Tips and tricks on deploying Google Apps

The process of going Google doesn't end with making the decision to migrate to Google Apps. That's why our Google Apps Deployment team is here to ensure that the millions of Google Apps users – from large businesses and schools to small community organizations – have the resources they need to help get Google Apps up and running.

If your company, school, or organization has decided to "go Google," but isn't yet fully "gone," today's post on the Official Google Blog points to some resources from our deployment team and tells more about the tools and guides available to help along the way.

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Google Apps team

Search Appliance gets real-time: Twitter feeds now available on the GSA

Real-time information is becoming an increasingly important part of searching online – both for business and consumer search users. Yesterday we announced the launch of real-time results on Google.com, and today we're announcing that the Google Search Appliance (GSA) can show users tweets from Twitter next to their internal Search Appliance results.

Social information is important for businesses: employees searching for information needed to do their jobs benefit from real-time news too. They might be developing a new breakfast cereal, or designing a marketing plan for a clothing line, or writing strategy report for a political campaign. In all of these cases, understanding what is being said just as Twitter users are saying it can be invaluable.

Google’s focus is to provide the most relevant search results to users. In the case of the GSA, this means accessing information from multiple sources, aka universal search. To this end, we already offer a feature called Related Web Results, which allows employees to view results from Google.com alongside corporate search results.

Customers have told us that placing web results next to intranet ones often allows employees to think differently about a particular topic and approach it in new ways. By integrating enterprise search with more of the information that exists in the cloud, like tweets, employees can more easily leverage the wisdom of the crowd.

To turn the Twitter box on in GSA results, follow the instructions provided here. It should take no more than 15 minutes to get up and running. It can be enabled for only some users, all users, or set up so users can choose themselves whether they want to see the Twitter results by using a keyword trigger (like 'twitter'). Integration info and how-tos for this feature can be found here, and happy realtime reading.

Posted by Cyrus Mistry, Product Manager, Google Enterprise Search

Communication and collaboration just got easier with Google Groups

Picture this: you're working on a new project with your team. You ask your IT admin to create a new group that includes all of your team members, keeping in mind that you must ask them to update the group every time people join or leave the group. Maybe you're even wishing that (a) you had a secure, central place to manage this group and communicate with it, and (b) you could easily search group archives for information somewhere other than your inbox.

That's when your admin gives you the good news: creating, managing and sharing with groups just got a whole lot easier. Today, Google Apps is giving business and school IT administrators the ability to let users create, manage and collaborate in groups without needing IT help. This launch is a major expansion to the mailing list functionality and content sharing we released earlier this year.

The following Google Groups features are now included in Google Apps Premier and Education Editions:

• Fast set-up. Employees and students can now create collaborative groups instantly without burdening IT, and manage the group settings to fit their needs.
• Searchable archives. Group discussions are archived by default, allowing users to easily search and view past and present discussions via the web.
• Sharing with a group. Once a group is set up, employees and students can easily share a document, spreadsheet, presentation, shared folder, site, calendar, or video with that group. No need to type in individual email address manually, or remember who joined or left the group. Plus, the shared items will only be accessible by the appropriate people, even as people join and leave the group.
• Reply on behalf of a group. In addition to communicating via email or the web interface, the new functionality lets group managers send a message on behalf of a group.
• IT capabilities. IT administrators still manage if and how users can create groups from the administrative control panel.

Google Apps Premier and Education Edition administrators can now enable the new groups functionality from the control panel by enabling the "user-managed groups" service. You can read more about this announcement on the Official Google Blog. Google Groups will be rolling out to Google Apps Premier and Education Edition domains over the next day, so if you don't notice these features right now, you should see them soon.

We're always developing new features to help you get your job done faster and more efficiently with Google Apps. Stay tuned to this blog for the latest updates as new features continue to come your way, or subscribe to our Google Apps update feed and get the news as it happens.

Posted by Shimrit Ben-Yair, Product Manager

Building your business around Google Docs

Editor's Note: Taylor McKnight is a co-founder of SCHED*, a web based scheduling and social networking application for conferences and festivals. He is currently a partner at The Hype Machine, a music blog aggregator and discovery tool for music fans and has worked extensively as a web developer at Gawker Media and The University of Florida. Taylor built SCHED* using Google Docs, part of the Google Apps suite of messaging and collaboration apps available in Education, Standard and Premier Editions.

We're sharing Taylor's story as an example of how Google Apps speeds innovation and makes it easy for good ideas to turn into real businesses, quickly, reliably, and without the need for investment in IT infrastructure.

I'm a rabid music fan, and friends often ask me for recommendations when it comes to festivals, bands, and other music-related events. SCHED* was born out of a desire to keep track of my favorite events.

SCHED* is a simple, social scheduling app that Chirag Mehta and I launched as an unofficial SXSW 2008 Schedule and which spread like wildfire among attendees. There were more than 4,000 bands, panels, films and parties going on during that week and I was obsessed with not missing a thing. I had grown weary of manually building a schedule of recommendations for friends and wanted to build an easy way that anybody could create and publicize a schedule themselves.

We soon expanded to support all kinds of events and new clients including music festivals like Lollapalooza, tech conferences like The Next Web, and political conventions like the UK Labour Conference. We've now handled 80+ new events.

We ran the original version of SCHED* at SXSW 2008 as a makeshift solution using an exported Microsoft Excel spreadsheet file. Once we began working with clients, we began looking for a more streamlined solution – ideally, an online spreadsheet that they could update on-the-go and didn't require programming knowledge. Google Apps Premier Edition provided the answer.

Google Docs spreadsheets, included in Google Apps, was the clear front runner because a majority of conference organizers already had Google accounts and were familiar with the interface. Additionally, the API made it easy for organizers to retrieve data from their spreadsheets. Here's what it looks like when it's up and running:

The idea of driving our entire admin interface from within a Google spreadsheet was exciting. Little to no learning curve, no server overhead, and Google's redundancy made this decision a big payoff. After setting up a simple data template, we used the Google Docs API to give the organizers a way to update the live site. In a single day it was integrated so that a simple click of a button would trigger an XML export of the Google Docs spreadsheet to our servers, instantly updating both our database and the live schedule that users would see.

The benefits of creatively using a Google Docs spreadsheet as a database entry point also gave us additional features we didn't have to build.

Document sharing was an easy way to provide access to all those involved as well as troubleshoot any difficulties live with the built in chat room. If a client needed help with formatting or suggestions for their event types we could give them live suggestions within the spreadsheet. Revision history gave us instant rollback in case there were any accidental overwrites, which are bound to happen.

Having these support features and safety nets built in to Google Docs spreadsheets let us spend more time improving the product itself (like an iPhone compatible version!) instead of reinventing the wheel.

We also use the Google Talk chatback badges embedded into every page of our new marketing site to provide always-on, live chat access to our team. We're excited to give our current and potential clients a new, simple way of communicating with us (even without logging into anything!).

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps team

Have a story to share about how you use Google Apps? Tell us here and we may follow up with you.

Explaining top result and date biasing in Google Site Search

We know that businesses want website search solutions that are easy to implement, require little maintenance, and consistently return the best search results, without requiring time-consuming manual refinements. We also know that there can be times when businesses want additional control over the search they offer on their websites. That's when two important features in Google Site Search come in handy: "top result" and "date biasing." We want to highlight those today.

Google Site Search lets you customize search results in several ways to make sure items you want featured reach the top of the results list. With top result biasing, you can target the top search results from specific sections of your website (such as your product catalog or newsletter sign up page) to make sure visitors can find the most relevant pages within your site.

Site admins can also choose to organize search results based on the age of the documents with something we call date biasing. If you want to make sure that, say, a new PDF makes it to the top of the results rather than an outdated version, you can switch on date biasing and decide the level of influence (low, medium, high or maximum) so visitors can easily find the most recent version.

These are only two of the suite of customization features that are available with Google Site Search. To learn more, visit google.com/sitesearch.

Posted by Anna Bishop, Google Enterprise Search team

Getting up to speed in Google Video for business & education

Have you ever wanted to watch a training video, but didn't feel you could take the time for it? Ever wished a slow speaker would talk just a little faster? Or maybe you'd like to skim through a presentation at high speed until you got to something really interesting?

All that is now possible with Google Video for business. Just select the video you want to watch, and you'll see a speed control in the player. Click the button to switch between 1.5x and real-time, or drag the pop-up slider to select the speed you want. The new speed setting is "sticky"...in other words, you can find particular sections of interest by dragging the position marker or clicking in the Scenes bar without dropping back to normal speed.

We've found that most videos are very comprehensible at 1.25x to 1.75x speed. If your video is captioned, you'll find that you can go even faster.

Give it a try. Once you start watching videos at 1.5x, you might never go back to real-time!

Google Video for business is part of Google Apps Premier and Education Editions, included with Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and more. To learn more about Google Apps, get started here.

Posted by Daniel Steinberg, Google Video team

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Sharing with groups

In my work, being able to communicate and collaborate with many groups of people is crucial to productivity, and I often want to use Google Apps to share content with particular groups or teams. Typing in every user's email address manually is painstaking and inefficient, and remembering when people leave and join different teams is impossible. Like any user, I want to make sure that I reach the right people, and I want this to be easy and and efficient.

With that in mind, I want to share some shortcuts that help with sharing and groups in several of our apps.

• In Google Calendar, you can share a calendar with a group by navigating to 'Share this calendar', and then entering a group's email address where you normally enter an individual's. The calendar will be shared with everyone in the group, and will automatically adjust to any membership changes over time.

• In Google Sites, you can share a site with a group in the same way. Choose whether you want everyone in the group to be an owner, collaborator, or viewer. The site will automatically detect group membership changes.

• In Google Docs, groups can be given permission to edit or view individual documents, spreadsheets, presentations, or files. It looks like this:
  

• In Google Video for business, you can add groups as collaborators or viewers of videos.

Here at Google, we use these features all the time and find them very useful. Now, with Google Apps taking care of group sharing for me, I can focus on other important things...

Stay tuned for even more exciting groups-related goodies coming your way!

Posted by Jeffrey Chang, Associate Product Manager, Google Groups

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Mapping it up: Adding Google Maps to your website

We often hear people ask, "How do I add a Google Map to my website?" Sometimes, it's from a small business owner simply trying to show directions to their store. Other times, it's from larger enterprises that want to create more complex mapping applications, overlaying their own proprietary layers of data on the map.

To help organizations of all sizes sort through their options, we've created a new web resource: maps.google.com/getmaps

Quick and Simple (for beginners and basic sites) You'll find step-by-step instructions for plotting one or more locations on a map and embedding that map into your own website.

Advanced (for developers & advanced sites ) You'll see examples of the various ways to manipulate a map and add your own content as well as a handy comparison chart of the two Google Maps APIs (Standard and Premier) that you'll implement on your site.

Curious what other businesses are doing with interactive maps? Check out a few success stories listed on our new site or visit our Google Enterprise Maps website to see a more comprehensive list of success stories that you can sort by industry and read up on companies lie yours.

For more information, check out our post on the Google Lat Long Blog.

Posted by Andrew Chang, Google Maps team

Q2 2009 Spam Trends

Editor's Note: The spam data cited in this post is drawn from the network of Google email security and archiving services, powered by Postini, which provide email security to more than 50,000 organizations, including businesses of all sizes, government agencies, and educational institutions. To learn more about what the Gmail team is doing to keep spam out of your inboxes, check out this post.

Our "Spam Trend" update last quarter summarized the rise in both levels and types of spam, with new players and techniques entering the market. This quarter, proliferation continues, with an unpredictable pattern of drops and spikes as 2009 moves along. Overall, spam is measurably up: Q2'09 average spam levels are 53% higher than in Q1'09 and 6% higher than in Q2'08.

After last November's McColo ISP takedown, when spam volumes dropped by 70%, spammers worked overtime to fill the void. They succeeded: Within four months, spam levels rose back to pre-McColo levels. This upward trend continued through June 4, when another large ISP spam source, 3FN, was reported to have been dismantled. Spam volume immediately dropped 30% – not as extreme as McColo, but still significant. Although this created a sudden dip in spam levels, it also created an open invitation for opportunistic spammers to once again seize a market opportunity.

Over the coming months, we anticipate watching new players once again drive spam levels back up. Since June 4, spammers have already made up a significant amount of ground, climbing 14% from the initial drop.

Here's what the trend looked like, as tracked through Postini filters, over the past six months:

"Unpredictability" summarizes the overall trend as Q2'09 winds down and spammers test both new and "retro" techniques. For example, on June 18 we tracked a new attack that unleashed 50% of a typical day's spam volume in just two hours' time. This attack used a simple "newsletter" template – somewhat "old school" by today's spam standard – with malevolent links and images inserted into the content. Google's Postini filters detected more than 11,000 variants of this spam during those two hours. Because this spam enabled spoofing of the recipient domain (meaning the "from" field was falsified), distribution lists were especially hard-hit by this attack.

Resurgence of image spam

One of the other trends we're watching closely is the sudden popularity of "image spam" – a form of spam that rose to prominence in 2007, before most anti-spam filters learned how to block it. It's simple stuff: basic email with advertising content, usually containing a related image. They can also include malicious links or content – and either way, the large file size of an image spam can place a heavy load on an email network.

An image spam email might look something like this:

Evidence of the resurgence in image spam can be seen in the graph below, which shows that the actual size of spam messages, measured in bytes, is back on the rise:

There are a couple of possible explanations for the resurgence in image spam, despite the fact that most spam filters out there have adapted to the technique. One theory is that this wave is designed to test the defenses of the different spam filters out there, so that spammers can do statistical analysis on what subject lines and content have the highest probability of success.

Another is that there may be some new players entering the spam game, following the McColo and 3FN takedowns, and these new players are opening with some well-tested techniques. Either way, we're watching this trend and will share insights as we gain them in the weeks and months ahead.

Spike in payload viruses

June was also an active month for viruses sent as email attachments, otherwise known as "payload viruses." Volumes rose to their highest level in almost two years as spammers returned to yet another tried-and-true technique to expand their botnets.

As you can see in the chart below, June's activity is almost as high as the two-month payload virus surge seen in Q3'07. Fortunately, Google's Postini zero-hour heuristics detected this uprise early and kept payload attacks in the cloud and away from users' email networks.

Everything old might be new again

In summary, Q2'09 saw continued unpredictability and the resurgence of old-style spam attacks. Are spammers finally running out of original ideas? And if so, like Hollywood, are we now starting to see spam "remakes," based on originals of a few years ago? And what are spammers looking to accomplish as they unleash these remakes? Only time will tell.

For more information on how Google email security services, powered by Postini, can help your organization provide better spam protection and take a load off your network by halting spam in the cloud, visit www.google.com/postini.

Posted by Amanda Kleha, Google message security and archiving team

Updates to Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook

When we announced Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook a few weeks ago, we committed to improving it over time to make the Outlook experience on Apps as similar to the experience on Exchange as possible. We first focused on making mail, contacts, and calendar work really well, because those are the features that the more than one hundred companies who tested Apps Sync before launch asked for. Today we wanted to share a couple of updates on our progress in improving compatibility.

We worked closely with Microsoft to address two issues that we shared recently, and we appreciate their help. The Windows Desktop Search feature now works, so you can choose between the native Outlook search, which has been available since launch, and Windows Desktop Search to find information in Outlook. We've also worked with them to add support for accessing Windows Live Hotmail via the Microsoft Office Outlook Connector plug-in.

We also added an option to allow users to enable or disable autoarchive during installation, improved the two-way synchronization of notes in contacts, and improved our installation to make it more clear where data in other Outlook accounts is located. To access these additional features and fixes, current users are being updated automatically to the latest version, and it's available immediately to new users here. As always, you can find more detailed information about Apps Sync in our help center, and we're going to continue to add more advanced features in the coming months.

Since the release of this tool, many businesses have asked us for more information about switching from Microsoft Exchange, so we've pulled together a Google Apps resource site that centralizes information for businesses coming from an Exchange environment. It has information about Google Apps, answers to your due diligence questions, customer feedback from those who have switched before you, and more.

Posted by Chris Vander Mey, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps

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Old tool, new tricks

I like to think I can do practically anything in a spreadsheet. But it's probably more accurate to say that I like to *try* to do anything in a spreadsheet whether or not I can succeed.

Of course, my spreadsheet of choice is the kind I can access from anywhere and share in real time – in Google Docs. So, some would say that even when it makes no sense, I try to do things in a spreadsheet (case in point – my poker simulator – why'd I do that?) But there are some things I never thought possible, like sending an email or reading my calendar.

That's why we're excited to announce a limited test of a new feature which lets people add customization and automation to Google Apps, starting with spreadsheets in Google Docs. We call this feature Google Apps Script.

Google Apps Script provides the ability to automate a variety spreadsheet actions, such as reading and changing values in cells and ranges, changing formats and formulas, and creating custom functions. It also reaches outside of spreadsheets to allow you to send email or create calendar entries.

Check out the Google Apps Script overview, below, and watch our example of sending email from Google Spreadsheets.

As Google Apps Script is in limited test, we see it as a puppy who's still in training. In fact, just this week, he learned to fetch (URL content) and speak (translate to other languages). But we think he's ready now for some time outside his yard.

So we're inviting a limited number of Google Apps domains – about a thousand organizations – to start playing with Google Apps Script and giving us feedback so we can quickly understand which tricks would be the most beneficial to learn next.

If you're like me and like to stretch spreadsheets to their limit, and don't mind working with early release features, you can get involved in Google Apps Script now by applying to join this limited test phase.

Posted by Jonathan Rochelle, Product Manager, Google Docs

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Webmaster tips: fighting back against hacks and spam

Most webmasters would agree that hacking and spamming are a real problem, but many may not be aware of how vulnerable their websites might actually be. Even more importantly, many webmasters may not know where to go to find resources that can help them protect their site, or show them what to do if their site has been hacked or spammed.

I want to share some examples that might help build understanding of the problem and motives behind hacking and spamming, and also offer some online resources to help organizations avoid these problems as much as they can.

If we look at [site:.edu free ringtones], we will see a lot of examples of different educational institutions being exploited by hackers for their high traffic and well-known names. For a spammer, acquiring links from a high-traffic site can artificially give their sites more worth and manipulate search results in their favor.

An example we often see is hackers using an exploit in a sites database (SQL Injection) or in sites that have unchecked areas for user input (XSS). A way to look for this is to run the site: query mentioned above (site:.edu free ringtones) and take look at the URLs of the sites that show up. If you see some trailing parameter like [/?p=ringtones], then your site is most likely hacked. Here are some steps you can take to prevent your site from getting hacked:

• One way to avoid SQL injection hacking is to escape all dangerous characters from input fields, with "dangerous characters" being those that can access and change the database behind your site.
• For both SQL injection and XSS hacking, creating a layer between the user input data and your back-end systems creates a space where you can check inputs and make sure that a user is not entering malicious code.
• Another potential exploit can occur if the root or any subdirectory of your site uses an open source CMS like Joomla or WordPress. In this situation, it is really important to make sure the CMS software is updated with every new release to make sure you are using the most secure version.

For more on hacking, check out this Google Webmaster Central Blog post: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/best-practices-against-hacking.html.

Forums can also be points of access for hackers and spammers. Does your site have a forum? If so, do a quick site search on your forum section [site:example.com/forum/]. Do you see anything fishy in the snippets, like "freeringtones"? If your forum is not about ringtones , this may very well be a case of comment spam. Any sort of platform where users can freely post their own comments, including hyperlinks, is a target for comment spam – especially if your website ranks high in the search results. The main reasoning behind comment spam is aspammer wants to get as many people as possible to visit their site and spend money there. The spammer can post several links on forums, guestbooks, etc., pointing to their own site, to help artificially boost their ranking in search results. Here are some precautions you can take:

• Every time a user wants to add a profile or comment on the forum, require them to complete a CAPTCHA. This creates an obstacle for automated software to generate profiles and comments.
• Add spammy keywords like "free ringtones" and "online casino" to a blacklist to block comments like this from showing up.
• Install a plug-in that automatically detects and blocks spam posted to the forum. Akismet is an example of this.

For more on comment spam, check out this Google Webmaster Central Blog post: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/keeping-comment-spam-off-your-site-and.html.

Resources
Staying aware of the latest spam and hacking trends, regularly monitoring the activity on your site, and being vigilant about updating your applications and plug-ins are key to keeping your website safe fromspammers and hackers. We've provided some Google resources here:

Webmaster Central Blog (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/) – Search for blog posts written by Googlers about how to secure your site.

Webmaster Central Channel on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/googlewebmasterhelp) – See video tutorials on all things webmasters.

Webmaster Help Center (http://google.com/support/webmasters/) – Find help articles on various webmaster concerns, including what to do if your site has been hacked.

Webmaster Help Forum (http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters) – Chat with your fellow webmasters about past and present experiences with being spammed or hacked, and get a variety of perspectives on how to protect your site.

Webmaster Tools (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/) – If you're not already registered, this is a great way to monitor how your site looks on Google. You can see what kind of sites are linking to you, and the top queries users type in to get to your site.

In addition to the links provided above, it's also a good idea to seek out more knowledge that is specific to your web server, applications, and plug-ins.

Posted by Adi Goradia and Charlene Perez, Search Quality Team

Charts, charts, charts!

A picture says a thousand words. An upward trending chart says even more!

Google Apps now provides you with usage charts for your business, school, or organization, allowing you to visualize important data such as active users and disk space utilization from within the control panel. In addition, these dynamic charts can be embedded in gadgets and put into Google Docs, Google Sites, or anywhere else that can host a gadget. You can even put them on a public web page - you control who sees your data.

In addition to seeing charts, administrators can now download CSV reports of domain usage straight from the control panel.

Want to graph the data differently or perhaps even access additional information such as the number of accounts that have been idle in the last 60 days? No problem. With the Google Apps Reporting Visualization API you can retrieve a wide range of usage reports for your domain and display them using a large selection of visualizations created by the developer community.

All of these enhanced reporting and visualization features are available for Google Apps Premier, Partner, and Education Editions. Enjoy!

Posted by Lily Xia and Nick Cooper, Google Apps Engineers

New Status Dashboard for Google Apps

We made a commitment last year to increase transparency and communication with Google Apps customers in several ways. We heard your feedback around the need for better communication when issues like yesterday's Gmail outage occur.

As part of that commitment, we're pleased to announce today the availability of the Google Apps Status Dashboard. Customers can use this Status Dashboard to check on the current service status of individual services such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Video for business. Administrators of Google Apps for their businesses, schools and organizations can also view the performance of the administrative control panel.

The Google Apps Status Dashboard represents an additional layer of transparency that we believe will be particularly useful for our business users, and it's also relevant to users of our consumer products. The Status Dashboard is the best place to check for information on service availability for Google Apps anywhere in the world. In my role on the sales team, I regularly talk with customers to make sure that they're getting the most out of Google Apps and I think that you will find this tool indispensable in managing your Google Apps deployment.

Additionally, here are other resources I often recommend to help account administrators get up and running quickly and smoothly and also to stay on top of new functionality:

Google Apps Help Center. Our Help Center for Google Apps admins can answer questions on "getting started" and also help you troubleshoot or find out the status about known issues. Topics include everything from email routing to data migration. We update the information in the Help Center regularly so it's a good starting point for any questions you encounter as you setup and manage your Google Apps account.

Google Apps Help Forum. In addition to our own online support resources (see below), we have a vibrant community of Google Apps administrators who are always willing to lend a helping hand. To read tips and get help from your peers, join this discussion board for IT admins. This forum is moderated by Google Apps Advisors and fueled by the knowledge of expert Power Posters. Recent questions answered in the Help Forum include ones on IMAP functionality and MX record settings.

Google Apps update alerts. Whenever we launch improvements to any of the apps or add new administrative capabilities – whether it's a minor user interface tweak or the release of major new functionality – we publish a summary with usage instructions and links where you can find more details. For example, we recently shared information on new capabilities for administrators to authorize who can upload videos to Google Video for business and instructions for setting password strength requirements. You can automatically get this information either as email alerts to your inbox, or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

Google Apps Channel on YouTube Here you can find product tutorials and overviews, as well as video testimonials from Google Apps customers and recordings of Google Apps-related talks and webinars. We recently posted a tour of a corporate intranet built by one of our customers and created a Google Apps Learning Center playlist to educate end users on topics such as "Webmail vs. Desktop," "Archiving or Deleting" in Gmail, for example. Take a look at the videos we've created.

The Solutions Marketplace. If you know that Google Apps is right for you but need some extra help, visit the Solutions Marketplace to find details about products and services from vendors whose solutions integrate and extend Google Apps. You can find vendors to help you with setup and deployment, data migration, integration with existing IT systems, user training and more. You can see how vendors have been rated by other customers and also read about customer experiences with partners.

I hope that this information helps you get the most out of Google Apps. One of the great things about Google Apps is the community that has grown up around it, thanks to you!

Posted by Tessa Prescott, Google Apps Sales Team

Making the switch: Migrating 3,000 users from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps, and what one company learned

If you've ever looked at your existing email system and wondered if there might be a better way, tune in to Andy Nallappan's online review of his recent migration to Google Apps on Monday, March 2, at 10:00 AM PST (1:00 PM EST).

Andy, Director, IT, Engineering and Enterprise Infrastructure for Avago Technologies (which provides components and subsystems to equipment manufacturers) recently migrated 3,000 of his company's employees from Microsoft Exchange 2003 to Google Apps – and he promises to tell all.

Explore the questions and concerns he faced as he researched the migration, including global integration, technology capabilities and workarounds, feature tradeoffs, cost savings, and more. Andy will share how he found his answers, what he'd do differently, what his internal pilot revealed, and how, in the end, Google Apps is working for his users.

This will be a clear, first-hand account what it takes to move a large corporate email system over to an integrated Google solution – and what that means for email systems of any size. We hope you'll join us, no matter what email system you're currently using, for a real-world look on what's possible in email today and what it takes to get there.

The agenda includes time for Q&A, so bring your questions and learn from Andy's experience.

Register for this free 60-minute webinar . We hope that you'll join us.

Monday, March 2, 2009 10:00 AM PST / 1:00 PM EST
Webinar: Avago Technologies: from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps

Posted by Kevin Gough, Google Apps Team

Update (03/02/09): More than 200 participants joined in as Andy Nallappan, Director, Enterprise Infrastructure for Avago Technologies, reviewed how he moved 4,100 users to Google Apps, primarily for email, in Q408 through Q109.

Avago expects to realize $1.1M in annual savings from moving from Exchange 2003 to Google Apps.

If you'd like to tune in to Andy's story, here's the complete recording.

Folders and labels: the best of both worlds

New Google Apps users quickly notice that Gmail uses labels instead of traditional folders for organizing email. Why this design decision? Put simply, you can organize and then find messages more efficiently with labels.

Here's why: a message can be tagged with multiple labels like "Project Orion" and "Budget," so you can find that message in either context down the road. With folders, you'd need to pick the one best place for that message – let's say the "Project Orion" folder – making it harder to find later if you're looking for that same message in the context of budget planning.

We hear that the concept of labels can feel foreign at first, and, up until now, the way you had to first apply a label and then archive to move it from your inbox was a two-step process. Listening to users, we heard that people wanted the flexibility of labels but the simplicity of folders.

As of today we're making it easier for you to work with labels. From your inbox or when viewing labeled messages, you'll see a new "Move to" button that labels and removes messages from the current location in one step, just like folders. To apply a label without archiving or removing existing labels, click the "Labels" button.

For you keyboard shortcut diehards, V lets you quickly move, and L lets you label selected messages...but first make sure you've turned on keyboard shortcuts.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Product Marketing Manager