In our ever-connected world, working revolves around collaborating. It’s important to be able to quickly reach people in your network, speeding up the tasks you perform daily, like making a phone call or sending an email – whether you’re at your desk or on the go. To help with this, we’re rolling out an updated version of Contacts that makes it easier to use, organize and edit your work contacts in Gmail.
In addition to all of the improvements we made to Contacts for individual users, we’ve been hard at work on bringing additional, business-specific features to help you and your colleagues get in touch with contacts more easily. Now, you can:
Add new contact information that will default to “Work” instead of “Home” field types
View contact details from the domain directory together with the contact details that you’ve added yourself
Add contacts from the domain directory to your “My Contacts” list in a single click
Manage groups more easily by quickly adding email addresses to groups, and picking from a contact’s multiple email addresses to use on a group-by-group basis
If you’re the Google Apps administrator for your organization, you can enable the new Contacts interface in Gmail for your users from the Service Settings > Contacts area of the next generation administrative control panel. It may take up to an hour for users to see the difference once you make the change.
Make collaboration easier today by switching to the new Gmail Contacts (and once you do, be sure to contact us with your feedback).
Posted by Sean Purcell, Product Manager, Google Contacts
Since we launched data layers in Google Earth Pro, we’ve seen strong and steady growth in use. To make the data even more valuable to our users, we're providing an update that greatly expands coverage for all layers. We hope you enjoy the data refresh!
If you’re new to Google Earth Pro, watch a video about the layers or download a free trial and explore the layers first-hand.
Here’s what’s new: U.S. Parcel Data from DataQuick:
Greater geospatial coverage: 6% increase in the number of parcels attributes available country-wide
8 new parcel attributes, including lot size, roof type, and tax information.
Ability to purchase additional data from DataQuick from within Google Earth Pro
We didn’t build Gmail to work like all the other email options out there. We launched with a full gigabyte of storage per person (now 25 GB for business users), lightning fast search, labels instead of folders, and newer improvements like Priority Inbox to help you cope better with lots of information. While most Gmail users find that these features save lots of time, naturally there are people who want to keep using email in more familiar ways. That’s why we launched alternatives like Microsoft Outlook® synchronization, native BlackBerry® integration and IMAP support. More choice helps people move to the cloud more quickly.
Conversation view is perhaps Gmail’s most hotly debated feature. Threading enthusiasts say they spend less mental energy drawing connections between related messages and that their inboxes are much less cluttered. On the other hand, email traditionalists like many former Outlook users think conversation view just complicates something that has worked for years. Russ Midford, Senior Information Systems Engineer at Sanmina-SCI, sums it up well. “I personally prefer threaded conversations, but as an administrator who still needs to support some long-time Outlook users on Gmail, the unthreaded option is like gold.”
We really hoped everyone would learn to love conversation view, but we came to realize that it’s just not right for some people. So today we’re introducing another valuable choice. Users who prefer a traditional inbox can toggle off conversation view to see email as individual messages in chronological order. Some actions commonly associated with unthreaded email can be accomplished with searches in Gmail, so check out our tips on advanced search operators.
Over the next few days, we’ll be rolling out conversation view settings to users in organizations with the “Enable pre-release features” option selected in the Google Apps control panel, and to individuals using Gmail.
Whichever side of the debate you’re on, we hope we’re continuously making Gmail more useful to you. For more information about migrating from common legacy solutions to Google Apps, see our resource pages for Microsoft® Exchange and Lotus Notes®, or contact our sales team.
Join the Google Apps team for a demonstration of this feature, a recap of recent Gmail innovations, and tools to help your school or business switch to Google Apps: Wednesday, October 6th, 2010 10 a.m. PDT / 1 p.m. EDT / 6 p.m. GMT On-demand webinar
Back in May we shared details about a big change so Google Apps accounts can start accessing dozens of Google services beyond the core suite of messaging and collaboration apps. This change will let users access many new services such as Blogger, Reader, Google Voice and calling-in-Gmail (US only), Picasa Web Albums, AdWords and iGoogle from their Google Apps accounts. This big improvement addresses 9 of the top 20 requests from customers in one fell swoop, so we’re thrilled that the new infrastructure is now open for early adopters! After accounts are transitioned to the new infrastructure, these customers will be able to tap into much more innovation happening all across Google, helping people be even more productive with a broader range of tools in the cloud.
Why just for “early adopters” you ask? We’re still working on a few important features, but after extensive testing we’ve found that what’s ready today is already tremendously valuable to many Standard, Premier and Education Edition customers. Here’s the functionality that early adopters won’t see before the new infrastructure is feature-complete:
Administrators do not yet have the ability to turn off access to any of these additional services as they can today for applications in the core suite.
A few applications are not compatible with the new infrastructure at this time including Google Health, PowerMeter, YouTube, Web History, Buzz and Profiles.
You should also be aware of two other details not specific to early adopters: support limitations and “conflicting accounts”. Additional applications beyond the core suite are not covered by Google Enterprise support or the 99.9% uptime guarantee. However, many services have self-service online help resources, and a subset (such as AdWords) offer enhanced support options. Finally, a small fraction of Google Apps users have created personal Google Accounts based on their organization’s Google Apps email addresses. Users in this situation will need to rename these “conflicting accounts” during the transition process, and we’ll help these users make the necessary changes.
So...if you understand the limitations and would like to transition users to the new infrastructure, sign in to the control panel. If you use the control panel in English and meet our other early adopter eligibility criteria, you’ll start seeing a notification in your dashboard in the next few days where you can get started. You can begin with a handful of pilot users, and then transition your whole organization once you’ve had a chance to kick the tires.
If any of the current limitations are problematic for you, or if your organization isn’t eligible yet, hang tight and keep an eye out here for the next phase of our roll-out. We’re excited to help you move to the new infrastructure too, and we’ll be ready for you soon! For more information, please explore our Help Center documentation for administrators and for end-users.
Information overload is a reality of the modern workplace. The average corporate worker sends and receives more than 150 messages per day1, an email deluge of varying importance: key project updates from colleagues, requests from higher-ups, appointment reminders, and automated mail that’s often much less important. With so much information to process, simply figuring out what needs to be be read and what needs a reply takes up a lot of time. Today, we’re excited to introduce Priority Inbox Beta in Gmail, an experimental new way of reducing information overload.
Priority Inbox is a new view of your inbox that automatically helps you focus on your most important messages. Gmail has always kept spam messages out of your inbox, and now we’ve improved Gmail’s filter to help you see the emails that matter faster without requiring you to set up complex rules.
Here’s how it works: Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred,” and “Everything else”:
Messages are automatically categorized as they arrive in your inbox. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). And as you use Gmail, it will get better. You can improve the ranking in Priority Inbox by clicking the buttons at the top of the inbox to mark conversations as important or not important.
As a result, your inbox is better organized, and you can spend your time addressing your most important emails right away. When we tested Priority Inbox at Google, we found that people spent 6% less time on email after enabling this feature. This translates to a week’s worth of time saved each year for information workers who typically spend 13 hours per week on email today!2
Luke Leonhard, Web Services Manager for Brady Corporation, says “Like many of our users, I get over a hundred messages each day. Priority Inbox saves me time by displaying emails in order of importance, letting me process them more efficiently than before. The time I save can then be spent on new projects that add value to Brady rather than managing my inbox.”
Over the next week, we’ll be rolling out Priority Inbox settings to users in organizations with the “Enable pre-release features” option selected in the Google Apps control panel.
Helping users manage lots of information has always been a core goal of Gmail, and we’re excited to see how Priority Inbox helps users in organizations mitigate information overload and get to important messages faster.
Google’s multi-tenant infrastructure allows us to launch new features to our customers seamlessly, and with over 50 launches in first half of this year alone, the pace of innovation in Google Apps continues to accelerate.
Today we keep up the innovation with several new updates in Google Sites and Google Docs. We’ve improved Google Sites with several highly-requested features including horizontal navigation, global footers, and a new section for deleted items.
Horizontal navigation enables site owners to easily add links across the top of their sites.
Site owners can also add a global footer that displays across all pages on a site, and we added a new section for deleted items in sites, making it easier to get to deleted pages and attachments.
We’ve also added quick links to open Google Docs that are embedded in a site, making it easier for collaborators to open embedded documents.
For more information on these new features in Google Sites, check out the Google Docs blog.
In addition to these updates to Google Sites, this week we also launched several improvements in Google Docs:
Typing links just got a little faster in Google documents. Now when you type something that we recognize as a web address, it will automatically become a link.
We’ve also added a few more page sizes for your documents. So if you’ve been craving an Executive sized page (7.25” x 10.5”), you’re in luck. For more information on autolinks and page sizes, head to the Google Docs blog.
Correct spelling is an essential part of document creation, and to that end we’ve added spellcheck to Google spreadsheets. For more information on spelling checker in spreadsheets, visit the Google Docs blog.
As with all updates on Google Apps, users can get new features just by refreshing their browsers, and improvements roll out to customers with no need for administrators to manage patches or install software.
Stay tuned for more updates to Google Docs and Google Sites.
Posted by Scott Johnston, Google Apps Product Manager
Gmail makes it easy to find emails really fast with Google-powered search for your inbox. This works well when you know you’re looking for an email, but if you have information in documents and sites too, you may have to search several places with the same query to find what you’re looking for.
Today we’re making it easier to search across more of your data with the new “Apps Search” lab in Gmail. Once the lab is enabled, the “Search Mail” button in Gmail will say “Search Mail and Docs” instead. When you run a search in Gmail, your search results will include matching documents and sites in addition to results from your email.
We also offer “Did you mean?” suggestions when it looks like you’ve misspelled a word:
This is a Labs launch, so to get started, click ‘Settings’ within Gmail, then the ‘Labs’ tab, and enable ‘Apps Search’. Standard Edition users can follow these instructions immediately, while Premier and Education Edition users will first need their domain administrators to enable Gmail Labs from the Google Apps control panel. For more information on Gmail labs for Google Apps, see the Help Center.
People should have the power to conduct searches from everywhere. This is why we provide users with numerous options beyond Google.com, such as typing in a search query directly in the address bar in Google Chrome, or through Google Toolbar, or Google Desktop.
However, when it comes to searching information on their corporate intranet, most users’ choices are limited. Corporate users typically have to go to a special URL or open up a special portal application to search their intranet. To alleviate this limitation, we have integrated the Google Search Appliance with the OpenSearch protocol. OpenSearch is a collection of simple formats for the sharing of search results. So for instance, integrating with OpenSearch enables accessing the Google Search Appliance directly from the browser:
Or, as shown below, you can search directly from Windows Explorer within Windows 7:
Ultimately, we are trying to provide as many options as possible to the end user. And by supporting OpenSearch, these options will increase as more platforms connect with OpenSearch.
Around the world, thousands of customers count on Google Earth Pro to help them get their work done. From visualizing complicated layers generated by GIS software to leveraging movie-making tools for site selection, engineering project visualization, and much more, Google Earth Pro enables businesses, government agencies, and educators to bring their geographic data to life.
Yet customers want more, with easy access to relevant data layers being a common request. In the past, users had to invest considerable time and resources to find data such as demographic, traffic counts, and land parcel information. Other customers struggled with processing large, complicated layers.
We’re happy to announce the launch of Google Earth Pro 5.2, which makes it much easier to find and access the data you need to make smart business decisions.
Google Earth Pro 5.2 includes:
a set of exclusive layers designed to make everything easier from site selection to business intelligence analysis
enhanced capabilities to process and visualize large geospatial data files
Point. Click. Start analyzing.
Earth Pro now includes three new productivity-enhancing layers:
U.S. Demographics: includes demographic data on 2010 and projected 2015 income, age, education, etc. at the state, county, tract, and block group level. For income and age, you can view beautifully color-coded layers enabling you to quickly zero in on target markets and cross-reference with your own layers. The data is presented in both tabular and pie chart format and is licensed from Claritas.
U.S. Parcel data: provides critical parcel and building information for both commercial and residential parcels. This includes APN (assessor’s parcel number), use codes, and zoning data to help you make the right business decisions. Even more exciting, you can get more details, such as sales history, by purchasing the corresponding DataQuick detailed report (sample), linked from each parcel info window.
U.S. Daily Traffic Counts: reports the historical average number of cars that have passed through an intersection in the US. Make sure your new development, store, or advertisement will get the right amount of visibility with data from MPSI.
In addition to the included layers, Earth Pro 5.2 also makes processing your own complex layers easier. With new built-in “regionation” functionality, Earth Pro can now ingest and display large KMLs with speed and ease. Vector “regionation” automatically optimizes your data by intelligently loading points as you zoom in to the globe. Super image overlays enable your layers to include larger images by optimizing the resolution of images as you zoom in.
To purchase Google Earth Pro, visit our online store or sign up for a 7-day free trial. We hope you enjoy these new features.
Posted by Daniel Chu, Product Manager, Enterprise Maps/Earth
Customers often tell us how much their users love Google Maps. They love the friendly blue of the oceans, the easy-to-read labels of cities, and the solid yellow of the roads. But maybe you’re a rebel – someone who wants the roads to look YOUR way. Or perhaps your corporate branding clashes with the standard version of cities and streets. You’d love to change the colors on the map, or adjust the details your customers see.
If that’s you, we have good news. With today’s launch of Maps API Premier Styled Maps, you’ll be able to do all of that and more. An easy-to-customize hierarchical structure lets you easily turn on and off the transit stations, change the colors of the maps to match your corporate identity, work with details, and more. Enjoy!
Click here to learn more about using Maps API Premier.
Daniel Chu, Product Manager, Google Enterprise Maps/Earth
Businesses rely on Google’s accurate routing engine to bring customers from their homes to company stores, from company headquarters to customer sites, and more. This is important on any platform, including mobile devices, and within increasingly-complex uses of map data.
But sometimes, technology has gotten in the way of the right user experience. No more. With today’s announcement, Google is delivering the most requested Maps API feature: a Directions web service. This new addition lets you couple the Static Maps API with the Directions API, letting users both visualize and get route directions through a simple HTTP interface.
Driving, walking, and biking directions are all included so regardless of your mode of transport, Google Maps API Premier has you covered!
Look for another blog post tomorrow with more exciting launches at Google I/O. Click here to learn more about using Maps API Premier.
Posted by Daniel Chu, Product Manager, Google Enterprise Maps/Earth
One of our most popular feature requests has been to add autocompletion of queries to Google Site Search. In recent months, many top websites have begun to provide search suggestions as you type, an innovative feature users are coming to expect as part of a quality search experience. Today, we announced at Google I/O that you can now enable query autocompletions for your search engine.
Travelocity.com is one of the first Google Site Search customers to implement autocompletions on their website. By doing so, they have provided an easy way for Travelocity users to explore and discover new destinations by suggesting the most popular queries based on the first few letters the user inputs.
To turn this feature on, please check the "Enable autocompletions" option in the Basics tab of your search engine. It may take several hours to start seeing autocompletions once you enabled them in the control panel.
For more information about how to turn on autocompletions for your Google Site Search engine, see our autocompletions Help Page.
Autocompletion is compatible with other new Google Site Search features including themes and mobile search capabilities – which can significantly enhance your users’ mobile experience. As with all Google Site Search features, every new development is rolled out free of charge for all customers.
You can learn more about these and other exciting new features by joining an upcoming webinar:
I’m delighted to announce the launch of Google Maps API Premier v3 today, which includes the functionality you’ve put to use in v2 plus new features that Premier partners have requested, including:
Support for mobile browsers such as Android and iPhone
Optimized routing
Support for custom Street View imagery
Support for mobile browsers
We started last year completely rebuilding the Maps API in order to dramatically increase performance, especially on mobile browsers. With the proliferation of mobile platforms and operating systems, it’s become more complicated to build web applications and sites that are relatively browser/OS agnostic. Yet the pressure to have apps and sites work on mobile has only grown stronger. Development teams have needed expertise in Java, Objective C, and other languages, and have often needed to retrofit existing code to new standards. No more! With Maps API Premier v3, the same JavaScript that works in Chrome, Firefox, and IE now works in the Android mobile browser and the iPhone mobile browser.
Optimized Routing
With the boom in geolocation and asset and fleet tracking, it’s clear that knowing the optimal route – right now – can make a huge difference in your business’ costs. Now you can take advantage of Google’s always up-to-date map data to find the best routes. Google Maps API Premier now can optimize the waypoints to give you the fastest route, saving you miles, wear and tear, and fuel. This is an easy way to move beyond distance matrices – and to stay a bit greener, too.
Custom Street View Imagery
Street View, one of the most popular and distinctive features of Google Maps, has long been useful for our Maps API Premier customers and partners, giving users the detail and feel of a location that no other type of imagery can. Now Maps API Premier customers can use their own imagery, whether it’s of their hotel rooms, houses for sale, or ski slopes, giving users this helpful perspective even in places beyond the Google Maps Street View car or trike routes.
Look for another blog post tomorrow with more exciting launches at Google I/O for Maps API Premier. Click here to learn more about using Maps API Premier.
Posted by Daniel Chu, Product Manager, Google Enterprise Maps/Earth
Google Apps provides businesses with seamless, secure access to information regardless of device. You can check your email or consult your calendar, sites, and documents from any web-enabled device anywhere in the world with an Internet connection.
The ability to access your data from virtually anywhere enables higher productivity, but just like traditional systems that don’t run in the cloud, security concerns can arise if a user loses a computer or mobile device that can access their sensitive information. Fortunately, when users store data in Google Apps, they do not need to keep it on the device itself. Starting today, administrators can also easily invalidate a user’s active connection to Google Apps services from the Google Apps control panel.
More specifically, administrators can now reset a user’s sign-in cookies to help prevent unauthorized access to their account. This will log out that user from all current web browser sessions and require new authentication the next time that user tries to access Google Apps. Combined with the existing ability for administrators to reset user passwords, this new feature to reset users’ sign-in cookies improves security in the cloud in case of device theft or loss.
If you have any questions about this feature, please check out our help page.
The security and privacy of our customer’s data is paramount so stay tuned for more security features on Google Apps.
Posted by Will Smit, Software Engineer, Google Apps
Recently, we showed you how Google Site Search Themes can help you customize the look and feel of your website’s search engine with just a few clicks. We know it’s just as important to be able to quickly and easily modify the format of search results so they appear exactly as you’d like.
With Google Site Search's new data rendering features, you can enable the return of search results in whatever format you’d like. You can control the size and position of images, personalize the attributes that are shown, insert lines of metadata into search results, and much more.
You can find more about the technical implementation details on the Google AJAX API blog, and can add Google Site Search to your website by visiting google.com/sitesearch.
Posted by David Gibson and Nicholas Weininger, Software Engineers
The data that powers API features like the map tiles, geocoding, and driving directions has been updated in Canada! The new base map in Canada will have expanded features such as more detailed water bodies, university campuses, postal code coverage, and a shorter feedback cycle for Maps updates – all leading to better, more accurate maps for employees and customers.
Along with this update we've launched the popular "Report a Problem" feature that's used in the United States to our Canadian users, too. It's recommended that you re-geocode all of your data to take advantage of the update.
When our users add Google Site Search to their website, they expect the same relevance, intuitiveness, and response time that’s delivered with Google.com search. As a website owner, you want to leverage the power of Google search while still staying within the unique look and feel of your site’s design, and Google Site Search Themes allow you to modify the appearance of search results to more closely match the overall styling of your website.
Google Site Search users can easily set up their themes through the admin control panel, which also manages everything from refinement labels to On-Demand Indexing. By clicking on the "Look and Feel" tab, you can choose between three primary layouts and six styles for your Google Site Search. Each style has a unique color scheme, text format, and search box appearance to fit in with the rest of your site.
If you love a style, but need to tweak it, you can customize it further by changing fonts, colors, backgrounds, promotion settings, as well as interactive features such as tabbing and mouse-overs. The preview function instantly shows you the effects of your changes, so you can keep iterating until your search results look just right.
What’s more, Google Site Search allows for further customization through a number of different features and capabilities such as the XML results feed, JSON, or our brand new custom data rendering features – tools that web developers with programming experience can use for more advanced results. With Themes, however, you can make major layout and formatting changes to your search experience right through your control panel, without having HTML, CSS, or JavaScript editing.
Google Site Search is constantly adding new features. We recently added mobile support for Custom and Site Search as well as support for rich snippets and easier synonym management, among many other enhancements made in 2009. Needless to say, we have ongoing new features and enhancements planned for 2010.
See how easy it is to put the power of Google search to work for your website.
Google Postini security services work in the cloud to help prevent spam and viruses before they hit your servers. These services also make it easy for admins to fine-tune filtering options to get the right level of protection for their organization's unique needs.
It can often be a delicate balance between protecting networks from attacks and allowing employees the flexibility to use email effectively. To help achieve this balance, today we're introducing a new Google Message Security reporting feature: Health Check.
Health Check helps you maximize the effectiveness of your spam filters. Think of it as a self-service "tune-up" for your Postini filters. It gives admins a comprehensive report that will help them check how current configurations impact the effectiveness of antispam and antivirus filters.
This report also highlights deviations from our recommended best practices, so that you can see areas where more protection might be helpful and select the levels that best meet your needs. For example, reports can "flag" areas of risk in user-defined settings, help optimize Approved Sender Lists, and guide the way you set up firewalls.
In this snippet from a Health Check report, the Virus Outbreak Level for this account is set to "Normal" (see red outline over item "2"). Our guidelines suggest that admins set this to Very High to increase security against viruses and malware. Deviations from recommended best practices are highlighted in red text so you can easily identify where changes can be made to tighten security.
With Health Check, we hope to empower administrators to make the best use of Postini Services. Health Check is now available through the Postini service administration console to Postini and Google Apps Premier Edition customers.
For more information the Google Postini suite of security and archving services, visit www.google.com/postini
Today we're introducing Dual Delivery, a new feature for Google Message Security that enables a copy of an email to be delivered to two different mail hosts. Dual Delivery provides two benefits. First, it can be used to support a transition to a new email service; second, it can be used as a backup email access point.
Dual Delivery allows an interruption-free transition to a new email solution. By enabling incoming email messages to be copied and sent to two different mailhosts, Dual Delivery gives users the chance to familiarize themselves with a new email platform without disrupting mailflow to the existing system. It also gives IT the chance to learn from user behavior and understand the technical implications of a transition before a full rollout.
Dual Delivery also makes it easier to pilot and transition to Google Apps. By enabling the "Send a copy to Google Apps Gmail" feature of Dual Delivery, you can test Gmail without interrupting current practice. If you choose to switch over to Google Apps, you can enable the "Use Google Apps Gmail" feature in the Administration Console to directly route all of your mail to Gmail without having to manually reroute your MX records.
Dual Delivery can also be used as a secondary email access point. If users are unable to access their primary mailbox for any reason, or if admins want to give users cloud-based remote or mobile email access, Dual Delivery can provide read/write email access through a secondary inbox.
Dual Delivery is now available to Postini customers through the Delivery Manager settings in the Postini Administration Console.
For more information about the Google Postini suite of security and archiving services, visit www.google.com/postini
Posted by Gopal Shah, Google Postini team
Update 04/05/2010: Dual Delivery is not a tool for migrating historical email or legacy data. It is a tool that makes it easier to transition to a new email system, like Google Apps, by having production email show up in both the new system and the legacy system, allowing you to evaluate both. Please check our Switching from Microsoft Exchange and Switching from Lotus Notes posts, for more information on migrating to Google Apps.
Thousands of businesses and schools have been using Google Sites as a collaboration platform for teams, classes, or entire intranets.
In the past year, we've helped simplify the site creation process with site templates and let businesses create domain-specific gadgets with private gadgets. Gadgets are snippets of code that can embed rich media, pieces of web content, or Google Apps products like Docs or Calendars, directly into Google Sites. One request we've received from Google Apps administrators is the ability to manage the types of gadgets available to users in the gadget directory.
Available to Google Apps customers, we're releasing an update to the Feed Server Client Tool (FSCT) – the same developer tool that enables private gadgets – to allow administrators to set which gadgets appear in the Sites gadget directory. Using the FSCT, businesses and schools can choose to explicitly select relevant gadgets for their domain's directory or blacklist inappropriate gadgets.
To find out more about using FSCT to manage your domain's gadgets in Google Sites, read the Help Center Article.
Posted by Jeffrey Harris, Associate Product Manager, Google Apps
