Official Google Cloud Blog: October 2012

Share your work from Google Drive to Google+

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Posted by Li-Wei Lee, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted on the Google Drive Blog.)

With Google+, you can share what you want with just the right people. That might be pictures from your team offsite or an article from your favorite new blog. Starting today, you can also share the work you create and store in Google Drive, and people will be able to flip through presentations, open PDFs, play videos and more--directly in the Google+ stream.

(click the image above to view a presentation in the stream)

Forms shared in the stream, like feedback surveys or lunch order polls, are interactive as well and can be completed with just a couple of clicks.

To share, paste the link to the Drive file directly in the share box inside Google+. And, if you use Google Apps for Business, Education or Government you can make the post restricted to ensure that the discussion is only visible to people in your organization.

Introducing the new compose in Gmail

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Posted by Phil Sharp, Product Manager(Cross-posted on the Gmail Blog.)Faster

Easier to use

finishing touches

Search. Click. Call. Get connected with your local expert today.

Monday, October 29, 2012

Posted by Amit Singh, Vice President, Google Enterprise

Whether you’re evaluating Google Apps, ready to make the move, or already a current user, we’re making it simpler for you to find the local, specialized, and trusted help you may need with the new Google Enterprise Partner Search. Search, click, and make the call to see how Google Apps Resellers can make your experience with Google Apps even better.

With over 6,000 Google Apps Resellers around the world, Enterprise Partner Search lets you preview the capabilities of a partner and find one that offers the services you’re looking for – from setup and user training, to email migration, management services, and support.

It’s simpler than ever, search for a partner today.

About today’s App Engine outage

Friday, October 26, 2012

Posted by Peter S. Magnusson, Engineering Director, Google App EngineEditors note: This morning we failed to live up to our promise, and Google App Engine applications experienced increased latencies and time-out errors. For a full report of the incident, visit the Google App Engine blog.High Replication Datastore

Helping SMBs save money with the cloud

Friday, October 26, 2012

Posted by Rich Rao, Director of Sales and Operations, Google EnterpriseAnalysis GroupAndrew McAfeestudy

USstoragesearch.comSMBs across the countryour websiteexplore McAfee’s comparative cost model

Playworks Transforms more than Recess with Chromebooks and Apps

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Posted by Richard Ng, IT director, PlayworksEditors note: Today’s guest blogger is Richard Ng, IT director at Playworks, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving children’s health and well-being through increased physical activity and play. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.For more than 16 years, Playworks has been working with elementary schools in urban communities to help increase students’ physical activity during recess and throughout the day. We are the only organization in the country to send trained adult program coordinators into low-income schools, where they turn recess into a fun, positive experience that helps kids and teachers get the most out of their school day.

Headquartered in Oakland, California, Playworks has coaches and staff deployed at 380 schools, reaching 170,000 students in 23 cities across the country every day. In addition, our training staff serves another 400 schools each year all around the country. As the director of IT, my job is to make sure that every one of our staff has access to the resources they need to be successful at their schools. For our program staff, who visit 2-3 different schools every week the ability to get to their documents, and share and collaborate with each other is vital. Playworks relies on flexibility, mobility and access to information anytime, anywhere – Google is helping us achieve that. In 2011, I attended Google I/O, where I had my first encounter with the Chromebook. I knew immediately that Chromebooks and Google Apps could be the answer our tech needs. We deployed a small, successful pilot program in early 2011, and today we have nearly 80+ Chromebook devices in use in the field, with more planned next year. With a simple two-page instruction document that we created internally, our team could work, share and collaborate from any of our 23 cities virtually overnight. Because Chromebooks don’t require manual software updates or an IT support staff to troubleshoot, my team can focus less on maintenance and more on strategic IT projects, and ultimately, the kids. As a non-profit organization, cost is a major factor in every technology decision. The value that Google Apps and Chromebooks have delivered is unprecedented. Playworks has been able to save tens of thousands of dollars since we implemented Google Apps and deployed the Chromebooks. Based on estimates of what we previously spent on software and maintenance versus what we are spending now, I estimate we will save $50,000 - $70,000 per year. That translates to tremendous savings that can be redirected to improving our programs for kids. At the end of the day, while we are working to improve the health and well-being of children by increasing opportunities for physical activity and safe, meaningful play, Google is helping our team access the technology they need to transform recess in the communities that need it the most.

One click to Docs, Sheets, and Slides

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Posted by Jonathan Rochelle, Director of Product Management(Cross-posted from the Google Drive Blog.)DocsSheetsSlides

Chromebook

The new Chromebook, for every student

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Group Product Manager, Chrome for Education & BusinessToday on the Chrome blog we announced the new Samsung Chromebook for $249, an even more affordable way to bring the the web’s vast educational resources and apps to your students.At only 2.5 pounds and 0.8 inches thick, the new Chromebook zips along, booting in under 10 seconds and playing high resolution video beautifully. It automatically receives the latest security updates from Google and doesn’t require any manual IT set-up, so additional devices won’t mean skyrocketing support costs. A recent IDC sponsored white paper showed that Chromebooks for Education require 69 percent less labor to install and 92 percent less labor to support, delivering big cost savings by reducing the need to hire additional IT staff.

Our goal is to make computers more accessible to everyone and we hope that the new Chromebook makes it even easier for you to bring the power of the web to your classroom.Editors note: Join us for a Hangout On Air on Tuesday, October 23 at 11:00 am PDT/ 2:00 pm EDT/ 7:00 pm BST off of the Google in Education Google+ page. We’ll do a quick review of the details of the new device, compare it to other models, and take your live questions.

Google’s data centers: an inside look

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Posted by Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Technical Infrastructure(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog.)designs and best practicespublishing our efficiency data since 2008Where the Internet livesConnie Zhou

front doordata center floorexteriorWIREDSteven Levynew storycreative waysGoogle Green Blog

Two new ways to add location intelligence to your apps

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Posted by Nabil Naghdy, Google Maps Product Manager

Google Maps Tracks API allows an organization to build applications that can store, display and analyze GPS data on a map. The API is built on top of Google’s reliable cloud infrastructure and offers specialized features such as geo-fencing.

Google Maps Geolocation API enables an application or device to determine its own location without the use of GPS by looking up the locations of nearby wifi access points and cell towers. By limiting GPS usage, a device can save battery life and work indoors or in remote areas.

unique capabilitiesGoogle Maps Tracks APIGoogle Maps Geolocation APIcontact our sales team

Dong-A Pharmaceuticals gets on the road with the Google Maps API

Monday, October 15, 2012

Posted by Jungil Lee, Dong-A Pharmaceuticals(Cross-posted on the Google Korea blog.)Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Mr. Jungil Lee from Dong-A Pharmaceuticals. Dong-A Pharmaceuticals is one of many local businesses featured at Korea’s Geospatial Expo in Seoul. This event puts the spotlight on Korea’s growing geospatial technology sector and the businesses that are embracing maps and mobile work solutions to work smarter.

Bitro connects with the world with the Google Maps API

Monday, October 15, 2012

Posted by Junghoon Lee, Bitro(Cross-posted on the Google Korea blog.)Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Mr. Junghoon Lee from Bitro. Bitro is one of many local businesses featured at Korea’s Geospatial Expo in Seoul. This event puts the spotlight on Korea’s growing geospatial technology sector and the businesses that are embracing maps and mobile work solutions to work smarter.IDC estimates

Reselling Google Apps becomes even easier

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Posted by Jaideep Mirchandani, Product Manager, Google Enterprise

Add new customer accounts

Transfer customers

View customer subscription information

MegazoneDeveloper’s Guide

Streak powers their business on Google Cloud Platform

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Posted by Aleem Mawani, co-founder of Streak

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Aleem Mawani, co-founder of Streak, a startup alum of Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley incubator. Streak is a CRM tool built into Gmail. Aleem shares why Streak chose Google Cloud Platform to run their business.

Everyone relies on email to get work done – yet most people use separate applications from their email to help them with various business processes. Streak fixes this problem by letting you do sales, hiring, fundraising, bug tracking, product development, deal flow, project management and almost any other business process right inside Gmail. We decided to build Streak on Google Cloud Platform to operate at scale, to understand our users and improve the application over time, and to rapidly grow our business.

We chose to build Streak with Google App Engine for many reasons: it can handle tons of load; it requires no maintenance; and it guarantees 99.95% uptime. Streak’s user base grew 30% week over week for 4 consecutive months after launch. Being able to handle the load and data requirements at our scale would have required us to hire a full team of backend engineers just to keep the application running. Instead, the Streak backend on App Engine is built and maintained by a single engineer.

All of our data is stored in the App Engine Datastore, but we also mirror our data using Google Cloud Storage. As a result, Cloud Storage is a conduit to route this data to other Google cloud services, such as BigQuery and the Prediction API.

Last, we use Google BigQuery to better understand our users. It allows us to analyze large amounts of data from our usage logs and query it to answer complex questions such as:

How much does the average request cost broken down by type? How many users are running an old version of Streak? Are there currently any abnormal error rates in our application? On average, if a user is working in a 3 person team, how many deals do they have assigned to them?

We bundle the insights gained from BigQuery and use it to power our dashboards with key business metrics.

One of many Streak dashboards powered by BigQuery showing current usage statistics

When we first launched our business, we had gigabytes worth of data. Now, we anticipate growing to terabytes of data in just a few months. We couldn’t have scaled this easily without Google Cloud Platform. To learn more, check out our case study and our post on the App Engine blog for a detailed technical explaination.

Communicate more easily across languages in Gmail

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Posted by C. Andrew Warren, Product Manager(Cross-posted on the Gmail blog.)type

Enable input toolsLanguageSettingsturn on and off any Input Tool

introduced Indic transliterationChrome extensionthe Windows desktop client or the Android app

Introducing the Google Search Appliance, version 7.0

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Posted by Matthew Eichner, General Manager, Enterprise Search¹

Universal search

Powerful simplicity

More search magic for business

Document preview - view thumbnails and flip through full-screen document previews right alongside search results.

Google Translate - secure and automatic translations display in search results, in more than 60 languages.

Updated language capabilities - including parsing the complex morphology of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean to improve results. Expert search - tap into your organization’s knowledge graph, and instantly collaborate with colleagues who have answers.

New interface - a more beautiful search experience rolling out with the GSA 7 series.

Improved scale - a single rack of GSAs could now fit the equivalent of the entire Google.com index in 2000 – 1 billion pages.

our website1 Findwise, Enterprise Search and Findability Study (2012)^↩

Education On Air: Connecting teachers and learners across the world

Friday, October 5, 2012

Posted by Tia Lendo, Google in Education TeamGoogle Apps for Education

Education On Air: We have organized a series of over 100 Hangouts On Air that will be led by educators and Googlers. Topics range from “Flipping Your Classroom” to “Weekly Office Hours staffed by “Tech Sherpa” High School Students” to “A Conversation with Sal Khan”, founder of the Khan Academy.

Topics-of-the-day: Starting Monday we will begin a program of daily content aimed to help educate and inspire. We’ll reshare posts from educators on the following topics:

“Magic Moment Monday” - Inspiring, magic moments in schools
“Tutorial Tuesday” - Google Apps tips and tricks
“Web Apps Wednesday” - Web-based resources and apps
“Chrome Tip Thursday” - Chrome Ninja tips to make the most of the browser
“Fabulous Find Friday” - Any fabulous Education resource
“Show it Saturday” - YouTube EDU content
“Search for it Sunday” - Google Search Education tips

Google in Education Google+ pagevisit the Edu On Air site

Enhanced email management for user groups

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Posted by Adam Dawes, Product Manager, Google AppsGoogle Apps delivers a stream of innovation that brings new features to end users. That same innovation also applies to our Apps administrators. In the past 3 months, admins have gained a number of new capabilities in the control panel, including the ability to search email logs, manage mobile devices more easily, and manage email delivery. Today, Apps admins have another new capability to support the needs of different user groups in their business or organization. Email settings can now be applied to groups of users, known as organizational units, or OUs. Examples of these email settings include: IMAP & POP access to Gmail, offline access, email forwarding, email footers and many more.

Applying email management settings to user groups helps Apps administrators tailor the use of Gmail within their organization. It’s especially beneficial for organizations that have user segments with different compliance or security needs, such as allowing IMAP access to a specific group of users. Like all the features that Google Apps delivers, administrators just need to refresh their browser to get access to these updates. For more information on email settings for organizational units, please visit our Help Center.

Enhanced Chrome browser support for Google Apps customers

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Posted by Fred Beckebanze, Manager, Google Apps Technical Solutions EngineersBusiness is moving to the web. The web allows organizations of all sizes to get stuff done from anywhere, and work better together. The Chrome browser helps businesses get onto the web securely and quickly – and today, we’re adding phone and email support for Chrome for Google Apps customers.

Moving forward, Google Apps for Business, Education and Government customers may contact Google via phone or email to receive support on Chrome installation, functionality, security, browser policy settings and Google Apps interoperability for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. With Chrome you can securely sync your bookmarks, apps, settings and open tabs across devices – useful for the 98% of us who move between screens throughout our day. Google Apps also work great with Chrome, as features like offline document editing, desktop notifications and homescreen apps are currently only available in Chrome. If your organization uses a legacy app that isn’t compatible with Chrome, we suggest adopting a dual-browser strategy. The costs of using an old browser can range from reduced speed and feature gaps to exposure to critical security holes – far greater than the costs of supporting a second browser. Editor’s note: For Apps organizations running Windows, download the Microsoft Installer version of Chrome and centrally configure and deploy it to your employees. For organizations that support multiple operating systems, users or IT can download the Chrome client directly. Join us for a Google+ Hangout on Air on Wednesday, October 3 at 11am PDT (2pm EDT) to review new Chrome features and deployment practices for Google Apps customers. Go to the Google+ Your Business page at the start time and you’ll be tuned in.

Google BigQuery updates: Faster, easier and more data formats

Monday, October 1, 2012

Posted by Ju-kay Kwek, Product Manager

We know you have a lot of data to work with within your organization, which can present big challenges. Your data can be large in volume and complex in structure. For example, large-scale web applications have millions of users, documents and events to manage. As a result, many engineering teams choose highly scalable NoSQL databases over relational databases. Though this approach is effective in storing and retrieving data, it poses challenges for interactive data analysis.

Today’s release of Google BigQuery tackles these hurdles with several new features:

Support for JSON: JSON is used to power most modern websites, is a native format for many NoSQL databases hosting large scale web applications, and is used as the primary data format in many REST APIs. With this update, it’s now possible to import data formatted in JSON directly to BigQuery without the hassle of writing extra code to convert the data format.
Nested and Repeated Fields: If you’re using App Engine Datastore or other NoSQL databases, it’s likely you’re taking advantage of nested and repeated data in your data model. For example, a customer data entity might have multiple accounts, each storing a list of invoices. Now, instead of having to flatten that data, you can keep your data in a hierarchical format when you import to BigQuery.
Additional improvements:

Increased import quotas from 1000 jobs per day to 1000 jobs per table per day, and boosted the file size limit from 4GB to 100GB
Faster data exports from BigQuery to Google Cloud Storage, by enabling large tables to be exported as multiple files in parallel
Permanently save common queries in the BigQuery interface

To learn more about how Google BigQuery can help you gain insights from your data in the cloud, click here to sign up.

Handsome Coffee brews its way to success with Google Apps for Business

Monday, October 1, 2012

Posted by Mike Hudson, Creative Director of Handsome Coffee RoastersEditors note: To celebrate National Coffee Day, today’s guest blogger is Mike Hudson, Creative Director of Handsome Coffee Roasters, an artisan coffee company headquartered in Los Angeles, CA. See what another coffee company that has gone Google has to say.webpage

Official Blog

Share your work from Google Drive to Google+

Introducing the new compose in Gmail

Search. Click. Call. Get connected with your local expert today.

About today’s App Engine outage

Helping SMBs save money with the cloud

Playworks Transforms more than Recess with Chromebooks and Apps

One click to Docs, Sheets, and Slides

The new Chromebook, for every student

Google’s data centers: an inside look

Two new ways to add location intelligence to your apps

Dong-A Pharmaceuticals gets on the road with the Google Maps API

Bitro connects with the world with the Google Maps API

Reselling Google Apps becomes even easier

Streak powers their business on Google Cloud Platform

Communicate more easily across languages in Gmail

Introducing the Google Search Appliance, version 7.0

Education On Air: Connecting teachers and learners across the world

Enhanced email management for user groups

Enhanced Chrome browser support for Google Apps customers

Google BigQuery updates: Faster, easier and more data formats

Handsome Coffee brews its way to success with Google Apps for Business

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