Innovation wins for mid-sized business

Editors' note: Today’s guest blogger is David Rumberg, Partner and CIO of Sports Basement, a place where runners, swimmers, backpackers, fitness fans and triathletes can find great prices online on everything they need for their outdoor adventures. David has worked in retail for over 20 years. Before Sports Basement, David worked for The Men's Wearhouse, where he was an application analyst working on large projects like PeopleSoft and ecommerce.

Join David for a live webcast on Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 2:00 p.m. EST / 11:00 a.m. PST / 7:00 p.m. GMT. Please note that registration will occur on a third party site.

Sports Basement is a specialty retailer – and to keep our mid-sized company going, we need to access email and other collaboration solutions to work in real-time from various locations. Until recently, we were using on-premise Microsoft Exchange and Outlook.

It was easy to see that there was a lot of innovative, cool stuff happening in the industry – such as managing email from your iPhone. These were the kinds of things we wanted to enable, yet we thought these capabilities would be too expensive or complicated for us. Many of them were not possible using our existing on-premise solutions. Then we investigated Google Apps, and saw that we could equip everyone with email, access it from anywhere and work collaboratively in real-time from different locations – even on mobile devices. Plus, we could free up staff time to build an online community, increase website conversions with Google Analytics and share best practices.

We're just getting started with Google Apps, but we did one thing right away that's been very helpful: uploading all of our HR forms as templates so anyone knows where to access the most recent form, copy it, and fill it out online.

In comparing our options, we did a hard cost analysis, but, as always, it was difficult to come up with an apples-to-apples comparison. If we analyzed email alone, then Microsoft and Google would break even after several years. But then we factored in instant messaging, security, spam protection, and mobile email access for all our users. And we also saw that we could end the philosophy of scarcity, ending user rationing and inbox quotas and provide a single platform for communications and collaboration for all of our employees. After we started comparing options, Google was an easy choice and we haven't looked back.

As a mid-sized business, we are still finding new ways to take advantage of Google Apps, and seeing more potential every day. Even the ability to put our forms online has been a huge boon for our productivity.

More importantly, the Google option was a way to tap into Google’s rich pool of innovation – and, in the end, that’s what we wanted. I’d be happy to share what we have learned so far about what Google inventiveness means to our business. I can also speak about tips and tricks in migrating from Microsoft Exchange and the approach we took in doing so.

Please join me for this LIVE event:

Choosing Google Apps for innovation over Microsoft Exchange
Thursday, March 11, 2010
2:00 p.m. EST / 11:00 a.m. PST / 7:00 p.m. GMT


Posted by Serena Satyasai, The Google Apps team

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

'Tis the shopping season: introducing Google Commerce Search

As we approach the holidays, retailers are gearing up for the seasonal shopping traffic. While they can't, of course, control overall consumer spending, they can control the experience they provide to consumers – both in their brick-and-mortar stores and online.

To help accomplish this, today we're announcing a new product, Google Commerce Search, to power e-commerce and search for online stores.

In the online shopping world, search quality is a big factor in converting browsers to buyers, and in keeping customers happy. In fact, 43% of visitors to online retail sites say the very first thing they do is type the product name or product category into the search box (MarketingSherpa).

While most of the top retailers have a search engine on their websites, the speed and accuracy of search results can make a real difference in visitor engagement and conversion rates. Visitors spend an average of only 8 seconds before deciding whether or not to remain on a website (MarketingSherpa), so fast, accurate results can make a big difference in conversion.

That's why we're prioritizing speed and search quality for online stores with Google Commerce Search (GCS). GCS is a hosted, cloud-based offering that brings the relevancy, speed, and Google ease-of-use to e-commerce sites. Learn more here:

GCS also has a bunch of user-friendly features that make shopping on online stores easier, and search results more refined and accurate. Some of those features are:

• speed – GCS leverages Google's ultra fast platform, because it's hosted, providing sub-second response times to users.

• Google quality and ranking – GCS analyzes every item in the data feed using proprietary signals to determine its optimal placement in the result set, for more accurate query results for shoppers.

• parametric search and sorting – GCS allows users to refine or sort results by category, price, brand, or other attribute; this is fully-functional parametric search for e-stores.

• product boost and promotions – Retailers can boost the relevance of certain items, or highlight specific products during a sale, and cross-sell related products.

• spell check, stemming and synonyms – By leveraging the larger Google search engine, GCS can include these advanced search and synonym options, so the shopping experience is smoother for customers – even customers who mistype.

• fast deployment and scale – Since this is a cloud-based offering, GCS can be deployed in days and, because it's hosted on the Google platform, retailers can scale to meet their higher-demand periods like the holidays without worrying about slowdowns or spikes.

The hosted factor is a key feature in making GCS easy for administrators to use. Because there's no hardware (or software, servers, operating systems, cables, or any other equipment), admins can upload product information to Google Merchant Center and provide a few extra customization parameters – and Google Commerce Search utilizes that product feed to power their website store search.

Retailers can use the same feed to submit their products for indexing in Google Product Search as well, cutting down on time and tech costs.

With GCS, any e-commerce website can provide visitors with an improved shopping experience. That improvement can drive higher visitor-to-buyer conversion rates. While the conversion rates of most retailers is around 3% (Forrester), the best-performing sites have been able to achieve much higher conversion rates – even reaching double digits. For the top online retailers, improving the conversion rate from 3% to even 4% might actually mean improving online sales by 33% – a jump that can represent millions of extra dollars each month.

GCS frees online stores to do what they do best – create the product and promotional mix that their visitors need – and leaves Google to do what we do best: search. This helps retailers improve conversions and drive the sales that matter this holiday season – and, in fact, all year 'round.

Learn more about GCS at google.com/commercesearch.

Posted by Anna Bishop and Eric Larson, Google enterprise search team

Singing a new tune: Google Search Appliance now includes automated tuning, better connectivity

When we launched Google Search Appliance 6.0 in June we introduced a brand new architecture, (GSA)ⁿ. The GSA now lets organizations search over a billion documents, and we are constantly looking to develop on (GSA)ⁿ even further. In that vein, our engineers have been working feverishly to build more capabilities and ease of use into the appliance. Today we're announcing more than 10 new features available on the GSA from Google Enterprise, including one that automatically improves results over time, the Self-Learning Scorer. Take a look here:

Self-Learning Scorer analyzes employee clicks and behavior to automatically fine-tune and improve its built-in relevance. For instance, if most users click on the fourth result for a given query, the GSA recognizes that and automatically boosts its placement – without any intervention from an administrator. Along with our existing and intuitive biasing features and Ranking Framework, this provides ease of relevance tuning.

Most enterprise search engines do three things: crawl, index and serve. With the new Self-learning Scorer, we're adding a new step to the mix: analysis. As the GSA continually serves up results, it's also learning to dynamically improve – automatically. This gives the GSA new self-improving intelligence, and adds a new step to the enterprise search cycle.

With this release, we're adding a new login feature, which provides a simple approach to securely mapping user credentials to the various back-end systems within an organization. Many larger organizations may have not one, but several 'single sign-on' systems, so this new universal login feature minimizes the number of logins for the user when performing an internal search across all company systems.

Today we're also expanding connectivity to a myriad of systems, including content management systems, file shares and databases. We are newly providing native integration for SharePoint out of the box, making indexing of SharePoint content 10x faster. Second, we are providing connectivity to Lotus Notes through Enterprise Labs. Third, we are expanding our support for file shares and databases, so organizations can connect to any file share or database in any format. The new GSA is built to be easier for users and admins – these connectors will make everyone in the office's life easer. We're also expanding the connectors program in our Enterprise Labs, live here.

These are just a couple of the product updates – you can learn about all the new features in this video too. Getting IT admins away from the tuning knobs and back to their real jobs will be a major benefit to our customers. More importantly, it will make employees across the company more productive. When internal search results improve, employees actually search more and find more information with which to do their work. You can read more about this on our blogpost, from a major US pharmaceutical company tracking the number of employee searches over time. After deploying the GSA, employees actually used their internal network significantly more – simply because it worked better.

Enterprise search isn't just about ECMs, connectors and security – it's about utilization. More relevant search results mean more employees utilizing the tools of their trade. Today's GSA update brings the search appliance into the realm of constant innovation – and self-improving intelligence. You can learn more about how the GSA adds the analytical step to the enterprise search cycle at GSA at google.com/gsa.

Posted by Cyrus Mistry, Product Manager, Google Enterprise Search

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We hope to see you there.

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps team

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Mike Lee, Google Apps team

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

Google at SMB Nation Fall Conference

As part of our continued outreach to find leading solution providers and MSPs for our Google Apps Authorized Reseller program, the Google Apps Partner team will head to Las Vegas on October 2, 3, and 4 for "SMB Nation Fall 2009." This conference, focused on technologies for small and medium businesses, is designed for consultants, channel partners and VARs, and offers the community a chance to engage in conversations around hosted, cloud-based solutions. It's targeted at both technical and business audiences, with an emphasis on managed services.

Program managers from Google will speak about opportunities for Google Apps Authorized Resellers. They'll also be listening to feedback from the community on areas for further improvement to the program. Google's partners often play a critical role in helping customers get the most out of Google Apps, and building a strong partner network will be key to keeping up with the accelerating adoption of Google Apps.

Learn more and register at smbnation.com, and be sure to find members of the Google team when you're there.

Posted by Jeff Ragusa, Google Apps Partner team

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

Google Earth Enterprise gets historical, two-dimensional, and nautical with version 3.2

We're constantly adding useful and interactive functionality to our enterprise products, and Google Earth Enterprise is no exception. Today we're announcing the latest release of Google Earth Enterprise: version 3.2. Google Earth Enterprise allows customers to build private globes on their secure networks using the same technology that powers the public Google Earth. Version 3.2 delivers new features that allow government agencies and other organizations to apply the recent advances in the public version of Google Earth, such as historical imagery and underwater terrain, to their own data and operations.

Version 3.2 gives Google Earth Enterprise users the option of using a browser to view and interact with their private globes using the Google Earth API. This delivers the same fast, familiar, 3-D navigation that users get from Google Earth – but within a web browser rather than the standard client.

Another new addition is historical imagery in Google Earth Enterprise, making it easy for employees to view how a place or region has changed over time. Many of our customers have archives of imagery of a property or point of interest taken over a series of days, years – even decades. The 3.2 release allows customers to time-stamp the imagery, tracking changes over time to provide a handy historical reference.

With the new release, customers also have the option to build Mercator imagery tiles for any 2-D maps they create with Google Earth Enterprise. Mercator is a commonly used conformal projection for viewing tiles in the browser. The new release allows customers to easily overlay their tiles on top of Google's basemap for a 2-dimensional mashup of their own internal data and Google's. (Thanks again to Gerardus Mercator and his great work on the Nova et Aucta Orbis Terrae Descriptio ad Usum Navigatium Emendate in 1569!)

We've also added support for Enterprise users to process their own sub-surface terrain data, also known as bathymetry – something we shared in the public Google Ocean launch in February 2009. Using the Earth API or latest Google Earth Enterprise client, you can now navigate below sea level to visualize that data in your organization's globe too.

Customers who want to access Google Earth Enterprise 3.2 can email enterprise-operations@google.com for upgrade information. Not using GEE yet? See what Google Earth Enterprise has to offer.

Posted by Dylan Lorimer, Product Manager, Google Earth Enterprise

Help customers find their way with new Google Maps gadget

Last week, I looked up directions to the hotel in Sacramento that I had booked for the Fourth of July weekend. As I had never been to that part of the state before, I was puzzled by the limited directions offered by their website - I had no idea whether I was approaching from the North, South, East or West or where the major highways were. What I needed were step-by-step directions from my exact starting point to the hotel that I could easily print and go.

With the new directions gadget from Google Maps, any business can offer just that. This simple gadget allows webmasters to add customized Google Maps directions to their business locations. With the directions gadget, you no longer need to type and update multiple sets of text directions. Let's face it: customers are only looking for directions from their specific location.

Google has made this process easy for you. The gadget allows you to pre-fill the "To" field with one or multiple addresses, a generic zip code or even a specific set of latitude-longitude coordinates. Customers are able to print their directions with a single click. And if they would prefer not to drive, the gadget also provides walking and public transit directions.

Take a look at how Legoland California, Emeril Lagasse, and Harvard University are using the gadget. And then test and create your own directions gadget here. For the many locations outside of the US, the gadget is available in 23 different languages.

If you're interested in learning more, head over to the Google Lat Long blog for a more detailed walk-through of the gadget's features.

Posted by Julie Zhou, Product Marketing Manager, Google Maps team

Serena Software on switching from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps

Editor's Note: We're pleased to welcome Ron Brister, Senior Manager of Global IT Operations, and Arron Privatsky, System Administrator, of Serena Software as our guest bloggers today. Serena Software, a leading provider of software to accelerate application development, helps IT departments keep pace with the demands of the businesses they support. Serena’s tools automate software development processes and help business users create powerful mashups – without requiring any coding. Serena is a privately owned company with 29 offices in 14 countries and 800 employees. Founded more than 25 years ago, Serena has more than 15,000 customers including 96 of the Fortune 100.

Serena Software recently selected Google Apps Premier Edition for its messaging and collaboration needs, saving more than $750,000 and countless IT hours. Members of Serena Software will be on hand next Thursday, June 18, to talk about that experience in a live webcast. Register here.

My name is Ron Brister, and I’m Senior Manager of Global IT Operations at Serena Software. I'm here with Arron Privatsky, System Administrator for Serena. Serena is a leading provider of software to accelerate application development. Because we are software experts, it’s no surprise that we are always looking for the best solutions.

For us, it was becoming increasingly clear that our messaging infrastructure was lacking. Inbox storage space was a constant complaint. Server maintenance was extremely time-consuming, and backups were inconsistent. Then we found that – calculating additional licenses of Microsoft Exchange, client access licenses for users, disaster recovery software, and additional disk storage space to increase mailbox quotas to 1.5GB – staying with our existing provider would have cost us upwards of $1 million. That was a nearly impossible number to justify with executives.

We thought about replacing our on-premise solution, but to tell the truth, we were skeptical. I, personally, had been a Microsoft admin for 15 years, and Microsoft technologies were ingrained in my thought processes. But Google Apps provided many pluses: Gmail, Google’s Postini messaging security software and 25 GB of mailbox space, as well as greater uptime and 24/7 phone support.

Apps also offered reliable mobile access and included other Google productivity and collaboration applications, such as Google Docs for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations – all at $50 per user per year. The cost savings would amount to a whopping $750,000 per year. All this added up to the ability to save the company money and to transition to a more advanced, flexible infrastructure.

Once we selected Google Apps, we decided on a “Big Bang” migration. Employees would switch over on their own, migrating their old emails to Gmail if they chose to, or simply starting with a clean inbox. We did not support local email clients, opting to support only the Gmail web interface through Mozilla Firefox to best accommodate the company's mixed Linux, Mac and PC environment.

We also enlisted four small groups of early adopters who would try the Google solution first, and then assist IT and support their peers during the full-scale migration. We used a lot of Google’s existing support documents to help us during the migration.

The overall move to Google Apps took all of six hours. We waited for the phones to ring, but all we heard was silence – in fact, we sat there playing meebo for quite a while – and still, nothing happened. We cut the cord all in one stroke to avoid the hassle of living in two environments at once. We made the switch globally, all in one day – and, due to the advantages of this cloud computing solution, we’ve never looked back.

I expect that what I am saying is probably setting off a lot of questions in your head. We welcome you to join us for a live webcast to learn more:

Thursday, June 18, 2009
1:00 p.m. EDT / 10:00 a.m PDT / 5:00 p.m. GMT

We'll give you more details and take questions on our recent switch to Google Apps. We hope that you'll join us.

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps team

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

Working with Google: Business tips to help you engage customers, monetize your site and work more efficiently

On this blog, we usually focus on helping you make the most of the products we've designed specifically with IT departments in mind. But Google has lots of other tools that other parts of your organization (such as the sales and marketing teams) might find useful.

So, in this post, we thought we'd go through a quick summary of the wide range of Google products that can help you do business. We've grouped these tips into three buckets: methods to optimize your website, details about how your company info can get listed on Google properties and finally, ways to improve your business operations.

OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE

Tip 1: Help customers find you with Google Maps

Pinpoint your business by embedding a Street View image on your website to show customers your storefront, office, building, parking facilities or anything else at the street level, or provide interactive door-to-door driving directions with a simple gadget. For a complete store locator solution, check out Google Maps API Premier

Tip 2: Engage users when they visit your site

Awaken and strengthen the community that visits your website by enriching it with social features. You can choose from a gallery of gadgets to add commenting, ratings and reviews, opinion polls, and more to your site. Learn more

Tip 3: Help visitors find what they're looking for

Add a customized Google-powered search box so that your visitors can easily find what they're looking for on your site. You can choose to show targeted ads alongside search results and earn revenue while helping visitors find what they're looking for with AdSense for Search, or you can purchase Google Site Search to offer your visitors an ad-free search experience.

Tip 4: Earn revenue from ads targeted to your content

Google AdSense enables website publishers of all sizes to display targeted ads alongside their online content and earn money. Sign up for AdSense and get access to Google's vast network of advertisers. If you're already selling ads directly to advertisers, learn how you can better manage your online sales and ad inventory with one of Google's ad serving solutions.

Tip 5: Measure website conversions on your website using Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free tool to track how visitors interact with your website. You can set up "Goals" in Analytics to track how many visitors complete a desired action, such as submitting a contact form or making a purchase. This lets you see your website's ROI and optimize your marketing efforts. Check out this post for a tutorial on how set up Goals for your site.

Tip 6: Increase your conversion rates with Website Optimizer

Every web page has room for improvement when it comes to conversions. Testing a few simple changes with Google Website Optimizer can radically increase your site's conversion rate. Try it now.

GET LISTED ON GOOGLE PROPERTIES

Tip 7: Put your business on Google Maps

People search for businesses on Google Maps and Google.com every day. Make sure your business is easy to find and your listing information is up-to-date by visiting the Local Business Center at www.google.com/lbc. It's free, and with the new dashboard feature, you can see how popular your business is on Google, where people drive from to get to you, and how they search to find you. Check out this video to learn more.

Tip 8: Submit all of your content

Google can also help you reach out to the world by distributing your content on Google Web Search, Product Search, iGoogle, and more. Learn how Google’s free products can make your online investments go further with increased distribution, traffic and monetization.

IMPROVE YOUR BUSINESS OPERATIONS

Tip 9: Simplify your IT environment, encourage innovation and cut costs

Managing email and other messaging software with multiple servers can be a headache. By switching to Google Apps, you can enjoy 99.9% uptime and take advantage of Google's data center infrastructure to ensure your information is secure. With your systems online, new features are automatically incorporated and collaboration can be done at a fraction of the cost of existing setups. Learn more

Tip 10: Archive corporate email in a central and searchable repository

Many businesses rely on backup tapes or .pst files to serve as their email archive. Searching through these sources can be time consuming and resource intensive. To minimize your IT operating burden and protect your business from costly e-discovery projects, you can archive email on-line in a central and searchable location with Google Message Discovery. Learn more

Tip 11: View and style mapping data with Google Earth Pro

If your business has GIS (Geographic Information System) data then use Google Earth Pro to view this map data with built-in GIS data import tools. You can also share styled map data quickly with colleagues and clients with Google Earth as a backdrop, leveraging Google’s comprehensive mapping data to make quick, location specific decisions. Learn more

Tip 12: Easily locate ALL of your internal documents using the Google Search Appliance 6.0
Your company’s internal search system can be just as good as Google’s – and just as easy to use. The Google Search Appliance (GSA) provides universal search for business, indexing all company content in a customizable way. The Google Search Appliance can search intranets, web servers, portals, file shares, databases, content management systems, and real-time data in business applications – and serve it up to employees in integrated, easy-to-navigate results. The new version of the GSA – GSA 6.0 – which just premiered yesterday, can now search billions of documents and provides rich customization features. Learn more

Posted by Debbie Leight, Google Apps team

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Introducing Google Search Appliance 6.0: The Story Behind (GSA)n

Today we're announcing the launch of the latest version of the Google Search Appliance, GSA 6.0. We've packed it full of so many new features that it's difficult to even count them. Check out the videos linked below to see some highlights, and I'll tell you how we got to this point -- the origins of (GSA)n.


As you might know, last August, we launched "10 million docs in a box ". Building on the premise of scale with simplicity, we (the engineering team) challenged ourselves to see how much further we could go, while still keeping the architecture extremely simple. After many late-night sessions spent diagramming on the whiteboards and chugging cappuccinos, we had a breakthrough.

The end result was a new architecture: (GSA)ⁿ. When we tested it out, the product manager was pretty excited about all the new features and search power. He was used to hearing about the millions of docs we could handle – but this time we were going to push it to a new realm: billions.

The idea was simple; build technology to connect as many appliances as you'd like, whether in one location or separated across departments or even across continents - and still provide a unified set of results to the end-user – the employee searching for an elusive document or piece of information. This would not only give our customers unparalleled ability to scale, but enable them to integrate all the data in their organizations. Information doesn’t do you much good if you can’t find it! That was our guiding principle.

One of our beta customers, MTCSC Inc., really needs the geographic integration. When we caught up with them, MTCSC was in the midst of deploying over 50 GSAs all over the world for a federal customer, connecting to over 2,500 data sources and consisting of data on websites, file shares, databases, and SharePoint servers. The new GSA 6.0 architecture is now helping them integrate information from the varied data centers to provide users with a single, unified set of results.

So imagine there is a database that might “live” in Egypt, some documents in a data center in Sydney, and a fileshare whose homebase is Los Angeles. The new GSA 6.0 integration can handle searching through all those data stores and give the employee who is looking a simple page of search results – one that looks as easy to use as Google.com – even though the backend search is really complicated.

And, since we were feeling ambitious, we added a Ranking Framework (where administrators can easily feed in server logs and other enterprise-specific information to improve relevance of search results), multiple new biasing options, and an administrative API to provide more control for automation of common tasks. We also added support for both early binding and late binding, providing organizations with flexible security policies to meet their needs.

The bottom line: safer, higher-quality, more customizable enterprise search with (GSA)ⁿ.

This morning, both Google and our customers, including MTCSC, spoke at an event on all the new developments leading to (GSA)ⁿ and the 6.0 version. We talked so much about searching a billion documents, we decided to try something we’ve never seen done before: set up and showcase the actual infrastructure required to search a billion docs, and you can see it here. It is surprisingly small and simple, and pretty cool to know that we can now take the amount of content in the entire Google.com index in the year 2000 (when Google.com was searching though just a billion docs), and pack it into a server rack built that could fit in the corner of my living room. And I have a normal-sized living room.

Posted by Shamim Alpha, Enterprise Search Engineer

Learn more about the Google Search Appliance 6.0 at google.com/gsa

New for local business owners: the Google Maps LBC dashboard

If your enterprise maintains one or more physical locations, you may already know that roughly 80% of consumers use search to find local businesses. But unless those customers are also visiting your website directly, you may not know much about how those customers are finding you, or where they're coming from when they visit one of your locations.

That's because your site is just a part of your entire web presence. Users of Google Maps and Google Search, for example, may also be interacting with your local listing on Google. And while there are plenty of great tools out there (like Google Analytics) to measure traffic to your site, there isn't any way to measure how customers are interacting with other elements of your web presence like your listing.

That is, until today. The Google Maps team has just launched a new dashboard in its free Local Business Center (www.google.com/lbc) tool that will open up exactly that kind of data to business owners.

This is the first time this kind of data has ever been made available to business owners, and we think you'll find it highly useful.

If you're interested in learning more, head over to the Official Google Blog for a more detailed overview or the Lat Long blog for a walk-through of the dashboard's features. And be sure press the play button, below, to see things in action.

Posted by Amer Shahnawaz, Software Engineer, Local Business Center

Google Apps Partners: helping organizations move forward

Our ongoing partner momentum is directly benefiting the people and organizations who use Google services in the workplace. Examples and of these successful engagements can be found in our Solutions Marketplace Customer Success Stories Blog.

A recent post shows how one of our partners, LTech, helped migrate The Huffington Post to Google Apps Premier Edition in just four days. Whether you're a potential partner looking to learn more about our Apps Authorized Reseller program or a professional who wants to know more about what Google solutions deliver in the workplace, we hope you find LTech's story interesting.

For small and medium-sized businesses interested in learning more about the benefits of Google Apps and cloud computing, we invite you to join our webinar, co-hosted with Salesforce.com, on June 4.

How to Go Beyond CRM with Salesforce for Google Apps
Thursday, June 4, 2009
10:00 a.m. PDT / 1:00 p.m. EDT

The webinar is one in a four-part series on how organizations can get started with, and benefit from, cloud computing.

Partners or organizations interested in the latest plans for the Channel 2.0 Conference: visit their website for information.

Posted by Michelle Lisowski, Google Apps Partners team

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Ben Salzman, Enterprise Sales Team

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We have a winner! News on the "Where's Your Google Search Appliance?" contest

Back in February we announced a contest challenging our customers to show us their Google Search Appliances and share a picture of where their yellow GSA boxes fit into their organizations. The prize? Tickets to the upcoming upcoming Google IO conference, to be held in San Francisco on May 27-28. We had some great entries – but when we saw this picture, from the Web Dev team at Atlanta'sWellStar Health System, we knew we had a winner.



WellStar's GSA keeps "operations" running smoothly

Congrats to Rob and the Web team at WellStar in Atlanta, Georgia. Here's their story:

Before GSA: With five premier hospitals in the Northwest suburbs of Atlanta, 11,000 employees and the largest nonacademic Physicians Group in the State,WellStar Health System has become one of the biggest not-for-profit health care systems in the Southeast. As WellStar grew, it became increasingly difficult for folks to find our stuff. WellStar’s intranet houses a physician portal containing content from over 70 different clinical sites – along with unique portals for 60+ supporting enterprise departments – andeveryone's generic material permeated our content management systems (CMS ). Employee and patient volumes intensified, organically creating a nightmare of a file library, and it seemed that our system needed 20CCs of Findability Stat! The challenge was to efficiently serve everyone at once while minimizing the impact on our own busy environment.

After GSA: Our previous intranet search limited employees to each of our internal .Net portals, meaning employees would have to be sifting through the right haystack to find a specific needle, which gave them a whopping 1.4% chance of starting in the right place. This all changed with the GSA. The GSA crawls from a central location and provides a single URL to hit when employees need fast results. Its active replacement of cached, dead-end links diminishes wasted search time, and the “Text Only” document display feature is an essential business asset for clinical employees without specific readers.

After purchasing the GSA and performing a minimal setup, our team found that the appliance was pulling several hundred rabbits out of its hat every eight hours. It was finding the one-of-a-kind policy, form, safety, and class information details from long forgotten documents – all without requiring someone to organize the material. Thin-air content was rediscovered, removed, and replaced with current information, and incoming help calls starting with “Where do I find…” have been eliminated.

We had a few other standouts. Here's one.



Two GSAs were all it took to change the "State" of search

Meet Chris with the State of Missouri in Jefferson City, Missouri.

Before GSA: The State of Missouri is made up of 16 executive agencies and various other non-executive agencies, boards and commissions. Prior to the purchasing the GSA, the state was simply a collection of data silos that provided no unified search for our citizens or the companies who wanted to do business with us. The bottom line: it was difficult (at best) for tax-paying citizens or businesses to find the information that they needed on the various State of Missouri web sites.

After GSA: After implementing the GSA as a centrally-managed device, we made search available to all of our executive agencies as well as to our other agencies, boards, and commissions. The GSA allowed us to index all the relevant information from across all of these entities and provide a unified search option to our citizens. The flexibility of the device also allowed each of the agencies to integrate the search onto their unique agency site and further refine the search capabilities they offered to their taxpaying customers. Not only have the search capabilities greatly increased, from the citizen’s perspective, the data silos are no longer there and results across each agency are much more relevant.

From all of us at Google: thanks, WellStar and State of Missouri.

In the next few weeks we will be releasing their full case studies and if you are interested in knowing how other customers are using their GSAs we have more success stories here. Thanks for your participation and don't forget to register for I/O. Congrats again to the winners!

Posted by Dave Kim, Google Enterprise search team

Mark your calendar: webinars with Google partners on IT in the cloud

Recent commentary on channel growth around cloud computing and the emerging business scenarios for trusted IT advisors are good examples of the growing momentum around the ecosystem of channel partners like consultants, resellers and developers pursuing new models for doing business in the cloud. We're excited to share details of what we're seeing and are we're pleased to offer two ways to learn more about the benefits of cloud computing.

For solutions providers, developers, and resellers. Co-hosted by Google and salesforce.com, this live discussion is aimed at helping channel partners understand the business change that cloud computing drives, and how to build the services that help customers benefit from these changes. Participants can expect to gain a fuller understanding of what cloud computing is, how it transforms the way that organizations think about IT, and how to make the most of the opportunity "in the cloud" for business growth and development.

Partner with Google and Salesforce.com

Wednesday, April 29
10:00 a.m. PDT / 1:00 p.m. EDT

For organizations thinking of moving to a cloud platform for business productivity. We're participating with Daston Corporation, a Google Apps Authorized Reseller, to showcase Google Apps, Google's enterprise-ready communication and collaboration tools. This live webinar will feature an overview of Google Apps, and how the expertise of resellers like Daston can help organizations make the transition from traditional platforms to IT in the cloud.

Google Apps – a new way of communicating and collaborating
Wednesday, May 6
11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT

Posted by Maureen Bradford, Google Partner team

New for Google Apps Admins: an online community

Listening to Google Apps admins talk – with us and with each other – made it clear: as IT professionals, admins wanted a way to connect online somewhere in the Google environment. We heard a clear call for a gathering place, or community – a meeting point where admins could meet one another, identify each other by business type or geography, discuss topics unique to their roles, and share learning and best practices in a way that helped in their professional roles.

We wanted to make the site relevant and easy for admins to use, and we also wanted to use Google Apps as fully as we could. So we used Google Sites, of course, and integrated the Google products that most admins already use, like Google Maps, Moderator, and Forms. A few highlights:

• The Admin community map – allows admins to easily see where their fellow community members are located; also highlights further information with a "click" on the marker.
  
  

• "Share your perspective " – uses Google Moderator to let admins easily add their own comments to posted topics, or vote on comments added by others. We've set this up to feature four topics at a time, so there's always something to talk about.

• "Stay Current " – the latest product information and posts to the Admin Help forum, so that Admins can see what's being discussed in Support
  

We want this forum to create a sense of connectedness and community among the people who work as admins for Google Apps – a place where they can learn from each other, share what they've learned, and create a dialog that can help all of us learn. We also want it to be a place where people considering Google Apps can come in and find out more about what it offers, so we made this an "open" environment, where people can easily invite colleagues who might want to know more. There's even a way to send an email right from the forum itself.

The Google Apps team hopes that this community adds value for admins, and we hope you'll take a look today.

Posted by Monali Narayanaswami, Google Apps team