Posted by Dennis Troper, Product Management Director, Google+ Pages

Just over a week ago we opened the doors of Google+ to Google Apps users, and today we’re welcoming the millions of organizations they’re a part of. Now your business, school or nonprofit can create its own corner on Google+ with Google+ Pages.

A Google+ page is your organization’s identity on Google+. Your business, school or nonprofit can post updates and news, send tailored messages to specific groups of people, and engage in conversations with customers and followers.



Circles
Circles allow you to group followers of your page into smaller audiences. This lets you share specific messages with specific groups. For example, you could create a circle containing your business’s loyalty program members or your university’s alumni so you can reach the right people with the right message.

Hangouts
Sometimes you might want to connect with your fans face-to-face. For example, if you run a bookstore, you may want to invite an author to talk about her latest novel, or a college athletic department could host a roundtable connecting athletes with fans. Hangouts make this easy, by letting you have high-quality multi-person video chats, with a single click. You can use Hangouts to get customer feedback, help solve problems or simply get to know people better, all in real time.

Google+ Badge
To help customers find your page and follow you, we have two buttons you can add to your website by visiting our Google+ badge configuration tool:

• The Google+ icon is a small icon that directly links to your page.
• In the coming days, we’re introducing the Google+ badge, which lets people add your page to their circles, without leaving your site.

We wanted to help you get your business, school or nonprofit on Google+ as soon as possible, so we’re opening the field trial for Google+ Pages to everyone today. Once you’ve enabled Google+ for your organization and created a personal profile, you can get started creating a Google+ page for your organization at plus.google.com/pages/create.

Posted by Ronald Ho, Product Manager

Google Apps fans, today we’re ready to add you to our circles. Google+ makes sharing on the web more like sharing in the real world, and now Google+ is available to people who use Google Apps at college, at work or at home.

Starting now you can manually turn on Google+ for your organization. Once Google+ is turned on, your users will just need to sign up at google.com/+ to get started. For customers who use Google Apps for Business or the free version of Google Apps and who have chosen to automatically enable new services, Google+ will automatically become available to all of your users over the next several days.*

Google Apps users will have access to the same set of features that are available to every Google+ user, and more. In addition to sharing publicly or with your circles, you’ll also have the option to share with everyone in your organization, even if you haven’t added all of those people to a circle.



Google+ at home, at work and at college
You use Google Apps in lots of different ways, and we expect the same for Google+. Apps users from artists to doctors to parents to students to teachers have told us that they are ready to join the 40 million people already sharing on Google+.

Circles is a great way to share relevant content with the right people. With Circles, your photography crew doesn’t have to get an update about your morning workout, your triathlon team doesn’t have to see all your thoughts on the latest camera gear, and your project teams can be kept separate from all of this.



Hangouts with extras, which combines multi-person video chat with screen sharing and collaboration in Google Docs, lets you work together on projects even when your team can't be in the same room. Whether you’re out of town, working on a project with a distributed group, or just don’t feel like walking to the next building for your meeting, Hangouts with extras can give your team the productivity boost it needs.



Google+ coming to a campus near you
Many students and teachers have sent us their ideas about how they can use Google+ to teach, learn, work, and play. These are a few Google Apps for Education universities from around the world that are bringing Google+ to their campuses today:

• Abilene Christian University
• American University in Cairo (Egypt)
• Arizona State University
• AT Still University
• Boise State University
• Central Piedmont Community College
• Dublin City University (Ireland)
• ESSEC Business School (France)
• Leeds Metropolitan University (United Kingdom)
• Loughborough University (United Kingdom)
• Saint Louis University
• Strathmore University (Kenya)
• Universidad Panamericana (Mexico)
• University of Ferrara (Italy)
• University of Maryland Baltimore County
• University of Minnesota
• University of Notre Dame
• University of Pavia (Italy)
• University of Portsmouth (United Kingdom)
• University of Washington
• Vanderbilt University
• Wake Forest University

Just the beginning
For those of you who’ve already started using Google+ with a personal Google Account and would prefer to use your Google Apps account, we’re building a migration tool to help you move over. With this tool, you won’t have to rebuild your circles, and people who’ve already added you to their circles will automatically be connected to your new profile. We expect this migration option to be ready in a few weeks, so if you’d like, you can go ahead and get started with your Apps account today and merge your connections once the tool is available.

It took more technical work than we expected to bring Google+ to Google Apps, and we thank you for your patience. This integration is just the beginning. We’ll continue to add features and improve the way that Google+ works with Google Apps, and we encourage you to share your ideas.


* Google+ requires Picasa Web Albums for photo sharing and Google Talk for chat, so if these services are not enabled then Google+ will not automatically become available, even if your domain has chosen to automatically enable new services. The option to automatically enable new services is controlled in the Domain settings tab of the administrator control panel. More information about using Google+ with Google Apps is available in the Help Center.


Update: For Google Apps for Education customers, we're starting with higher ed institutions and are looking into making Google+ available to K-12s at some point in the future.


Update 2: The Circles migration tool referenced in this post is now live at google.com/takeout. You can learn more about how to use the tool in the Help Center.

Editor’s note: Last year we launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.



Welcome to Google Groups
Google Apps for Business and Education customers have traditionally had access to Google Groups for Business, which has allowed the creation of groups and mailing lists within the organization. Today we’re expanding the discussion by making the general Google Groups service, which allows users to participate in public discussions with others outside the organization, available with Google Apps.

Google Groups allows the creation of groups and mailing lists with any group of people from all across the web and includes Usenet archives and archives of public groups. For example, if you’re writing a new mobile app and want to follow the Android Developers forum or are interested in the latest news about Chrome OS in the Chrome notebook pilot forum you can use Google Groups to get involved in the discussion. There are millions of public groups available, so no matter your field or focus, you’re likely to find relevant discussions that you can follow and join using Google Groups. You can also set up your own public discussion community using Google Groups

Google Apps for Business and Education customers will continue to have access to Google Groups for Business, which is part of the core Google Apps suite. Google Groups is a separate service, and will be available to users of the free version of Google Apps as well as Google Apps for Business and Education. Administrators can turn on both services, or only the one that makes most sense for their use case, giving more control over how users participate in groups inside and outside of the organization.

Learn more and get started
Google Groups can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

For more information please take a look at our Help Center.

Posted by Chandrashekar Raghavan, Product Manager, Google Groups

Note: Google Groups may not be available in all areas.

Editor’s note: Last year we launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.



Welcome to User Managed Storage
As more and more people discover the power and flexibility of creating and collaborating using nothing but the web, an increasing volume of user content is stored in the cloud. As part of our effort to support our users’ move into the cloud, we’re pleased to announce that over the next couple of days we will be making User Managed Storage available to Google Apps customers.

User Managed Storage is a service that has allowed users to purchase more storage space when they fill the allotted quota on their personal Google Accounts. Over the next couple of days, we will be rolling this service out for users of Google Apps accounts as well, allowing the purchase of extra storage for Google Docs, Picasa Web Albums, and photos from Blogger. Any of these products that is over its storage quota can use the extra storage on a first-come, first-served basis. Users that upload lots of files to Google Docs, sync their Office documents to the cloud using Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office, or store and share pictures using Picasa or Blogger can now expand the storage space available for these files.

Pricing for this service is the same as for personal Google Accounts:

Plan	Price
20 GB	$5 USD per year
80 GB	$20 USD per year
200 GB	$50 USD per year
400 GB	$100 USD per year
1 TB	$256 USD per year
2 TB	$512 USD per year
4 TB	$1,024 USD per year
8 TB	$2,048 USD per year
16 TB	$4,096 USD per year

The User Managed Storage service is enabled or disabled by the domain administrator, and the end user purchases additional storage using his or her Google Checkout account. Additional storage added using User Managed Storage cannot be pooled or transferred to another Google Apps user account and cannot be used for Gmail.

Data stored using User Managed Storage is subject to the same ownership policy as other data in the Google Apps account.

Learn more and get started
User Managed Storage can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). Note that the Google Checkout service must also be enabled to allow end users to purchase additional storage. If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

For more information please take a look at our Help Center.

We continue to work to enable Google Apps users to be more productive using nothing but the web. Sign up to be notified when additional storage features become available.


Posted by Gaurav Jain, Product Manager, Google Apps

Note: User Managed Storage may not be available in all areas. A Google Checkout account is required to purchase User Managed Storage and Google Checkout must be enabled by the domain administrator.

Last month we launched an improvement that makes more than 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. Since the launch, we’ve featured posts from product teams across Google to showcase how you can benefit from the new services.


Our colleagues working on Google Reader, Google Alerts, Google News, and Google Finance described how their products give you new ways to discover content on the web. The Blogger and YouTube teams shared how their services can be used to connect with your customers and communicate information about your products and brand. We also featured posts from the Google Analytics, Google Website Optimizer, Google Custom Search, and Google Translator Toolkit teams to highligh tools that help your company build and optimize your web property. Posts from Google AdWords and Google Places showed how you can make it easier for potential customers to discover your business when they are searching online, and a post from Google Checkout described how you can let visitors purchase products from your site once they arrive. And if your business isn’t built around an online transaction model, the Google AdSense and DoubleClick for Publishers teams outlined tools that you can use to efficiently monetize traffic to your website. We also featured posts on Picasa Web Albums and Google SketchUp & 3D Warehouse that highlighted use cases for sharing and editing photos and 3D images at your organization. Finally, posts from Google Voice and Google Chrome Sync featured products that leverage the power of the web to allow you to work seamlessly across multiple devices, so you’re not tied to your desk phone or desktop PC to be productive.

This series has highlighted a few ways that you can use these additional Google applications, and we’re confident that you will discover many new and interesting use cases that fit your business. You can explore even more exciting Google services now available with your Google Apps account at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

All of these new services can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). Your domain administrator can grant different groups of users access to different sets of applications, so your company can get up and running today with more than 60 productivity-boosting applications matched to those users that will benefit from them most.


Posted by Jeremiah Dillon, Google Apps team

Note: Some products may not be available in all areas.

Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.



Welcome to Google Chrome Sync
These days, we spend more and more time working in a web browser, in fact, the number of hours the average American spends online has grown by over 120% in the last 5 years.* Much of the information we consume is delivered through the web, and tools like Google Apps make it easier than ever for workers to collaborate and create using nothing but the web. This shift of data and applications to the cloud makes us less dependent on the specific hardware device that we use to get our work done.

You may use a desktop or laptop PC or Linux box at your desk, then a netbook or maybe even a pilot program Chrome OS notebook when you’re on the go, and then perhaps work from a personal computer when you need to send a quick email from home. Traditionally, your experience has been different on each of these devices depending on how the browser is configured. Now, recently added integration with Google Apps lets you unify your browsing experience across the different devices you use to get your work done, just like millions of Chrome users already do with Google Chrome Sync.

Google Chrome is a modern web browser that was built with today’s web in mind, with a focus on speed, security, and simplicity, and it’s used by more than 120 million people worldwide. One of the features of Chrome that makes it so simple and easy to use is the ability to synchronize your bookmarks, extensions, apps, theme and browser preferences with a Google account, so they are always available in the browser, no matter where you are signed in. Google Apps users now have access to this functionality, allowing you to make these components of your browsing experience available across any device you use to access the Chrome browser.



With Chrome Sync, many of the inefficiencies that result when you switch from one device to another are eliminated. When you bookmark a news article relevant to your business on your desktop PC as you're running out the door to catch a flight, that bookmark will be there when you connect to WiFi as you’re waiting at the airport. The Google Mail Checker extension you discovered last week was synced to your laptop so you notice the email that comes in at the last minute before you close your laptop for take-off. And when the passenger in the seat next to you spills coffee on your keyboard in the middle of the flight, you’re secure in the knowledge that Chrome on your new laptop will have all of the personalization you added on your old one.

Now that Google Chrome is ready for business, Chrome and Chrome Sync combined with Google Apps make a powerful combination for workers leveraging the power of the cloud to be productive no matter where they are and what device they are using.

Learn more and get started
Google Chrome Sync can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

You can find more information about using Chrome in your organization on our Chrome for Business webpage or take a look at a product overview.


Posted by Nick Carter, Software Engineer, Google Chrome

Note: Google Chrome Sync may not be available in all areas.
* Forreseter Research, 2010

Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.



Welcome to Picasa Web Albums
Sharing and collaboration are central to Google Apps with over 30 million users in businesses, schools, and government already using products such as Gmail, Google Docs and Google Sites to work together more efficiently. As part of the effort to enhance the tools available to our Apps users, we’re pleased to bring the the photo sharing capabilities of Picasa Web Albums to your Google Apps account.

Picasa Web Albums makes it easy to organize, share and edit your photos, and collaborate with others. You can create web albums to group your images, add tags for organization and searching, edit your photos using Picnik to ensure they look their best, add places to your photos with geotagging via Google Maps, and easily share your photos with colleagues.

Whether it’s photos from a recent corporate offsite or holiday party, or visuals for insertion in a document or blog post, Picasa Web Albums allows you to store your images in the cloud and access them from any browser on any device. Sharing with colleagues is easy as well using your Google Apps account with email address autocomplete linked to your existing Contacts list.


Uploading, storing and sharing your photos is just the beginning. Picasa Web Albums is also integrated with other Google products such as Google Docs, Google Sites and Blogger, which allows users to seamlessly insert images stored or shared with you in Picasa Web Albums into documents, sites or blog posts in just a few clicks. It’s never been easier to compose a multimedia document using nothing but the web.


Stop sending photos to colleagues as attachments and load them into the cloud instead. Just like Google Apps, Picasa Web Albums runs in your web browser so your photos are at your fingertips anywhere you have an Internet connection.

Learn more and get started
Picasa Web Albums can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

You can learn more about Picasa Web Albums in our Help Center or you can stay up to date on product news as well as tips and tricks on our blog.


Posted by Lisa Conquergood, Picasa Team

Note: Picasa Web Albums may not be available in all areas.

Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.



Welcome to Google News
Staying up to date on all the day’s news is a challenge – even when that news might be absolutely critical to your business. Missing a story could mean missing an opportunity. That’s why we’re pleased to make Google News available with your Google Apps account.

Google News is a computer-generated news site that aggregates headlines from news sources worldwide, groups similar stories together, and displays them according to your personalized interests. You can customize Google News with topics you are interested in, and even indicate which publications you’d like to prioritize in your personalized news stream.


Google News will surface stories relevant to the interests you indicate and will aggregate articles from multiple news sources covering that story. For example, if a story about changes in the funding environment for small businesses shows up in your news stream, you’ll be able to click through to coverage from a variety of news outlets in order to get a spectrum of views on the issue.

Now that Google News is integrated with Google Apps, sharing the articles that you discover with coworkers is easier than ever. You can email a link directly from the News interface with address autocomplete linked to your existing Contacts list.


And Google News even makes it easy to stay current on the latest developments in the news when you’re away from your desk. When you connect to Google News on your smartphone with your Google Apps account, you will find an experience optimized for viewing on your mobile device and get the same personalized stream of news you see in the full browser version.


Now you can make the most of those spare minutes between meetings or the transit time on your morning commute by reading the latest news, complied and organized just for you.

Learn more and get started
Google News can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

For answers to specific questions you can visit our Help Center or you can follow the latest updates on our product blog.




Note: Google News may not be available in all areas.

When we announced that Chrome is now used by over 120 million users and showed off some of its latest features last week, we saw a tremendous amount of excitement from both users and businesses. Many businesses asked how they can get the benefits of increased security, speed and the modern browser capabilities that Chrome offers with the configurability and customizations they need.

The good news is that businesses don’t need to wait any longer to deploy Google Chrome. Today, we’re announcing that Chrome offers controls that enable IT administrators to easily configure and deploy the browser on Windows, Mac, and Linux according to their business requirements. We’ve created an MSI installer that enables businesses who use standard deployment tools to install Chrome for all their managed users. We’ve also added support for managed group policy with a list of policies and a set of templates that allow administrators to easily customize browser settings to manage security and privacy. For your users that need access to older web applications not yet qualified for Chrome, we also added group policy support to Google Chrome Frame, an Internet Explorer (TM) plug-in that provides Chrome-quality rendering for the broader Web, while defaulting to host rendering for any web applications that still require IE.

By deploying Google Chrome, organizations can take advantage of improved security and web application performance without needing to upgrade other expensive software licenses or buy new hardware. Deploying Google Chrome also gives users access to productivity-enhancing HTML5 web applications. Since Google Chrome is the same as the browser on Chrome OS, admins considering Chrome OS for their organizations can start testing their mission-critical web applications by deploying the Google Chrome browser.

Support for these new administrative features is available to Google Apps for Business admins by phone and email as part of their Apps deployment. For those who are not Google Apps for Business customers, we’ve also posted documentation to assist administrators deploying Chrome inside their organization.

Over the past few months, we’ve worked to test Chrome with admins in a diverse set of large organizations interested in moving to a more secure, modern browser. Organizations such as Vanguard, Boise State University, and Procter & Gamble (and Google!) have already successfully deployed Chrome to thousands of users. They’ve provided us with excellent feedback, and we’re continuing to work on the next set of features that they’ve requested.

What we’ve built is just the start of what we’d like to offer businesses with Google Chrome. We’re excited by the features built so far, and we’re working hard on polishing the next set of policies that will make Google Chrome even more customizable and useful to users in the future. Please give the new features a try and let us know what you think!

Posted by Glenn Wilson, Product Manager and Daniel Clifford, Software Engineer, Google Chrome team

Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.



Welcome to DoubleClick for Publishers
For millions of online publishers—from the smallest blogger to the largest entertainment, news, e-commerce and information sites—online advertising revenue is vital. When publishers can maximize their returns, everyone benefits from more vibrant online content and websites. A publisher's ability to manage this process can have a significant impact on how much money they make from their online content, which is why we’re happy to bring our Google Apps customers our next generation ad serving platform to solve these problems: DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) from Google.

Imagine you're a major online publisher with a popular global surfing website and an ad sales team. Every second of every day, you have difficult decisions about what ads to show and how to measure their relative performance. For example:

• In the same ad space, a surfboard wax advertiser wants to run a static image ad for your Australian readers, while an airline offering flights to Hawaii wants to run an expandable interactive ad for your American readers.


• A fast-food restaurant wants to run its burger ads before noon and its pizza ads in the afternoon.


• You've sold 10 different surfboard makers a million ad slots at slightly different prices; now you have to allocate them across your various webpages to fulfill all these orders over the next two weeks.


• One of your surfing tournament reviews is linked to by a popular news site and you have a surge in traffic. Your sales team couldn't predict this, so you’re left without any ads for thousands of readers. You want to fill this ad space by selling it via an ad network that has ads available.

These examples illustrate how complicated it can be to optimize ad serving on your website, and they only scratch the surface.

DFP comes in two flavors, tailored for different publishers' needs: DoubleClick for Publishers, for the largest online publishers, and DFP Small Business, a simple, free version designed for growing online publishers. As a Google Apps user, you now have access to both versions of DFP with your existing Apps account.


With advanced features such as streamlined ad trafficking, inventory management and forecasting, revenue optimization, granular reporting, and an open API, DFP offers a complete toolkit to easily sell ads on your site directly to advertisers while also working dynamically to help you get the most money from inventory you sell through partners like AdSense and ad networks.

Just like Google Apps, DFP runs in Google’s cloud so you get the same reliability, flexibility, and easy access without any software to install or hardware for IT to maintain. Also, DFP is fully supported by Google so you don't have to worry about manual system updates or downtime.

Learn more and get started
DoubleClick for Publishers can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

To learn more about how DFP can help you manage and grow all of your online ad inventory, please visit our website or follow along with the latest news and release updates at the DoubleClick for Publishers blog.

Share your story
Have you already started using Google Custom Search at your organization, or plan to now that it’s available? Please share your story and your organization could be featured in the next Gone Google ad campaign!


Posted by Stephen Kliff, DoubleClick Team

Note: DoubleClick for Publishers may not be available in all areas.

Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.



Welcome to Google AdSense
Do you have traffic to a web property that you would like to monetize? Whether you’ve invested time and energy in developing web content that brings in tons of traffic or would just like another income stream to support your business’s online presence, there is a solution for you that now works with your Google Apps account: Google AdSense.

Google AdSense enables millions of website owners of all sizes to display relevant ads alongside their online content. AdSense taps into Google’s vast network of local and international advertisers so there is great variety in ads, and Google technology selects ads specifically targeted for your website and visitors. By allowing advertisers to compete to display ads you can easily monetize traffic to your website and earn revenue.

Setting up an AdSense account is easy and free. As soon as you set up your account you can begin to place ads on your website. AdSense provides actionable data to help maximize your revenue, rich controls to protect your brand, and other helpful resources to improve your efficiency in managing and optimizing your revenue streams.



AdSense is simple to set up, you just have to add a few lines of code to the HTML of your site and you’re ready to start displaying ads. With AdSense, you stay in control of the user experience on your site by customizing the size, location, and types of ads that appear, and there is no commitment so you can turn the ads off at any time.

Before this improvement enabled access to additional applications, Google Apps users had to create a separate account to sign in to AdSense. Now, Apps users can access their cloud-based productivity applications, along with AdSense, using the same account. As an Apps user, you will now be able to seamlessly control your AdSense ads, as well as view a wide range of descriptive statistics and graphs about your ad performance using your existing Google Apps account.



Just like Google Apps, AdSense runs in Google’s cloud so you get easy access from anywhere without any software to install or hardware for IT to maintain.

Learn more and get started
Google AdSense can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

You can learn more about Google AdSense in the Help Center or stay up-to-date on the latest launches on the Inside AdSense Blog.

Share your story
Have you already started using Google AdSense at your organization, or plan to now that it’s available? Please share your story and your organization could be featured in the next Gone Google ad campaign!


Posted by Nate DeOms, AdSense Team

Note: Google AdSense may not be available in all areas.
Update: For those of you who already have a Google AdSense account, we're in the process of finalizing the infrastructure that will allow you to seamlessly transition your existing AdSense account and data over to your Google Apps account.

Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.



Welcome to Google Custom Search
These days, content is being created faster than ever. In fact, the data equivalent of 250,000 years of DVD-quality video is created every two days, which is more than the entire amount of digital information that was created from the birth of the world up to 2003. Users are faced with the challenge of wading through all of this data to find the information they are looking for, and businesses are faced with the challenge of making this easy to do for their customers and employees. Most businesses consolidate their information on a public-facing website, internal micro-sites, product blogs and customer portals to help visitors surface relevant content. But even with this type of organization and structure, information can still be difficult to locate. That’s why we are pleased to introduce Google Apps customers to a product that will make finding easy for their employees and for their customers: Google Custom Search.

Google Custom Search brings the power, speed and relevance of Google.com to any website through a hosted search bar.


Custom Search allows visitors to your site to scour your web pages in fractions of a second with the same speed and familiarity that they are used to when performing a search on Google.com. The technology behind Google Custom Search powers the built-in search capabilities of Google Sites and Blogger, so if you organize your web content using these tools then you’re already using it. For other websites you create, set-up takes only a few minutes and adding the search box is as easy as pasting a few lines of pre-generated code to the HTML of the page where you want the search box to appear. Just like Google Apps, with Google Custom Search there’s no hardware or software to maintain or upgrade - it gets better as Google gets better.

Google Custom Search will automatically display advertisements and allows you to monetize them using AdSense for search. If you prefer that ads not be displayed you can upgrade to Google Site Search.

Learn more and get started
Google Custom Search can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

For more detailed information, you can take a look at our Help Center or follow the latest news and updates on the Google Custom Search blog.

Share your story
Have you already started using Google Custom Search at your organization, or plan to now that it’s available? Please share your story and your organization could be featured in the next Gone Google ad campaign!


Posted by Guillaume De Zwirek, Google Enterprise Search Team

Note: Google Custom Search may not be available in all areas.

Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.



Welcome to Google Website Optimizer
Making changes to your website can be a challenge. Websites are often built with little data available in the design phase but once the site launches, tracking tools such as Google Analytics can provide tons of information about visitor behavior, and can highlight areas that aren’t performing as expected. But how will you know what kind of revisions will better achieve your goals? How can you be confident that changes won’t actually result in worse performance? How can you reconcile the different ideas that stakeholders throughout your company contribute about what the site should look like? Now, Google Apps users can address these questions using Google Website Optimizer for free with their Google Apps accounts.

Google Website Optimizer is a tool that lets you eliminate guesswork from website design by testing variations of your webpages. When you identify a page that might need a change, you can create alternate versions of that page and use Google Website Optimizer to send a fraction of the users visiting your website to each alternate version. Website Optimizer then runs an analysis to tell you how visitors to each version of the webpage behave. With this data, you can make much more informed decisions about website updates.



The key advantages of running website tests using Google Website Optimizer are:

• Base website design decisions on data, not intuition. You probably hear a different opinion about what’s best for your website from each person you ask. Controlled tests provide objective data that can be used to support or disprove different hypotheses.


• Try multiple ideas at the same time, instead of just one. Instead of putting all your eggs in one basket, Google Website Optimizer lets you test many ideas at once and pick the winner as it emerges.


• Experiment, with a safety net. If the new page you are testing performs well, you can keep that page and maintain the conversion gains. If the new page doesn’t perform well, you can easily stop the test. Google Website Optimizer even monitors page performance and can be set up to automatically disable website variations that begin to perform worse than your original page.

Take, for example, our landing page for a Google Maps Driving Directions widget. The team wanted more visitors to add the widget, but wasn’t sure what design elements would work best. Using Google Website Optimizer, the team ran an experiment to compare the original page to three alternate designs. You can see the four versions below (including the original in the top left):


The result? The Google Maps team found that the lower right-hand design outperformed the original with a 75% conversion rate increase, meaning more users added the widget. Google Website Optimizer made it easy to select the best version of the webpage.

Learn more and get started
Google Website Optimizer can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

You can learn more about using Website Optimizer from the team’s Help Center, and more technical users should also read the Techie Guide to Website Optimizer (PDF). You can also follow the latest news about Google Website Optimizer on our team blog.

Share your story
Have you already started using Google Website Optimizer at your organization, or plan to now that it’s available? Please share your story and your organization could be featured in the next Gone Google ad campaign!


Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Website Optimizer team

Note: Google Website Optimizer may not be available in all areas.

Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.



Welcome to Google Checkout
With global online sales measured in hundreds of billions of dollars annually*, how does your company process its online orders? Do you worry about order path friction causing customers to drop out before completing their purchase? How do you help your customers feel secure and protected from fraud when they purchase online? Whether you don’t yet have a checkout solution or you’re looking to give your customers multiple checkout options, you now have an additional tool at your disposal that is integrated with Google Apps: Google Checkout.

Google Checkout is a fast and highly secure online checkout process that allows your customers to buy from you quickly and easily with a single login.


Not only does Google Checkout provide a flexible shopping cart and payment infrastructure that enables customers to buy from you online, but the use of Google Checkout can also bring other benefits to you as a seller. For example, Google Checkout’s fast, convenient checkout process reduces transaction friction by using customers’ existing Google accounts and has increased conversion rates by as much as 40% for some sellers. Also, our data shows that Google Checkout customers click on search advertisements 10% more often if those ads feature the Google Checkout badge, bringing more traffic to those sellers’ sites.

Most importantly, Google Checkout gives customers peace of mind when they shop online because our fraud policy offers protection against unauthorized purchase and users can use their existing Google account instead of entering their data again. Sellers also benefit directly from fraud protection with our Payment Guarantee Policy.

Best of all, it's quick and easy to add Google Checkout functionality to your website using various integration options, including Buy Now buttons, custom shopping carts, and the Google Checkout Store Gadget, which allows you to quickly set up a storefront for buyers in over 140 countries.



Google Checkout runs in Google’s cloud, so there is no hardware to maintain or software to update. And Google Checkout can be integrated with your Google Apps account, allowing you to quickly and easily insert a Checkout store gadget into a site you create with Google Sites or Blogger.

Learn more and get started
Google Checkout can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

For more information about Google Checkout, take our product tour. You can visit our Help Center for answers to specific questions or check out our blog for the latest updates.

Share your story
Have you already started using Google Checkout at your organization, or plan to now that it’s available? Please share your story and your organization could be featured in the next Gone Google ad campaign!


Posted by Satyajeet Salgar, Product Manager, Google Checkout

Note: Google Checkout may not be available in all areas.
* Source eMarketer, 2009.

Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.



Welcome to Google Analytics
In today’s world, it is increasingly important for organizations to have a presence on the web. But once your organization has invested time and resources in a website, how do you measure the impact of this investment? Where is your traffic coming from and what is it doing when it gets to your site? Which pages on your site are the most engaging and which pages have the most user dropouts? All of these questions can be answered with Google Analytics, Google’s enterprise-class web analytics service, which is now available for free with your Google Apps account!

Google Analytics provides data about your web properties, including traffic volume, number of visitors, and time spent on your site, in a straightforward and easy to understand way.


Google Analytics also makes it easy to track where your traffic comes from, both in terms of referring sources as well as geographic location.


Google Analytics is designed to be easy to use for everyone in your organization, from the product manager to the chief of marketing. Even though it’s simple to use, Google Analytics offers advanced features such as custom reports, segmentation, e-commerce capabilities, API access, and onsite search for power users that want to construct a more tailored experience. Google Analytics delivers easily-digestible insights that can be used across your organization to increase website traffic and engagement, and to improve the return on your web investment.

Just like other Google Apps services, Google Analytics runs in Google’s cloud so it delivers all of the world-class reliability and scalability that you have come to expect from Google Apps. Also, sharing Analytics data and delegating access to colleagues in your organization is simple using their existing Google Apps accounts. And, because the documents, spreadsheets and sites that you create using Google Apps live in the cloud and have unique web addresses, you can use Google Analytics to track traffic to your domain’s docs in addition to your website.

Learn more and get started
Google Analytics can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

For more information about how Google Analytics can help you track engagement with your website take a look at our product tour or read some customer stories to learn how Google Analytics has had an impact on an organization like yours. Or, check out the Google Analytics blog for the latest news and tips and tricks.

Share your story
Have you already started using Google Analytics at your organization, or plan to now that it’s available? Please share your story and your organization could be featured in the next Gone Google ad campaign!


Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics team

Note: Google Analytics may not be available in all areas.

Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.



Welcome to Google Places
You already know that Google Apps is a great way to run your business and ensure that your employees can collaborate and work effectively. But are you also taking advantage of Google’s other online tools that can help your company build a strong external presence and customer base? Our recent infrastructure upgrade has made doing so much easier: now you can access Google Places with your existing Google Apps account.

Google Places offers business owners a free and easy way to make sure that potential customers can find their business when searching online at Google.com and in Google Maps, both from desktops and mobile devices. With your free Google Places account, you can:

• Be found: Verify your business’s information to make sure people can find you on Google.


• Stand out: Engage customers with photos, coupons, custom posts, and more on your Place page.


• Get insight: Use feedback about your listing to make smarter business decisions.

Claiming your business listing with Google Places is easy and verification methods are in place to make sure data is accurate. Once you’ve claimed your listing, you can update it through Google Places at any time using your Google Apps account by signing in at google.com/places. In addition to creating your listing, you can also enhance it by highlighting special offers with coupons, sharing photos and videos of your location or products, marking your service areas, and responding to reviews from customers.

Once your business listing is up and running, you can use the Places dashboard to gain valuable insights about your listing’s performance. For example, you can view top search terms for your business, which can help you set up a more targeted AdWords campaign. Or, you can view an interactive map showing the origin of customers who request driving directions to your current location, which could help you decide where to open up a new location.

Learn more and get started
Google Places can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

Share your story
Have you already started using Google Places at your organization, or plan to now that it’s available? Please share your story and your organization could be featured in the next Gone Google ad campaign!


Posted by Brianna Brekke, Google Places team

Note: Google Places may not be available in all areas

Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.



Welcome to Google SketchUp & 3D Warehouse
3D can be a great tool for solving all kinds of problems, like redesigning an office space or envisioning the neighborhood around the new office park in Shanghai. However, the software to generate 3D models and images has traditionally been prohibitively expensive or too difficult for non-professionals to learn. Enter: Google SketchUp.

We like to say that SketchUp is “3D for everyone.” By stripping out the technical hurdles that make traditional 3D software difficult to learn in favor of a simple, intuitive interface, most users are up and modeling in less than 10 minutes. We also made SketchUp free and as a result, we’ve found that people are using SketchUp in all sorts of creative ways to solve everyday problems and make their jobs easier.

Store owners are using SketchUp to visualize ways to maximize foot traffic in their stores. Facility managers are using SketchUp to redesign the office space to accommodate more desks. Event planners are using SketchUp to figure out how to set up their booth for their next event.


But building models in SketchUp is just scratching the surface. You can also use Google 3D Warehouse, which is a searchable repository of hundreds of thousands of 3D models, to discover existing 3D elements and share those that you create. Seamless auto-complete integration with your existing contacts in Google Apps makes it effortless to share models and collaborate with colleagues. To give you more control over the content you create, 3D Warehouse also allows you to set sharing permissions so you can manage who has viewing and editing access to your models.


Learn more and get started
The web sharing functionality of Google 3D Warehouse can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name) and you can get started by downloading the Google SketchUp application. If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

For more answers to specific questions about Google SketchUp and Google 3D Warehouse you can view our Help Center or get the latest news, tips, and tricks on the SketchUp Blog.

Share your story
Have you already started using Google SketchUp or 3D Warehouse at your organization, or plan to now that it’s available? Please share your story and your organization could be featured in the next Gone Google ad campaign!


Posted by Gopal Shah, Google SketchUp Team

Note: Google SketchUp & 3D Warehouse may not be available in all areas.

Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.



Welcome to Google Translator Toolkit
As the world’s citizens come online, more and more businesses are seeing the value of offering their services in multiple languages. Translation, however, can be costly and time-consuming, making it hard for businesses to take the first step. Whether you have an in-house translator or are a small translation service yourself, we think you will be excited by the newest addition to Google Apps: Google Translator Toolkit.

Translator Toolkit is a web-based translation editor that makes it easier and faster for translators to translate documents, web pages, and other content into dozens of other languages. To begin, upload a document from your desktop or enter the URL of a website that you want to translate. Translator Toolkit will then automatically load the text and generate a machine translation.


Once the translated content appears in Translator Toolkit, a user can easily make changes directly to the text or use tools designed to help make the translation process easier – such as the ability to see previous translations provided by others or the ability to reference bilingual dictionaries. Using Translator Toolkit with your Google Apps account makes it easy to collaborate on translations with colleagues. Others you share translations with can access your document and contribute in real-time, much like collaboration works in Google Docs.



Many professionals, individuals, and institutions have already started using Translator Toolkit to help bring their content into other languages and reach new markets. For example, within Google’s philanthropic arm Google.org, the Health Speaks team uses Translator Toolkit to make public health education more widely accessible across languages. In the coming weeks we plan to translate critical public health information into Arabic, Hindi and Swahili – all with the help of Translator Toolkit.

Learn more and get started
Google Translator Toolkit can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

You can learn more about Google Translator Toolkit in the Help Center or stay up-to-date on the latest launches on the Google Translate Blog.

Share your story
Have you already started using Google Translator Toolkit at your organization, or plan to now that it’s available? Please share your story and your organization could be featured in the next Gone Google ad campaign!


Posted by Mike Galvez, Product Manager, Google Translator Toolkit

Note: Google Translator Toolkit may not be available in all areas.