Official Google Cloud Blog

Help customers find their way with new Google Maps gadget

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Last week, I looked up directions to the hotel in Sacramento that I had booked for the Fourth of July weekend. As I had never been to that part of the state before, I was puzzled by the limited directions offered by their website - I had no idea whether I was approaching from the North, South, East or West or where the major highways were. What I needed were step-by-step directions from my exact starting point to the hotel that I could easily print and go.

With the new directions gadget from Google Maps, any business can offer just that. This simple gadget allows webmasters to add customized Google Maps directions to their business locations. With the directions gadget, you no longer need to type and update multiple sets of text directions. Let's face it: customers are only looking for directions from their specific location.

Google has made this process easy for you. The gadget allows you to pre-fill the "To" field with one or multiple addresses, a generic zip code or even a specific set of latitude-longitude coordinates. Customers are able to print their directions with a single click. And if they would prefer not to drive, the gadget also provides walking and public transit directions.

Take a look at how Legoland California, Emeril Lagasse, and Harvard University are using the gadget. And then test and create your own directions gadget here. For the many locations outside of the US, the gadget is available in 23 different languages.

If you're interested in learning more, head over to the Google Lat Long blog for a more detailed walk-through of the gadget's features.

Posted by Julie Zhou, Product Marketing Manager, Google Maps team

Google Apps Standard Edition: still free

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

We've heard some questions about why the link to Google Apps Standard Edition disappeared from the Enterprise Apps home page, so we wanted to share the answer. As we explored a few design changes to the page, the link to Standard Edition was inadvertently dropped, although the free version of Apps was, as always, available here. We've put the link back where it belongs so that it's easy to find.

We have no intention of eliminating Standard Edition, and we apologize for any confusion.

In other news, we've taken Google Apps out of beta today. You can read more about that here.

Posted by Ellen Leanse, Google Enterprise team

Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our RSS feed or email alerts.

Paving the road to Apps adoption in large enterprises

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Google Apps has always been a compelling offering for small and medium sized companies, and they've accounted for much of our growth to 1.75 million businesses. Large enterprises can also get great results with Apps, as Fairchild Semiconductor and the dozens of other big companies that have Gone Google have discovered. Still, we appreciate that there have been some boulders along the road to adoption for the largest businesses in the world.

Since the beginning of the year, we've focused on making it as easy as possible for those large enterprises to switch to Google, and offline access, BlackBerry and Microsoft Outlook support, and enterprise contact management were the dynamite that cleared the road to Apps.

Today we're paving the road. We're taking the beta label off of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk to remove any doubt that Apps is a mature product suite.

We're also launching a tool that will be particularly useful to administrative support staff to screen and send email on behalf of others – a feature called email delegation. And to help customers comply with regulations that may exist specific to their industry, we're adding email retention so that IT administrators can set up policies to determine when email will be purged. Both retention and delegation are in testing with customers, and will start rolling out to all Premier edition domains over the next weeks.

Finally, we're continuing to implement additional procedures to ensure that our business customers enjoy even greater reliability: live replication of data to other locations for near-instant disaster recovery, and special handling of business users' data in our data center operations.

While we believe these features will be most useful to big companies, we hope they'll also help today's small business grow into tomorrow's global enterprise. To complement these new features, enterprise IT managers can access tools for switching to Google Apps in our Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes resource centers.

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps

Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our RSS feed or email alerts.

Template galleries for Google Apps domains

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Since we launched the public template gallery last year for Google Docs, people who use Google Apps have been asking if they could have their own template galleries to share templates (everything from branded presentation designs to document letterhead to spreadsheet templates) with their co-workers.

Today, we've enabled these template galleries for Google Apps Premier and Education Edition customers. Anyone in your domain can submit templates created in Google Docs to your organization's own gallery. These templates will not be visible outside of your company domain. Templates can be any of the four document types in Docs (documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and even forms). Other people you work with can preview, use (making a copy of that template as a new document in their own account), and rate your templates.

Just like in the public template gallery, you'll be able to sort and narrow the templates by usage, rating, and document type. Administrators can also create categories of templates for the domain (for example: by function, region, or department) to keep templates organized.

Within Google, the most popular templates have been technical design documents and Google-branded presentation layouts. Teachers might share templates with other teachers in their school or district. For example, a teacher might submit a "Getting to Know You" form to send to students when school starts next year, and other teachers could use the template and customize it for their own classroom. Non-profits could create grant proposal templates that would give their employees a common starting point for proposals.

To submit a template, follow these steps:

Go to Google Docs from within your Google Apps account
Click New > From template to view your company's private gallery
On the upper right-hand side, click the "Submit a template" link

A few final notes: This feature is available in Google Apps Premier Edition and Education Edition only, and is available in all languages supported by Google Apps. Admins can configure the templates gallery service from within the Apps control panel (Control panel > Service settings > Docs > Templates).

Posted by Valerie Blechar, Software Engineer, Google Apps team

Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our RSS feed or email alerts.

Drag and drop, and organize your labels in Gmail

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Organizing email can be a challenge, especially in the workplace where it's not uncommon to get hundreds of messages a day. In Gmail, labels are key to organizing, archiving and filtering messages, so we've made a number of improvements to make labels more accessible and easier to organize.
New locationLabels are now located above the chat list in Gmail, grouped with default labels like Inbox and Drafts for quicker access (no more scrolling for those of us who keep a large chat list).
Hide and showIf you have labels that you don't regularly click on, you can hide them so they only appear when you click the "more" link. That way, your left nav is only filled with labels you consider to be a priority. Show, hide or delete labels by clicking the down-arrow to the left of a label.
To make changes to multiple labels at a time, go to the "Labels" tab under "Settings" where you can edit labels in bulk.

Drag and drop

We've added drag and drop capabilities that let you do a few things:

Hide and show labels by dragging and dropping them in and out of "more"
Instead of using the "Move to" button, drag messages into a label to label and archive in one step.
Instead of using the "Label" button, drag a label onto selected messages.

These updates are available across all editions of Google Apps.

For more details on this launch, check out the Gmail Team's announcement.

Posted by Joyce Sohn, Product Marketing Manager, Google Apps team

Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our RSS feed or email alerts.

Improvements to Google Apps contacts

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Today, we're happy to announce updates to contacts in Google Apps: new features that many of our enterprise customers have been asking for.
For starters, we've launched a new API that, when combined with the existing shared contacts API, gives administrators the ability to maintain an updated and detailed global address list in Google Apps.

We've also updated the Contacts interface throughout the Google Apps suite – particularly in Gmail – making it easier for employees to find and start collaborating with all other users on their company domain.
Global address list management

These GData APIs let administrators maintain and manage their company's global address list in Google Apps.

User profiles API

Administrators can retrieve and update profile information for all users on a company domain, giving companies the option to provide rich user information to make it easier for employees to find and contact each other.

Shared contacts API This API (launched in December of 2008) lets administrators perform all of the above, but for users who do not have accounts provisioned in Google Apps, ensuring that all users (not just those with a Google Apps account) are accounted for in the company's global address list.
These APIs are available exclusively to Google Apps Premier Edition customers.

Enhancements to Contacts
Until today, the only entries that would appear in Contacts in Gmail were those that the user had either explicitly added or had previously emailed. Starting today, when you search for a name, you'll see relevant results from your company's entire global address list, not just people you've emailed with in the past.
We've also made some improvements to the Contacts interface. When administrators add user details (job title, office location, department, cost center, etc.) through the APIs above to the company's global address list, the additional information provided will also display, making it easier for users to get in touch with each other. This also ensures that you get the most updated contact for everyone in your company.

Posted by Florian Niemann, Engineer, Google Apps team

Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our RSS feed or email alerts.

UPDATE: Please note that these changes are enabled for users of Google Apps Premier Edition and for users of Google Apps Education Edition. We apologize for the omission of educational users in our original post.

Q2 2009 Spam Trends

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Editor's Note: The spam data cited in this post is drawn from the network of Google email security and archiving services, powered by Postini, which provide email security to more than 50,000 organizations, including businesses of all sizes, government agencies, and educational institutions. To learn more about what the Gmail team is doing to keep spam out of your inboxes, check out this post.
Our "Spam Trend" update last quarter summarized the rise in both levels and types of spam, with new players and techniques entering the market. This quarter, proliferation continues, with an unpredictable pattern of drops and spikes as 2009 moves along. Overall, spam is measurably up: Q2'09 average spam levels are 53% higher than in Q1'09 and 6% higher than in Q2'08.

After last November's McColo ISP takedown, when spam volumes dropped by 70%, spammers worked overtime to fill the void. They succeeded: Within four months, spam levels rose back to pre-McColo levels. This upward trend continued through June 4, when another large ISP spam source, 3FN, was reported to have been dismantled. Spam volume immediately dropped 30% – not as extreme as McColo, but still significant. Although this created a sudden dip in spam levels, it also created an open invitation for opportunistic spammers to once again seize a market opportunity.

Over the coming months, we anticipate watching new players once again drive spam levels back up. Since June 4, spammers have already made up a significant amount of ground, climbing 14% from the initial drop.

Here's what the trend looked like, as tracked through Postini filters, over the past six months:

"Unpredictability" summarizes the overall trend as Q2'09 winds down and spammers test both new and "retro" techniques. For example, on June 18 we tracked a new attack that unleashed 50% of a typical day's spam volume in just two hours' time. This attack used a simple "newsletter" template – somewhat "old school" by today's spam standard – with malevolent links and images inserted into the content. Google's Postini filters detected more than 11,000 variants of this spam during those two hours. Because this spam enabled spoofing of the recipient domain (meaning the "from" field was falsified), distribution lists were especially hard-hit by this attack.

Resurgence of image spam

One of the other trends we're watching closely is the sudden popularity of "image spam" – a form of spam that rose to prominence in 2007, before most anti-spam filters learned how to block it. It's simple stuff: basic email with advertising content, usually containing a related image. They can also include malicious links or content – and either way, the large file size of an image spam can place a heavy load on an email network.

An image spam email might look something like this:

Evidence of the resurgence in image spam can be seen in the graph below, which shows that the actual size of spam messages, measured in bytes, is back on the rise:

There are a couple of possible explanations for the resurgence in image spam, despite the fact that most spam filters out there have adapted to the technique. One theory is that this wave is designed to test the defenses of the different spam filters out there, so that spammers can do statistical analysis on what subject lines and content have the highest probability of success.

Another is that there may be some new players entering the spam game, following the McColo and 3FN takedowns, and these new players are opening with some well-tested techniques. Either way, we're watching this trend and will share insights as we gain them in the weeks and months ahead.

Spike in payload viruses

June was also an active month for viruses sent as email attachments, otherwise known as "payload viruses." Volumes rose to their highest level in almost two years as spammers returned to yet another tried-and-true technique to expand their botnets.

As you can see in the chart below, June's activity is almost as high as the two-month payload virus surge seen in Q3'07. Fortunately, Google's Postini zero-hour heuristics detected this uprise early and kept payload attacks in the cloud and away from users' email networks.

Everything old might be new again

In summary, Q2'09 saw continued unpredictability and the resurgence of old-style spam attacks. Are spammers finally running out of original ideas? And if so, like Hollywood, are we now starting to see spam "remakes," based on originals of a few years ago? And what are spammers looking to accomplish as they unleash these remakes? Only time will tell.

For more information on how Google email security services, powered by Postini, can help your organization provide better spam protection and take a load off your network by halting spam in the cloud, visit www.google.com/postini.

Posted by Amanda Kleha, Google message security and archiving team

Official Blog

Help customers find their way with new Google Maps gadget

Google Apps Standard Edition: still free

Paving the road to Apps adoption in large enterprises

Template galleries for Google Apps domains

Drag and drop, and organize your labels in Gmail

Improvements to Google Apps contacts

Q2 2009 Spam Trends

Labels

Archive

Feed

Useful Links

Company-wide

Products

Developers