Despite a delay due to the holidays, we are excited to announce the stand out of the customer story marketing test kitchen, submitted by Smartsheet about their collaboration with Timeraiser. Smartsheet will be featured in the rotation of the featured & notables section on the Marketplace front page and a story in the Google Enterprise Blog.

Smartsheet tells a joint story of committing to the cloud and using strong examples and visuals to fully depict their message. Not only did they tell the story of Timeraiser’s use of Smartsheet, they vividly depicted an organization that has committed to cloud computing and has benefited greatly from it.

Read Smartsheet’s blog post and watch the video to see Timeraiser’s web strategy.


Other great stories were submitted by Mavenlink, Aprigo, Outright, and Manymoon.

In the last 5 months, we've worked with over 150 companies who have launched apps in the Google Apps Marketplace. In our conversations with developers, marketing teams, and business execs, it's become clear we would all benefit from a wider conversation and debate -- beyond one-on-ones.

So we took the logical next step and created an email-based Google Apps Marketplace forum, and then embedded it in our documentation and program sites so it’s easier to find. Starting today, it's the best place we know of to engage folks in the Apps Marketplace community to discuss trends, pricing models, brainstorm features, or just gripe about stuff.

Join the forum and dive in!

But wait, there’s more

There’s a wider Google Apps solution provider community beyond Marketplace developers however. Google Apps resellers, integrators, and consultants are equally passionate about innovating with customers in the cloud. And here at Google, we’re growing an equally passionate team to work with you all, our extended community.

But our team has a problem: we have a lot of news and observations to share, large and small, but no good way to share them in a way that enables an easy conversation. You know, Twitter-style, but with the ability to actually find the comment thread that develops around an interesting post. So we created a Google Apps Ecosystem team Buzz stream for that very purpose.

Follow us on Buzz and share your thoughts in the comments!

We like shaking hands too

We love the Internet, but sometimes we would rather meet face-to-face. We do that too when possible. For example, we recently held a Google Apps Hackathon here in Mountain View, where dozens of cloud app developers, IT developers and systems integrators joined together to code and learn about Google Apps APIs.

We kicked of the day with great presentations by Jeremy Glassenberg of Box.net on their Marketplace app, and Chris McGarry and Neel Patel from Omnetic talking about opportunities for system integrators to build on and extend Google Apps. There was strong interest in the 9 short technical side sessions on many of our APIs, though a little less coding than expected. Our quick survey of attendees gave us some great feedback, so we plan on iterating and doing more in the future.

So please do reach out, both to us here at Google as well as your fellow community members, using these new virtual water coolers.

Posted by Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead

Want to weigh in on this topic? Discuss on Buzz