'Net Features : google apps

New Business Tools for Google+

Allison Howen — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 17:00:00 GMT

Google has launched some new business tools for Google+, which aim to help colleagues collaborate more easily over the social network.

Currently, the new tools are in “full preview mode” for Google Apps customers. According to Google’s Blog, organizations that have already adopted Google Apps for businesses will be able to use Google+’s new business features for free through 2013.

The new features include private sharing, updates to video meetings and administrative controls. Learn more about each of the features below:

Private Sharing – Users can now mark posts as “restricted”, which are private to the user’s organization and can’t be shared with anyone else. However, the person who creates the post has the option to share it with specific partners or colleagues outside of the organization if desired.

Video Meetings – Video meetings powered by Google Hangouts now integrate with Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs. Since July, users have been able to join a multi-way video chat powered by Hangouts directly from Gmail, as well as have been able to open Google Docs while in a Hangout meeting. However, now users can also add a Hangout to a Calendar event, which allows attendees to join the meeting directly from the invite or Calendar entry.

Administrative Controls – These new controls enable administrators to set company-wide defaults for posts and Hangouts.

It is important to note that these are just the beginning of Google+’s new business features.

“We have a lot more planned for the coming months," states Google's blog. "Including a mobile version of Google+ for enterprise users and more administrative controls.”

The Best Web Tools for Businesses

Michael Garrity — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 17:00:00 GMT

Business advice start-up BestVendor released the data from a survey they implemented recently and it provides an interesting picture about the web tools that businesses are using.

Small businesses and start-ups can find it tricky to maneuver their way through the various Web-based tools available to them in areas like communication, productivity, finance, and IT. With new products constantly being launched in all of these areas, BestVendor wanted to aid these companies in their search through a seemingly endless amount of options to find those tools that will work best for them.

The survey was conducted by asking 550 start-up executives and managers (all of whom work in companies with 100 people or less) which tools they preferred for various business and business-related functions. Almost half (45 percent) of the respondents work in Tech companies. As BestVendor's own chart says, after compiling the data, "a few themes clearly emerge."

Google Apps, at only $5 a month, was considered one of the leading service providers when it comes to running a business.

More and more, small businesses seem to be moving away from on-premise software to on-demand Web applications that can be accessed directly from a browser.

Overall, the results weren't spectacularly alarming. Broken down by category, Google Apps was the most popular for company email, Quickbooks won out in accounting, Google Analytics was considered the best for Web analytics, Salesforce was the mostly highly accepted for customer relationship management, Adobe CSS was the best for website design, Dropbox triumphed in the storage/backup/virtualization category, and PayPal came out as the top tool for payment processing.

The chart also includes a few "hidden gems" to help the office run a bit more smoothly, such as IdeaPaint, HipChat, and Pandora or Turntable.

The study also breaks down some of the categories further. More detailed results from productivity, finance & accounting, development & IT, design, and Web operations can be found in BestVendor's offical chart below.

Five Google Announcements for Developers

Mike Phillips — Thu, 20 May 2010 20:00:00 GMT

Google IO kicked off this week, and among their many announcements are a few for developers, designers and publishers. There will be much more news to come, but for now here are five items of interest, currently in development.

Google App Engine for Business:

The Google App Engine has been around for a couple years, but now comes Google App Engine for Business - allowing business to build custom applications and run them in the cloud for greater portability and easier administration. Consider this service a direct competitor to Amazon EC2 and Microsoft's Azure platform. In addition to the centralized management features (a single administrative console) users will have access to Google API's in Java or Python, access to a hosted SQL relational database, and some added security with SSL communications on hosted apps. Each application costs $8 per user, per month, with a maximum of $1,000 per month.

AdSense Upgrades:

New AdSense options look to help publishers and developers better target their users. AdSense for search ads only lets publishers include ads on pages and include them in native search results -- above, below or beside the results. In the past, publishers could only use AdSense for search within Google results.

AdSense for Ajax solves the problem of serving relevant ads when content of a page changes. When a user is on an Ajax-heavy website, they can now be served changing ads based on the changing context within the page. In the past, new ads were only served when the page was refreshed. As Ajax does not require refreshing the page even when the context of the page changes, relevant ads were a problem.

There's an added benefit of AdSense for Ajax. From Google, "In addition to the ads refreshing, you might wonder why the subject of the ads changed since the crawlable content on the page didn't change much when the tab changed. The second benefit of AdSense for Ajax is that it allows you to provide hints about your site's uncrawlable content with each refresh."

Google Font API and Directory:

Google's Font Directory and API are now available, providing "high quality open source Web fonts" for everyone. The fonts are enabled by CSS3 @fontface standard, hosted in the cloud and sent to browsers as needed.

Each font is cross-browser compatible, fully searchable and accessible to users with screen readers. Utilizing search-engine friendly fonts is a nice way to separate your website from others and provide a little "flair" for users to enjoy.

Google Wave (Labs):

Wave might have started slow, but Google's new Wave (Labs) announcement might turn the tide. Wave is now open to businesses, schools and organizations. The focus is on collaboration within organizations. Members of a wave can play back previous developments within the wave and remove the discussion when the project is complete. Also, new extensions (such as maps and voting gadgets) allow for more collaboration, and developers can develop custom extensions within Wave to suit their needs.

More information about Wave is available, as is registration for a webcast that will detail new additions and answer user questions.

WebM:

In addition with other companies, (Mozilla, Brightcove, Skype, Opera and others) Google announced WebM, providing an open, standard video codec that looks to provide high-quality, optimized video under a royalty-free license. It includes:

VP8, a high-quality video codec we are releasing today under a BSD-style, royalty-free license
Vorbis, an already open source and broadly implemented audio codec
a container format based on a subset of the Matroska media container

According to Google, VP8 results in more efficient bandwidth usage (lower costs for publishers) and high-quality video for end users. A developer preview is available at www.webmproject.org.

Google Apps Plugin for MS Outlook & Exchange

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:59:00 GMT

Google Apps users will now be able to sync-up their Microsoft Outlook with their premier or education editions.

According to the official announcement:

Many business users prefer Gmail's interface and features to products they've used in the past. But sometimes there are people who just love Outlook. For them, we've developed Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook. It enables Outlook users to connect to Google Apps for business email, contacts and calendar. And they can always use Gmail's web interface to access their information when they're not on their work computer.

Google Apps users will be able to sync not only email, but calendar and contacts as well. A simple, two-click data migration tool allows employees to easily copy existing data from Exchange or Outlook into Google Apps.

Google Apps Reseller Program Unveiled

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:42:00 GMT

Google announced the launch of an authorized reseller program for Google Apps.

While some might see this as a direct attack on Microsoft's core product line (which it very well may be), Web hosting companies should really be the entities worrying. If web hosting resellers shift from promoting entire Web business configurations over to Google Apps, small hosting companies could end up all but obsolete. For this to happen though, Google will surely need to beef up its own services. But the threat is certainly there.

For those unfamiliar with Google Apps, it is a SaaS package of business applications such as email, calendar, group site creation, and document collaboration (watch a video on Google Apps here). Over 1 million companies already use the product, and some 3,000 new businesses sign up each and every day.

The challenge, however, for Google is that many of the businesses right for Google Apps don't have the expertise or resources to implement it correctly and integrate it into their existing business processes. That's where authorized resellers come in. Google is aiming to steal away some market share from hosting companies by training affiliates to resell its application bundle.

The Google Apps Authorized Reseller program gives affiliates the opportunity to earn product and service revenue (20% on each $50 per user/per year price) from their new and existing customers by deploying Google Apps. Google provides resellers with the standard marketing collateral (sales tools and technical training) and management accounts (console to create and manage customer accounts).