Google Apps just got smarter: introducing the Apps Marketplace’s new EDU category

The education technology space has seen an explosion of new offerings in the past few years. What has been missing is a centralized platform for schools and universities to easily evaluate and utilize web apps. Today we are excited to launch an education category in the Google Apps Marketplace designed specifically to help schools and universities easily discover and deploy new web applications that integrate with their existing Google Apps accounts.

The new education category includes over 20 applications from 19 vendors ranging from learning management systems (LMS) to student tools and teaching aids – all of which integrate with Google Apps for Education. Each app can be accessed through single sign-on and the Google universal navigation bar and many offer deeper integrations that synchronize with Google Calendar and Documents.

This new education category will make it easier for schools to have more web apps at their fingertips, including popular existing apps such as Aviary, Grockit, and LearnBoost as well as the new apps launching today.



Learning Management
Now faculty can bring their classroom management to the cloud with apps such as:

• Haiku: an LMS that allows teachers to create media-rich class websites, give and auto-grade assessments, annotate assignments and interact online with students.
• LearnBoost: an all-in-one gradebook and lesson plan software for teachers that includes tools to visualize data and student performance.
• And other classroom management tools such as eduARC, Class.io, PlanbookEdu, ThinkWave SIS and Applane SIS, gradebooks such as Engrade and ThinkWave Gradebook, and assessment tools such as EduBrite and RCampus iRubric.

Learning Aids
Teachers can help student learn more effectively with web-based learning aids like:

• BrainPOP: an app that offers animated, curriculum-based content that enhances student learning in numerous ways, from illustrating complex concepts to reviewing before a test.
• DreamBox: a tool that helps students learn math through interactive lessons and gives teachers reporting dashboards to monitor individual student progress.
• And other teaching aids like Grockit, BuzzMath and LearnThatWord.

Student and Admin Tools
Administrators and students can tackle other education needs with even more tools:

• EasyBib: an automatic bibliography composer that helps students format sources quickly and accurately to cite in papers.
• Digication: an online e-Portfolio creation tool that helps students share and showcase their work and achievements online.
• And other student and admin tools like Aviary, Edutone Sakai Connector, Edutone Moodle Connector, Leveled Library and Rcampus e-Portfolio.

Thousands of universities, colleges and K-12 schools around the world with over 10 million users already deploy Google Apps in their classrooms. The applications we're introducing today into the new Marketplace education category are just the beginning. We look forward to expanding and strengthening our offerings as we continue to add new education tools, including web applications by Blackboard, Knewton and the Khan Academy already on the way.

To learn more about the education category of the Apps Marketplace – and hear directly from the developers of these applications – register to attend live Google webinars and Q&A on Wednesday, February 2nd.

Manage your school in the cloud with the Google Apps Marketplace
Featuring classroom management tools Haiku and LearnBoost
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
10:00 a.m. PST / 1:00 p.m. EST
Register here

Help students learn more effectively with the Google Apps Marketplace
Featuring web-based learning tools Grockit, BrainPOP, and DreamBox
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
4:00 p.m. PST / 7:00 p.m. EST
Register here

Posted by Dennis Troper, Director of Product Management, Google Apps Marketplace

Nothing but the web

This year cloud computing went mainstream, and the conversations moved beyond "this is a way to cut costs" to "this is a better way to run my business." While many IT vendors have now adopted (or co-opted) the term “cloud computing” to describe a wide variety of technologies, most don’t deliver on the true promise of the cloud. Hosting single-tenant server products in a data center is not cloud computing. Nor is requiring customers to install thick client software. These solutions lock-in customers to multi-year release cycles, leave them with the significant costs of managing client software, and expose sensitive data on insecure devices. In 2011, we are committed to moving beyond the current notion of cloud computing to bring customers to a world we call 100% web.

100% web
In a 100% web world, business applications are delivered over the Internet and accessed in a web browser. The applications and the data are stored centrally and are designed to be served from a highly scalable, secure and reliable multi-tenant infrastructure. Devices like notebooks, tablets, and smartphones are portals to the data that help people be productive from anywhere, at any time. Upgrades aren’t necessary to get access to the latest innovation, just refresh the browser. Businesses no longer own or manage servers and client software: they purchase integrated applications and development platforms from others, and now devote their valuable time to business logic and features that create competitive advantage.

We are investing in a variety of technologies so that companies can be productive with nothing but the web:

• Google Apps is the world’s most popular suite of web-based communication and collaboration applications, and includes email, instant messaging, calendaring, documents, sites, video sharing, Postini services and dozens more. We will continue to improve and expand our offerings to bring more powerful technologies to our more than three million customers.
• Google App Engine lets companies build their own applications for internal or external use and host them on Google infrastructure. This allows for faster and easier development, virtually no ongoing maintenance, and the ability to easily scale to meet capacity needs at short notice. App Engine already sees more than 1 billion page views per day from more than 150,000 active applications, and we will be launching App Engine for Business more broadly in 2011.
• Google Apps Marketplace provides the other applications customers need to build their business on the web, integrated with Google Apps and installed in a few clicks. The marketplace will continue to grow beyond its 250 applications and make it easier for businesses to find, evaluate, and purchase the best non-Google applications on the web.
• Android is one of the fastest growing mobile platforms in the world and designed to drive innovation and choice. Companies can now manage Android, iPhone, Windows Mobile, and other ActiveSync devices right from the browser. And the Android team is hard at work on a new version of the platform that addresses the unique aspects of tablet form factors and use cases.
• Google Chrome is an open source web browser developed to provide users with a fast, simple, and secure web-browsing experience with modern web applications. Chrome has become 300% faster in just two years, and adoption has tripled over the last year. This week we announced new features for Chrome to make managing enterprise deployments easy. Also, companies using older versions of Internet Explorer for their legacy applications can use Google Chrome Frame to access modern web apps that rely on technologies like HTML5.
• Google Chrome OS is a new operating system designed from the ground up for 100% web. By building an operating system that is essentially a browser, we can make computers faster, much simpler and fundamentally more secure. Last Tuesday, we announced the Chrome notebook Pilot program (apply to pilot) and Chrome devices for business will be available for purchase in 2011.

While many companies are able to jump right to 100% web, we understand that other larger businesses have substantial investments in legacy technology. So we’re also investing in solutions that bridge existing technologies to the world of 100% web:

• Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office allows people to continue to use the familiar Office interface (including Office 2003, 2007, and 2010), while reaping many of the benefits of web-based collaboration that Google Docs users already enjoy. It will be available soon.
• Google Message Continuity is a very cost-effective form of disaster recovery that lets Microsoft Exchange customers leverage the reliability of Gmail to back up their servers.

100% web is a dramatic shift from how companies have traditionally purchased, deployed, and managed IT. But the more we talk with customers the more we realize that this is the change they’ve been waiting for. It is the ultimate extension of the cloud computing model, and it brings substantial benefits for companies that no other IT model can provide in terms of simplicity, cost, security, flexibility, and pace of innovation. If 2010 was the year of the cloud, 2011 looks to be the year of nothing but the web.

Posted by Dave Girouard, President, Google Enterprise

The new Google Search Appliance - a bridge to the cloud

In the last year, businesses have started using cloud-based applications from Google and other technology providers at an accelerated rate. While many organizations still have information that resides in on-premise systems, more and more important business information today is living in the cloud, in collaborative tools like Google Apps—now used by more than 3 million businesses — and services like Twitter. Starting today, Cloud Connect for the Google Search Appliance lets workers search across both on-premise and cloud-based content from a single search box, delivering more comprehensive results and improving productivity. We’ve also added a few other handy features that make it easier to collaborate and find information faster.

Cloud Connect for the Google Search Appliance
Cloud Connect displays relevant, personalized results from Google Docs and Google Sites alongside results from more traditional repositories, like file shares and content management systems. Easier access to collaborative documents, spreadsheets, presentations and sites with Cloud Connect speeds up how quickly coworkers can complete projects. Cloud Connect also lets users search content from Twitter, as well as blogs and industry websites via Google Site Search.

For organizations such as Delta Hotels and Avago that have already deployed both Google Apps and the Google Search Appliance, the new Cloud Connect feature brings “universal search” to another level, with more accessible business systems and content now spanning from cloud to ground.

People Search
This new version also helps foster faster collaboration between employees with the addition of People Search, which makes it easy to find experts and contact coworkers who are related to a search query, right from the search results page. For example, a search for “field marketing” would return a list of field marketing team members alongside other relevant content. Organizations can index personnel information like department, interests, expertise and location, and there’s an LDAP connector to help get People Search up and running quickly.

Dynamic Navigation and more
Our new Dynamic Navigation feature allows users to drill down into search results based on search modifiers for their queries, and Active-Active Mirroring improves reliability by spreading search traffic across multiple boxes. Dynamic Navigation was a top user request and we’re glad to be able to add it. In addition, the Search Appliance now supports Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 content out of the box without the need for additional connectors.

As you move your business to the cloud, the Google Search Appliance’s new features can be an important bridge between on-premise and cloud-based systems, while enhancing employee collaboration. You can learn more about this latest release at www.google.com/gsa.

Posted by Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager, Enterprise Search

Getting public opinion on the cloud

We’ve seen quite a few state and local governments make the switch to Google Apps in recent months. Cities from Orlando to Los Angeles, state agencies in Kansas and New Mexico, and an ever-increasing number of counties across the country have all gone Google. These agencies have found making the move to Google a great way to cut costs ⚊ a top priority in these days of budget shortfalls ⚊ and to gain capabilities like seamless collaboration, “anywhere” access, and other benefits of cloud computing.

We were curious to find out what people across the country think about their local government’s adoption of new technologies, so we asked the Clarus Research Group, a non-partisan survey research firm based in DC, to poll 1,000 U.S. voters nationally to get their opinion on government technology issues.

The results are out today, and they show that 92% of U.S. voters believe “public agencies should make better use of new technologies to cut government spending and improve efficiency.”

That’s certainly how we feel here at Google, and we’re glad that a clear majority of polled voters also appreciate the need to invest in 21st century technology in the public sector.

The results also show people think email is a great place to start. When given a list of different technologies that could make a difference, three-quarters of those polled thought that “quicker and more efficient email systems” would make government workers more productive. Google email is fast and reliable ⚊ providing 99.9% uptime, and access from any computer or mobile device to allow government employees to be productive anytime, anywhere.

Government employees everywhere are getting more efficiency for less money with Google Apps. Bigger email inboxes and collaboration tools like video chat and shared documents are just a few of the tools within Apps that can make public employees more productive and collaborative.

Government IT staffs benefit from Google’s expert security team and processes, best-in-class disaster recovery at no additional cost, and a dramatic reduction in time and dollars spent maintaining and patching software & hardware. That is time and money that can be dedicated to more strategic priorities.

If you work for a local government agency, we’d like to hear from you. If you’re an interested citizen who’s part of the 92%, then ask your elected officials to take a serious look at new ways of computing that can cut costs while increasing capabilities. You can even point them to this website. You’ll be doing your part to equip your local officials with better tools to do their jobs, while saving (your) taxpayer dollars. It’s a win-win.

Posted by Dan Israel, Public Sector Marketing Manager, Google Enterprise

Google Apps and the cloud: Maximum economies of scale

Editor's note: This post is the last in a three-part series on the benefits of Google Apps’ cloud-computing architecture. - Ed.

The first post in this series focused on faster access to innovation and last week’s entry described how Google Apps can drive higher reliability and security. This final installment explains advantages achieved from the scale at which the Google Apps infrastructure operates.

Maximum Economies of Scale
An Internet-scale cloud infrastructure achieves economies of scale that can produce tremendous cost savings. Rather than buying off-the-shelf completed servers, Google buys raw computer parts in massive quantities, and assembles custom servers with few unnecessary components. Not only do we save costs on hardware, we also minimize overhead by consolidating on a very small number of server configurations that can be managed in bulk globally at an extremely efficient ratio of staff to machines. On a per-user basis, these economies of scale allow Google Apps to operate at higher levels of efficiency than can be achieved by customers themselves.

Further cost savings are also made possible by applications that run in the browser. Not only can customers forgo licensing expensive client software, but browser-based applications also require much less administrative overhead than traditional software or “software plus services”. IT departments don’t need to deploy patches or upgrades for web-based applications, and since improvements roll out gradually and continuously instead of in large disruptive batches every several years, companies can also save on change management costs.

Cloud computing – hosted, web-based applications built on shared infrastructure – can achieve breakthroughs in the pace of innovation, reliability, security and economies of scale. As you consider alternatives to address your organization’s messaging and collaboration needs, it pays to understand how different technologies are actually delivered. Over two million businesses considered their own options and have truly moved to the cloud with Google Apps.

If you’re interested in going a level deeper, we invite you to geek out with us on Thursday, when we’ll be holding a webcast to explore the advantages of Google’s cloud. Hope you can join us!

Geek out on the Cloud-Based Infrastructure of Google Apps
Thursday, April 22, 2010
2:00 PM ET / 11:00 AM PT / 6:00 PM GMT


Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Google Apps and the cloud: Improved reliability and security

Editor's note: This post is the second in a three-part series on the benefits of Google Apps’ cloud-computing architecture. - Ed.

Last week’s post kicked off our series on the advantages of Google’s cloud, and described how our infrastructure gives customers faster access to innovation than on-premises technology, single-tenant hosted applications, and “software plus services”. Here, part two focuses on how Google Apps is designed from the ground up to provide higher reliability and better security.

Improved Reliability and Security
Through synchronous replication, data and user actions in Google Apps are mirrored in nearly real-time across multiple data centers. If one data center becomes unavailable for any reason, the system is designed to instantly fall back to a secondary data center with no user-visible interruption in service. For Google Apps customers, our recovery point objective (RPO) design target is zero, and our recovery time objective (RTO) design target is instant failover. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Groups, Google Docs and Google Sites have a 99.9% uptime guarantee, and our actual reliability has been significantly higher than this commitment. Attempting to replicate this level of reliability with on-premises or hosted technology is tremendously costly and complex. Even very large enterprises with state-of-the-art disaster recovery systems typically target a recovery time of one hour and accept the loss of one hour’s worth of data.

On the security front, Google’s large investments in physical and process-based security are passed on to customers. First, Google is able to hire many of the worlds leading security experts to protect our systems and conduct cutting-edge security research. Our data centers are hardened with many of the latest measures in security precautions, including biometric access controls and multi-tiered security perimeters. Furthermore, Google has implemented a multi-layered security process protocol designed to help keep customer data safe. Our processes have been independently verified in a successful third-party SAS 70 Type II audit to verify our confidentiality, integrity and availability of customer data. Finally, Google is able to efficiently manage security updates across our nearly homogeneous global cloud computing infrastructure, so customers aren’t exposed to known vulnerabilities until they install security patches themselves.

Browser-based applications also help keep sensitive data more secure. Unlike traditional software, when a user is finished using a web-based application, minimal data is left on the machine that could be compromised. Also, when employees can securely access their data from any browser, they’re less likely to store data locally on unsecured end-points like thumb drives. In a world where one out of ten laptops go missing in the first year¹ and 66% of workers report having lost a thumb drive², making data securely available from the browser and minimizing the amount of sensitive data stored on devices is an effective security strategy.

Next week I’ll conclude this series by sharing how Google’s economies of scale can help companies reduce costs and free up technology resources for higher value initiatives that can make businesses more competitive.

If you’re interested in going a level deeper, we invite you to geek out with us on Thursday, April 22nd, when we’ll be holding a webcast to explore the advantages of Google’s cloud. Hope you can join us!

Geek out on the Cloud-Based Infrastructure of Google Apps
Thursday, April 22, 2010
2:00 PM ET / 11:00 AM PT / 6:00 PM GMT


1. The Federal Bureau of Investigation & The Computer Security Institute’s annual Computer Crime and Security Survey, 2005.
2. “Thumb Drives? The New Portable and Convenient Way to Lose Data”, 2007.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Laying the foundation for a new Google Docs

Over the last year, we’ve been hard at work rewriting the infrastructure underlying Google Docs to take advantage of the latest advances in modern browsers. Our updated codebase will help us deliver richer functionality more quickly, and over the next few days, we’ll be rolling out a preview of the new editors.



New document and spreadsheet features

You shouldn’t have to give up any routine features when you switch to web-based applications, and we’re addressing many longstanding requests across Google Docs with this release that were not feasible with older browser technology. Documents support better formatting options like a margin ruler, better numbering and bullets, and more flexible image placement. Spreadsheets now have a familiar formula editing bar, cell auto-complete, drag-and-drop columns and more.

Higher fidelity document import

It should be easy to move files saved on your computer to the cloud, so we made our document upload feature much stronger. Imported documents keep their original structure more accurately, so you can spend less time adjusting files you move to the cloud.

Speed and responsiveness

Browser-based applications shouldn’t force you to compromise on performance either, and our new architecture is much faster than before. Working with very large spreadsheets is even snappy now. Web apps really can feel just as fluid as traditional software.

Faster collaboration

Collaboration has always been Google Docs’ forte, and the new codebase is letting us leap forward here, too. The applications support up to 50 simultaneous editors, and documents let you see other people’s changes character-by-character as they type. Finally, we’ve added multi-user editing to drawings too, so now you can build flow charts, schematics, and other kinds of diagrams collaboratively.

The new Google Docs editors will take advantage of faster rendering engines in modern browsers as well as new web standards like HTML5. As a result, we need to temporarily remove offline support for Docs starting May 3rd, 2010. We know that this is an important feature for some of you, and we are working hard to bring a new and improved HTML5-based offline option back to Google Docs. Please note that this change only concerns Google Docs. We will continue to support offline access for Gmail and Google Calendar. To learn more, please see our Help Center.

Over the next few days, users will be able to start creating collaborative drawings from the Docs list. For Google Apps customers with the control panel option set to “enable new pre-release features,” users will have the option to enable the new document editor in the ‘Document settings’ page, and activate the new spreadsheet editor with the “New version” link at the top of any spreadsheet.

These improvements to Google Docs are designed to help businesses like yours move to the cloud faster and be more productive than ever before. We look forward to hearing what you think.

To learn more about these new features, check out our on-demand webinar.

Posted by Anil Sabharwal, Product Manager, Google Apps

Editor's note: To learn more, check out the Google Docs blog for deep dives on the new editors for Documents, Spreadsheets, and Drawings. Original links to webinar registration removed on 04/23/2010.

Update (05/05/2010): We’ve received a lot of great questions about the new Google Docs editors in our forums, blog comments, and webinars. Check out this post on the Google Docs blog for answers to the most frequent questions.

Google Apps and the cloud: Faster access to innovation

Editor's Note: This post is the first in a three-part series on the benefits of Google Apps’ cloud-computing architecture.

“Cloud computing” has become a trendy buzzword, and some traditional technology vendors are even using the term though their solutions are still rooted in legacy architectures. In this three-part series, I’ll share how Google’s multi-tenant, Internet-scale architecture and browser-based applications produce three key advantages: the fastest innovation, improved reliability and security, and maximum economies of scale. Today I’ll focus on how Google’s innovation exceeds what’s possible with on-premises technology, single-tenant hosted applications, and “software plus services”.

Faster access to innovation for higher productivity
The web is the epicenter of innovation, and Google’s multi-tenant infrastructure is designed so we can push improvements to our entire customer base on short iteration cycles. We can deliver new functionality on a weekly basis, or faster, because our systems are able to distribute updates so efficiently. In 2009 alone, we launched over 100 improvements, and customers didn’t need to manage any upgrades or patches. In contrast, businesses tend to update traditional server software every five to seven years due to long release cycles from vendors and the cost and complexity businesses face implementing upgrades, especially when more powerful servers are required, like 64-bit hardware.

Browser-based applications are another key ingredient in our recipe for rapid innovation. When we launch new features to our web applications, users automatically get these improvements just by refreshing their browsers. Our mobile browser applications also get new features without software updates. With traditional technology and “software plus services”, client software is an innovation bottleneck. Even after back-end systems can support new features, users don’t get new functionality in those environments until the software on their computers and mobile phones have been upgraded, which can be an expensive and labor-intensive project.

Feedback and anonymous usage statistics from hundreds of millions of users in the real world also help us bring stress-tested innovation to business customers at an unprecedented pace. From our consumer user base, we quickly learn which new features would be useful in the business context, refine those features, and make them available to Google Apps customers with minimal delay.

Continuous innovation powered by the cloud has another advantage over traditional technology cycles: employees adapt to a continuous stream of manageable improvements better than they tolerate large, disruptive batches of change. Gradual iterations in bite-sized chunks substantially reduce change-management challenges. Conversely, employees are subjected to a painful re-learning cycle each time companies upgrade traditional software.

Dramatically faster innovation helps employees be more productive, but that’s not all Google’s cloud has to offer. In part two of this series, next week I’ll focus on how Google Apps can offer better security and higher reliability than on-premises technology, single-tenant hosted applications and “software plus services”.

If you’re interested in going a level deeper, we invite you to geek out with us on Thursday, April 22nd, when we’ll be holding a webcast to explore the advantages of Google’s cloud. Hope you can join us!

Geek Out on the Cloud-Based Infrastructure of Google Apps
Thursday, April 22, 2010
2:00 PM ET / 11:00 AM PT / 6:00 PM GMT


Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Faculty and staff are going Google, too

September was a big month for Google Apps Education Edition as everyone headed back to school. When we announced five million active users in early September, we didn't expect that it would only be about a month before we would announce that more than six million students, staff, and faculty at schools worldwide are now actively using Google Apps at school.

We talk a lot about what students want and need (and we also try to learn from them as much as possible), but it's important to remember that these six million users aren't only students – they are also faculty and staff members using Google Apps technology in education.

The cloud is all about collaboration, and this means not only students working together, but also students working with their teachers and professors to improve learning outcomes and save time. Using internet-based solutions like Google Apps to enhance the cycle of lesson, evaluation, and adjustment can shorten what used to take days or weeks into minutes, and collaborating in the cloud helps educators connect more effectively with students.

There are lots of examples we're seeing crop up on campuses. For example New York City's Intermediate School 339 ensured clear communication between students, teachers, and the community by moving the entire campus to Google Apps, and taking advantage of features like forms in Google Docs to create real-time quizzes helped to double Math performance scores, increase attendance, and build student engagement.

And, after Boise State University migrated their 2,400 faculty and staff to Google Apps, not only were they able to foster better collaboration between students and staff, but they reduced costs for IT infrastructure, support, and maintenance by $90,000 annually.

Other schools that have chosen Google Apps for their faculty and staff include Temple University, Columbus State University, Abilene Christian University, Macalester College, Manhattan College, Mary Baldwin College, Northeastern State University, and Saint Louis University (including 8,500 staff from their Medical Center and Hospital).

We strongly believe that when all education users - from students to professors to school administrators - have access to cloud-based tools and aren't limited by where or when they work, it enhances their ability to communicate and collaborate effectively. So come on, Go Google and join these schools (and many others) in the cloud with Google Apps.

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Google Apps Education Edition team

Learn more about what's possible for your school with Google Apps Education Edition.

Research finds that IT departments are thinking in the cloud

Google recently sponsored a global, multi-industry research project surveying 1,125 IT decision-makers and their perceptions about cloud computing and the key drivers behind the growth of cloud-based IT solutions.

We're sharing the results of the study in a new whitepaper: the Google Communications Intelligence Report. The findings provide some insights on what types of organizations are moving to the cloud, what value they find there, and what the key drivers for and barriers to adoption are. Some of the key takeaways follow:

• More than 60% of respondents indicated that the IT department holds the majority of the responsibility for communications security and compliance, but fewer than 20% feel they are well equipped to handle it.
• Email security, web security, and messaging are the cloud applications most widely adopted, and organizations using these applications in the cloud report higher satisfaction than users of traditional platforms.
• Ease of use is cited as the key motivator for transitioning to cloud-based applications.
• Although price is mentioned as a key deterrent for respondents who are not yet using cloud-based apps, value is cited as a key benefit by respondents who already work in the cloud.

In these findings – and in our conversations with businesses of all types and sizes – we are seeing that more and more businesses are finding enhanced productivity and IT efficiency when they move their applications to the cloud with services such as Postini or Google Apps. That the cloud movement is more than just a trend is validated by our research findings, which indicate that 50% of the respondents who were aware of but not currently using cloud-based apps are planning to deploy a cloud solution within the next 12 months.

Read more about how your organization (or business) might benefit from the research in the Communication Intelligence Report.

Posted by Adam Swidler, Google Postini Services team

How Google tackles IT security – and what you can learn from it

Providers of cloud computing services like Google are equipped to protect millions of users' data every day – it's core to how we run our business. Our users enjoy our economies of scale at minimal expense. We also employ some of the world's best security experts to help to make sure that your data stays safe.


On October 1, join us for a live webcast with some of our top security experts who are on the front lines of fighting spam, malware, and phishing for Google Apps users, designing identity management systems for hosted web apps, and monitoring the Google network for potential threats. Register for this live webcast, “How Google Tackles IT Security – and What You Can Learn From It,” to learn about security in the cloud and get your questions answered by members of Google's Security team. Participants include:

Eran Feigenbaum – As the Director of Security for Google Apps, Eran Feigenbaum defines and implements security strategy for Google's suite of solutions for enterprises. Prior to joining Google in 2007, Eran was the US Chief Information Security Officer for PricewaterhouseCoopers.

John Flynn – John “Four” Flynn has an extensive background in network monitoring, intrusion detection, and incident response. John currently leads Google's Security Monitoring program and is a founder of Google's Security Metrics group.

Bradley Taylor – Gmail's “Spam Czar,” Brad Taylor leads Gmail's technical anti-spam, anti-abuse, and email delivery engineering efforts. Brad has played a key role in the development of Gmail's spam filter since Gmail launched in April, 2004.

Eric Sachs – Eric Sachs has over 15 years of experience with user identity and security for hosted web applications. During his years at Google, he has worked as a Product Manager for many services including Google Accounts, Google Apps, orkut, Google Health, Google Security, and Internal Systems.

While circumstances may vary, most IT departments face similar security challenges. Find out more from the people who confront these issues every day here at Google.

Join us for our live webcast to learn about the people, best practices, and technologies that we have in place to minimize security threats.

How Google Tackles IT Security – and What You Can Learn From It
Thursday, October 1, 2009
11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT

We hope to see you there.

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps team

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

Cloud adoption and getting voted best mid-market solution at the Mid-sized Enterprise Summit

Last week, I attended the Mid-sized Enterprise Summit West in Los Angeles. I enjoyed the opportunity to hear from industry leaders and thinkers and connect with CIOs and senior IT leaders from a wide variety of companies and industries. The hot topic of the conference? Cloud computing and how it can drive innovation.

Several speakers touched upon using the latest Internet technologies to accelerate business results. Geoffrey Moore presented on the importance of businesses focusing on their core competencies as a way of driving innovation and amplifying their competitive advantage. Andrew McAfee, who teaches at Harvard Business School and coined the phrase "Enterprise 2.0," explained how the collaborative opportunities offered by tools such as wikis and user-rated intranet search results can reinvigorate employee engagement and accelerate innovation.

It was heartening to hear these ideas because this is very much how we do things at Google and what we hear from our leading-edge customers. For example, it's very common practice for our global, cross-functional teams to use Google Sites (an easy way to create and publish web pages) to manage product launches (just recently, JohnsonDiversey talked about how Google Sites powers a global leadership council, an HR talent review process, and many other things).

Finally, in our breakout sessions we showcased how businesses have utilized the wide range of tools that Google offers for business – for example, Hamilton Beach, which has been able to free up IT resources and focus on its core business.

Finally, we took the pulse of the conference by surveying attendees on their attitude toward Software as a Service (SaaS) or, as it's also known, cloud computing. Our survey reached about 70% of the conference attendees, and it's interesting to note that 46% reported either "actively embracing the cloud" or having "implemented one or two apps." That said, another 40% described themselves as "curious but hesitant," so it was great for us to engage with audiences who still have questions about how Google Apps can work for their business.

We were also grateful that conference participants voted us "Best Midmarket Solution – Services" the second time in a row. Thanks, MES, for another great event! We hope to see everyone in the spring.

Posted by Mike Lee, Google Apps team

Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our RSS feed or email alerts.

Google Apps and Government

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

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

We also want to do our part to make it easier for government to transition to cloud computing. We recognize that government agencies have unique regulatory and compliance requirements for IT systems, and cloud computing is no exception. So we've invested a lot of time in understanding government's needs and how they relate to cloud computing. To help meet those requirements we're taking two important steps:

• FISMA certification for Google Apps. In July, we announced our intent to secure certification for Google Apps to demonstrate compliance with the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), the law defining security requirements that must be met by all US Federal government information systems. Our FISMA process is nearing completion. We will submit a Certification and Accreditation (C&A) package to the U.S. Government before the end of this year. Upon review and approval of the Google Apps C&A package, agencies will be able to deploy Google Apps knowing that it is authorized to operate under FISMA.

• Dedicated Google cloud for government customers in the US. Today, we're excited to announce our intent to create a government cloud, which we expect to become operational in 2010. Offering the same services and features as our existing commercial cloud (such as Google Apps), this dedicated environment within existing Google facilities in the US will serve the unique needs of US federal, state, and local governments. It is similar to a "Community Cloud" as defined by the National Institute for Science and Technology. The government cloud will allow Google to manage and meet additional government policy requirements beyond FISMA.
  

We look forward to working with governments across the country on these exciting initiatives in the months ahead.

Posted by Matthew Glotzbach, Director, Product Management, Google Enterprise

Los Angeles universities take to the clouds with Google Apps

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.

Building perspective and getting voted "Best Mid-Market Solution" at the Mid-sized Enterprise Summit

I was among a team of Googlers who recently attended the Mid-sized Enterprise Summit in Miami, Florida. We enjoyed the sunshine, industry speakers, and above all the chance to talk with CIOs and IT leads from companies across a range of industries. Given the economy, the cost savings available through Google Apps gained a lot of interest.

But we probably got the most "oohs" and "aahs" when we demoed our collaboration apps (Google Docs, including data processing and spreadsheets, Google Sites, for easy web publishing, and Google Video, for secure video sharing). We're always satisfied when we see "the light go on" as newcomers to these products realize what they enable that just isn't available with traditional desktop apps.

Geoffrey Moore set the context for the conference, and indeed, for our message with Google Apps. The well-known author of Crossing the Chasm discussed how the internet has changed the way we can do business. He encouraged audience members to rethink work that doesn't provide any strategic business differentiation for companies – email administration, software upgrade management, things like that. Instead, he emphasized that IT's unique opportunity to help their companies fuel innovation and gain productivity by "investing in the core business to amplify differentiation." According to Moore, this differentiation, and the innovation it enables, is a key lever for doing well during a downtown.

In one of our breakout sessions, we shared one example of how a business might invest in its core by showing resource site built by Home Care Assistance (HCA), an internationally-franchised provider of in-home caregivers. Using Google Sites, HCA created a series of pages that help new franchisees come on board with the information they need to become effective representatives of the HCA brand and philosophy.

HCA's online resource center consolidates knowledge
and spreads best practices.

Instead of spending time getting new offices set up on standalone technology – servers, local IT teams, things like that – HCA corporate has leveraged the power of cloud computing, using Google Apps, to focus its effort on sharing business strategies, techniques for recruiting and screening of caregivers, and refining leading-edge online marketing techniques. Home Care Assistance has not only consolidated its knowledge into this secure intranet but also provided the means for its field offices to share best practices with eachother – blogging about how best to optimize an AdWords budget, for example. This type of collaboration would be resource-intensive, or maybe even impossible, with a static-intranet model where IT would push information out to end users. Home Care Assistance hasaccelerated productivity with this approach and has also fostered wider collaboration amongst its field offices. Using Google Apps, Home Care Assistance has grown 15-fold in less than four years, and has recently expanded into Canada (giving the firm even more ways to integrate Google products!).

HCA makes it easy for people to find office locations
by listing them in a Google Docs spreadsheet and inserting a
Google Maps Gadget into a Google Site.

In another session, we asked people to go hands-on to demonstrate the easy productivity available with Google Apps. Using the forms that are built in to Google Spreadsheets, we captured input from the audience in a survey covering things like the how they communicate with users, responses to presentations, and input on topics and content. This let us show easy, visual summaries of information, displaying answers in charts available to audience members as easily as opening up a browser.

Mid-sized Enterprise Summit attendees filled out a form and saw
how the data filled a spreadsheet and displayed in a graph

We had a great time meeting with customers and understanding how Google Apps can help mid-sized businesses achieve their objectives. We were also grateful to conference participants for voting us the "Best Mid-Market Solution" in Services. The event organizers did a great job and we look forward to seeing you in the fall at the west coast version of the Summit.

Posted by Ben Salzman, Enterprise Sales Team

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Exciting, useful sessions at Google I/O...be there!

The Google I/O Developer Conference is coming up in just four weeks, on May 27 – 28, 2009 in San Francisco, California, so we thought now would be a good time to give you a sneak preview into some of the exciting Enterprise sessions we have planned.

Growing a SaaS-based services business reselling Google Apps
presented by Jeff Ragusa

Traditional value-added resellers are looking for ways to adapt their business for the world of cloud computing and the new Google Apps Authorized Reseller program provides the perfect framework for moving a services business in this direction. This session will focus on revenue opportunities for partners in this area ranging from assisting with SaaS product selection, to guidance on best practices, to custom application development, deployment & integration work, and managed services. Learn how Google's reseller program can enable service providers to take advantage of these opportunities through marketing, sales and technical tools and resources. See Jeff's video invitation to his session here.

Extending the Google Search Appliance to Crawl Valuable Data Behind the Firewell
presented by Nitin Mangtani

The Google Search Appliance is an on-premise hardware and software solution that brings Google search into the enterprise, so users can find content quickly and securely. In this session, learn how partners today are plugging enterprise data sources into the GSA through Connectors and displaying results using OneBox. See Nitin's video invitation to his session here.

OpenSocial in the Enterprise
presented by Chris Schalk, Mark Wentzel, Dave Carroll, Rich Manalang, and Tugdual Grall

With OpenSocial's proven global success in traditional social applications, the enterprise software community has begun to realize its potential and build innovative solutions that cater to the enterprise. Join us for a session centered on how the enterprise software development community is successfully bringing social concepts and technology into the enterprise. Key enterprise players will present and demonstrate how they've successfully used OpenSocial software to build new social solutions.

One last thing to remember: even though Google I/O will be primarily geared around breakout sessions, there will be a ton of other interesting stuff going on, including the Developer Sandbox, Fireside Chats, Tech Talks and After Hours Playground. Click here to register.

Posted by Chris Kelly, Google Apps Partners team

What we talk about when we talk about cloud computing

Recently, McKinsey & Company published a study on cloud computing as part of a symposium for The Uptime Institute, an organization dedicated to supporting the enterprise data center industry. We share McKinsey's interest in helping the IT industry better understand cloud computing, so we'd like to join the conversation Appirio and others have started about the role of cloud computing for large enterprises.

There's quite a bit of talk these days about corporations building a "private cloud" with concepts like virtualization, and there can be significant benefits to this approach. But those advantages are amplified greatly when customers use applications in the scalable datacenters provided by companies like Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com and soon, Microsoft. In this model, customers can leverage hardware infrastructure, distributed software infrastructure, and applications that are built for the cloud, and let us run it for them. This offers them much lower cost applications, and removes the IT maintenance burden that can cripple many organizations today. It also allows customers to deliver innovation to their end users much more rapidly.

We thought we'd provide some insight into what we mean when we say cloud computing, and how its advantages in cost and innovation continue to attract hundreds of thousands of companies of all sizes -- from 2nd Wind Exercise Equipment to Genentech. We created our cloud by building an optimized system from the ground up: starting with low-cost hardware, adding reliable software infrastructure that scales, offering innovative applications, and working every day to improve the whole system. While the McKinsey study only considered the hardware cost savings of the cloud, there is tremendous customer benefit in all of these areas.

Hardware infrastructure
It starts with components. We serve tens of millions of users, so we've had to build infrastructure that scales and can run extremely efficiently to support that load. Consider three areas of data center design: server design, energy efficiency, and scale of operations.

In the virtualization approach of private data centers, a company takes a server and subdivides it into many servers to increase efficiency. We do the opposite by taking a large set of low cost commodity systems and tying them together into one large supercomputer. We strip down our servers to the bare essentials, so that we're not paying for components that we don't need. For example, we produce servers without video graphics chips that aren't needed in this environment.

Additionally, enterprise hardware components are designed to be very reliable, but they can never be 100% reliable, so enterprises spend a lot of time and money on maintenance. In contrast, we expect the hardware to fail, and design for reliability in the software such that, when the hardware does fail, customers are just shifted to another server. This allows us to further lower the cost of our servers by using commodity parts and on-board storage. We also design the systems for easy repair such that, if a part fails, we can quickly bring the server back into service.

Traditionally, companies have focused on using large, highly reliable hardware to run databases and large backend systems, but there is a significant cost impact to that strategy. For example, a 4 CPU quad-core system with 600 GB of high end SCSI storage and 16GB of memory is 8 times more expensive than a system 1/4 its size with less expensive SATA storage. This is because the price of the components increase exponentially as the hardware gets larger and more reliable. By building the reliability into the software, we're able to use a much lower cost hardware platform but still maintain the same reliability to customers.

Beyond server design, we do everything possible to make our servers and data centers as efficient as possible from an energy and cooling perspective. Consider how we designed our data centers for energy efficiency. Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is an industry-standard metric for measuring the efficiency of a data center. We recently shared that the average PUE for our data centers is now better than the state-of-the-art 2011 data center PUE prediction by the EPA. In other words, we beat the EPA's best case estimates three years early, and we achieved this result without the use of exotic infrastructure solutions thought necessary in the EPA report. And we're doing that at every level of the stack: from server utilization to networking.

Finally, we operate at scale, and that drives economies of scale. Just by managing thousands of servers together and making them homogeneous, we're able to cut down on our administrative costs dramatically and pool resources of many types. This benefits end users by enabling us to offer low prices.

But, most importantly for our customers, we manage this entire infrastructure such that they don't have to. According to Gartner, a typical IT department spends 80% of their budget keeping the lights on, and this hampers their ability to drive change and growth in their business. The reality is that most businesses don't gain a competitive advantage from maintaining their own data centers. We take on that burden and make it our core business so that our customers don't have to.

Software Infrastructure

While most discussions of cloud computing and data center design take place at the hardware level, we offer a set of scalable services that customers would otherwise have to maintain themselves in a virtualization model. For example, if a company wanted to implement a typical three tier system in the cloud using virtualization, they would have to build, install, and maintain software to run the database, app server, and web server. This would require them to spend time and money to acquire the licenses, maintain system uptime, and implement patches.

In contrast, with a service like Google App Engine, customers get access to the same scalable application server and database that Google uses for its own applications. This means customers don't have to worry about purchasing, installing, maintaining, and scaling their own databases and app servers. All a customer has to do is deploy code, and we take care of the rest. You only pay for what you need, and, with App Engine's free quota, you often don't pay anything at all.

A great example of software infrastructure that scales is the recent online town hall meeting held by President Obama. The White House was able to instantly scale its database to support more than 100,000 questions and in excess of 3.5 million votes, without worrying about usage spikes that typically would be tough to manage. Because of the cloud, there was no need to provision extra servers to handle the increased demand or forecast demand ahead of time.

Applications
Beyond the underlying hardware and software design, what attracts many customers to the cloud is application outsourcing.

There is limited value to running an Exchange Server in a virtual machine in the cloud. That server was never designed for the cloud, so you don't get additional scale. You'd also need to continue to maintain and monitor the mail server yourself, so the labor savings are marginal. But with cloud-based applications like Gmail, we take care of all of the hassle for you. We keep the application up and running, and have designed it to scale easily. All of this provides an application that is roughly less than 1/3 the cost of a privately hosted mail system, has 100x the typical storage, and innovates much faster.

Innovation
While the cost advantages of cloud computing can be great, there's another advantage that in many ways is more important: the rapid pace of innovation. IT systems are typically slow to evolve. In the virtualization model, businesses still need to run packaged software and endure the associated burden. They only receive major feature enhancements every 2-3 years, and in the meantime they have to endure the monthly patch cycle and painful system-wide upgrades. In our model, we can deliver innovation quickly without IT admins needing to manage upgrades themselves. For example, with Google Apps, we delivered more than 60 new features over the last year with only optional admin intervention.

The era of delayed gratification is over – the Internet allows innovations to be delivered as a constant flow that incorporates user needs, offers faster cycles for IT, and enables integration with systems that were not previously possible. This makes major upgrades a thing of the past, and gives the customer greater and greater value for their money.

As companies weigh private data centers vs. scalable clouds, they should ask a simple question: can I find the same economics, ease of maintenance, and pace of innovation that is inherent in the cloud?

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps