Building on last week’s post on automatic mobile rendering, we’re excited to introduce five new templates to make it easier for businesses to create mobile landing pages. You can also start from scratch with our custom template if you’re feeling creative.


Watch the video below to see how “small” businessman, Bob, transformed his business using Google Sites:



Visit sites.google.com/mobilize to check out the five templates.

Posted by: Shiv Kumar, Google Mobile Specialist

(Cross-posted to the Enterprise blog)

As the dramatic growth of the mobile web changes the way people consume content, it’s becoming increasingly important for publishers to provide a good mobile experience. With this in mind, we just added automatic mobile rendering in Google Sites for iOS 3.0+ and Android 2.2+ devices, and a mobile version of the Google Sites lists.

By going to General settings under More actions > Manage site and clicking on Automatically adjust site for mobile phones, your Google site will be automatically adjusted whenever it’s viewed from an iOS or Android 2.2+ device:

Before	After

The most noticeable automatic adjustments include:

• Aligning the header layout and top bar
  
• Fitting the width of the site to match the device’s width
  
• Smart handling of sidebars, horizontal navigation, and dropdown links

After you’ve enabled this feature, you can preview the page from your computer as a mobile viewer using More actions > Preview as viewer then select Mobile from the yellow Preview page as viewer (Mobile | Desktop) box at the top of the page.

You can also choose to hide some of the links in your site’s footer to save vertical space.


It’s also important for you to be able to access and search your own sites on the go, which is why we’ve also added mobile versions of the site list, sites search, and browse sites categories.


Just navigate to http://sites.google.com from any iOS 3.0+ or Android 2.2+ device for quick access to your sites.

As more people unplug from their desks and interact with content on the go, new doors are opening for everyone. We hope these tools will empower you to meet the challenges of publishing in a mobile world using Google Sites.

Posted by: Luciano Cheng, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted to the Enterprise blog)

One of the key features of Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office is the ability to easily sync Office documents up to Google Docs and to collaborate on them with others. You asked us to simplify the experience of downloading and opening Office documents stored in your Google Docs account, so today we’re doing just that. Now you can open any Office file stored in Google Docs directly from within Microsoft Office.

Earlier this week, five members of our team held an “Ask Me Anything” Q&A on Reddit, a popular social news community. While we get to hear from you on the forums, Twitter, and our blog regularly, we thought it’d be fun to experiment with something different.

In the IAmA subcategory on Reddit, a poster starts a thread by saying “I am a...” before allowing Redditors to freely ask questions. After introducing ourselves -- product managers Scott Johnston, Jeff Harris, and Ronald Ho; engineer DJ Lee; and me, the community manager -- we gave users the green light to ask us anything.

Over the next six hours, Redditors posed questions about our product roadmap, the challenges we’d encountered during development, and even our breakfast food preferences. We also gave users a sneak peek into the things we’re currently working on, including Cloudprint, presentations, and the mobile experience.

Having an AMA was a unique opportunity for us to hear from the community, and we were delighted by the stories, witty comments, and declarations of love that Redditors shared with us.

We announced this Reddit AMA on Monday via our @GoogleDocs Twitter account -- if you’re interested in participating in a community event like this in the future, be sure to follow us on Twitter.

Posted by: Teresa Wu, Community Manager

You may not have noticed the description field for items in your documents list, but descriptions hold great potential for sharing information and file management.

When you have an item selected, you’ll see information about the item in the details pane to the right of your documents list, including a Description section. If you don’t see the details pane, click the double-arrow in the upper right of your documents list to expand it.


What you add to the description, in addition to the contents of the doc itself, can be found when you use the search box in Google Docs. This opens up the possibility of using the description for keywords and tagging. So, if your description contains the words “Astronaut, Space” that file will show in your search results when you do a Google Docs search for “astronaut” or “space.”

Descriptions also allow you to add clickable links. If it’s important for you to reference a website on an item, simply copy and paste the URL into your description. When the details pane is open, you’ll be able to click the link.

You can also make your description stand out with formatting:

• Use underscores to italicize a word, such as _word_
• Use asterisks to bold a word, such as *word*
• Use hyphens to strike-through a word, such as -word-

A description is a great way to share information about your shared doc or collection to all of your collaborators, or add reference notes about an item. With the added benefit of search, clickable links, and formatting, descriptions become a powerful tool for sharing information and managing your growing documents list.

If you have other suggestions for ways you’ve used the description field, please add them in the comments below.

Posted by: Rebecca Steelman, Consumer Experience Specialist

We’re releasing a small batch of features this week: In Google documents, we added an Ignore all option to hide all spelling suggestions for a specific word, and a new web font, Ubuntu. We’ve also made it easier to manage your deleted sites in Google Sites.

Ignore All
In documents, we already give you the option to add words to your dictionary so we won’t show spelling suggestions for them in the future. That feature is convenient if you’re using a surname that will be reused in many documents. But sometimes there’s a non-dictionary word that’s only used in one doc, which might make you hesitant to add that word to your dictionary for all docs. Ignore All lets you hide the spelling suggestions for a specific word, but only affects the doc that you currently have opened.



Ubuntu
We’re also adding a new font to Google documents: Ubuntu. Earlier this year, we made Ubuntu available in the Google Font API, and it quickly rose to become one of our most popular fonts. The font was commissioned by Canonical Ltd and designed by Dalton Maag as part of the Ubuntu operating system open source project.


Ubuntu has a simple, modern style that’s both recognizable and legible. It’s designed to look great in many sizes, and we hope you’ll find it useful in anything from document text to large poster headlines to small image captions.

You can learn more about Ubuntu and see how to use the font by visiting the Google Font Directory.

Soft delete your sites
We’ve received a lot of feedback that it was sometimes difficult to restore a deleted site, since you needed to remember a deleted site’s URL. Starting today, you will be able to view any sites you’ve deleted in the Deleted sites section of My Sites rather than needing to remember their URLs. In this section, you can also choose to restore your site or delete it permanently before 30 days have passed. Note that as before, after the 30-day grace period, deleted sites will be permanently deleted.


Let us know what you think of these updates. If you have any ideas for new features, submit them to our Product Ideas page, open until June 16.

Posted by: Kara Levy, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted to the Enterprise blog)

In March, we launched discussions in Google Docs, replacing comments with discussion threads, @mentions, email notifications, and much more. This week, we’re launching a handful of improvements based on your feedback.

Improvements to the discussion pane

(Cross-posted to the Enterprise blog)

You make Google products what they are -- and the feedback you share with us every day helps shape the future of our products. We’re always listening to your requests via blogs, Twitter, our forum, and other channels, and for the next two weeks, we’re bringing back a more structured way to get your input by opening up our Product Ideas page.

On this page, you can submit your ideas, read other users’ suggestions, and vote up your favorites. We’ll use the top ideas to help us prioritize our development in the coming months. After the two-week period, we'll follow up with a blog post summarizing the results. While we may not work on all of the top ideas immediately, we’ll let you know which of the ideas we’re working on.

We hope you’ll use this as an opportunity to help us prioritize the features that are important to you -- for your business, in the classroom, or at home. Start submitting your ideas, big or small -- we look forward to hearing what you have to say!

Note: We’re specifically looking to hear your product ideas and suggestions. If you’re seeking help, please post your support questions to the Help Forum. Off topic submissions may be removed.

Posted by: Teresa Wu, Community Manager

(Cross-posted to the Google Enterprise Blog and the Gmail Blog)

For web applications to spring even farther ahead of traditional software, our teams need to make use of new capabilities available in modern browsers. For example, desktop notifications for Gmail and drag-and-drop file upload in Google Docs require advanced browsers that support HTML5. Older browsers just don’t have the chops to provide you with the same high-quality experience.

For this reason, soon Google Apps will only support modern browsers. Beginning August 1st, we’ll support the current and prior major release of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis. Each time a new version is released, we’ll begin supporting the update and stop supporting the third-oldest version.

As of August 1st, we will discontinue support for the following browsers and their predecessors: Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, and Safari 3. In these older browsers you may have trouble using certain features in Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs and Google Sites, and eventually these apps may stop working entirely.

So if it’s been a a while since your last update, we encourage you to get the latest version of your favorite browser. There are many to choose from:

• Chrome
  
• Firefox
  
• Internet Explorer
  
• Safari

As the world moves more to the web, these new browsers are more than just a modern convenience, they are a necessity for what the future holds.

Posted by Venkat Panchapakesan, Vice President of Engineering