping administrators keep corporate data more secure. Today, we are announcing new mobile device management options for Google Apps administrators.

  • Requiring devices to use data encryption
  • Auto-wiping device after specified number of failed password attempts
  • Disabling the phone’s camera
  • Ensuring old passwords are not reused
  • Requiring passwords to be changed after specified time interval
  • Disabling data synchronization when device is roaming to reduce wireless overage charges

    Starting this week, these policies will be available to all Google Apps Premier and Education customers. They can be accessed from the 'Mobile' tab under 'Service Settings' in the Google Apps control panel.


    It’s our mission to provide users with seamless access to their data while allowing enterprise administrators to centrally manage a diverse range of mobile devices. We’re working to enhance our device management options and to expand our list of supported devices – including Android later this year. If you have any questions, please check out our Help Center documentation.

    Posted by Dale Woodford, Software Engineer
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    Posted:
    UPDATE, 07/14/2010: Please note that we have postponed this webinar until Wednesday, August 18. Please register here to confirm your participation in this event. Thank you and we look forward to sharing Brown University's experience deploying Google Apps.

    A few weeks ago, we announced that Brown University has gone Google for all students, staff, and faculty on campus. If you’re interested in learning more about why they made this decision, we encourage you to register for the upcoming EDUCAUSE Live! Webcast – part of the Spotlight on Cloud Computing Series – that features Michael Pickett, the Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Brown discussing this decision.

    In this free, hour-long web seminar “Google Apps at Brown,” you’ll learn how Brown deployed Google Apps to its 6,000 students and why they’ve decided to extend the service to include faculty and staff as well. Register here to tune in for more information about how these decisions were made, the options they considered, lessons they learned, and successes to date.

    Wednesday July 14, 2010
    1:00 p.m. EDT / 10:00 a.m. PDT

    Posted by Miriam Schneider, Google Apps EDU team



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    Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Sites and all Google Apps were designed as cloud-based services from day one. Google’s web-centric approach allows any application to work seamlessly on any device with a browser, allowing users to work when, where, and how they want. No more need for constant upgrades, security patches and bug fixes required by client based software.

    Given the first step to the cloud for many businesses and schools is Gmail, the Google Apps Marketplace aims to make it easier for organizations that have “gone Google” to take the next step and take fuller advantage of the cloud by running even more of their infrastructure on cloud-based apps, from hundreds of software companies.

    These software companies agree the web-centric approach is the way to go, and are building their applications on web-based architectures and open standards like OpenID for Single Sign-On and OAuth for data access. Marketplace developers build their applications using the technologies and hosting platform they prefer. Want to build using Java? Great. Ruby or PHP? Fine with us. .NET? Sure, the Marketplace supports that too. These apps are then hosted on developers’ own servers, on Amazon EC2, on Google’s App Engine, or on any other cloud hosting service. As developers, they don’t need to worry about proprietary tools, vendor lock-in, or proprietary cloud architecture lock-in, and as Google Apps customers, you’ll even find apps that compete with Google products such as SlideRocket presentations and Zoho CRM, giving you the maximum possible choice.

    The key advantage of Marketplace apps, however, is their integration with Google Apps. All installable Marketplace apps feature single sign-on with Google Apps, and most go beyond that to incorporate specific features that help you accomplish everyday tasks more easily in combination with Google’s applications. Here is a tiny sampling of Marketplace apps that integrate with various Google Apps:

    Gmail – Manymoon is an online project management tool that make it easy to turn emails from team mates or customers directly into tasks in your projects. Kwaga Context and Awayfind are two productivity apps that help you manage your conversations directly in your Gmail inbox, helping keep you more productive.

    Spreadsheets – Sliderocket lets you connect media-rich presentations to live data in Google Spreadsheets, so your presentation always display the most up to date charts and graphs, and Smartsheet lets you extend Google Spreadsheets with Gantt tracking and customer management features to empower your sales teams.

    Calendar – Tungle.me and Timebridge are meeting management tools that make it easier to set up and conduct meetings with partners and customers who use different calendaring systems.

    Sites – RunMyProcess lets you embed custom business process workflows into Google Sites, so each part of an organization can more easily access business process that effect their daily work.

    Talk – Atlassian integrates Jira Studio with Google Talk, so your software development team can stay up to date with the latest build status and team conversations from within Jira Studio, all in real time.

    There are hundreds more business applications available on the Marketplace for every aspect of your business. Find CRM apps, Admin tools, Document Management apps, Productivity apps, and many more.

    Every week more cloud-based business applications are added. If you can’t find an app you want please post a suggestion.

    Posted by Don Dodge, Google Apps team
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    Editor's note: Continuing our “Going Google Everywhere” series, we’ve invited Jeff Hulett, Founder and CTO of Vektrex, an electronics company that produces LED and laser power sources and reliability test systems. Located in San Diego, California, Vektrex makes products to help companies develop energy-saving LED illumination. Learn more about other organizations that have gone Google on our community map.

    Spam was killing our server
    Vektrex had been successfully hosting its own email using Microsoft’s Exchange Server for years. It had always been pretty simple: our IT person, Mike, occasionally did updates to our Microsoft Exchange server, and our dozen or so employees used Outlook to access their accounts.

    Then, a while back, the job became much tougher. With several longstanding email addresses, we started to receive a lot of spam. My account started getting one or two spam emails per minute – and our CEO received many times that amount. Mike tried various programs to filter the spam, but each was eventually overwhelmed. We suffered with monthly email outages that lasted a few hours – or even days – despite Mike’s all-nighters. After a lot of discussion, we finally decided that we would try moving our email to external hosting at our next outage. We chose Gmail because it seemed like a good fit for the size of our company. The conversion to Gmail itself was very simple and fast; we were able to move our accounts quickly and easily. Initially we stayed with Outlook as our client and we used the IMAP interface with local caching. As time passed, we found most users choosing the native Gmail web interface, so eventually we moved the whole company to it.

    Gmail can display folders
    After moving to Gmail’s interface, we had to learn the differences between Outlook and Gmail. The main difference in the beginning was the way that emails are displayed, sorted and archived. Gmail offers labels instead of folders. Labels give you the ability to "tag" one email with several key words and Gmail provides ways to move/archive tagged messages in folders, providing functionality that makes everything more familiar and useful to our users.

    The last remaining issue was email access on our cell phones and PDAs. To optimize functionality with our business accounts that include our own domain name, we moved initially to Palm Treos and then to HTC Androids, which worked flawlessly with Gmail's business accounts.

    Converting is work but Gmail is worth it
    When we started the conversion, IT staffers were a little reluctant to abandon the independence and control we felt we had with our own server. But we overcame our reluctance and the end result was worth it. I see only a few spam emails per week, and we haven't had a significant outage in over a year.

    Vektrex employees are re-focused on our core products – reliability test systems for LEDs – rather than on keeping things up and running. The switch has saved roughly $500 per month in IT labor. It was also more economical than a hardware spam filter costing at least $1,000 up front, $350 in yearly fees, and an unknown amount to administer. Even Mike is happy. He finally got some well-earned time off - and the chance to drive his 1970 Volkswagen beetle in a 1,000-mile off road race through the Baja desert!

    Vektrex IT Administrator Mike Zavos takes a vacation
    after switching the company to GMail


    Posted by Serena Satyasai, the Google Apps team

    Do you have an informative and fun Google Apps story to share? Please submit it here.
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    Editor's note: Today's guest blogger is Jay Goldman, Head of Marketing for Rypple, a lightweight, social service for continuous feedback and collaboration. Rypple helps managers and their teams achieve goals faster with a simpler way to stay on track, recognize achievements, give useful feedback, and get people talking. Rypple has Gone Google from top to bottom — helping them to grow rapidly.

    Rypple is all about teamwork and collaboration, so having an internal teamwork and collaboration platform is essential to our success. We're a small but growing start-up with a geographically diverse team spread across North America, from San Francisco to Toronto. Staying lean and agile is a key part of our DNA, giving us a strong preference for lightweight and simple solutions, so there was no way we were going to choose a solution that didn't allow us to live it in our infrastructure. Google Apps was the clear choice.

    We'd Gone Google even before we'd written a line of code on our own application. Setting up our Gmail, Docs, Calendar, and Sites was one of the first things we did at Rypple. Our team exists online, constantly connected through laptops and mobile devices. All roads lead seamlessly back to Apps, where we easily exchange emails, share information, and collaborate in the cloud.

    Our customers use Rypple to improve communication and stay on track, so it's no surprise that we're big fans of Google Talk, our inter-office chat medium of choice. Chatting over IM saves us countless trips across the office, making sure we stay focused on building great software. Our knowledge base lives in a Google Site, keeping our team up to speed on the latest developments, marketing strategies, and collateral. On-boarding new employees - a constant concern for a growing start-up - is as simple as logging in to the Apps admin panel and making a few quick clicks.

    Our Googley-ness goes even deeper than our choice in email and calendering tools. Google Analytics and Website Optimizer are essential elements of our marketing strategy and significant enablers of our data-driven approach. Their tabs are always open in Chrome, giving us a view into what's happening on our website and how our sales and marketing funnel is performing. And we keep the top of that funnel full thanks to Google AdWords, which drives a considerable portion of our daily traffic.

    All of that makes us a cutting edge tech start-up with an infrastructure that helps power our growth. Our love affair with Google goes even one step further: the entire Rypple application is built on Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Our development team loves how GWT gives them the tools to build quickly and easily stick to our agile roots. Our customers love how we're able to push a new release packed with features and enhancements every week.

    Launching a start-up used to be a really expensive proposition. You needed teams of developers and expensive servers, not to mention all the foosball tables, basketball hoops, and scooters. Here at Rypple, we're proud to be a different kind of start-up, focused on customers, products, and our business model. We're at the vanguard of a new generation: lightweight, agile, and living on the cloud — and we couldn't do it without Google.

    Posted by Ashley Chandler, Google Apps Team

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    Editor's note: Continuing our “Going Google Everywhere” series, we’ve invited Stijn Van Vreckem, Founder and Managing Director of XAOP, a small Belgium-based software development company specializing in content integration, to talk about a quick and easy way his company has utilized APIs with Google Apps Premier Edition. XAOP builds software solutions, information integration products and related services for the life sciences industry.

    Learn more about other organizations that have gone Google on our community map.

    Filling in timesheets is a task that needs to be performed monthly or weekly in most service-oriented organizations. For years, I used to write everything down in my notebook to keep track of things.

    Because the XAOP team has grown to seven people in the last year – who are usually working in small teams of two or three developers – it became more and more difficult to manage the billing for different projects. It was time to look for a better, more transparent solution to keep track of everyone's time.

    After some internal discussions, we introduced a timesheet process based on Google Calendar. We created a calendar in our Google Apps Premier environment for each billable project we want to track. These calendars are shared with the team members working on the project.

    Each team member registers his or her activities by simply putting them on the correct project calendar. As a result, everybody on the team can see who is working on which task in the project. At the end of the month, all invoices are created based on the activities of the project calendar.


    Users track their time using project calendars in Google Apps.

    Now, generating timesheet reports and invoices for clients is easy. Here’s how it works:
    • A background Ruby application connects each Google Calendar with the Google Data API to collect the activities.
    • The Ruby application then generates a monthly PDF report of the project calendars.
    • These reports provide a detailed overview of the activities for each person in the project.
    The main disadvantage is that we need a lot of calendars, so cleanup is sometimes necessary. We also wish we could see who created which event so we could more easily manage larger projects. For example, you can see who created an event via the tooltip when you rollover it with the mouse, but this becomes difficult to read easily when more than 3 users fill in the timeslot on the same calendar. Therefore we implemented a convention on some projects to start the title with a person's initials.

    But there are many advantages. We now have a lightweight timesheet application that lets everyone fill in their calendars when they have the time. The Google Calendar user interface is very simple and accessible for everybody. Freelancers or other external people working on XAOP projects can be added to the calendar of the project without complexity. This is a web-based solution that can be used via a PC or a mobile phone.

    Today, XAOP team members don’t need to keep track of the projects. They only need to keep their calendars up to date. Invoices are now generated automatically and we can provide transparent reporting on each hour of work.

    XAOP recently invested in new mobile phones and our time management solution worked without any changes. Because these HTC devices (Hero and Magic) integrate seamlessly with Google Apps, we can fill in our timesheets from anywhere.

    Posted by Serena Satyasai, the Google Apps team

    Do you have an informative and fun Google Apps story to share? Please submit it here.
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    Posted:
    As we just announced on the Google Australia blog, Google Commerce Search is extending its availability beyond the U.S. and U.K. to include Aussie retailers. With this launch, Australian e-commerce sites will be able to respond to the growing proportion of shoppers who turn to the web to research and purchase products – and unfortunately often have a hard time finding what they’re looking for.

    Launching today at the Online Retailer Conference & Expo in Sydney, Google Commerce Search can now bring the same speed, relevancy, and ease of use that retailers like Smart Furniture in the U.S. and Chemist Direct in the U.K. have chosen for their sites.

    If you’re an e-commerce company in Australia and won’t be attending the conference in Sydney this week, you can learn more by visiting the website or contacting us here.

    Posted by Anna Bishop, Google Commerce Search team
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    Editor’s note: Today’s guest bloggers are Aaron McCarthy, IT Director for Limbach Facility Services, Cristine Leifheit, Team Lead. McCarthy and Leifheit recently spearheaded the move to Google Apps for Limbach’s 500 employees. A mechanical contractor founded in 1901, Limbach Facility Services switched from Lotus Notes®/Domino® to "go Google" and gain 25GB mailboxes and built-in disaster recovery capabilities at no extra charge.

    Aaron McCarthy holds 13 years of IT experience, 7 of which are with Limbach Facility Services. He has a Bachelor in MIS from Oakland University (Rochester, MI) and a Master in Business Information Technology from Walsh College (Troy, MI). Cristine Leifheit, PHR has worked with the Human Resources Department of Limbach for the past 11 years. She served as the Communications Team Leader throughout the selection and implementation of Google Apps alongside the Limbach Corporate IT Department.

    Aaron and Cristine will be joined by Google Apps partner Cloud Sherpas on a live webcast on Thursday July 8, 2010 at 2:00 p.m. EDT / 11:00 a.m. PDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT.     Register today.

    At Limbach, we had a Lotus Notes/Domino system and, despite it being a recent version, the Notes system was hampering the innovation of our 500 employees. As a construction company, we have a workforce that is typically non-tech savvy. We are constantly learning what is required to bridge their needs while providing the advanced tools required to improve the way we do business.

    We formed a “2012 Committee” comprised of non-technical staff from nine branches to better set up the company for the future. Part of their job was to re-evaluate our email system. When a new hire and recent college graduate on the committee suggested moving to Google Apps, management initially scoffed.

    We did a line-by-line comparison of Google Apps, Microsoft® Exchange, and Lotus Notes and were quickly convinced of the value of Google Apps. We could get 25GB mailboxes—eliminating the constant strain on our small IT staff of four to meet ongoing requests for larger mailboxes. We also got built-in disaster recovery capabilities at no additional charge. Google’s mail capabilities were unmatched, but then we considered that Google Apps also provides great collaboration tools.

    We did a small pilot with committee members and then a broader one with 50 users that helped us understand our full deployment requirements. The pilots were a wise move, and they helped us transition to Google Apps smoothly. Things moved quickly; we were able to decommission two servers just two months after deployment.

    Today, we use the full suite of Google Apps tools, including Google Sites for our intranet. Google Apps has also become a platform for innovation. One safety manager used Google video chat to broadcast a helicopter lift of an HVAC system onto a roof to staff members at a branch office. We also added a cloud-based workflow tool from the Google Apps Marketplace.

    It’s been a positive experience for us and we’d be happy to share out insights. Please join us for an interactive webinar!

    Getting 25GB Inboxes and Built-in Disaster Recovery with Google Apps
    Thursday, July 8, 2010
    2:00 p.m. EDT / 11:00 a.m. PDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT


    Posted by Serena Satyasai, the Google Apps team

    Find customer stories and research product information on our resource sites for current users of Microsoft® Exchange and Lotus Notes®/Domino®.





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    Editor’s note: For this week’s guest blog post, we head to Plymouth, England to hear from Jon Stacey, a partner at Riley Chartered Accountants, an eighteen strong firm of Chartered Accountants. Riley offers accounting, tax and business development services to clients throughout the UK.

    Riley have been enthusiastic adopters of cloud computing for a couple of years now. As a UK firm of Chartered Accountants based in Plymouth, England we have been technology driven since the business started in 1981. Our ability to communicate as a team and with our customers is paramount and the recording and storing of what we do in the most efficient and accessible format is critical.

    Our office systems were previously almost totally reliant on Lotus Notes, which we’d started using in 1998. However, over the years we started to see deficiencies that began to hinder business -- challenging technical management issues, the clunkiness of the user-interface even after major updates, and access issues. These problems were especially noticeable because the quality of the personal email systems we had all started to use at home had surpassed that of the system we were using at work.

    Finally, changes in our key team forced us to look properly at other solutions and we settled on migrating our e-mail, calendars and instant messaging to Google in August 2009. The migration was handled painlessly by Glo-Networks and we moved the majority of our communication IT to web-browser access without a hitch.

    That first step was a revelation. Not only was our information now accessible from anywhere in the world, from any computer or device with an Internet connection, the move massively freed up resources of people (and cash) and removed the restrictions on our thinking about IT. We still have certain legacy databases on Lotus Notes but have started to wind these down as more content is now cloud based. We found that Google Apps allowed us to store all of our templates for letters, spreadsheets and many of our management tools too.

    Google Docs has become our go-to source for new files, collaboration and systems development. This morning I spent half an hour collaborating on an internal project with two of my partners - one of them was in another office, another at home while I was at my desk talking to them both on the phone. The speed of decision making is enhanced by the ability to see what others are doing as they amend and delete cells within a spreadsheet or words in a proposal letter. And then there’s Chat with video chat - something which we didn’t take much notice of while we were assessing Apps, but which is becoming more and more useful as we build our team.

    Using Google Sites, we have developed a dashboard for the Riley team and easy-to-create websites within minutes. The simple interface, clean design and ability to pick up on templates designed by both the Google team and other businesses mean that someone, somewhere has often done some of the hard work for you.

    More recently, we’ve started to use Google Apps Marketplace to drive the development and integration of our CRM requirements, mail and contacts. This is an on-going process and we are currently evaluating a number of solutions for this need - something which all the providers have made extremely easy.

    We have also been able to dispense with the office-based back-up solution which was the bane of many of our lives. There have also been no problems with software updates – I’m sure that they exist but they happen painlessly when we don’t notice or incrementally as the developers finish a feature. We don’t have to buy an upgrade path or worry about compatibility – it just happens.

    Posted by Ashley Chandler, The Google Enterprise Team
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    We’re right in the middle of football fever worldwide and as the number of competing teams dwindles, the interest is only growing. Of course, many of these eyeballs around the world are turning to FIFA.com to get the latest scores, updates, and analysis.

    Given the traffic flowing through FIFA.com, FIFA understands the importance of search on their website. Indeed, according to a recent independent Forrester Research, Inc. report, a 2008 survey found that “70 percent of online users stated that “ease of search” is the most important factor influencing how they select news resources”. 1 For this reason, FIFA has chosen the Google Search Appliance to power search on their website.

    With the Google Search Appliance, FIFA.com is able to provide a user-centric, universal search experience across all types of content—news, statistics, images and videos. For instance, when you type in “Messi,” you first see a box at the top showing “player statistics,” followed by FIFA news results in order of relevance, then images and videos specifically pertaining to Messi.



    Additionally, features like “Did you mean” direct people to the right results. For instance, if you type in “mesi,” FIFA.com will ask you if you meant “Messi.” Or if you type in a country name, say “Argentina,” the top result will be a link to a country-specific page.

    By focusing on the user, FIFA.com offers their fans a compelling experience, with search as a core element. And we’re happy to play a small role in helping millions of fans around the world keep up to date on their favorite sport.

    1 Site Search Best Practices: Methods for Creating a Positive Search Experience, Forrester Research, Inc., March 5 2010.

    Posted by Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager, Enterprise Search
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