Google Apps News & Articles

If you’ve never heard of AdventNet Inc., you’re not alone, and they’re not worried, you weren’t their target audience anyway -- until now.

Over the last few years, the 13-year-old software company based in Pleasanton, California has quietly carved out an online empire known to most of us as Zoho.com and after years with an obscure name, they have embraced the brand which they believe best represents the next evolution of the company.

Google (news, site) is taking another step towards real competition with Microsoft in the productivity solutions department. They have announced Google Apps Directory Sync -- the ability to provision users and groups from your own internal directory services be it Active Directory, Lotus Domino or another LDAP solution with your Googe Apps accounts.

With the amount of sensitive content floating around enterprise content management systems it is hardly surprising that ‘security’ is becoming an increasingly important issue, especially given the number of companies that are beefing up their web presence.

Only last week, US data and email security firm Websense introduced a new Web Gateway appliance that allows companies access Web 2.0 sites without security concerns.

This week, UK-based Sword Group, a provider of high value and hi-tech business applications, has unveiled a new gadget that will allow enterprise content management integration for Google Apps.

And the clincher -- using the gadget can access complex ECM repositories that are firewalled up to the hilt.

Nobody’s perfect. Even Internet overlord Google has its faults. For example, we’re sure all of you have been frustrated from time to time with Big G’s occasional bouts of downtime.

In an effort to quell all the nervous twitching that immediately spreads like Web-wildfire as soon as anything Google-related hiccups, a new Apps Status thingy has been introduced -- and it's strikingly similar to something Zoho kicked out late last year.

Featuring a list of Google's core apps, Google's new Apps Status Dashboard is a daily tally of any outages or disruptions.

Any time any of these services experience trouble, various icons notify the users. After the problem is fixed, information is added about what the problem was, when it occurred, and even how long it took to implement a solution. 

This new feature is most likely a response to the outrage over recent Google failures -- like, the Februrary Gmail downtime, or when every page found in Google's index was flagged as potentially harmful. Perhaps this is also a response to Zoho.

Another possible variant is that it’s the result of requests from business customers. One of their most frequently cited reasons for not using Google Apps is a lack of control over the applications they depend on.

Whatever the case, the new feature is clearly trying to re-affirm current and potential customers’ confidence in the reliability of Google Apps. Here’s to that.

Announcing the Google Blog Converters project! 

Tired of Blogger? Want to move to WordPress? Or vice versa? Problem solved! Google's new Open Source project enables you to easily move blog posts and comments from service to service. 

Like using Google Apps? There are a lot of templates to choose from, so you don’t need to start from scratch. And if you liked all those templates, then you’ll probably love these new ones — Forms Templates.

Zoho wants you to know they believe in being open and transparent with their users. That’s why they have added a new section to their website called Zoho Status. Now you can see at a glance the health of all those Zoho applications you use.

Google has launched Google Apps Labs, an experimental area that will enable Google Apps for Your Domain customers to place add-ons into popular Google hosted applications. These third-party applications will need to be added by the domain administrator of a Google Apps-enabled domain.

Google has thrown out 3 Labs add-ons as a demonstration of the type of functionality available from using Apps Labs including: Google Code Reviews, which will enable software developers to collaborate on code; Google Short Links, which makes it possible to shorten URLs; and Google Moderator, an app that allows you groups to have an online home for a question and answer portal.

It remains to be seen how popular it will be to create third-party add-ons for Google Apps, but it is refreshing to see Google open up and allow for the possibilities to be manifested.

If you were worried about the present and future of SaaS — Gartner says don’t be. Worldwide Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) revenue in the enterprise application markets is going strong.

Gartner predicts it will surpass US$ 6.4 billion in 2008, a 27% increase from 2007 revenue. Moreover, the market is expected to more than double with SaaS revenue reaching US$ 14.8 billion in 2012.

At the recent Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, Gartner analysts presented their insights into the top 10 technologies and trends to rule the world in 2009.

With emphasis on virtualization, organizations should also pay close attention to cloud computing, green IT, Business Intelligence (BI) and social software — among other strategic trends.

Using Google Apps and Google Docs is quite an accessible and functional way to collaborate and manage documents in a Software-as-a-Service web environment, but leveraging this data in an enterprise environment could prove somewhat difficult — that is until Panorama Software released Panorama Analytics and Panorama PowerApps.

Social Media moves so fast, its hard to keep up. Here’s the weeks news from the trenches in scan-friendly format.

This week:

• Facebook Flip-Flops Over New Design
• Enterprise Microblogger Yammer Scoops Techcrunch50 Top Prize
• New iTunes is Genius. Especially for those with half a brain.
• Google Apps on Blackberry (as discovered at RWW for Pastors)
• Google Mobile Search with My Location
• The Best of Friendfeed

Facebook Flip-flops Over New Design

The new Facebook UI is splitting opinion down the middle. Half of all users despise it. The other half merely really hate it. So it comes as no surprise that the company has postponed plans to impose the new design on all users from this week, and has murmered something about D-day being postponed for ‘a few more weeks.’

There’s some interesting talk in air these days around office productivity suites and the move to using purely web-based products. Some predict the end of Microsoft if they don’t make the move to a SaaS offering. Other reports show something completely opposite.

The rumor mill is all a flutter with the expected announcement that Salesforce will begin to offer Google Apps to it’s customers.

Good news for Google as this provides them with a great way to sell their services to enterprise customers. Their web apps would be sold through Salesforce.com and integrated tightly into the service.

Salesforce already enables it’s customers to manage their Google Adwords campaigns from within Salesforce.com, so this is just another piece to the puzzle.

Indications of this potential integration circulated back in March when people starting finding references to Salesforce in Google CSS files. Likewise, references to Google in Salesforce documentation to things like buttons for Gmail and Google Docs lead you to believe this has been a plan in the making for a while.

Guess we’ll have to wait for Monday to hear all about this and other Salesforce partner news. If you have any details please let us know. Otherwise, Stay tuned!

When Google dropped a cool US$ 625 million on communications security and compliance company Postini in July of 2007, speculation was rampant about the company’s intentions, with most pointing to a desire to attract more enterprise customers by beefing up their “Apps” with security options.

The pundits appear to have gotten this one right with Google’s announcement of a series of enticing email compliance and security products — all powered by what was Postini. The new offerings include message filtering, transport layer encryption, and business records archiving and discovery. Shazam! The records management market just got Googled.