The Apps Marketplace YouTube channel showcases videos from Marketplace vendors. Ranging from funny to informative, from cartoons to screencasts, these videos are meant to convey the benefits of extending Google Apps with integrated apps that work seamlessly with Gmail, Calendar, Docs and more. We're happy to already have more than a dozen videos in the channel and over 60 integrated app vendors in the Marketplace, and look forward to more great things as the Marketplace grows.
Please enjoy these examples of our Marketplace vendors' hard work. Thanks for the videos, guys!
Aviary:
ScheduleOnce:
MindMeister:
To get started using great apps like these, visit google.com/appsmarketplace, or watch our own short demo video explaining how the Marketplace works.
Editor's note: Ryan Goodman is the founder of Centigon Solutions, Inc. and is an expert in business intelligence dashboards with BusinessObjects Xcelsius. Using Google Maps API Premier, Centigon has created a dashboard application to help users better visualize complex data from SAP BusinessObjects. With hundreds of succesful dashboard projects under his belt, he continues to innovate in applying geographic analysis for performance management dashboards using Google Maps Premier.
As co-author of "Crystal Reports 2008 the Official Guide," and a frequent contributor to trade publications, Ryan continues to push the envelope for what's possible with dashboards and Xcelsius on his personal blog: www.ryangoodman.net/blog.
Enterprise organizations that utilize Business Intelligence dashboard technologies require flexible mapping solutions to meet a range of geo-analysis requirements for performance management dashboards. With numerous potential use cases for bringing maps into dashboards, customers have long struggled between static graphics or traditional GIS solutions.
While static images don't provide enough flexibility to address all business needs, feature-rich GIS solutions are sometimes more than most business users need. To facilitate flexibility and ease-of-use for dashboard end users, Centigon Solutions has helped Google Maps become a rich enterprise visualization tool with GMaps Plugin for Xcelsius 2008. GMaps Plugin empowers developers to deploy Google Maps API Premier enabled dashboards to drive geographic visualization of performance management metrics without without writing a single line of code.
Centigon Solutions has bridged the gap between SAP BusinessObjects' on-premise dashboard technology and Google Maps API Premier service, making geo-analysis accessible at any level of an organization, and in any industry. Using a simple property sheet, dashboard developers can align geographic dimensions with performance measures and then deploy a fluent Google Maps experience to business users. From global financial metrics to city-level risk analytics, both technical and non-technical users can leverage GMaps Plugin's seamless integration with Google Maps API Premier to create compelling analysis – in minutes.
Organizations that rely on on-premise, on-demand solutions require easy methods for analyzing and communicating information queried from these systems. In the dashboard shown below, an analyst required a mashup of Salesforce.com campaign/lead data and enterprise financial data to measure campaign effectiveness. GMaps Plugin provided the location intelligence required to quickly digest a large volume of information.
The example shows how multiple marketing campaigns across the United States were created and tracked through Salesforce.com. Powered by GMaps Plugin, Google Maps API Premier, and Force.com Integration (hosted on Google App Engine), this dashboard empowers marketing professionals to view and drill into each campaign and visually digest campaign results. The resulting analysis provided a visual proximity of attendees and their response rate.
From this information, the user can make informed decisions to what regions should receive priority for future campaigns. This new visibility into lead data provides a new perspective for a marketing analysts to make more informed decisions through guided analysis.
While traditional reporting solutions can present drillable tabular data, the graphical and spatial analysis gained with a Google Maps API Premier enabled dashboard increases the speed, depth, and efficiency of data analysis. By mobilizing Google Maps API Premier for enterprise performance management reporting and dashboards, Centigon Solutions improves the way business decision makers can interpret key information. Visit our website to learn more about GMaps Plugin and the Google Maps API Premier case study page for more success stories.
About Centigon Solutions:Centigon Solutions Inc. couples business insight with technical expertise to deliver quality business intelligence dashboard solutions. Centigon Solutions Inc. is strategically focused on creating interactive visualization technology for developers and business users. As thought leaders in dashboard and Web 2.0 technologies for the enterprise, Centigon Solutions is also recognized as the premier developer of Xcelsius® add-on solutions, including GMaps Plugin.
Posted by Natasha Wyatt, Google Earth and Maps Enterprise team
This evening, we were joined by more than 50 participating companies to announce the launch of the Google Apps Marketplace, a new online storefront that enables millions of Google Apps administrators to discover and purchase integrated third party cloud applications and deploy them to their domains.
Adding an application from the Marketplace to your domain is simple - it only takes four clicks. Applications can then be easily managed from your domain's control panel and accessed by users through the same links as the Google Apps suite.
1) Click "Add it now" 2) Agree to the vendor's Terms of Service 3) Grant access to the data that the app is requesting (ome apps require data access, some don't...so only grant access to apps you trust) 4) Turn it on and start enjoying your increased productivity
Applications listed in the Google Apps Marketplace integrate with Google Apps using open protocols. These integrations improve the efficiency of your businesses by allowing users to share data and collaborate on projects as well as connect to users' daily workflows in apps like Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Contacts.
This integrated app experience is available in the Marketplace today for users of Google Apps Premier, Standard and Education Editions thanks to the efforts of folks like Intuit and Atlassian, and others who are committed to join, including NetSuite and Successfactors. We are honored to work with the more than 50 partners listed below:
The Google Apps Marketplace gives software vendors access to a rapidly growing Google Apps customer base of 25 million users from 2 million businesses and universities. By embracing open standards like OpenID and OAuth, and by giving software vendors freedom of choice for both billing arrangement and hosting platform, Google makes it easy to build apps for the Google Apps Marketplace.
We look forward to seeing the ways in which companies leverage the applications currently in the Google Apps Marketplace in addition to the apps to come in the future. In fact, we'll be exploring these topics further at Google I/O on May 19-20 in San Francisco. We hope you'll join us!
Posted by Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead, Google Enterprise team
The Google Developer team will be live streaming an important announcement about Google Apps this evening. Tune in on the Google Developers YouTube channel tonight at 6:00 p.m. PST to watch. Enjoy the show!
Posted by Chris Kelly, Google Apps Developer Marketing team
When we launched the Google Apps Authorized Reseller Program a year ago, a number of partners around the world were already actively helping customers of all sizes reduce IT costs and complexity while giving users the productivity tools they wanted – Gmail, Google Calendar, and more. Since then, millions of businesses have gone Google – and our resellers, too, have gained momentum. With nearly 1,000 Google Apps Authorized Resellers from more than 50 countries now building successful Google Apps practices, we celebrate our partners' progress over the last year and look forward to them continuing to drive customer success with Google Apps in the years to come.
In a recent mark of this progress, the MSPmentor 100 Report for 2010, which ranks top managed service providers worldwide, reports that already 22% of these top MSPs are now promoting Google Apps to their clients.
Our resellers represent a wide range of firms who assist businesses in adopting, leveraging, and extending Google Apps – from global systems integrators to smaller, specialized IT service providers. Acting as trusted advisors, these solution providers work to serve their clients' unique business needs and to improve user productivity via Google Apps at lower costs and with greater reliability.
In our first year, we launched some important tools to help our partners better serve customers, including our online Reseller Console for automated ordering, provisioning, and management of their Google Apps clients. Our Solution Providers resource site provides a full range of marketing, sales, and product information, while we also instituted a series of online webinars and live training sessions in Google offices around the world.
Conversations with channel firms at events hosted by Everything Channel, CompTIA, ConnectWise, and SMB Nation reinforced our belief that customer needs are well served when resellers act as the primary contact for provisioning, deployment, billing, and ongoing consulting and support.
We're especially excited about the relationships we've built with our partners over this first year. Some highlights include (in alphabetical order):
• Appirio and Genentech (large enterprise): Appirio, a cloud solution provider, migrated 15,000 Genentech users from a variety of legacy systems such as Apple Mail, Exchange 2003, Sendmail MStore, and Thunderbird. Appirio also provided a range of value-added services including integration with new systems such as Magic Meeting Marker, end user training, and on-site support.
• Cloudreach and Small World Financial Services: Cloudreach, a UK-based reseller, successfully migrated Small World Financial Services, a family of retail financial services businesses that operates worldwide, from their legacy Microsoft Exchange and Kerio environment to Google Apps. In total, 500 users across 9 countries were migrated resulting in cost savings in excess of 75% annually against their legacy software license. Here's more:
• Cloud Sherpas and Lincoln Property (mid-market): Cloud Sherpas, cloud computing systems integrator and application developer, assisted Lincoln Property with the configuration, implementation, change management and deployment support around their move to Google Apps. In addition to successfully migrating GroupWise mail and contacts data for 950 users, they implemented SherpaTools, a free app from Cloud Sherpas that provides additional IT management functions for admins and new features for employees.
• Sheepdog and Evisu (small business): Sheepdog successfully migrated Evisu off of Microsoft Exchange 2003 in less than two weeks, allowing the company to avoid its renewal deadline. They also provided comprehensive Gmail and Calendar training for all users and continue to offer support as Evisu adds new users to Google Apps.
• Spread and Renner Stores: Renner, the second largest clothing retailer in Brazil with more than 120 stores, wanted to transform the delivery of product information to store clerks. Spread, one of our leading Brazilian resellers, implemented Google Apps for 3,500 users, provided training, and delivered integration services among Google Sites, Google App Engine, and a number of premises-based legacy systems, thereby reducing the time to market for building new Renner sites by a factor of 10.
We recently kicked off our second year by hosting our first Google Apps Partner Advisory Board here at Google in Mountain View. Our partners provided valuable input on the best ways to continue to enrich our program. In 2010, we look forward to strengthening our reseller relationships and finding new ways to help our partners build sustainable, profitable cloud computing businesses.
If your firm is interested in Google Apps reselling and services, we invite you to learn more about the Google Apps Authorized Reseller Program and join this growing movement.
Posted by Stephen Cho, Director, Google Apps Channels
Editor's note: Don Dodge is a Google Developer Advocate helping developers build new applications on Google platforms and technologies. Don has been a startup evangelist at Microsoft and is also a veteran of five start-ups including Forte Software, AltaVista, Napster, Bowstreet, and Groove Networks.
You can follow the Developer team's updates on Twitter, too – @googleappsdev – and, while you're at it, stay tuned to updates from the Google enterprise team at @googleatwork.
We've just launched have a new blog, Google Apps Developer Blog, for developers interested in building applications that leverage Google Apps. This blog will cover topics of interest to Google Apps developers building applications on top of Google Apps, integrating with them or utilizing the APIs.
Some of our topics and resources will include:
• code snippets and samples • reviews of customer integration and deployment cases • interviews with developers on best practices for developing in Apps • voting on most-requested developer extensions in Apps • discussion of OAuth roadmap • references to OpenID • smart ways to do logging (and analysis/reporting) in AppEngine, etc. • storing JSON in AppEngine
Watch this blog for announcements of developer events, DevFests, Google I/O updates, product announcements, links to other Google developer related content and case studies on actual integration, implementation and deployments.
Also, don't forget to register for Google I/O, which is May 19-20, 2010 in San Francisco. Google I/O will feature 80 sessions, more than 3,000 developers, and over 100 demonstrations from developers showcasing their technologies. You'll be able to talk shop with engineers building the next generation of web, mobile, and enterprise applications. Last year's I/O sold out before the start of the conference, so we encourage you to sign up soon.
We want your feedback! Ask questions, suggest topics, and even submit your own stories for possible inclusion in the Google Apps Developer Blog. ContactGADBeditor @ google if you have a story for submission, or story suggestion. Comments will be enabled on this blog, and we hope you'll join the discussion.
Thanks,
Don Dodge Developer Advocate Developer Relations Team
Posted by Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead
This year's Google I/O will play host to a number of sessions and events aimed specifically at helping Software as a Service companies integrate with and monetize Google Apps, including:
We are planning several more sessions that we'll be announcing in the coming weeks that you won't want to miss. We'll also be hosting a mixer event just for the enterprise developer community that'll take place just before the After Hours party at I/O.
Google I/O is our biggest developer event of the year, and it's also the best chance you'll get to learn about the technologies that can help you build a thriving business extending Google Apps. We hope you'll register today!
Posted by Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead
Since we launched the Google Sites Data API last fall, we've heard great feedback from businesses and schools using the API to update sites from 3rd party applications, migrate data from legacy workspace solutions into Google Sites and more.
Today, we're releasing several improvements to the API: the abilities to list a user's sites, create new sites, copy existing sites, and manage sharing permissions. You can read more about these updates to the Google Sites Data API on the Google Code Blog.
Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager
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We're happy to announce that we've integrated the Google Earth API into Maps API Premier, adding easy multiple domain and SSL support, enterprise technical support, and a more expansive license to enable commercial use or sale of a product that embeds Earth API or to use it in a site that isn't publicly accessible. With this news, Earth API joins the current family of Maps API Premier services including the Javascript Maps API v2, Maps API for Flash, Static Maps API, StreetView API, and geocoding service, as explained today in the Google Maps API Premier Developer's Guide.
A number of developers have already created amazing products leveraging the Earth API platform in the Maps API Premier suite. Earth Knowledge's Earth API implementation shows how:
Click on the screenshot (you may be prompted to add the Google Earth Plugin, and then "refresh" to view) to see how it powerfully visualizes all of the critical 3D data an emergency responder would need to know about the recent catastrophic earthquake in Haiti.
Other examples include StrataLogica™, Nystrom's great education application, which brings a favorite teaching tool – the globe – to the 21st century. And, in these climate-conscious times, Space Time Insight enables utilities to visualize critical streams of data using the Earth API from smart grid data to current wind conditions.
One more thing: we're also announcing full HTTPS support in the Premier version of the Maps API for Flash. This addition delivers the added security of HTTPS while still providing a friendly user experience that's free of warning pop-ups. This is important news for customers who are creating applications with the Maps API for Flash but who need the security of HTTPS.
Learn how to work with this functionality here, and (if you're already a Premier customer) make sure you contact Enterprise Support with your client ID to have them enable SSL.
Posted by Daniel Chu, Product Manager, Enterprise Maps & Earth team
As you may have heard from our announcement yesterday, registration for Google I/O is now open! This year's Google I/O will focus on building the next generation of applications in the cloud, using Google products like App Engine, Google Web Toolkit, and Google APIs, with particular emphasis on Android, Chrome, and Enterprise.
Here are just a couple of Enterprise sessions that are already listed on the I/O website (many more are in the works!):
We'll be adding much more Enterprise (and Google Apps) content to the I/O website over the next couple of months. For updates on new content, follow @googleio on Twitter.
Today's registration opens with an early bird rate of $400, which applies through April 16 ($500 after April 16). Last year's I/O sold out before the start of the conference, so we encourage you to sign up in advance.
Editor's note: George Kroner is a Developer Relations Engineer for Blackboard, a company that focuses on transforming and improving the educational experience at over 5,000 institutions worldwide. Through the work of Blackboard’s community of over 1,000 educational tool developers, George sees many opportunities where Blackboard’s and Google’s open platforms can be paired together to provide better and more productive teaching and learning experiences.
Thanks to George for sharing these outlooks.
Technology has the potential to transform the educational experience and to connect students, instructors, and researchers in new ways. We think it's critical for schools and institutions to expose learners to these tools and practices to impart information literacy skills required to succeed in their careers – as students and beyond.
Sharing a strong belief in the power and possibility of open platforms, Google and Blackboard have recently teamed up to combine our platforms, and we wanted to share a few powerful examples of these integrations with you here.
Enhancing collaboration in the classroom. Earlier this summer, Northwestern University took the lead on developing a way to facilitate classroom activities by letting instructors embed Google documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and calendars into Blackboard course sites. Individuals enrolled in Blackboard courses are automatically added as collaborators to these documents, and single sign-on capabilities allow documents to be accessed without logging in twice.
A recent student newspaper article details how these new capabilities are being used in courses ranging from foreign language to world history enabling new models of academic collaboration and assessment. What Northwestern has accomplished exemplifies one of the best recent examples of tying together the unique capabilities of Google Apps for Education and Blackboard Learn.
Now, more than ten different institutions, Google, and Blackboard meet on bi-weekly calls to regularly discuss the future of the Bboogle project. Northwestern has also made this Blackboard plugin available through an open source educational tool community called OSCELOT for other clients to download and contribute back to.
Enabling coordinated collaboration. As part of a class project at Penn State University, a team of students examined ways to improve their online learning experience by integrating Blackboard with other systems. After some analysis, their top recommendation was to develop a solution that combined events from their multiple school-related and personal calendars into a single location.
By integrating with Google Calendar, they were able to create a Blackboard plugin that combines events from Google Calendar with academic course schedules, assignment due-dates, and group meeting times from Blackboard. Their plugin was also made available as an open source project at the end of the semester. More details, including user documentation, are available through OSCELOT at this link.
Connecting researchers where they teach. The London International Development Center was formed to connect researchers from the University of London's six Bloomsbury Colleges. Its mission is to find ways to solve complex problems relating to international development by bringing together scientists from interdisciplinary backgrounds. By creating a Google Spreadsheet that integrates behind the scenes with the familiar Blackboard user experience, the LIDC provided a way for researchers to search and connect with each other by name, college, and research interest.
Facilitating new ways to communicate. Google Wave represents a new way to approach group collaboration and communication, and thus the potential for impacting education using such a tool is significant. Imagine creating a course assignment within Blackboard that triggers a contextualized Wave of thought and conversation that can react to changes in course content within the LMS and relay thoughts and comments from subject matter experts around the world back into an assessable course discussion forum or blog.
Today we invite you to join a discussion of how you think Wave should be used to enhance educational experiences. Log into Wave and click this link to post your thoughts, then see your comments show up within the discussion forum in this Blackboard course.
The examples listed above are just the beginning of what's possible when combining the power of the Blackboard and Google platforms, and we salute the institutions that are on the cutting-edge, creating these integrations.
– George Kroner, Blackboard Developer Relations Engineer
Posted by Gabe Cohen, Google Apps Education Edition team
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.
One of the benefits of Google Apps is the extensibility and openness of the platform. Today we're pleased to advance that story by introducing a new API for Google Sites in Labs.
The use cases are plentiful for businesses:
Update Google Sites from 3rd party applications – e.g. your sales team's Google Sites pages can update automatically when new leads are added to your CRM system.
Migrate files and content from workspace applications like Microsoft SharePoint and Lotus Notes to Google Sites.
Export Google Sites pages, edit them offline, and re-import the updated content.
Export your sites, including every page revision, for backup.
Easily monitor changes across your important internal and public sites, all from a single gadget.
Push new content like changes to employee policies or a new corporate logo to any site on your domain, even sites created by individual employees.
Best of all, while this API is brand new, application developers will find it rather familiar – it is, after all, a Google Data API. And like our 16 other Google Data APIs, this one comes with all the standard protocol support around authentication and querying that you'd expect. You'll find everything you need to get started on the Google Code pages, including links to documentation and sample applications.
For those of you interested in applications already built on top of this API, be sure to look at:
The open source import/export project on Google Code that lets you export entire sites as static HTML, maintaining the structure and page hierarchy.
SharePoint Move for Google Apps, a product developed by LTech for migrating data and content from Microsoft SharePoint to Google Sites.
We're looking forward to your feedback! Watch this space for updates to the API in the coming months.
Google Wave has been generating lots of interest among Google Apps users since we unveiled it in May at Google I/O, our annual developer conference. Today we're pleased to announce that we'll be opening up access to Google Wave for some schools and businesses as part of the preview this fall. And while we won't be able to open it up to all Google Apps users just yet, we hope to bring Google Wave to all Google Apps users next year. If you're a Google Apps administrator and you're interested in testing Google Wave, you can sign up here.
Over the last couple of months, we've been very busy developing the product, opening the protocol and learning from the thousands of developers who are using and contributing to Google Wave. While the product, platform and protocols are still being developed, we're extending access to some of the highly collaborative people and communities we hope to benefit in the future – businesses and schools. In turn, we look forward to learning from these Google Apps users, so we can continue to tweak and develop the product as we gain insight from their experiences.
A wave is equal parts conversation and document, where individuals communicate and work together in a multimedia environment – the wave itself. You can check out the video below (it's long – lots to see!) and it's easy to imagine its utility for groups within a business or academic environment. Whether there's a report to write, an event to plan, research to do or communications to conduct, we're building Google Wave so people can be more productive and collaborate more effectively in a real time environment. Users can insert text, photos, gadgets, maps, web feeds and edit instantaneously. Organizations can extend Google Wave using APIs to tightly integrate with existing tools and workflows. It's communication and collaboration, conversation and document, in one unified, cloud-based space.
To learn more about Google Wave check out wave.google.com, and to sign up for Google Apps so you're ready when Google Wave rolls into businesses in the future, visit google.com/a.
Posted by Matthew Glotzbach and Stephanie Hannon, Google Enterprise and Wave teams
Today, we're thrilled to host more than 150 Enterprise customers and partners at Google headquarters for the second annual Google Earth Enterprise user forum. This event is an opportunity to hear the latest news about the 3.2 release of Google Earth Enterprise and other Google innovations directly from our product managers and engineers, to learn from customers like the US Army Corps of Engineers and Caltrans about how they're using the product, and to exchange ideas.
The people at this user forum come from the federal government, state and local governments across the country, and a range of companies, large and small. They've travelled from as far away as Asia and Europe (not to mention the east coast) to be here. All with one thing in common: putting the power of Google Earth to work to make information accessible within their organizations in an intuitive, visual way.
At Google, we have a firm belief that our customers are the most important source of feedback about our products. We look forward to a productive dialog about what's working with Google Earth Enterprise, and what we can do better.
Welcome to Mountain View, Google Earth Enterprise users! We're glad to have you here.
Posted by Dan Israel, Product Marketing Manager, Google Earth Enterprise
Today, we announced Rich Snippets for Google web search, a new presentation of snippets that highlight structured data embedded in web pages. Rich Snippets provide summary information, including important page-specific attributes, to help users quickly identify result relevance. Experiments on Google have shown that users find the additional data valuable – if they see useful and relevant information from a web page, they are more likely to click through to it. Our web search team is currently experimenting with a limited set of attributes for reviews and user profiles that webmasters can provide through in-line markup in their web pages by using open standards such as microformats or RDFa.
Since Google Site Search leverages our web search platform, Google Site Search customers can benefit from this new functionality as well. In fact, Google Site Search customers can define their own custom attributes that we'll index and return with your site search results. In addition to microformats and RDFa, you can also provide custom metadata within your webpages via special markup called page maps. A page map identifies specific attributes that are recognized and preserved by Google at index time, and returned along with search results for presentation to the user.
So if you're using Google Site Search on your website, you can now control further how your content appears in search results. You can showcase key information, such as image thumbnails, summaries, ratings in your result snippets if you provide the appropriate markup on your pages.
Rich Snippets attribute information for Google Site Search is only returned in XML (via <PageMap> tags), so you can use your own customized presentation controls. Indexing of the rich snippets information can have unspecified latency, as some pages are indexed and refreshed more frequently than others, and page map attributes may not be indexed from all web pages.
As an illustration of Rich Snippets, the web page featured in the following example provides custom information about an image thumbnail that is displayed in the rich snippet of the result along with date, author and category information.
If you are getting results back via XML, then the custom attributes are returned in the results within the PageMap tag, as shown below. You can parse the DataObjects within the PageMap tag and provide customized presentation of the relevant attributes.
If you are new to Google Site Search and would like to provide Google quality search results on your website, visit www.google.com/sitesearch
Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Lead Product Manager, Google Enterprise Search
Google I/O is coming up on May 27 – 28, 2009 in San Francisco, California, and will feature many sessions on enterprise adoption of the cloud. Come hear how companies likeSalesforce.com and ThoughtWorks partner with Google and leverage technologies like App Engine and Secure Data Connector to pioneer applications and help businesses realize the benefits and efficiencies of cloud computing.
Connecting the Clouds: Integrating Google App Engine for Java with Force.com, presented by Ron Hess of Salesforce.com and Iein Valdez of Appirio
This session will focus on connecting the Salesforce SOAP Web Services API to Google App Engine for Java, including a demonstration by Appirio of an advanced casino host application blending App Engine and Salesforce.
ThoughtWorks on App Engine for Java: An Enterprise Cumulonimbus?, presented by Martin Fowler and Rebecca Parsons of ThoughtWorks
Presenters from ThoughtWorks will discuss applications they've built for App Engine, as well as strengths and weaknesses they've encountered with the platform. The session will also include a discussion of the role of Big Table in App Engine.
Using the Google Secure Data Connector to Access Behind-the-Firewall Data from Google's Cloud, presented by Jun Yang
This session will demonstrate how enterprises can bring their own data into Google Apps using the Google Secure Data Connector. The presenter will share an example of using data stored in a behind-the-firewallSQL database in App Engine, a spreadsheet and a gadget.
If you've ever checked out the nearest store with Trek bikes, planned a trip to a Crowne Plaza Hotel, or looked for the best local anything on Yelp, you know that many businesses use Google Maps to help people find where they're located.
Maps can be deployed within your organization to help your employees make fast, informed decisions – such as assessing the location and performance efficiency of your vehicles and other mobile assets. Tracking your assets on Google Maps became easier yesterday when FleetMatics announced that its GPS fleet tracking software is now integrated with Google Maps API Premier.
The FleetMatics solution provides real-time vehicle data, such as start/stop times and speed, to help its users efficiently dispatch to reduce vehicle mileage and downtime. With the addition of Google Maps, FleetMatics now offers the ability to visualize entire fleet locations and easily identify the closest vehicle to a given location.
View the positions and status of an entire fleet on a single screen.
FleetMatics customers can also use Google Maps to find driving directions and optimized routing information, including real-time traffic reports and nearby points of interest.
Drill into a specific vehicle's data, including start/stop times, mileage, and routing information.
According to Jamie Sene of FleetMatics, "Selecting a new mapping provider is not a trivial task. We need an engine that can handle our massive demand across the US and Europe, and we want a partner on the cutting edge of location-based technologies to mirror our own product development. After thorough research, it was clear that only Google Maps satisfied all of these requirements."
Google Maps' familiarity and speed have sparked feedback from Fleetmatic customers, leading to emails like this one: "How do you take an existing product that is miles ahead of its competition and make it even better? By adding Google Maps, of course."
In early April we unveiled App Engine for Java as a preview release. With the goal of providing an end-to-end Java solution for web applications, this release includes an early look at our Java runtime, integration with Google Web Toolkit, and a Google Plugin for Eclipse.
We're excited about the potential to use these tools to build scalable applications that complement the Google Apps suite of messaging and communication services. We're eager to share what we've learned so far, and encourage you to try it out and give feedback.
To help with that, we hope you'll join us for two upcoming events focused on developers, where you'll hear about our experience and that of partners who've begun development with App Engine and Google Apps. Then, give App Engine a try and join the conversation in our developer and partner communities and let us know what you think.
Details:
Partner Webinar, May 12:Building Enterprise Applications Using Google App Engine for Java. Google is pairing up with Appirio, a Google Enteprise Partner, to offer a webinar detailing these new developer capabilities. The event targets IT leads and app developers within enterprise companies and takes place at 10:00 a.m. PDT / 1:00 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, May 12. Register or learn more here.
Partner Event May 14: Partner with cloud leaders Google and Salesforce.com. Google and Salesforce.com are jointly hosting an ISV-focused event on Thursday afternoon, May 14 in Sunnyvale, California to discuss building a cloud computing strategy. If you're in the area, register here for this free event to test drive the latest cloud technologies, meet Salesforce.com and Google partner representatives, and network with cloud experts, fellow entrepreneurs, and developers.
Also: Google I/O May 27-28th:The Google I/O Developer Conference is May 27–28, 2009 in San Francisco, California. Learn more about the enterprise-focused sessions and sign up.
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.
