January 14th, 2009

Google cripples Google Apps Standard and pushes Premier

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 7:27 pm

Categories: Google Apps, Uncategorized

Tags: Google Inc., Google Apps, Reseller, Sales Strategy, Cloud Computing, Sales, Garett Rogers

Google is now giving anyone with the expertise, and desire, to resell Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE). This is a significant departure from Google’s past sales tactics, and it will definitely be interesting to see what kind of impact it has on their market share.

This new opportunity gives companies with the capacity to make significant amounts of recurring income by reselling GAPE. As a “reseller”, you are responsible for billing customers — that means you could technically charge whatever you want for the service. In turn, Google then bills you for the accounts you sell, at a reduced rate.

Google also provides training and support materials for resellers, which will hopefully give end users a better customer service experience — something that is severely lacking in both GAPE and Standard edition.

It’s interesting to note that Google has also put a stop to people creating “standard” accounts (which are free) that have more than 50 users. This is a strategic move that makes the free version of Google Apps usless for a huge number of companies. What do you think of the new reseller program, and the user limit on new Standard accounts?

December 20th, 2008

Google Apps adds shared contacts and a new contact manager

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 10:26 am

Categories: Gmail, Google Apps

Tags: Google Inc., Google Apps, Google Gmail, Contact, Cloud Computing, E-mail Providers, Internet, Garett Rogers

Google just made a couple of interesting updates to Google Apps — the ability for administrator to create shared contacts, and a stand-alone contact manager that can be used outside of Gmail.

Google Apps Premier Edition administrators can now create contacts which aren’t employees — these contacts are accessible by employees within the company through any Google Apps service that uses a contact list. In order to create these “shared contacts”, one must use the Shared Contacts API that was announced in conjunction with the feature.

In addition to this new API, administrators can enable a new stand-alone contact manager feature that gives users access to their contacts outside of Gmail. This feature is available to both Google Apps Premier Edition and Standard Edition — however, shared contacts are only available to premier accounts. That said, the contact manager isn’t anything particularily special — it appears to be simply the contact manager from Gmail, without the Gmail shell.

To install the new stand-alone contact manager for your Google Apps account:

1. Log into your control panel
2. Click “Add more services”
3. Enable the “Contacts” service

According to Google, a new “Contacts” link will start appearing for your users in the link bar at the top of each application, however after adding the contacts service, I have yet to see a Contacts link at the top of any service.

November 23rd, 2008

Google adds contact syncing for your Blackberry

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 1:04 pm

Categories: Gmail, Google, Google Apps, Google Calendar

Tags: Google Inc., Google Apps, RIM BlackBerry, Handhelds, Cloud Computing, Hardware, Garett Rogers

A piece of news that somehow didn’t get a lot of attention is that the Google Sync utility for Blackberry now does contacts too. This is a huge leap forward for Google Apps — users now have the ability to do true two-way syncing with their Blackberry for mail, calendar appointments, and contacts.

This means that now you don’t have to worry about maintaining two contact lists — something that you’ve never previously had to worry about with Microsoft Exchange. Each time Google adds a feature that strikes a chord with business users, they are scoring points that could one day turn the tables on Microsoft’s dominance in the enterprise.

On a related note, if your business still uses Microsoft Exchange, I’d be interested to know what is stopping you from switching to Google Apps. My biggest problem is the lack of technical support and the feeling of helplessness when something does go wrong, or some user accounts stop working. Let’s hear what you think in the TalkBack!

November 3rd, 2008

Google lets you measure how useful corporate documents are

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 10:09 am

Categories: Google Apps

Tags: Google Inc., Sales Strategy, Microsoft Word, Financial Planning, Cloud Computing, Sales, Microsoft Office, Office Suites, Software, Finance

If you subscribe to Google Apps, you can now attach a Google Analytics account to features like Google Docs and Google Sites. This gives administrators a grasp on usage details for these services.

Have you ever wondered if your staff is actually reading the policies you spend so much time creating? Perhaps they are so boring that 99% of people that open your document leave right away. This type of information will help organizations measure how useful documents are, and how people within your organization are using Google Sites (Google’s take on Microsoft SharePoint)

Want to see how many employees checked out your company’s new travel policy? Curious if your European sales team is taking advantage of the same resources as your US team? Because you can slice and dice usage information for content by hour, day, week, month, user location, browser type and more, answering these kinds of questions is easy.

These are the kinds of things that could make Google Docs more compelling to businesses — measuring this information would be a lot more difficult if there are copies of a Microsoft Word document floating around as opposed to a centrally managed, and collaborative document.

Are features like this important to you? Let’s hear your opinion in the TalkBack!

October 18th, 2008

Google Apps no threat to Microsoft? Maybe it is...

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 11:09 am

Categories: Google, Google Apps, Google Docs, Microsoft

Tags: Google Inc., Google Apps, Microsoft Corp., Cloud Computing, Garett Rogers

Steve Ballmer is convinced that Google Apps is nothing to worry about — according to Steve(24 minutes in), “you can’t even put a footnote in a document”. Perhaps what happened directly after he said that is precisely why Microsoft should be worried.

About 2 days after Steve downplayed any kind of competition that may be coming from Docs, Google added footnote support. The agility, and horsepower that Google has behind it is something that companies — even Microsoft — should be wary of, and definitely shouldn’t take lightly.

It’s true that Google Docs hasn’t yet challenged Microsoft as much as I’m sure they would like, but don’t count Google out just yet. This is how I see it playing out over the next few years:

1) Google perfects their entire Google Apps suite (which includes Google Docs, Gmail, Google Calendar, etc.) by getting it to a point where it could theoretically compete with Microsoft
2) They make everything available “offline”
3) The Enterprise Search Appliance will be no longer just for search — it’s will be an enterprise class server that you can deploy internally to host Google Apps

Once Google reaches step 3, there nothing stopping them. Companies will have the power of Google Apps which is by then able to compete with Microsoft products, and deployable within their company infrastructure. Users won’t have to worry about downtime (unless it’s actually their own problem), and all that data is completely out of Google’s hands and available without an internet connection.

Perhaps this is why all Google’s stuff is still in beta? Do you think Microsoft has anything to worry about with Google Apps?

August 13th, 2008

Google adds two new features to Gmail for Google Apps

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 5:39 pm

Categories: Gmail, Google Apps

Tags: Google Inc., Google Apps, Google Gmail, Gmail Feature, E-mail Providers, Cloud Computing, E-mail, Internet, Online Communications, Garett Rogers

Only a couple days after “the outage”, Google has responded with a couple new Gmail features that I’m sure some users will be happy about. Before we get to the new features, I should mention that Google has apologized for the inconvenience caused by a problem with the “contacts system” in Gmail.

We heard loud and clear today how much people care about their Gmail accounts. We followed all the emails to our support team and user group, we fielded phone calls from Google Apps customers and friends, and we saw the many Twitter posts. (We also heard from plenty of Googlers, who use Gmail for company email.) We never take for granted the commitment we’ve made to running an email service that you can count on.

The new Gmail features are small, but address two important issues — usability and security.

When users are used to other mail clients, there is one feature in Gmail that gets on your nerves — that is, you can’t select contacts while composing your message. You used to be expected to know someone’s name or email address, then begin typing it to get a list of users. Now, you can simply click on the “To:” to bring up your contact list, like in most other mail applications.

The second feature is important for security. Administrators can now enforce the usage of SSL, which can keep all traffic going to and coming from Gmail completely private, and basically invisible to anybody trying to sniff your packets.

What do you think of these new features?

May 22nd, 2008

Google Sites opens up to everyone

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 11:02 am

Categories: Google, Google Apps, Google Page Creator

Tags: Google Inc., Web Site, Web Site Development, Web Technology, Internet, Garett Rogers

I guess it was technically available to everyone already, but you needed to have a Google Apps account to use it. Now, as of today, anyone can simply create a “site” on the relatively new Google service.

A few months ago we launched Google Sites exclusively as part of Google Apps for companies and organizations that wanted to use the service on their own domains. Now we’ve made it easy for anyone to set up a website to share all types of information — team projects, company intranet’s, community groups, classrooms, clubs, family updates, you name it — in one place, for a few people, a group or the world. You can securely host your own website at http://sites.google.com/[your-website] and add as many pages as you like for free. — Official Google Blog

Now that this service publicly available, you may wonder what the difference between Google Sites and Google Pages is. Well, you can technically use both to create a public website, but Google Sites is geared more towards collaborative, private web portals than a traditional website.

[image from Google]

The reason Google Pages is better suited for external websites (like for instance a personal webpage) is because it can be hooked up to your own domain, and overall, you have better control over its appearance.

Google Sites, on the other hand, gives you much more power as far as collaboration goes, but you have to use a special website address, and many things like the search bar at the top of every page are not optional. A “Google Site” can be thought of as more of a wiki where people you give access have the ability to easily update the content.

[Thanks Josh]

May 8th, 2008

Google offers enterprise web security

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 9:53 am

Categories: Google, Google Apps

Tags: Google Inc., Postini Corp., Web, Web Security, Productivity, VPNs, Blogging, Spyware, Adware & Malware, Network Security, Networking

Postini, a company acquired by Google, is now offering enterprise web security. All traffic is routed through Google, and they take care of making sure traffic meets your corporate policies. The interesting part of all this though is how it secures computers, even when they aren’t in the office.

According to the Google Enterprise blog, this new system forces users using corporate computers to use the Postini web filtering tool — without requiring a VPN connection.

Protecting off-network users used to require them to connect via a VPN when they were out of the office — often with mixed results. With this new feature, all off-network users’ web traffic is automatically directed to scanning infrastructure to enforce your policies and protect their computers, requiring no action on the part of individuals. It’s easy to deploy and users can’t tamper with it, ensuring your security and appropriate use policies are always in place. — Google Enterprise Blog

Since users cannot tamper with it, this service becomes very desirable for network administrators who are constantly fighting against malware and spyware that creeps onto systems while connected to networks outside the company. There is no reference to the cost of the service on the website, but if the price is right, this could be big.

[Thanks Nate!]

May 1st, 2008

You can now use Google Apps on your iPhone

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 10:58 pm

Categories: Google, Google Apps, Google Mobile

Tags: Apple iPhone, Google Inc., Google Apps, Advertising & Promotion, Digital Music, Digital Media, Marketing, Personal Technology, Consumer Electronics, Garett Rogers

Google just released a new interface for the iPhone/iPod Touch that lets Google Apps users easily access everything they need in an integrated environment. This new interface lets you use applications like Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and other services that aren’t associated with Google Apps like Google Reader, Google Notebook, Google News and Blogger.

If you have Google Apps for your domain, you can bookmark or set http://www.google.com/m/a/your-domain.com as your default page for quicker access to the information you find the most useful. This specific functionality is new, but the interface you will be using is actually a few months old. With regards to the interface, Google also announced today that it is now available in several languages. Since Google knows that mobile internet is going to be a big thing in the future, they have been increasing the amount of time and resources assigned to work on mobile related products.

The mobile interface for Google (be it using Apps or not) works great. I find that I use my iPod Touch to keep on top of daily routine tasks — then I use my laptop to do the heavy lifting. The majority of my time online is research, and who needs to use a real computer for that when the iPod/iPhone alternative is quicker, and is far more mobile?

April 13th, 2008

Google announces SalesForce integration with Google Apps

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 9:44 pm

Categories: Google, Google Apps

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Google Inc., Google Apps, Integration, Sales Force Management, Sales Strategy, Sales, Garett Rogers

Google Apps is quickly becoming a pain in Microsoft’s side. Today, they are rolling out tight integration inside Salesforce with the Google Apps suite. The announcement was made on their “what’s new” page for Google Apps, but the related page on SalesForce.com doesn’t appear to be live yet.

The offering will compete with Microsoft’s customer relationship management software, which is integrated with the its Office suite. The alliance could help Google, whose productivity programs are used largely by individuals, make inroads into businesses, where it is seeking to challenge Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar Office franchise. — NY Times

According to Google, here is what you can expect with this latest announcement:

• Automatically add Gmail communications to Salesforce for a record of customer interactions
• Chat with colleagues right from Salesforce—during sales or customer services calls
• Associate Google Docs to your sales data and colloborate with colleagues in real-time
• View your Salesforce meetings, marketing campaigns, and other business events inside Google Calendar
• Display sales and marketing dashboard components from Salesforce on your Google Start page

[image from Google]