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Google Apps Marketplace Open for Business Software

Bart Salisbury — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:09:52 -0600

Business users of Google Apps might find this intriguing--Google has opened up a Google App Marketplace, which will offer business-oriented third-party add-ons and supplements for Google’s online application suite.

The Marketplace contains apps from 50 companies, including eFax, Concur, Intuit, and Jobvite. The applications are tightly coupled with Google Apps, allowing seamless integration with Gmail, Calendar, and Docs. Vic Gundotra, a vice president of engineering at Google, says “The Applications Marketplace makes it easy for domain administrators to discover and install new software and have it integrated into Google Apps.”

Google charges developers $100 for placing an application in the Marketplace, and keeps 20 percent of the proceeds. Developers are free to name their own price for their applications. Google doesn’t expect to get rich(er) from the Marketplace, rather it's looking for the Marketplace to promote Google Apps and the software applications of its partners.

Google claims 25 million Google Apps users, in more than two million businesses. Google concedes, however, that only “hundreds of thousands” are paying customers.

Image Credit: Google

Google Lets You Upload Your Email Archives to Google Apps

Bart Salisbury — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 15:39:50 -0600

Email goes back a long way. And so too, perhaps, do your archives. If you happen to be one of those obsessive savers of email, then Google’s newly announced Email Uploader might just be of interest to you.

If you’ve got a lot of email history odds are it’s in a number of different formats. Putting it all into a single format, and in a single location, would be a boon, especially if you have the need to dredge back through them from time-to-time. The Email Uploader lets you “push your archives” up to your Google Apps email account, where they’ll float away on the cloud until you need them. And, as an added bonus, you’ll be able to access them anywhere you can get on the Internet.

The Email Uploader for Windows, however, is limited to moving your Outlook archives (2003 and greater) up to the cloud. The Mac client, on the other hand, will let you load archives from Apple Mail, Eudora, and Thunderbird. And, Google warns us, this will only work for a Google Apps email account--not for gmail.com or googlemail.com accounts.

Image Credit: gosheshe/Flickr

Google Releases Dashboard to Show You How Much Data You Have Stored In the Cloud

Ryan Whitwam — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:53:51 -0600

We all know Google has a lot of information about us. Now there’s a way to have all that data laid out before you in terrifying detail. Google Dashboard is the search giant’s new site aimed at increasing user control over personal information.

The Dashboard is available in your account settings page (or just go here), and kept behind an additional sign-in page. Once logged in, you’ll see all the Google services you use along with a summary of its use. There is currently support of more than 20 Google services including Gmail, Latitude, Google Voice, Google Docs, Gtalk, YouTube and Picasa.

Google offers quick access to the settings for each service if you’re not happy with the information being stored. So, feel better?

Google's video overview:

Google Wave Opens Federation Support to Allow Private Hosting

Jason Barry — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:11:25 -0500

The benefits of Google Wave are yet to be seen by the mass public. Google released an internal developer sandbox earlier this year and eventually rolled out a consumer preview to 100k users in September. Now, Google has announced its next step in the rollout process: the federation sandbox.

Federated distribution models mean that companies can build and host their own Google Wave servers and integrate them with other servers. The features and promises from Google about Wave’s capabilities mean that corporate collaboration will take on a whole new meaning. This next step, allowing corporations to control their own servers, means that Wave will more likely be adopted into business use.

The federation sandbox is strictly experimental for the current time. They have released about 40k lines of code for inspection and the Wave Federation Protocol and Conversation model. They have also demoed a terminal based Wave client.

You can check out the Wave Federation technical information at the Wave Federation Protocol site.

Los Angeles Tests the Gmail Waters with 30k City Employees

Jason Barry — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:49:51 -0500

Los Angeles City Council approved a deal which will roll out Gmail and Google Apps to about 30,000 employees throughout the city.

"The City of Los Angeles, the second largest city in the nation, made a world-class decision today to support a state-of-the-art e-mail system," said Tony Cardenas an L.A. City Councilman. Most of the concerns regarding the switch surrounded privacy, stability, and cost.

Google and the city of Los Angeles cut a deal that if there was a “significant data breach” in which employee information was stolen or viewed Google would pay damage compensation. There should be obvious cost savings in moving away from onsite infrastructure as well as stability improvements moving the services into the cloud.

Have you, or your company made the switch? What are your thoughts on the Google Apps system?

IBM Takes on Google Apps

Justin Kerr — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 16:19:48 -0500

Starting on October 5th IBM will begin selling a Web-based version of its popular Lotus Notes software suite, a move that puts it in direct competition with Google. The service which is currently being called “LotusLive iNotes” will include the traditional email, calendar, and contact management applications, but interestingly enough will not have any type of substitute for Google Docs.

IBM is apparently counting on the notion that most companies simply don’t want all of the applications that come with Google Apps, and would choose just the core communication applications if they had the choice. Just in case that alone isn’t enough to win over companies looking at cloud based options, they are also undercutting Google’s price per user by $14 a year, bringing the annual cost of a license down to a mere $36.

Google may have a two-year head start on IBM with over 1.75 million registered businesses, but researchers from Gartner claim this is only the tip of the iceberg. Apparently if current trends continue, almost 20 percent of companies will use some form of hosted email by 2012. It will be interesting to see if IBM’s sterling reputation with enterprises will be enough to beat out Google. Currently they don’t have any plans to offer free consumer level versions of the product, but that could certainly change over time.

Head on over to IBM's website to access the free 30 day trial.

Last Week's Google Slow Down Caused by High Traffic

Ryan Whitwam — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 20:01:05 -0500

Google says that it was high load on the internet giant’s Contacts server that caused the outages of last week. Users of Google Apps could not access their Google Contacts on September 24, from 10 AM to 11:30 AM EDT. Gmail contacts were also unavailable from 10 AM to 1 PM EDT. This also affected Google Voice, as it relies on Google Contacts.

According to the Google Apps team, the solution was to temporarily stop all requests to the Google Contacts servers. A banner was shown in Gmail that informed users of alternate ways of accessing their contacts, but this likely did not lessen withdrawal symptoms for those affected.

On September 25, Google explained that the increased server load was caused by a rare convergence of events. First, an error in a network data center caused additional load on the Contacts server. Also, it just so happened that the server was experiencing higher than average usage that day. Finally, an update to the Gmail platform unintentionally increased load on the Contacts server even more. If they keep this up, their uptime might fall below 99%... the horror.

Microsoft's Move to the Cloud Proves a Worthy Opponent for Google Apps

Paul Lilly — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 09:07:12 -0500

While most of the attention between Microsoft and Google focuses on the search engine scuffle (Bing vs Google), the two sides are also doing battle in the Cloud, where things are starting to heat up. That's because Microsoft on Thursday began opening the doors of its free web-based version of its Office Suite -- called Microsoft Office Web Applications -- to select Windows Live SkyDrive users.

Things will really get interesting when Microsoft officially launches its online version of Office in the first half of 2010, and until then, the software maker still has time to fine tune the experience, although it might not have much to do. Microsoft Office Web Applications already works on Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, while support for Chrome is being developed. But the biggest boon might be the ability to switch between the desktop and web versions

Between now and launch, Microsoft says it will be adding beta testers 1000 users at a time

Image Credit: Microsoft via TechCrunch