Tips and tricks for deploying Google Apps

Has your company, school or organization decided to "go Google" — but not yet fully "gone?" Perhaps you'd like more guidance on the technical, marketing or training details? Or maybe you could use some resources to help you deploy? Making the decision to go Google can be the easiest part, but we realize that it sometimes takes a little boost to finish the process, which is where we come in.

Our Google Apps Deployment team has assisted hundreds of organizations — large and small — make the switch to Google Apps. To ensure that your implementation is a success, we've developed step-by-step tools to guide you through the process, and best practices to make your transition as smooth and easy as possible. Here are some of the resources you can explore when going Google:

Sign up for a Deployment Training Webinar. In this live session, a deployment specialist will walk you through the deployment planning steps and use cases.

Take advantage of our deployment guides, which include creative examples and templates, to help with your technical and marketing rollout:

• For enterprises
• For small/medium businesses
• For schools

Recently, we also launched two learning sites to jump start your transition to Google Apps: the customizable Google Enterprise Launch Site for large enterprises and the Apps Learning Center for small businesses. You can find out more about these Google site templates in the Enterprise Deployment Site.

To find answers to your technical questions about Google Apps, visit the Administrator Help Center. We also provide overviews and videos for integration and migration tools, including Microsoft Outlook Sync, Google Blackberry Enterprise Server Connector and Lotus Notes Migration.

We hope these resources help with your move to Google Apps, and we can't wait to welcome you to the Google Apps family.

Posted by Cindy Chin, Google Apps Deployment Specialist

Cloud apps, big city: LA goes Google

This fall we've seen lots of government agencies decide to make the switch to cloud computing, joining the many businesses already using Google Apps for email and collaboration at work. Today we'd like to officially welcome another customer to the mix: the City of Los Angeles. Starting today, Los Angeles will be equipping 34,000 city employees with Google Apps for email and collaboration in the cloud.

The story of Los Angeles moving to Google Apps started early this year, when the city's Chief Technology Officer, Randi Levin, and her team at the Information Technology Agency (ITA) looked to replace their aging, on-premise system with more secure, productivity-focused technology. After calling for proposals and carefully evaluating over 14 different ones, Randi and the ITA decided to revamp the city government's email technology by adopting Google Apps. Los Angeles' going Google will help the city on a number of fronts. The cloud computing system will improve the security and reliability of city email, transitioning from servers in the City Hall basement to hosted, secure data centers. Employees will also have a new avenue for collaboration with Google Apps in the cloud: sharing docs, sites and videos and editing them together in realtime as they work on making the city run more smoothly and efficiently and thus better serving Angelenos city-wide. Furthermore, Randi and her team realized that moving to Apps would mean less taxpayer money spent on IT — valuable budget that can be rededicated to other city efforts over the next few years.

Check out this video to hear more from Randi on Los Angeles and Apps.



Los Angeles is the second-largest city in the U.S., and the latest in a string of cities, like Washington D.C. and Orlando, FL, to go Google. With this switch to the cloud, Los Angeles joins the group of leaders on the innovation front — not only with regard to budget but technology as well. Bringing in cloud applications will make city work more efficient, which is great for Los Angeles residents too. Read more from Randi on the Google Enterprise blog, and stay tuned to follow Los Angeles' Google Apps story, and to learn about other governments moving to the cloud.

Posted by Matt Glotzbach, Product Management Director, Google Enterprise

Join this group: Google Groups joins Google Apps

Blogs, wikis, social networks, YouTube and Twitter are changing how many of us connect with others. Yet within most businesses, especially large corporations, the software hasn't evolved much over the last decade. While traditional business technologies give companies the necessary security and controls, they do so at the expense of rapid innovation. Businesses shouldn't have to make this compromise.

This is one reason why customers are so enthusiastic about Google Apps. It offers enterprise-grade security and control while letting businesses instantly tap into a swift stream of innovation, based on services tested by hundreds of millions of people around the world. We've launched over 100 improvements to Google Apps in the last year, and the pace of innovation continues to increase.

Today, we're happy to announce the launch of Google Groups to Google Apps Premier and Education Edition users. Google Groups is one of our most widely used applications, enabling everyone from the local hiking club to the family next door to create mailing lists and discussion forums. Now employees within a company can create groups for their departments, their teams or their projects. Employees can use these groups as mailing lists, but they can also share documents, spreadsheets, presentations, calendars, videos and sites with groups, instead of many individual recipients. They can choose to receive communications directly to their email inbox, in a digest format, or in the Groups forum view, and can access all the information in the groups archive, without the intervention of an IT administrator.



Google Groups is a boon for IT administrators too. After enabling the new service from the administrative control panel (add "user-managed groups"), users can start managing their own groups without burdening administrators for support. Administrators can still set group policies and manage other group settings. If you want to learn more, check out our post on the Enterprise Blog.

Google Groups is just one of the many consumer features that we've tailored for the enterprise since we launched Google Apps for businesses nearly three years ago, and we're looking forward to bringing more innovation to our customers in the months and years ahead.

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps

Templates now available in Google Sites

I'm pleased to announce we just added a stocked gallery of site templates in Google Sites. Anyone can browse the public template gallery, and businesses using Google Apps each have a private area where employees can share site templates with coworkers.

The rate that businesses are adopting Google Sites has surpassed our expectations, and templates will make Sites even more useful by dramatically reducing the time it takes to set up collaborative workspaces like employee intranets, project tracking sites, team sites and employee profile pages. Templates let you quickly start a new site with pre-built content, embedded gadgets, page layouts, navigation links, theming and more.


You can find more about what's new and read stories from customers about why they switched to Google Sites from on-premises collaboration solutions on the Google Enterprise Blog.

And because many of you are managing personal projects with Google Sites, we also added templates for family sites, weddings, neighborhood associations, clubs, charitable causes and more to the public gallery. Check out the Google Docs Blog for other examples and details, and if you have a personal site that others could use as a template, please submit your work to the public gallery!


Posted by Scott Johnston, Product Manager

Gone Google at EDUCAUSE 2009

Last week the Google Apps for Education team headed to Denver for EDUCAUSE 2009 where the higher education community meets annually. It was at this conference three years ago that we first unveiled Google Apps for Education. Since then, we've witnessed staggering growth in the world of cloud computing in education. Lots has happened over the past year especially: more than 100 new features have rolled out in Google Apps, we've engaged well over six million students and faculty (a 400% increase since this time last year), launched free Google Message Security for K-12 schools and have integrated with other learning services such as Blackboard and Moodle.

These developments are just the beginning. According to the newly-released 2009 Campus Computing survey statistics, 44% of colleges and universities have converted to a hosted student email solution, while another 37% are currently evaluating the move. Of those that have migrated, over half — 56% precisely* — are going Google.

To toast the students and faculty that are shaping this movement, we hosted our customers and EDUCAUSE conference attendees at the Denver Public Library. Check out the photos to see what these schools have to say:



We also did something different this year and invited some student ambassadors from schools using Google Apps to come to Denver and share how using Apps on campus helps make their lives easier. Daniel Miller who works at University of Washington's Ethnic Cultural Center uses Calendar to let students on campus know about his organization's events. Sociology major Robin Brown uses forms in Docs to collect data for her class surveys at Notre Dame. Taylor Bell at Boise State relies on Gmail's filters and gadgets to seamlessly access to his Calendar, Docs, Tasks and Chat. After losing his journal, Vaughn Parker at Temple University created a Calendar to keep track of his assignments and share them with his classmates and professors. (There are many more of these student stories, too).

Every year, more schools move to Google Apps so they can spend their time focusing on students, not servers; on higher learning, not higher costs. If you're a school, you can go Google, too. Check out www.google.com/appsatschool to learn more.

*Update on 11/20: Among 4-year universities and colleges, the number is slightly higher, with 59% choosing Google Apps.

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Product Marketing Manager

Self-improving results now in the Google Search Appliance

The Google Search Appliance (GSA) is getting an update today, with a bunch of new features aimed at making enterprise search easier for everyone inside a company. One of our favorites, the Self-learning Scorer, learns from employees' searches to tune itself and improve over time. If employees repeatedly choose, say, the fourth result for a given query the GSA will learn that's probably the most relevant one and bring it up to the top the next time the query is searched for. Over time, the GSA auto-tunes, serving up better and better internal search results without any extra administrative work. You can read more about the Self-learning Scorer and check out the GSA's other new features in our post on the Google Enterprise Blog.

Posted by Sibabrata Ray and Liviu Panait, Engineers, Google Enterprise Search team

"Going Google" with millions of businesses around the world

Each day, thousands of companies choose to "go Google" — that is, switch to Google Apps. Over two million business and 20 million users in over 100 countries and more than 40 languages have adopted Apps for their workplace, and we're happy to welcome companies around the world such as Konica Minolta, Rentokil Initial and TOTO that have just decided to go Google. These companies no longer have to deal with the hassles of managing email servers or rolling out software updates, and their employees now enjoy the convenience of shared documents and calendars, Gmail and more.

Since we first asked for your "gone Google" stories in August, we've seen thousands of tweets and hundreds of comments explaining how and why your company decided to go Google with Apps, as well as with other Google enterprise products such as Google Postini Services and the Google Search Appliance. Jeffrey D. from Ottawa, Canada told us that with Apps, he "was able to set up a new business in minutes with email, calendar, docs, and sync with [his] BlackBerry." @happymacs from San Diego, CA tweeted how they liked the ability to "search every single email received in the past 2.5 years in under 2 seconds"; while @Appfrica highlighted the sobering fact that the cost of an alternative software solution would employ a person in Uganda for a month.

Today, we're excited to support this global momentum with the expansion of the "Gone Google" initiative to additional countries including the U.K., France, Canada, Japan, Australia and Singapore. We hope our messages — in train stations such as Paddington, La Défense and Shinagawa, and at airports in Singapore, Toronto, Dallas and beyond — help companies, schools and organizations learn all about the benefits of going Google with our enterprise products. Here's a sneak peek at what you can expect to see both here in the U.S. and abroad:



If you've already gone Google, you can share your company's Gone Google story with us, or use some of our tools to help spread the word about switching to Google Apps. We hope you'll be part of the story.

Posted by Tom Oliveri and Vivian Leung, Google Enterprise Team

Making intranets more like the Internet with enterprise search

Employees at big companies often have mountains of information available to do their jobs — information that lives (and hides!) in various areas within the organization. The information can lie buried deep within an enterprise content management system or a company intranet. Unlike the Internet, however, this info isn't necessarily well organized — there isn't always a searchable index to sift through and get good results. Lots of companies want to make searching their intranet more like searching the Internet — bringing Google.com-type search to their internal information stores.

Mercer, the global professional services company, has been dealing with this issue for a while. Their intranet, Mercer Link, has more than 350,000 webpages, and over 1.5 million docs in a content management system— lots of information for employees to search through as they work on projects for clients. They're now using the Google Search Appliance to give employees a more searchable intranet experience, so the docs and pages that were hidden or hard to find are now easier to track down fast. Mercer's enterprise search architect Haroon Suleman, along with AMR Research's Jim Murphy, will be sharing the company's search story in a special webinar aimed at enterprises, "Search: A Vital Element to a Content Strategy," this Thursday, October 8 at 11 a.m. PDT. You can register and learn more about the conversation here — hope you can join.

Posted by Vijay Koduri, Google Enterprise Search team

Getting connected Side-by-Side with enterprise search

People use search to find what they need, and the same holds true in the business world. We want searching your company intranet to be comparable to searching on Google.com, and the Google Search Appliance (GSA) to have the most relevant, high quality results possible. That's why today we're announcing two new tools for Google Enterprise Search: Side-by-Side search comparison and new connectors for the GSA, both in Enterprise Labs. Enterprise Labs is where you can find the latest-and-greatest tips and tools for better enterprise searching — tools like Side-by-Side.

Side-by-Side lets employees test and rate results from two different search queries on the same body of data, to see which gives better results. In the example below, the admin has set up two different GSA configurations to search [google].


Employees can then vote on their preferred results, by choosing the Policy A or B buttons, and the administrator can then use that information to choose and set up the right search solution for the business. Product manager (and Enterprise Labs guru) Cyrus Mistry explains more:



In the enterprise, search engines crawl more than just the Internet — they're also searching across all sorts of data stores and offline content. Today we're also announcing GSA connector updates to the major content management systems, as well as a cool new GSA connector for Salesforce data, so the GSA can search and provide employees access to the internal Salesforce info they need in search results. Connectors integrate data from all different kinds of file and content systems (like SharePoint, FileNet, Documentum) so an employee searching their company intranet can see a single, unified search results page, even if the results are drawn from a wide variety of company data systems.

Enterprise search is about the fundamentals: organizing information so that people can do their jobs more easily. You can read more about today's launches on the Google Enterprise Blog, and download Side-by-Side and other search tools in Google Enterprise Labs.

Posted by Michael Parker and Salmaan Rashid, Engineering team

"Going Google" with Google Apps

Every morning, millions of people wake up to a very refreshing experience at work. They don't see "mailbox is full" errors in their email. They don't worry about backing up their data. They can get to any file they need from any computer, anywhere with Internet access and a browser. They can all access and edit the same documents and spreadsheets at the same time as their colleagues. They use Gmail and Google Calendar at work as fluidly and easily as they use their personal Gmail accounts. They video, voice and text chat with their peers globally as naturally as they send email.

The IT people at these companies and organizations don't waste time or money buying, installing or managing email servers. They focus on the smart, innovative stuff they want to work on, because they never have to bother with expensive and painful software upgrades, hardware compatibility issues or managing data centers. They have left many IT frustrations and costs behind and moved on to something better.

Here at Google, we have a term for the moment a company realizes there's a better way and goes for it: "going Google." Over 1.75 million businesses, schools and organizations have gone Google — including Motorola, University of Notre Dame, the Mercy Corps and many more — and each day, 3,000 more organizations join them. We want every organization to understand the benefits of going Google, so today we're telling the story in a new way. We're kicking off a series of outdoor billboards in four cities — Boston, Chicago, New York and San Francisco — that will change every weekday for the next four weeks. The billboards tell the story of an anonymous IT manager who gets so fed up with the typical IT status quo that his company eventually — you guessed it — goes Google. Here's a preview:



Visit www.google.com/appsatwork to get more information about the benefits of going Google. Already gone Google? Tweet your story and check out our tools to help spread the word.

Posted by Andy Berndt, Managing Director, Google Creative Lab

Google Apps is out of beta (yes, really)

We're often asked why so many Google applications seem to be perpetually in beta. For example, Gmail has worn the beta tag more than five years. We realize this situation puzzles some people, particularly those who subscribe to the traditional definition of "beta" software as not being yet ready for prime time.

Ever since we launched the Google Apps suite for businesses two years ago, it's had a service level agreement, 24/7 support, and has met or exceeded all the other standards of non-beta software. More than 1.75 million companies around the world run their business on Google Apps, including Google. We've come to appreciate that the beta tag just doesn't fit for large enterprises that aren't keen to run their business on software that sounds like it's still in the trial phase. So we've focused our efforts on reaching our high bar for taking products out of beta, and all the applications in the Apps suite have now met that mark.

Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk — both enterprise and consumer versions — are now out of beta. "Beta" will be removed from the product logos today, but we'll continue to innovate and improve upon the applications whether or not there's a small "beta" beneath the logo. Indeed, today we're also announcing some other Google Apps features that we think will appeal to large enterprises: mail delegation, mail retention and ongoing enhancements to Apps reliability.

We have much more in store, and IT managers can read more about how to make the switch to Apps in our Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes resource centers. One more thing — for those who still like the look of "beta", we've made it easy to re-enable the beta label for Gmail from the Labs tab under Settings.


Posted by Matthew Glotzbach, Director, Product Management, Google Enterprise

What we've learned about spam

Blended threats. Payload viruses. Spam. If you're one of the more than 15 million people whose work email is protected by Postini's email security products, we hope you don't spend a lot of time thinking about these things. And if we're doing our job right, they certainly shouldn't be showing up in your inboxes. But we process more than 3 billion business emails per day for our customers, culling the spam, viruses, and other threats out, so we do think about this stuff. A lot.

On occasion, we like to share some of what we've learned, so that those of you who are interested can see what spammers are up to. If you're one of those people, head over to our Enterprise Blog for an update on spam trends over the past few months.

Posted by Ellen Leanse, Google Enterprise team

The state of cloud computing

Earlier today at the Clift Hotel in San Francisco, we convened a group of journalists, partners and customers for a discussion on Google Apps in the enterprise. We're pleased to report that the "state of the cloud" is strong, and we've taken a number of steps to make it stronger.

At the event we discussed the growth of our business, introduced some new customers, and announced a feature that makes switching to Apps even easier. The Clift was a particularly appropriate venue because it's a member of the Morgans Hotel Group, which is deploying Google Apps to its 1,750 employees. JohnsonDiversey, a global provider of commercial cleaning and hygiene products and solutions, has also gone Google. Choosing Apps helped JohnsonDiversey migrate its 12,000 employees to one communications platform while lowering its IT costs and furthering its commitment to sustainability through the elimination of a number of energy-intensive email servers.

Of course, when big companies like Morgans move all their employees from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps, there are often a few folks who aren't ready to give up Microsoft Outlook right away. To help them make the transition, today we also introduced Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook to our Premier and Education edition customers. It lets Outlook work easily with Apps and — like offline Gmail and the Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry® Enterprise Server — is another example of how we're making it dead simple to switch to Google Apps.

To read more about Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook and hear why 1.75 million companies are now running their business on Google Apps, check out the Google Enterprise Blog.

Posted by Matthew Glotzbach, Product Management Director, Enterprise team

Search billions of documents with the Google Search Appliance 6.0

It's hard to conceptualize the number 1,000,000,000. One billion sheets of paper could circle the earth at the equator well over five times. Counting to one billion would take about 30 years of your life, even if you never stop to sleep. And if you had to find a single piece of information by sorting through a billion documents it would take you, on average, about 2000 years. Businesses and large organizations have tons of documents and other types of data — some even have a billion documents that need searching, and it's unlikely that employees have 2000 years to dedicate to the hunt.

Figuring out how to navigate the complex content systems of large organizations is a tough problem, one we've dedicated years to solving. Today we're releasing the newest version of our solution, the Google Search Appliance 6.0 (GSA), which has the capacity to search billions of documents. So whether you own a small business with a few thousand docs or belong to a huge organization with a billion, the GSA can search them all. Even if the content you need lives in a bunch of different departments or locations, in all kinds of formats, languages and repositories, the GSA makes searching within your organization as simple as searching on Google.com. It also has helpful features like user-added results and query suggestions, so over time your coworkers' input improves search results. The GSA 6.0 also is full of customization features, as well as flexible security policies so that each enterprise or large organizations can tweak the settings to suit its needs. We believe that setting your enterprise up with the GSA can save you tons of employee hours spent looking for data — letting you focus on the actual work to be done.

We demonstrated the infrastructure you'd actually need to search a billion docs — check it out in the video below. To learn more about the GSA 6.0 or our search solutions for businesses, check out the Google Enterprise Blog or our website.




Posted by Cyrus Mistry, Product Manager

30,000 new Google Apps business users at Valeo

Since Gmail launched in 2004 with, what was at the time, an unprecedented 1GB of storage per person, we've been focused on continuously improving the email experience with things like fast search to find messages quickly, mobile support, offline access and integrated IM, and voice and video chat. Gmail was really the beginning of how we're rethinking personal and group productivity, and over the last couple of years, business adoption has accelerated rapidly as the hosted suite has emerged as a powerful, affordable successor to on-premises business technology.

Today, more than a million businesses have moved beyond traditional software and hardware to cloud computing – where data and applications live online – and they're using the Google Apps suite not just for Gmail, but also for shared calendaring, collaborating on files without attachments, private video sharing and quickly deployable internal and external sites. IT managers are refocusing the money and time saved towards core projects that help their individual businesses become more competitive.

Today we're thrilled to share news about another exciting partnership: Valeo is deploying Google Apps to the company's entire office-based workforce.

This marks a significant moment for Google Apps, because Valeo has 30,000 Internet-connected employees, making this one of the largest enterprise deployments of Google Apps to date. Valeo is moving to the cloud with the support of Capgemini, one of the world's most highly regarded technology advisory firms. This deployment across Valeo's distributed workforce of 192 business entities in 27 countries and five continents demonstrates the vast scalability of Google Apps. Whether your company has just five employees in a single room, or tens of thousands of people scattered around the globe, Google Apps can easily provide powerful messaging and collaboration tools.

If you help make technology decisions where you work, we invite you to learn about Google Apps and join the million businesses that have already become more productive by rethinking their approach to technology.

Posted by Laurent Guiraud, Google Enterprise

Business in the cloud

There's a lot of interest in understanding cloud computing these days, so we thought we'd share some thoughts. If you're interested in hearing what we talk about when we talk about the role of cloud computing in business, check out our post on the Google Enterprise Blog.

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps

GSA contest results are in

Back in February we announced a contest to discover how "findable" the Google Search Appliance (GSA) is in offices across the U.S. The GSA gives businesses of all shapes and sizes the power of universal search. In order to discover exactly how the GSA is helping businesses, we asked our customers to submit photos of their shiny yellow box with an explanation of how enterprise search has made their job easier.

The results are in and we have chosen two grand prize winners who will attend an all-expenses paid trip to the Google IO Conference in May. Check out one of the winning photos below from WellStar Health Systems, one of the largest not-for-profit health care systems in the Southeast, based in the Atlanta area. You can read their story and more on the Enterprise Blog.

Keeping "operations" running smoothly

Posted by Dave Kim, Associate Product Marketing Manager

The search is on for the Google Search Appliance

The Google Search Appliance (aka the GSA) provides universal search for businesses of all sizes. This handy yellow box pulls together documents, images, and other files from web servers, intranets, business applications, and more, making all of this accessible from one search box. Now we're holding a contest to see how "findable" the GSA is in offices from coast to coast in the U.S.

If the GSA has helped your business, we want to hear your story and see your pics with the shiny yellow box. (Don't worry, your photo doesn't have to be star-studded to win.) Two grand-prize winners will receive an all-expense paid trip to the Google IO conference.

The contest deadline is March 31, 2009 and the winners will be announced on April 17. For more information and to find out how to enter, check out the Enterprise Blog.


Posted by David Kim, Associate Product Marketing Manager, and avid appliance photographer

Helping healthcare providers become more efficient

Healthcare professionals have always focused on reducing costs while still increasing the quality of the care they provide to patients — and this kind of efficiency becomes even more important in challenging economic times.

Fortunately, healthcare providers can turn to the web for a growing number of resources that help them achieve these goals. With our health initiatives and solutions for businesses of all kinds, Google is committed to helping bring exactly these kinds of productivity gains and cost reductions to healthcare providers. We're also committed to harnessing the power of the web to help people everywhere effectively manage their healthcare records and information in a private, secure online setting.

To learn about our latest innovations in this area, tune in to our free webinar scheduled for Wednesday, December 10, at 10:00 am PT.

The session will include a current look at Google Health, which empowers patients to securely organize and manage their health information online. For the full lineup of topics that will be covered, check out our post on the Enterprise blog.

We hope to see you there.

Posted by Sundar Raghavan, Google Enterprise Team

Holiday templates to keep you organized

The holidays are upon us, and there's much to do: Gifts to be wrapped, lights to be strung, candles to be lit, and a long list of tasks at the home and the office. A little creativity can come in handy at this time of year. You can save time and money with the Google Docs template gallery for documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Whether you're a small business owner or the chief holiday organizer, the gallery includes a few special templates designed to help you spread a little holiday cheer. Here are a few tips to help you get everything done on time:

1. Email friends, colleagues or customers this survey form to update your mailing list...


2. ...and then send them a holiday postcard.


3. Use fun mailing labels to save time when sending packages...


4. ...and these festive gift tags to personalize gifts.


5. If there's no time for snail mail, email a video card to send friends and colleagues warm wishes or to thank customers for their business.


It's easy to get started with any of these tips. In Google Docs, just click File -> New -> From Template to be taken to the main template gallery (it's worth a look!). Click the "Holiday" category to see just the holiday templates, or you can tab through to filter results by product. Pick the design you like and edit it for your needs. And you can always find help at the Google Docs Help Center.

We have more holiday ideas on our Enterprise Blog, along with other hints and tips to keep your workplace humming all through the year.

We hope you enjoy, and season's greetings!

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps Elf