xtex.org

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.

For a lot more detail on what this means for developers and ISVs, check out our posts on the new Google Apps Developer Blog and the Google Code Blog.

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

When we launched Directions in Maps API v3 last year we asked "Where will you go from here?". You may have asked the same question of us, and today we're pleased to be taking another step forward with several new Maps API v3 Directions features.

• Avoid highways and tolls. If you prefer to take the road less traveled you can now generate routes that avoid highways. Similarly, if you find yourself a little short of loose change, you can avoid tolls.
  
  
• Route optimization. Have many places to go but no preference as to the order you visit them in? We can now reorder the waypoints of your route to minimize the distance and time you must travel. Very useful for traveling salesman I hear.
  
  
• Bicycling directions. Prefer your vehicles of the two wheeled human powered variety? In conjunction with the launch of Bicycling directions in Google Maps you can now also request directions in Maps API v3 that are tailored to your Penny-farthing.

You can try these new features using the below map. Simply click to create waypoints and then generate directions between them. The first and last points you click are the start and end point, which remain fixed when the route is optimized. Any intermediary points may be reordered.


Note that Bicycling directions are currently only available in the U.S., and that the Bicycling layer available on Google Maps is not yet available in the Maps API.

In conjunction with these new features we are also making some changes to the DirectionsResults structure in response to developer feedback. The object representing a complete journey from origin to destination was previously called a "trip" but is now being renamed to a "route". The object previously called a "route", which represents the portion of the journey between two consecutive waypoints, is being renamed to a"leg". For more details please see the Maps API V3 Services documentation.

We will support both the old and new naming scheme in the v3 API for a transition period until May 1st, after which the old names will be removed. Please update any existing applications to use the new names. We realise this change may cause some inconvenience, but believe the new naming scheme is more intuitive for newcomers to the Maps API.

We hope that you will find interesting ways to put these new features to good use. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a bicycle to find and dust off...

Posted by Thor Mitchell, Maps API Product Manager

Geocoding - finding the geographical location of a given address - is one of the most popular features of the Google Maps API. Both the JavaScript Maps APIs and the Maps API for Flash include classes that enable applications to perform geocoding, and there is also a RESTful web service that offers the option of making geocoding requests from server side applications with output in both XML and JSON.

The Google Maps JavaScript API v3 introduced a new format for geocoding responses that offers a number of improvements over the format used in the v2 API:

• A flatter response format for address components that is easier to parse
• The ability to tag an address component with multiple types
• Both full names and abbreviations for countries and states
• Differentiation between rooftop and interpolated geocoder results
• Both the bounding box and recommended viewport for each result

We're happy to now announce a new Geocoding Web Service that adopts these improvements.

The Geocoding Web Service is intended to enable precaching of geocoder results that you know your application will need in the future. For example, if your application displays property listings, you can geocode the address of each property, cache the results on your server, and serve these locations to your API application. This ensures that your application does not need to geocode the address of a property every time it is viewed by a user. However we do ask that you regularly refresh your cache of geocoder results.

Note however that it is a requirement of the Maps API Terms of Service that you use the Geocoding Web Service in conjunction with a Google map. This means that when it comes time to use cached geocoder results in an application, the application must display the results or any data derived from them on a map generated using one of the Google Maps APIs or Google Earth API.

If your application needs to geocode arbitrary addresses that are entered by your users while they wait we recommend that you use the classes in the appropriate client API. This ensures that the requests your application generates reach Google directly from your users, which will improve the performance of your application and ensure it is resilient to unexpected spikes in use. For more details, I highly recommend this excellent blog post by our very own Mano Marks.

In addition to an improved response format you will notice some other changes in the new Geocoding Web Service. Requests no longer require a Maps API key, and Maps API Premier customers must sign their requests. In addition CSV output is not supported because we found that the minimal amount of data in a CSV response makes it is difficult to identify false positive results.

2,500 requests may be sent to the Geocoding Web Service per day from a single IP address. This is independent of any geocoding activity generated by applications using one of the client Maps APIs for geocoding. Maps API Premier quotas remain unchanged.

A forward geocoding request to the new Geocoding Web Service with XML output looks like:

http://maps.google.com/maps/api/geocode/xml?address=sydney&sensor=false

A reverse geocoding request with JSON output looks like:

http://maps.google.com/maps/api/geocode/json?latlng=-33.873038,151.20563&sensor=false

Check out the Geocoding Web Service documentation for more details on the options available for language and biasing of results.

In conjunction with the launch of the new Geocoding Web Service we are also announcing the deprecation of the current service, now retroactively named the "Geocoding V2 Web Service". Existing applications using the V2 Web Service need not worry though. Deprecation indicates that we no longer intend to pursue any further feature development, but we will continue to maintain and support the service in accordance with the deprecation policy set out in the Maps API Terms of Service.

We hope that you find the new Geocoding Web Service easier to use and useful. As always we encourage you to check out the Google Maps API Google Group if you have any questions or comments relating to the APIs. We look forward to adding more great features to the Geocoding Web Service in future.

Posted by Thor Mitchell, Maps API Product Manager

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

Last week, I sat down with Tim Horton, CEO of DiscountOfficeItems.com, to present a webinar entitled “How Discount Office Items Increased Revenue 6% by Switching to Google Commerce Search.”

I appreciate any chance to speak in-depth with Google customers and partners, but what I thought was most interesting about my conversation with Tim was a quick poll we ran midway through the presentation: When asked how satisfied they were with current search performance on their website stores, 82% of respondents said that they were neutral, unhappy or very unhappy with it. Only 10% of respondents were happy or very happy (note that about 8% of attendees don’t have search on their sites).

It’s exactly this discrepancy that spurred us to create Google Commerce Search last year. While the web as a whole is advancing at a staggering pace, online retailers are lagging behind in the overall quality and usability of their websites. As a recent Forrester study (see reference below) showed, 17% percent of frustrated consumers walk away from their online purchases, and 11% give up on shopping when unable to complete online research. Improving search - a key element on any website - can help bridge this gap and bring shoppers through the purchase cycle.

We hope you’ll join us next time to learn more about search and e-commerce, and in case you missed the webinar, you can catch the playback here.

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Senior Product Manager, Enterprise Search team

"Web Sites That Don’t Support Customers’ Goals Waste Millions," Forrester Research, Inc., February 2010

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.

Webmaster Level: All

Last October, we launched Webmaster Tools Labs and it has been a huge success. Malware Details have helped thousands of users identify pages on their site that may be infected with malicious code, and Fetch as Googlebot has given users more insight into our crawler.

Today, we're happy to announce two additional Labs features:

• Fetch as Googlebot-Mobile
• Create your Sidewiki page owner entry

Fetch as Gooblebot Mobile (developed by Ryoichi Imaizumi)

After we launched Fetch as Googlebot, many users with mobile-specific sites asked if we could provide the ability to fetch their pages as Googlebot-Mobile. We thought it was a great idea, and added it as an option to our Fetch as Googlebot feature. We have two mobile options: cHTML (primarily used for Japanese sites), and XHTML/WML.





Create your Sidewiki page owner entry (developed by Derek Prothro)

Sidewiki allows users to contribute helpful information to any webpage using a sidebar in Google Toolbar or a Chrome extension. Webmasters can create a special entry, called a page owner entry, that appears above all entries written by users.



After Sidewiki launched webmasters kept asking, "How can I put a Sidewiki page owner entry on all pages of my site quickly?" With the feature that we're introducing today, you can now create these page owner entries directly within Webmaster Tools for any site you own.



We're really happy about these new features, and hope you enjoy them as much as we do. Let us know what you think!

Written by Sagar Kamdar, Product Manager, Webmaster Tools

One feature of the AJAX Image Search API that you might find useful is the ability to retrieve only the images which are visible on a specific website. For example, you could add a search box that allows people to search through just the images on your own site or you could create a slideshow which shows images from your favorite site.

To specify a site, use the setSiteRestriction method on an ImageSearch object. Here is a simple example:

http://code.google.com/apis/ajax/playground/#site_restrict

We can do more than just provide a site-specific image search box, we could also use the search results in a unique way. For example, we could create a slideshow which shows images which match our desired keyword and appear on a specific site. For this example, let's create a simple slideshow that displays images from nasa.gov.

var imageIndex = 0;
var images;

function nextImage() {
imageIndex++;
if (imageIndex >= images.length) {
imageIndex = 0;
}

var imageContainer = document.getElementById(
'image-container');
imageContainer.src = images[imageIndex].tbUrl;
}

function searchComplete(searcher) {
if (searcher.results && searcher.results.length > 0) {
var contentDiv = document.getElementById(
'content-slideshow');
contentDiv.innerHTML = '';

var imageTag = document.createElement('img');
imageTag['id'] = 'image-container';
imageTag['src'] = searcher.results[imageIndex].tbUrl;
images = searcher.results;

contentDiv.appendChild(imageTag);

// Switch to the next image every 5 seconds.
setInterval("nextImage();", 5000);
}
}

function slideshowOnLoad() {
var imageSearch = new google.search.ImageSearch();
imageSearch.setSiteRestriction('nasa.gov');
imageSearch.setSearchCompleteCallback(
this, searchComplete, [imageSearch]);
imageSearch.execute('supernova');
}

google.setOnLoadCallback(slideshowOnLoad);

In the above samples, there are three lines I'd like to call your attention to. The first line to note is the imageSearch.execute at the bottom, here we've entered the keywords that our slideshow images should be related to. Next we restrict the site to nasa.gov using imageSearch.setSiteRestriction. Lastly, we call setInterval once we receive the results of our search for images. The setInterval call tells the browser to run our nextImage function every five seconds.

Here are the two samples we've talked about in action:

The site restriction can also include a path within a website. For example you could do setSiteRestriction(
'http://www.flickr.com/photos/<username>') to search the photos that have been posted by a particular user on flickr.

To learn more about some other neat features of the AJAX Image Search API take a look at our code playground samples and documentation. For questions on this and other topics, drop us a line in the discussion group.

google.load("search","1"); function onLoad(){var searchControl=new google.search.SearchControl;var imageSearch=new google.search.ImageSearch;imageSearch.setSiteRestriction("nasa.gov");searchControl.addSearcher(imageSearch);searchControl.draw(document.getElementById("search-demo"));searchControl.execute("supernova");var imageSearch=new google.search.ImageSearch;imageSearch.setSiteRestriction("nasa.gov");imageSearch.setSearchCompleteCallback(this,searchComplete,[imageSearch]);imageSearch.execute("supernova")}var imageIndex=0; var images;function nextImage(){imageIndex++;if(imageIndex>=images.length)imageIndex=0;var imageContainer=document.getElementById("image-container");imageContainer.src=images[imageIndex].tbUrl} function searchComplete(searcher){if(searcher.results&&searcher.results.length>0){var contentDiv=document.getElementById("slideshow-demo");contentDiv.innerHTML="";var imageTag=document.createElement("img");imageTag["id"]="image-container";imageTag["src"]=searcher.results[imageIndex].tbUrl;images=searcher.results;contentDiv.appendChild(imageTag);setInterval("nextImage();",3E3)}}google.setOnLoadCallback(onLoad);

Social networks came into existence thanks to our instinctive need for sharing. Facebook grew out of college campuses by allowing students to share photos or "faces", while Twitter grew by enabling users to share short and quick "tweets" or status updates. As smartphones like iPhone and Android led to the rise of the mobile web, location signature of GPS-enabled devices added a new twist. Users could share locations and activities, opening up a wide range of possible applications, and creating brand new specialty social networks.

As I recently moved from OpenSocial to the Geo APIs, I'm very excited to see that Google Maps is the default platform to power this fast growing segment of what I call the Geo Mobile web. In this post I'm going to highlight this emerging trend by sharing a few of my favorite examples.

Let's start with FourSquare, which is all about sharing the location and activities of users. When a user signs in from a mobile device, FourSquare detects the current location of the user, performs a reverse geocode to fetch a list of places nearby and sends them back to the user, who can opt to check in at one of the places and share it with others. In this snapshot the Google San Francisco office is shown on Google Maps using the Google Maps JavaScript V2 API. Users can check-in to a place, see check-ins by others, explore places nearby, and build up social contacts by adding friends, all the while having fun by earning badges.

Gowalla by Alamofire is another application building on this same concept of user check-in and sharing location and activity. When a user chooses a place of interest, activities by others at that location are shown and the user can choose to add people as friends, discover new places, pick up, drop off, and trade items with others.

Gowalla's web app version uses the Google Static Maps API to show a map view of a place while the iPhone native app uses the MapKit framework to render a map.

It is interesting to note that users of these apps initially start out without a built-in social graph but can gradually build them up by sharing their own whereabouts and discovering the location and activities of others.

This kind of viral sharing has boosted the growth for Facebook and Twitter in the past and it is once again driving the creation of these specialty social networks on the new frontier of the Geo Mobile web.

Established social networks like Twitter have taken notice. They recently enhanced their APIs by offering geotagging for tweets and local trends, which have spawned innovative mash-ups like Trendsmap.

The rise of these specialty social networks on the Geo Mobile web is predicated on the introduction and wide adoption of smart mobile devices, the viral spread in user sharing check-ins, as well as the availability of geo data sources and services. Google Maps is the developer solution of choice for many of these applications in regards to data source of tiles and places and services like geocoding, and I'm looking forward to seeing more innovations in this exciting arena.

Posted by Shawn Shen, Developer Relations

​The future of productivity applications is in the cloud. We've always believed the web is the best platform for creating and sharing information, and Google Docs has already helped millions of people become more productive. But we recognize that many people are still accustomed to desktop software. So as we continue to improve Google Docs and Google Sites as rich collaboration tools, we’re also making it easier for people to transition to the cloud, and interoperate with desktop applications like Microsoft Office.
​
For example, we recently made it possible to use Google Docs to store and share any type of file that you have on your computer, not just the ones you create online. Today we’re excited to announce another step towards seamless interoperability: we have acquired DocVerse.

DocVerse is a small, nimble team of talented developers who share our vision, and they’ve enabled true collaboration right within Microsoft Office. With DocVerse, people can begin to experience some of the benefits of web-based collaboration using the traditional Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint desktop applications.

A huge "welcome" to the DocVerse team and their customers! Current DocVerse users can keep using the product as usual, though we’ve suspended new sign-ups until we’re ready to share what's next. Stay tuned!

Posted by Jonathan Rochelle, Group Product Manager, Google Apps team

While feedback and revision are crucial steps to successful writing, it’s not always easy to do in practice. Keeping track of revisions, deciphering edits, and arranging reviews can keep us from repeating this editing cycle more often.

The collaborative nature of Google Apps can help evolve the writing process with easy sharing and anytime, anywhere collaboration. Add in built-in reference tools, autosave and revision history, and ready-made templates, and Google Docs – part of the Google Apps suite – becomes a powerful platform for writing.

We’ve developed our first Google Apps Topic Review to highlight some of these features and stories from teachers in the classroom, and we shared and revised this paper using the same principles of collaboration.

If you’re attending this year’s ASCD Conference (held from March 6-8 in San Antonio, Texas) we invite you to hear presentations from Google Certified Teachers, Google Apps Education Edition customers, and Google Apps Education team members about other ways Google Apps can help in the classroom. View our teaching theater schedule and stop by to visit us in Booth #626.

For more information about how to start using Google Apps Education Edition at your school, visit www.google.com/a/edu

Posted by Dana Nguyen, Google Apps Education team

Thousands of businesses and schools have been using Google Sites as a collaboration platform for teams, classes, or entire intranets.

In the past year, we've helped simplify the site creation process with site templates and let businesses create domain-specific gadgets with private gadgets. Gadgets are snippets of code that can embed rich media, pieces of web content, or Google Apps products like Docs or Calendars, directly into Google Sites. One request we've received from Google Apps administrators is the ability to manage the types of gadgets available to users in the gadget directory.

Available to Google Apps customers, we're releasing an update to the Feed Server Client Tool (FSCT) – the same developer tool that enables private gadgets – to allow administrators to set which gadgets appear in the Sites gadget directory. Using the FSCT, businesses and schools can choose to explicitly select relevant gadgets for their domain's directory or blacklist inappropriate gadgets.

To find out more about using FSCT to manage your domain's gadgets in Google Sites, read the Help Center Article.

Posted by Jeffrey Harris, Associate Product Manager, Google Apps

Will you be ready when disaster strikes? It's an uncomfortable question for many IT administrators, because answering it with confidence usually requires boatloads of money, immense complexity, and crossed fingers. Fortunately there's a better way.

Taking email as an example, consider a few of the ways that companies protect their data from disruption. Ideally a typical small business backs up its email. They have a mail server, and copy the data to tape at regular daily or weekly intervals. If something goes wrong, they go to the tapes to restore the data that was saved before their last backup. But the information created after their most recent backup is lost forever.

In larger businesses, companies will add a storage area network (SAN), which is a consolidated place for all storage. SANs are expensive, and even then, you're out of luck if your data center goes down. So the largest enterprises will build an entirely new data center somewhere else, with another set of identical mail servers, another SAN and more people to staff them.

But if, heaven forbid, disaster strikes both your data centers, you're toast (check out this customer's experience with a fire). So big companies will often build the second data center far away, in a different 'threat zone', which creates even more management headaches. Next they need to ensure the primary SAN talks to the backup SAN, so they have to implement robust bandwidth to handle terabytes of data flying back and forth without crippling their network. There are other backup options as well, but the story's the same: as redundancy increases, cost and complexity multiplies.

Google Apps customers don't need to worry about any of this for the data they create and store within Google Apps. They get best-in-class disaster recovery for free, no matter their size. Indeed, it's one of the many reasons why the City of Los Angeles decided to go Google.


How do you know if your disaster recovery solution is as strong as you need it to be? It's usually measured in two ways: RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective). RPO is how much data you're willing to lose when things go wrong, and RTO is how long you're willing to go without service after a disaster.

For a large enterprise running SANs, the RTO and RPO targets are an hour or less: the more you pay, the lower the numbers. That can mean a large company spending the big bucks is willing to lose all the email sent to them for up to an hour after the system goes down, and go without access to email for an hour as well. Enterprises without SANs may be literally trucking tapes back and forth between data centers, so as you can imagine their RPOs and RTOs can stretch into days. As for small businesses, often they just have to start over.

For Google Apps customers, our RPO design target is zero, and our RTO design target is instant failover. We do this through live or synchronous replication: every action you take in Gmail is simultaneously replicated in two data centers at once, so that if one data center fails, we nearly instantly transfer your data over to the other one that's also been reflecting your actions.

Our goal is not to lose any data when it's transferred from one data center to another, and to transfer your data so quickly that you don't even know a data center experiences an interruption. Of course, no backup solution from us or anyone else is absolutely perfect, but we've invested a lot of effort to help make it second to none.

And it's not just to preserve your Gmail accounts. You get the same level of data replication for all the other major applications in the Apps suite: Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Google Sites.

Some companies have adopted synchronous replication as well, but it is even more expensive than everything else we've mentioned. To backup 25GB of data with synchronous replication a business may easily pay from $150 to $500+ in storage and maintenance costs- and that's per employee. That doesn't even include the cost of the applications. The exact price depends on a number of factors such as the number of times the data is replicated and the choice of service provider.

At the low end a company might tier the number of times they replicate data, and at the high end they'll make several copies of the data for everyone. We also replicate all the data multiple times, and the 25GB per employee for Gmail is backed up for free. Plus you get even more disk space for storage-intensive applications like Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Video for business. Other companies may offer cloud computing solutions as well, but don't assume they backup your data in more than one data center.

Here are a few of the reasons why we're able to offer you this level of service. First, we operate many large data centers simultaneously for millions of users, which helps reduce cost while increasing resiliency and redundancy. Second, we're not wasting money and resources by having a data center stand-by unused until something goes wrong – we can balance loads between data centers as needed.

Finally, we have very high speed connections between data centers, so that we can transfer data very quickly from one set of servers to another. This let us replicate large amounts of data simultaneously.

One of the most compelling advantages of cloud computing is its power to democratize technology. Whether it's a 25GB email inbox, Video for business, synchronous replication, or one of countless other advanced services, Google Apps gives companies of all sizes access to technology that until recently was available to only the largest enterprises. And it's available at a dramatically lower cost than the on-premises alternatives, without the usual hassles of upgrading, patching and maintaining the software.

No one likes preparing for worst-case scenarios. When you use Google Apps, you have one less critical thing to worry about.

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps

Every day thousands of companies move to Google Apps, but it's not that often that we get to bring Apps to those who already work among the clouds. We're excited to share that KLM Royal Dutch Airlines has moved 11,200 of their crew members to Gmail as part of their Google Apps Premier Edition deployment. KLM crew members will now be able to send and receive email effectively from any location and using any Internet connected device, including personal laptops, shared computers, BlackBerry devices, mobile phones, or PDA devices.

The adoption of Gmail marks KLM's move to cloud computing. With 25 GB of storage per account, Gmail provides them with a powerful, intuitive and efficient messaging platform with integrated IM (Google Talk) and a series of additional features that facilitate communication.

For example, message translation allows KLM employees to translate email from and into 42 different languages with one click of the mouse. The employees' familiarity with Google's consumer products meant that minimal or no training was needed to complete the deployment.

If you're interested in joining KLM in the cloud, check out http://www.google.com/a

Posted by Adrian Joseph, Managing Director of Google Enterprise for Europe, Middle East and Africa

Webmaster Level: All

Everything is more fun with a friend! We've just added a feature to Webmaster Tools Site Verification to make it easier to share verified ownership of your websites.

In the past, if more than one person needed to be a verified owner of a website, they each had to go through the meta tag or HTML file verification process. That works fine for some situations, but for others it can be challenging. For example, what if you have twenty people who need to be verified owners of your site? Adding twenty meta tags or HTML files could be pretty time consuming. Our new verification delegation feature makes adding new verified owners a snap.



Once you're a verified owner of a website, you can view the Verification Details page (linked from Webmaster Tools or the Verification home page). That page will show you information about the site as well as a list of any other verified owners. At the bottom of the list of owners, you'll now see a button labeled "Add a user...". Click that, enter the user's email address, and that person will instantly become a verified owner for the site! You can remove that ownership at any time by clicking the "Unverify" link next to the person's email address on the Details page.

There are a few important things to keep in mind as you use this feature. First, each site must always have at least one owner who has verified directly (via meta tag or HTML file). If all of the directly verified owners become unverified, the delegated owners may also become unverified. Second, you can only delegate ownership to people with Google Accounts. Finally, remember that anyone you delegate ownership to will have exactly the same access you have. They can delegate to more people, submit URL Removal requests and manage Sitelinks in Webmaster Tools, etc. Only delegate ownership to people you trust!

We hope this makes things a little easier for those of you who need more than one person to be a verified owner of your site. As always, please visit the Webmaster Help Forum if you have any questions.

Sean Harding, Software Engineer

Webmaster Level: All

How many of Google's web pages use a descriptive title tag? Do we use description meta tags? Heading tags? While we always try to focus on the user, could our products use an SEO tune up? These are just some of the questions we set out to answer with Google's SEO Report Card.

Google's SEO Report Card is an effort to provide Google's product teams with ideas on how they can improve their products' pages using simple and accepted optimizations. These optimizations are intended to not only help search engines understand the content of our pages better, but also to improve our users' experience when visiting our sites. Simple steps such as fixing 404s and broken links, simplifying URL choice, and providing easier-to-understand titles and snippets for our pages can benefit both users and search engines. From the start of the project we also wanted to release the report card publicly so other companies and webmasters could learn from the report, which is filled with dozens of examples taken straight from our products' pages.

The project looked at the main pages of 100 different Google products, measuring them across a dozen common optimization categories. Future iterations of the project might look at deeper Google product web pages as well as international ones. We released the report card within Google last month and since then a good number of teams have taken action on it or plan to.

We hope you find our SEO Report Card useful and we'd love to hear your feedback in the comments below or in the Webmaster Central Help Forum. And if you'd like to do your own SEO tune up, a good place to start is by reading our free SEO Beginner's Guide.

Written by Brandon Falls, Adi Goradia, and Charlene Perez, Search Quality Team

Webmaster Level: All
As we crawl the web, we see bad content inserted on to thousands of hacked sites each day. The number of sites attacked is staggering and the problem is only getting worse. Hackers and spammers target and successfully compromise any sites they can - small personal sites, schools and universities, even multinational corporations. Spam attacks against forums and user content sections of sites, though not as shocking, are even more widespread.
You may have read in an earlier post that we've begun notifying webmasters about new software versions via Webmaster Tools to help protect their sites. Continuing with our effort to provide more useful information to webmasters, we're happy to announce that we'll soon be sending even more notifications to the Message Center.
Starting this month, we will notify more webmasters of more potential issues we've detected on their websites, including:

• Spammy or abused user-generated content
• Abused forum pages or egregious amounts of comment spam
• Suspected hacking

These notifications are meant to alert webmasters of potential issues and provide next steps on how to get their sites fixed and back into Google's search results. If it pertains to a hacking or abuse issue, the notification will point to example URLs exhibiting this type of behavior. These notifications will run in parallel with our existing malware notifications.
A notice of suspected hacking, for example, will look like this:

We've been notifying webmasters of suspected hacking for years, but a recent upgrade to our systems will allow us to notify many more site owners that have been hacked. We hope webmasters will find these notifications useful in making sure their sites are clean and secure, ultimately providing a better user experience for their visitors. In the future, we may extend this effort even further to include other types of vulnerabilities or abuse issues.
Just as before, webmasters who have not already signed up for Webmaster Tools may still do so and retrieve previously sent messages within one year of their send date. And if you don't want to miss out on any important messages, remember to use the email forwarding feature to receive these alerts in your inbox.
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask in our Webmaster Help Forum or leave your comments below.
Posted by Jessica Wong and Jason Morrison, Search Quality Team

Today we're happy to announce that Google has joined the Cloud Security Alliance, a non-profit organization of experts focused on best practices and education efforts around the security of cloud computing.

Cloud computing continues to gain momentum, and organizations such as the CSA are an important part of an ecosystem that works to increase transparency, lower risks, and promote independent research. The CSA's focus on security best practices offers valuable information to organizations looking to move to the cloud, and as a member of the CSA, we look forward to providing ongoing education about cloud computing and its value to the organizations that use it.

Google's activities with the CSA include sponsoring the Cloud Security Alliance Summit at RSA Conference 2010 on March 1, 2010 in San Francisco, California, and participating in a CSA panel discussion at SecureCloud 2010, held on March 16 and 17 in Barcelona, Spain.

Learn more about Google's cloud computing solutions for organizations.

Posted by Adam Swidler, Google Enterprise Marketing team

Small business owners often ask us how Google Apps can help improve the way they work. We'll be sharing some answers in May when we join the U.S. Chamber of Commerce at this year's America's Small Business Summit.

Every day, thousands of businesses of all sizes sign up for Google Apps to help save money, reduce IT hassles, and improve collaboration. For small business owners, Google Apps provides a familiar set of easy-to-use Google business applications with minimal setup and maintenance costs, so that you can stay focused on more strategic elements of running your business.

We hope that you'll join us at this upcoming summit, and, in the meantime, we invite you to take a look at how a few small businesses are using Google Apps today to help improve they way they work.



Posted by Shaluinn Fullove, Google Apps 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