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Posted by Martijn Nykerk, Senior Consultant Group IT

Editor's note: Our guest blogger this week is Martijn Nykerk, Senior Consultant Group IT at Randstad, the Netherlands-based global provider of HR services and the second largest staffing organization in the world. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.



HR is fundamentally about people. That may seem obvious, but in our firm that takes unusual dimensions. Randstad is one of the biggest staffing companies in the world and has some 29,000 employees working from more than 4,500 branches in 40 countries around the world. We help companies and candidates connect in industries such as engineering, finance and accounting, healthcare, human resources, managed services, pharma and technology. To give you an idea, we place on average well over 500,000 people per day. We’ve grown to become quite large since we began as a small company started in a student dorm room in 1960 and our business has changed quite a bit in that time. But at its core, we’re still the same. We’re all about people.

With so many employees in locations across the world, we had several different email and collaboration systems in place and were looking to standardize. A majority of employees around the world were using Microsoft Outlook for email and Lotus Notes for collaboration, but we ran into several problems. For one, both Outlook and Lotus Notes weren't seamlessly integrated with other systems, requiring our employees to find workarounds and solve formatting issues on their own. This wasted valuable time on the part of both the employee and IT department. In addition, both Outlook and Lotus Notes are primarily hosted solutions, which makes it difficult to collaborate across our many locations.

Our decision making process involved several companies, but ultimately we decided on Google for a few different reasons. We have a workforce of younger, web-savvy employees and we heard the feedback that they are quite familiar with Google tools like Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive and Google+ Hangouts in their personal lives, and on a variety of devices, and that they'd like to use them at work too. Also, because the Google tools are all integrated, we wouldn't run into the problem of having employees across offices and countries having to work with several different pieces of technology that don’t work well together. Lastly, the availability of resellers such as G-company was a big plus. We wanted to provide our employees with as much training as they needed and G-company were able to provide that. Our rollout will eventually include all 29,000 Randstad employees, 5,000 of whom are located in the Netherlands. Our employees in France, Japan and India, approximately 8,000, are already on Google.

We’re right in the middle of our rollout, but early feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. We can simply do things that weren't possible before. For example, it has become much easier to search and access mail, calendar and documents when on the road, or for an employee in France to schedule a video chat with an employee in The Netherlands in a Hangout. It’s a conference call, but it’s so much more - it’s a conference call that’s based around people, not technology. For an HR company, that’s exactly what we’re looking for in a technology partner.

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Thousands of organizations deploy Google Apps every day, and a challenge for some large businesses has been migrating employees on multiple domains. Until now, companies that ran into this issue could either set up other domains as domain aliases or set up different Google Apps accounts for each domain, neither of which was an ideal solution. Now there’s a better way: multi-domain support in Google Apps.

Multi-domain support is a new admin control that allows organizations with two or more domains on Google Apps to manage them from a single control panel. Users belonging to different domains within an organization keep their domain-specific email address but can see coworkers from other domains in the organization’s global address book. It’s also easy for users to share across domains in Google Docs, Sites and the rest of Google Apps. Matt Vandenbush, director of IT strategy and architecture at Brady Corporation, says, "Multi-domain support in Google Apps lets us administer our entire organization from one central place. Considering that we have users on 88 different domains, this is a big time-saver for our IT department, and it lets employees from different parts of our organization share information much more seamlessly than before.”
This feature is available now to Premier and Education edition users at no additional charge. To learn more about multi-domain support on Google Apps, please visit our Help Center or join us for a live webinar on Tuesday, July 13th at 9am PST / 12pm EST / 5pm GMT.

Posted by Will Smit, Software Engineer, Google Apps
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Editor's note: Today's guest blogger is Kevin Crawford, Assistant General Manager for the City of Los Angeles Information Technology Agency. Kevin was part of a team of technology executives that chose Google Apps six months ago to support the city's 30,000+ employees and 44 different departments, from police and fire to transportation and more. In the past, Kevin has served as CIO of Sound Transit, senior manager of IT infrastructure at Port of Seattle, and support manager at Weyerhauser. Kevin shares his thoughts about how the US's second largest city has gone Google in perhaps one of the most-watched technology deployments in recent memory. This post is a follow-up to the initial blog post on the City of LA from Randi Levin, CTO.

Kevin will speak at a live webcast this Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 2:00 PM (EDT) | 11:00 AM (PDT) Register today.

The City of Los Angeles currently faces a $400 million deficit, but from a technology standpoint, we still have to provide advanced tools to 30,000+ employees and 44 different departments – technology is vital to the inner workings of the city. Running a city of this size requires people to work together, from designing and operating public facilities to policing the streets.

At the city’s Information Technology Agency (ITA), we are responsible for managing all of the City's enterprise applications – including email. Up until about six months ago, we had an aging, on-premise email system. Our Novell Groupwise system didn't work on some mobile devices and we had to enforce inbox space quotas that City employees found limiting.

In addition to providing better collaboration tools and remote access, we also needed archiving and disaster recovery capabilities to safeguard information. Disaster recovery precautions are especially important in this part of the world where earthquakes are not a question of if, but when.

We looked at 15 different proposals and went through extensive due diligence, finally gaining the City Council's unanimous buy-in with a 12-0 vote in favor of a proposal from Google and CSC. We found that Google Apps provided the richest, most cost-effective and efficient communication solutions. That was six months ago. Since then, we've worked with CSC to implement Google Apps City-wide.

By ITA estimates, Google Apps is saving Los Angeles $5.5 million over five years by allowing us to shift resources currently dedicated to email to other purposes. For example, moving to Google has freed up nearly 100 servers that were previously used for our existing email system, which in turn – an unanticipated benefit – is lowering our electricity bills by hundreds of thousands over five years. Los Angeles found Google's system availability of 99.9% and service levels for response in the event of an issue to be equivalent – if not better – to what we could provide ourselves. In short, this decision to go Google helps us safeguard information and get the most out of the city's IT budget.



Because we are such a large government organization, people are eager to hear how our deployment is going. We also built a Google Site to help us easily provide updates on the process and gather input from our user base. We'd be pleased to discuss the progress we've made in the six months since we unanimously decided to go to Google Apps. Please join me for an interactive webinar!

On switching 30,000 Employees to Google Apps
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Time: 2:00 PM (EDT) | 11:00 AM (PDT)


Posted by Serena Satyasai, The Google Apps Team

Do you have an informative and fun Google Apps story to share? Please submit it here.
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Editor's note: Today's guest blogger is Cathy Lilli, Director of Infrastructure Services for Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A. (Konica Minolta). Konica Minolta Business Solutions is a leader in advanced imaging and networking technologies for the desktop to the print shop. Cathy's team recently spearheaded the company's switch to Google Apps. Today, the team reports that Google Apps not only provides email, but also integrates collaboration, security, and spam blocking – all while freeing the entire IT department to spend more time on forward-looking enterprise initiatives.

Cathleen Lilli serves as Director of Enterprise Infrastructure Services where she leads the corporate teams responsible for Data Center Operations, Network Services (Data and Voice), Client Services (Help Desk and Desktop Support), and Messaging & Security. Christopher Henry serves as Manager, Messaging and IT Security, where he is responsible for the management of the corporate messaging group as well as the Coordination of all IT security activities.

Cathy will be joined by Chris Henry, Manager of Messaging and IT Security on a live webcast this Thursday, June 17, 2010 2:00 p.m. EDT / 11:00 a.m. PDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT. Register today.

At Konica Minolta, we had an aging Lotus Notes®/Domino® messaging environment along with other messaging platforms in the mix supporting 6,000-plus users across all of our U.S. locations, and it was time to make a change. Our users were dabbling in Microsoft SharePoint®, and they were adopting their own instant messaging tools. We wanted to make collaboration tools available to everyone by default. And we wanted an easy way to keep the business moving forward with future innovations.

On the IT front, we no longer wanted to spend a significant amount of time on constant tactical chores like server updates, storage management and patching. The on-premise environment was too cumbersome to maintain and was pulling away our focus from strategic initiatives that would provide more business value. We also had to find an easier way to integrate multiple corporate acquisitions (we had just acquired Danka and had to merge 2,000 users on multiple messaging platforms into our infrastructure).

We already had positive experiences with cloud-based solutions such as Postini for anti-virus/anti-spam protection, ADP for payroll, and a CRM. Our main goals from the outset were to:
  • Better meet our user requirements, especially regarding ease of use and collaboration
  • Simplify IT management
  • More easily integrate acquisitions

With Google Apps, we saw that we could get a powerful, low maintenance- and complexity-free email solution plus innovative collaboration tools that would have cost extra in Microsoft® Exchange or Lotus Notes®/Domino®. But, we had to convince our parent company that Google Apps was the right choice since they were on a Microsoft® Exchange environment. We had many discussions and we did a lot of due diligence, particularly around Google's security expertise and policies.

We created a requirements document, and we talked to several large enterprise customers of Google Apps. At the time, we were completing the Danka merger and it involved shutting down a data center, so things in IT were pretty hectic. Despite these complicating factors, the switch to Google Apps went smoothly and with almost no complications. Today, Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A. Inc. has benefited significantly. We can:
  • Provide not just email, but also collaboration, security, and spam-blocking all in one solution
  • Deliver genuine, bottom-line value to the business, driven by continuous innovations from Google
  • More easily integrate new acquisitions like Danka
  • Align our activities to help drive Konica Minolta's business forward
We did not make this decision lightly and the IT team had many internal discussions about our role going forward in a cloud environment. Staff questioned, if we're not responsible for the servers on a maintenance basis – what will happen to our jobs?. But I can tell you, on top of owning messaging, we still have other apps to manage and run the data center - in other words, we have plenty to keep us busy. From our point of view, we couldn't be happier that we made the decision to migrate to Google Apps.

It has been so rewarding to move from an internal infrastructure for messaging that was cumbersome and challenging to support – one that was not getting us anywhere in terms of having a forward-looking impact on the business – to one that allows us to start delving into strategic initiatives.

Whether you need to integrate acquisitions or deliver more value from enterprise IT, we have a lot of perspective and lessons learned that we'd be pleased to share with you. Join us for this live webcast:

http://webcasts.techrepublic.com.com/abstract.aspx?docid=1825337
Thursday, June 17, 2010
2:00 p.m. EDT / 11:00 a.m. PDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT


Posted by Serena Satyasai, the Google Apps team

Find customer stories and research product information on our resource sites for current users of Microsoft® Exchange and Lotus Notes®/Domino®.





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Every day thousands of companies move to Google Apps, but it's not that often that we get to bring Apps to those who already work among the clouds. We're excited to share that KLM Royal Dutch Airlines has moved 11,200 of their crew members to Gmail as part of their Google Apps Premier Edition deployment. KLM crew members will now be able to send and receive email effectively from any location and using any Internet connected device, including personal laptops, shared computers, BlackBerry devices, mobile phones, or PDA devices.

The adoption of Gmail marks KLM's move to cloud computing. With 25 GB of storage per account, Gmail provides them with a powerful, intuitive and efficient messaging platform with integrated IM (Google Talk) and a series of additional features that facilitate communication.

For example, message translation allows KLM employees to translate email from and into 42 different languages with one click of the mouse. The employees' familiarity with Google's consumer products meant that minimal or no training was needed to complete the deployment.

If you're interested in joining KLM in the cloud, check out http://www.google.com/a

Posted by Adrian Joseph, Managing Director of Google Enterprise for Europe, Middle East and Africa
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Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Barry Driscoll, Senior Director of IT for Fairchild Semiconductor, the $1.2 billion chipmaker. Barry has more than 15 years of IT experience in the semiconductor industry. His responsibilities include enterprise IT support for telecommunications, messaging, database administration, and product design infrastructure as well as responsibility for business applications supporting finance, human resources, and business intelligence.

Barry will be available on a live webcast this Thursday, January 28, at 2:00 p.m. EST, 11:00 a.m. PST, 7:00 p.m. GMT to talk about his company's experience switching to Google Apps, and to answer your questions about this process.

At the end of 2008, we were at a crossroads for our email and collaboration tools. We had to make a long-term decision on what direction to take. At the time, we had over 6,000 Lotus Notes/Domino users around the world using an older platform (Lotus Notes/Domino version 6.5). We had some serious challenges: our users were frustrated with the outdated Notes/Domino functionality, the IT environment was complicated, and the ongoing maintenance costs were high. At the same time, we were working to implement an email archiving and e-discovery solution that was, frankly, not going well. To add to the mix, the world economy was in free-fall and our business was seeing those effects.

We wanted to improve our messaging tools while simplifying the IT environment, but needed a cost-effective approach. We originally thought we should upgrade our existing solutions to the latest releases, but knew that was going to be a time-consuming and expensive approach. So, we started seriously evaluating other options. During our review, we considered the hosted versions of the Lotus and Microsoft offerings, but ultimately focused our attention on evaluating Google Apps.

When Paul Lones, our SVP of IT, first suggested taking a look at using Google Apps as our enterprise email tool, we thought he was joking. But when we started looking at the capabilities, benefits, and costs of Google's enterprise offering, we were very impressed. We then began a more thorough technical and functional review. We determined that the core capabilities for email, calendar, contacts, and IM would probably meet our needs. Since email archiving and discovery were also critical for us, we looked at the Postini solutions. Again, we thought the delivered Postini features would work for Fairchild. Beyond the basics, we also saw the added value of Google's collaboration features available from Google Sites and Google Docs, and the anywhere/anytime access provided by Google's cloud-based services. Finally, we did an ROI analysis and estimated we’d save about $500,000 per year by migrating off of Lotus Notes/Domino. So, we made a case to our CEO and executive team to move forward with a pilot project using Google Apps.

For the pilot, we selected a core group of IT and business employees and asked for some volunteers. To our surprise the CEO and the entire executive team volunteered. As a result, we also included the executive assistants. Although having the execs in the pilot raised the stakes, it turned out to be one of the keys to the project's success. To help us get up to speed quickly and run the pilot smoothly, we partnered with Appirio Consulting. Appirio had previous experience converting large corporations from Lotus Notes/Domino to Google Apps. Appirio conducted one-on-one or small group training sessions for the pilot users and targeted training for the executive admins because of the complexity of their jobs when it comes to collaboration, email, and calendar management.

After a successful pilot, we made the decision to migrate the whole company to Google. The next group of employees migrated were 400 "early adopters" from across the company, including all owners of Notes/Domino applications and databases. The idea was to give these people a head start in moving any important non-email content from Lotus to Google Apps. For the early adopters, we used a combination of live and recorded web-based training. These early adopters also became "Google guides" for the rest of the user base during the full company migration.

Ultimately, we deployed Google Apps to over 6,000 users in 20 countries in less than five months. This deployment included migrating contacts, calendar entries, and up to 12 months of historical email, plus providing BlackBerry support. At the same time, we implemented the email security and email archiving capabilities available using Google's Postini platform.

Now we are providing our employees with a lot more functionality for a lot less money. Google Docs and Sites are really changing the way people work as teams, and the way information is shared. This new way of doing working is really powerful, especially for a company that does business in so many countries and timezones. We are now looking at Google Sites to replace our existing intranet. But the ability to access Gmail and the other Google Apps from anywhere – without having to use a VPN – has probably been the biggest hit.

We learned a lot of valuable lessons throughout the process of evaluating and migrating to Google Apps that we’d be happy to share with you. Please join me to discuss our experience in more detail and to learn how you might leverage Google Apps for your company.

Join us for this LIVE Event on:
Switching from Lotus Notes/Domino to Google Apps by Fairchild Semiconductor
Thursday, January 28, 2010
2:00 p.m. EST / 11:00 a.m. PST / 7:00 p.m. GMT


Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps team

Find customer stories and research product information on our resource sites for current users of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino.
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As we approach the holidays, retailers are gearing up for the seasonal shopping traffic. While they can't, of course, control overall consumer spending, they can control the experience they provide to consumers – both in their brick-and-mortar stores and online.

To help accomplish this, today we're announcing a new product, Google Commerce Search, to power e-commerce and search for online stores.

In the online shopping world, search quality is a big factor in converting browsers to buyers, and in keeping customers happy. In fact, 43% of visitors to online retail sites say the very first thing they do is type the product name or product category into the search box (MarketingSherpa).

While most of the top retailers have a search engine on their websites, the speed and accuracy of search results can make a real difference in visitor engagement and conversion rates. Visitors spend an average of only 8 seconds before deciding whether or not to remain on a website (MarketingSherpa), so fast, accurate results can make a big difference in conversion.

That's why we're prioritizing speed and search quality for online stores with Google Commerce Search (GCS). GCS is a hosted, cloud-based offering that brings the relevancy, speed, and Google ease-of-use to e-commerce sites. Learn more here:



GCS also has a bunch of user-friendly features that make shopping on online stores easier, and search results more refined and accurate. Some of those features are:
  • speed – GCS leverages Google's ultra fast platform, because it's hosted, providing sub-second response times to users.
  • Google quality and ranking – GCS analyzes every item in the data feed using proprietary signals to determine its optimal placement in the result set, for more accurate query results for shoppers.
  • parametric search and sorting – GCS allows users to refine or sort results by category, price, brand, or other attribute; this is fully-functional parametric search for e-stores.
  • product boost and promotions – Retailers can boost the relevance of certain items, or highlight specific products during a sale, and cross-sell related products.
  • spell check, stemming and synonyms – By leveraging the larger Google search engine, GCS can include these advanced search and synonym options, so the shopping experience is smoother for customers – even customers who mistype.
  • fast deployment and scale – Since this is a cloud-based offering, GCS can be deployed in days and, because it's hosted on the Google platform, retailers can scale to meet their higher-demand periods like the holidays without worrying about slowdowns or spikes.
The hosted factor is a key feature in making GCS easy for administrators to use. Because there's no hardware (or software, servers, operating systems, cables, or any other equipment), admins can upload product information to Google Merchant Center and provide a few extra customization parameters – and Google Commerce Search utilizes that product feed to power their website store search.

Retailers can use the same feed to submit their products for indexing in Google Product Search as well, cutting down on time and tech costs.

With GCS, any e-commerce website can provide visitors with an improved shopping experience. That improvement can drive higher visitor-to-buyer conversion rates. While the conversion rates of most retailers is around 3% (Forrester), the best-performing sites have been able to achieve much higher conversion rates – even reaching double digits. For the top online retailers, improving the conversion rate from 3% to even 4% might actually mean improving online sales by 33% – a jump that can represent millions of extra dollars each month.

GCS frees online stores to do what they do best – create the product and promotional mix that their visitors need – and leaves Google to do what we do best: search. This helps retailers improve conversions and drive the sales that matter this holiday season – and, in fact, all year 'round.

Learn more about GCS at google.com/commercesearch.

Posted by Anna Bishop and Eric Larson, Google enterprise search team
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When we launched Google Search Appliance 6.0 in June we introduced a brand new architecture, (GSA)n. The GSA now lets organizations search over a billion documents, and we are constantly looking to develop on (GSA)n even further. In that vein, our engineers have been working feverishly to build more capabilities and ease of use into the appliance. Today we're announcing more than 10 new features available on the GSA from Google Enterprise, including one that automatically improves results over time, the Self-Learning Scorer. Take a look here:


Self-Learning Scorer analyzes employee clicks and behavior to automatically fine-tune and improve its built-in relevance. For instance, if most users click on the fourth result for a given query, the GSA recognizes that and automatically boosts its placement – without any intervention from an administrator. Along with our existing and intuitive biasing features and Ranking Framework, this provides ease of relevance tuning.

Most enterprise search engines do three things: crawl, index and serve. With the new Self-learning Scorer, we're adding a new step to the mix: analysis. As the GSA continually serves up results, it's also learning to dynamically improve – automatically. This gives the GSA new self-improving intelligence, and adds a new step to the enterprise search cycle.


With this release, we're adding a new login feature, which provides a simple approach to securely mapping user credentials to the various back-end systems within an organization. Many larger organizations may have not one, but several 'single sign-on' systems, so this new universal login feature minimizes the number of logins for the user when performing an internal search across all company systems.

Today we're also expanding connectivity to a myriad of systems, including content management systems, file shares and databases. We are newly providing native integration for SharePoint out of the box, making indexing of SharePoint content 10x faster. Second, we are providing connectivity to Lotus Notes through Enterprise Labs. Third, we are expanding our support for file shares and databases, so organizations can connect to any file share or database in any format. The new GSA is built to be easier for users and admins – these connectors will make everyone in the office's life easer. We're also expanding the connectors program in our Enterprise Labs, live here.

These are just a couple of the product updates – you can learn about all the new features in this video too. Getting IT admins away from the tuning knobs and back to their real jobs will be a major benefit to our customers. More importantly, it will make employees across the company more productive. When internal search results improve, employees actually search more and find more information with which to do their work. You can read more about this on our blogpost, from a major US pharmaceutical company tracking the number of employee searches over time. After deploying the GSA, employees actually used their internal network significantly more – simply because it worked better.

Enterprise search isn't just about ECMs, connectors and security – it's about utilization. More relevant search results mean more employees utilizing the tools of their trade. Today's GSA update brings the search appliance into the realm of constant innovation – and self-improving intelligence. You can learn more about how the GSA adds the analytical step to the enterprise search cycle at GSA at google.com/gsa.

Posted by Cyrus Mistry, Product Manager, Google Enterprise Search
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In large enterprises today, employees and administrators are trying to make sense of the volumes of content created by and living inside their companies, and quite a few of these organizations are turning to enterprise content management (ECM) systems. According to Forrester Research, ECM license revenue was projected to reach $3.9B in 2008.

Yet, over the past few years, as companies have spent significant dollars on their ECM systems, they've come to realize one thing. Content management systems are great at being repositories of information, yet individual employees still struggle to find the exact document they are looking for – even if they know it's in the ECM system. In other words, finding information can be a painful process.

Which leads us to the latest thinking from AMR Research, which provides comprehensive research and advisory services for supply chain and IT executives. Jim Murphy, Research Director for Knowledge Management at AMR Research, is looking at effective search as the missing element of a content management solution. While many content management systems have a built-in search feature, the capability and relevance of this functionality is typically not up to par. Murphy has been talking to many enterprises who are increasingly looking to separate enterprise search solutions to provide high quality search across not only their ECM system, but across other major repositories in their companies as well.

One such enterprise Murphy has spoken to is Mercer. As a global services company in 180 cities and 40 countries, Mercer has 19,000 employees, many of whom need to access information instantly to effectively serve their clients. Their business depends on leveraging intellectual capital and sharing best practices. So even though their intranet linked to Livelink, an ECM system which stored 1.5 million documents, there was no comprehensive search tool spanning all of the companies. After evaluating many different search technologies, Mercer made the choice to bring in the Google Search Appliance to provide universal search across their intranet.

As Haroon Suleman, Mercer's Lead Enterprise Architect for enterprise search, explains, "The Google Search Appliance won hands down. The fact that the Google Search Appliance provided a bridge to Livelink, and can provide future SharePoint connectivity if needed, was a major selling point."

Both Murphy and Suleman will join us on Thursday, October 8 for a webinar titled "Search: A Vital Element of an ECM Strategy." Murphy will present AMR's views on the ECM and enterprise search space, and Suleman will share the Mercer story, discussing Mercer's business needs, needs behind enterprise search, and specific metrics from users on how the Google Search Appliance has been increasing productivity. Register for the webinar and join the conversation – and the question and answer session at the end of the session.

Thursday, October 8, 2009
11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT

Maybe ECM systems need good search too, after all.

Posted by Vijay Koduri, Google Search Appliance team
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Providers of cloud computing services like Google are equipped to protect millions of users' data every day – it's core to how we run our business. Our users enjoy our economies of scale at minimal expense. We also employ some of the world's best security experts to help to make sure that your data stays safe.


On October 1, join us for a live webcast with some of our top security experts who are on the front lines of fighting spam, malware, and phishing for Google Apps users, designing identity management systems for hosted web apps, and monitoring the Google network for potential threats. Register for this live webcast, “How Google Tackles IT Security – and What You Can Learn From It,” to learn about security in the cloud and get your questions answered by members of Google's Security team. Participants include:

Eran Feigenbaum – As the Director of Security for Google Apps, Eran Feigenbaum defines and implements security strategy for Google's suite of solutions for enterprises. Prior to joining Google in 2007, Eran was the US Chief Information Security Officer for PricewaterhouseCoopers.

John Flynn – John “Four” Flynn has an extensive background in network monitoring, intrusion detection, and incident response. John currently leads Google's Security Monitoring program and is a founder of Google's Security Metrics group.

Bradley Taylor – Gmail's “Spam Czar,” Brad Taylor leads Gmail's technical anti-spam, anti-abuse, and email delivery engineering efforts. Brad has played a key role in the development of Gmail's spam filter since Gmail launched in April, 2004.

Eric Sachs – Eric Sachs has over 15 years of experience with user identity and security for hosted web applications. During his years at Google, he has worked as a Product Manager for many services including Google Accounts, Google Apps, orkut, Google Health, Google Security, and Internal Systems.

While circumstances may vary, most IT departments face similar security challenges. Find out more from the people who confront these issues every day here at Google.

Join us for our live webcast to learn about the people, best practices, and technologies that we have in place to minimize security threats.

How Google Tackles IT Security – and What You Can Learn From It
Thursday, October 1, 2009
11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT

We hope to see you there.

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps team

Find customer stories and product information on our resource sites for current users of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino.
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Editor’s note: Brent Hoag is Senior Director, IT for JohnsonDiversey, formed when Johnson Wax Professional acquired DiverseyLever. Its focus is on providing products to commercial businesses for food safety, housekeeping, and industrial cleaning. Throughout its history, the company has been dedicated to leadership in environmental issues, health, and safety. You can read more about the company's work in these areas in the post we shared a few days back.

Please join Brent and members of the Google Enterprise team for a live webcast this Thursday, September 17, at 2:00 p.m. EDT / 11:00 a.m. PDT.

When we first decided to switch to Google Apps from Lotus Notes/Domino, we planned on using a typical IT deployment process. As a global company, JohnsonDiversey (JDI) conducts "go-lives" in its IT environment almost weekly, and therefore we are all old hands at managing rollouts to achieve a smooth technical transition and minimize business disruption.

Given that Google Apps would impact all of our 12,000 global users spread across 168 locations and 70 countries, we made two assumptions. First, we thought a phased migration would be best. We planned to migrate employee data and continue to support our two legacy local email clients at the same time. Second, we’d staff a command center to handle the flood of calls from employees trying to learn the new system.

Both assumptions proved totally wrong.

As we delved deeper into our migration planning and learned from our early adopters, we realized that we would be better off using a big bang approach. One major reason is that getting everyone onto a single system faster reduces the largest pain of having co-existence of two systems for any amount of time.

Google Apps is helping JDI, as a global company, communicate and collaborate better from a single platform. Under our old Lotus Notes/Domino system, even simple tasks like booking meetings were difficult, because employees could not easily see the details of someone's availability, an agenda or other participants. People’s inboxes were also filling up when they were traveling. With Google Apps, we realized we would solve many problems at once (read Part I of our story here).

What did we actually end up doing? We provided Apps to early adopters who became business champions – and ultimately helped others if they ran into issues. We decided to support only the web interface and provided early access prior to go-live to mitigate login issues. We also provided tools for self-service migration and put up a Google Site providing a centralized point of information. We offered global deployment support for the first two days after go-live.

Since deploying, we've received some nice feedback and results:
  • one employee told us "this is the first project that IT did for the users rather than to the users"
  • our help desk volume has substantially dropped from our legacy steady state call volume and most of the questions are "how-to"
  • our department has more time to work on strategic initiatives
You can watch a bit more about our success with Google Apps here:



Moving 12,000 people over to any new solution can be daunting – but it can also be painless. We found that out the easy way. We would be happy to share our experiences with you. Join us for a webinar:

Migrating 12,000+ users from Lotus Notes/ Domino to Google Apps in 48 hours
Thursday, September 17, 2009
2:00 p.m. EDT / 11:00 a.m. PDT

We'll share our story and be happy to answer your questions.

Brent Hoag, Director, IT, JohnsonDiversey

Posted by Serena Satyasai, The Google Apps team

Find customer stories and product information on our resource sites for current users of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino.
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Editor's Note: We're pleased to welcome Ron Brister, Senior Manager of Global IT Operations, and Arron Privatsky, System Administrator, of Serena Software as our guest bloggers today. Serena Software, a leading provider of software to accelerate application development, helps IT departments keep pace with the demands of the businesses they support. Serena’s tools automate software development processes and help business users create powerful mashups – without requiring any coding. Serena is a privately owned company with 29 offices in 14 countries and 800 employees. Founded more than 25 years ago, Serena has more than 15,000 customers including 96 of the Fortune 100.

Serena Software recently selected Google Apps Premier Edition for its messaging and collaboration needs, saving more than $750,000 and countless IT hours. Members of Serena Software will be on hand next Thursday, June 18, to talk about that experience in a live webcast. Register here.

My name is Ron Brister, and I’m Senior Manager of Global IT Operations at Serena Software. I'm here with Arron Privatsky, System Administrator for Serena. Serena is a leading provider of software to accelerate application development. Because we are software experts, it’s no surprise that we are always looking for the best solutions.

For us, it was becoming increasingly clear that our messaging infrastructure was lacking. Inbox storage space was a constant complaint. Server maintenance was extremely time-consuming, and backups were inconsistent. Then we found that – calculating additional licenses of Microsoft Exchange, client access licenses for users, disaster recovery software, and additional disk storage space to increase mailbox quotas to 1.5GB – staying with our existing provider would have cost us upwards of $1 million. That was a nearly impossible number to justify with executives.

We thought about replacing our on-premise solution, but to tell the truth, we were skeptical. I, personally, had been a Microsoft admin for 15 years, and Microsoft technologies were ingrained in my thought processes. But Google Apps provided many pluses: Gmail, Google’s Postini messaging security software and 25 GB of mailbox space, as well as greater uptime and 24/7 phone support.

Apps also offered reliable mobile access and included other Google productivity and collaboration applications, such as Google Docs for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations – all at $50 per user per year. The cost savings would amount to a whopping $750,000 per year. All this added up to the ability to save the company money and to transition to a more advanced, flexible infrastructure.

Once we selected Google Apps, we decided on a “Big Bang” migration. Employees would switch over on their own, migrating their old emails to Gmail if they chose to, or simply starting with a clean inbox. We did not support local email clients, opting to support only the Gmail web interface through Mozilla Firefox to best accommodate the company's mixed Linux, Mac and PC environment.

We also enlisted four small groups of early adopters who would try the Google solution first, and then assist IT and support their peers during the full-scale migration. We used a lot of Google’s existing support documents to help us during the migration.

The overall move to Google Apps took all of six hours. We waited for the phones to ring, but all we heard was silence – in fact, we sat there playing meebo for quite a while – and still, nothing happened. We cut the cord all in one stroke to avoid the hassle of living in two environments at once. We made the switch globally, all in one day – and, due to the advantages of this cloud computing solution, we’ve never looked back.

I expect that what I am saying is probably setting off a lot of questions in your head. We welcome you to join us for a live webcast to learn more:


Thursday, June 18, 2009
1:00 p.m. EDT / 10:00 a.m PDT / 5:00 p.m. GMT

We'll give you more details and take questions on our recent switch to Google Apps. We hope that you'll join us.


Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps team

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





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On this blog, we usually focus on helping you make the most of the products we've designed specifically with IT departments in mind. But Google has lots of other tools that other parts of your organization (such as the sales and marketing teams) might find useful.

So, in this post, we thought we'd go through a quick summary of the wide range of Google products that can help you do business. We've grouped these tips into three buckets: methods to optimize your website, details about how your company info can get listed on Google properties and finally, ways to improve your business operations.

OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE
Tip 1: Help customers find you with Google Maps
Pinpoint your business by embedding a Street View image on your website to show customers your storefront, office, building, parking facilities or anything else at the street level, or provide interactive door-to-door driving directions with a simple gadget. For a complete store locator solution, check out Google Maps API Premier

Tip 2: Engage users when they visit your site
Awaken and strengthen the community that visits your website by enriching it with social features. You can choose from a gallery of gadgets to add commenting, ratings and reviews, opinion polls, and more to your site. Learn more

Tip 3: Help visitors find what they're looking for
Add a customized Google-powered search box so that your visitors can easily find what they're looking for on your site. You can choose to show targeted ads alongside search results and earn revenue while helping visitors find what they're looking for with AdSense for Search, or you can purchase Google Site Search to offer your visitors an ad-free search experience.

Tip 4: Earn revenue from ads targeted to your content
Google AdSense enables website publishers of all sizes to display targeted ads alongside their online content and earn money. Sign up for AdSense and get access to Google's vast network of advertisers. If you're already selling ads directly to advertisers, learn how you can better manage your online sales and ad inventory with one of Google's ad serving solutions.

Tip 5: Measure website conversions on your website using Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free tool to track how visitors interact with your website. You can set up "Goals" in Analytics to track how many visitors complete a desired action, such as submitting a contact form or making a purchase. This lets you see your website's ROI and optimize your marketing efforts. Check out this post for a tutorial on how set up Goals for your site.

Tip 6: Increase your conversion rates with Website Optimizer
Every web page has room for improvement when it comes to conversions. Testing a few simple changes with Google Website Optimizer can radically increase your site's conversion rate. Try it now.

GET LISTED ON GOOGLE PROPERTIES
Tip 7: Put your business on Google Maps
People search for businesses on Google Maps and Google.com every day. Make sure your business is easy to find and your listing information is up-to-date by visiting the Local Business Center at www.google.com/lbc. It's free, and with the new dashboard feature, you can see how popular your business is on Google, where people drive from to get to you, and how they search to find you. Check out this video to learn more.

Tip 8: Submit all of your content
Google can also help you reach out to the world by distributing your content on Google Web Search, Product Search, iGoogle, and more. Learn how Google’s free products can make your online investments go further with increased distribution, traffic and monetization.

IMPROVE YOUR BUSINESS OPERATIONS
Tip 9: Simplify your IT environment, encourage innovation and cut costs
Managing email and other messaging software with multiple servers can be a headache. By switching to Google Apps, you can enjoy 99.9% uptime and take advantage of Google's data center infrastructure to ensure your information is secure. With your systems online, new features are automatically incorporated and collaboration can be done at a fraction of the cost of existing setups. Learn more

Tip 10: Archive corporate email in a central and searchable repository
Many businesses rely on backup tapes or .pst files to serve as their email archive. Searching through these sources can be time consuming and resource intensive. To minimize your IT operating burden and protect your business from costly e-discovery projects, you can archive email on-line in a central and searchable location with Google Message Discovery. Learn more

Tip 11: View and style mapping data with Google Earth Pro
If your business has GIS (Geographic Information System) data then use Google Earth Pro to view this map data with built-in GIS data import tools. You can also share styled map data quickly with colleagues and clients with Google Earth as a backdrop, leveraging Google’s comprehensive mapping data to make quick, location specific decisions. Learn more

Tip 12: Easily locate ALL of your internal documents using the Google Search Appliance 6.0
Your company’s internal search system can be just as good as Google’s – and just as easy to use. The Google Search Appliance (GSA) provides universal search for business, indexing all company content in a customizable way. The Google Search Appliance can search intranets, web servers, portals, file shares, databases, content management systems, and real-time data in business applications – and serve it up to employees in integrated, easy-to-navigate results. The new version of the GSA – GSA 6.0 – which just premiered yesterday, can now search billions of documents and provides rich customization features. Learn more

Posted by Debbie Leight, Google Apps team

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Today we're announcing the launch of the latest version of the Google Search Appliance, GSA 6.0. We've packed it full of so many new features that it's difficult to even count them. Check out the videos linked below to see some highlights, and I'll tell you how we got to this point -- the origins of (GSA)n.


As you might know, last August, we launched "10 million docs in a box ". Building on the premise of scale with simplicity, we (the engineering team) challenged ourselves to see how much further we could go, while still keeping the architecture extremely simple. After many late-night sessions spent diagramming on the whiteboards and chugging cappuccinos, we had a breakthrough.

The end result was a new architecture: (GSA)n. When we tested it out, the product manager was pretty excited about all the new features and search power. He was used to hearing about the millions of docs we could handle – but this time we were going to push it to a new realm: billions.

The idea was simple; build technology to connect as many appliances as you'd like, whether in one location or separated across departments or even across continents - and still provide a unified set of results to the end-user – the employee searching for an elusive document or piece of information. This would not only give our customers unparalleled ability to scale, but enable them to integrate all the data in their organizations. Information doesn’t do you much good if you can’t find it! That was our guiding principle.

One of our beta customers, MTCSC Inc., really needs the geographic integration. When we caught up with them, MTCSC was in the midst of deploying over 50 GSAs all over the world for a federal customer, connecting to over 2,500 data sources and consisting of data on websites, file shares, databases, and SharePoint servers. The new GSA 6.0 architecture is now helping them integrate information from the varied data centers to provide users with a single, unified set of results.

So imagine there is a database that might “live” in Egypt, some documents in a data center in Sydney, and a fileshare whose homebase is Los Angeles. The new GSA 6.0 integration can handle searching through all those data stores and give the employee who is looking a simple page of search results – one that looks as easy to use as Google.com – even though the backend search is really complicated.

And, since we were feeling ambitious, we added a Ranking Framework (where administrators can easily feed in server logs and other enterprise-specific information to improve relevance of search results), multiple new biasing options, and an administrative API to provide more control for automation of common tasks. We also added support for both early binding and late binding, providing organizations with flexible security policies to meet their needs.

The bottom line: safer, higher-quality, more customizable enterprise search with (GSA)n.

This morning, both Google and our customers, including MTCSC, spoke at an event on all the new developments leading to (GSA)n and the 6.0 version. We talked so much about searching a billion documents, we decided to try something we’ve never seen done before: set up and showcase the actual infrastructure required to search a billion docs, and you can see it here. It is surprisingly small and simple, and pretty cool to know that we can now take the amount of content in the entire Google.com index in the year 2000 (when Google.com was searching though just a billion docs), and pack it into a server rack built that could fit in the corner of my living room. And I have a normal-sized living room.

Posted by Shamim Alpha, Enterprise Search Engineer

Learn more about the Google Search Appliance 6.0 at google.com/gsa
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Tens of millions of people around the world have transitioned from software-based email and personal productivity tools to powerful web-based applications like Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Sites.  Over the last couple years, businesses have been making the switch to our hosted solutions too, putting complex, expensive on-premises IT systems in the past.  With Google Apps, employees are equipped with work productivity tools that they can access from anywhere, that provide enough email storage to keep everything important, and that enable more natural collaboration like document sharing without the hassles of attachments and integrated voice and video chat.

More than a million businesses have moved to Google Apps, and Valeo – an auto parts manufacturer with 30,000 Internet-connected employees in 27 different countries – has joined the movement.  You can read more about Google Apps and their deployment on the Google Blog and in Valeo's own announcement.


Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing manager

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Editor's Note: We're pleased to welcome guest blogger Louis Gary, Manager of Client Services, Information Services Department, Hamilton Beach Brands, Inc. Louis recently completed a global migration to Google Apps from Lotus Notes/Domino. Louis has been a technology manager at Hamilton Beach for 14 years. During this time, he introduced PC networks and WAN connections to the various operating locations worldwide, was an early adopter to VPN technologies, migrated the company from cc:Mail to Lotus Notes, and expanded VoIP into their customer service center.

He currently manages the desktop support team which provides employee support for PC, phone, multi-function (print, scan, fax) devices, e-mail, and application training.

I've done many migrations in my years in IT and, although they can be fun as a technologist, they're never easy. But I'm getting out of the upgrade business altogether now that my company, Hamilton Beach, recently switched to Google Apps. Many of you may know Hamilton Beach for the coffee makers, blenders, toasters or the panini grills that sit on your kitchen countertop. As a global brand with design, engineering and manufacturing operations located around the world, our IT department supports diverse functions. We recently had to deal with an upgrade to our Lotus Notes/Domino messaging system to keep up with growing business needs.

Because of the complexity, we upgrade our Lotus Notes/Domino environment about every five years. Our current version was coming to an end of life. Since the software would be free, under maintenance, we certainly looked at upgrading to a newer version of Lotus Notes/Domino. We were looking at old servers that would need to be replaced, all of the desktop client software requiring an upgrade, as well as training for employees on the new look and feel. We had so much e-mail, we estimated the upgrade might take more time than a three-day weekend to complete, with the email system shut down. So we took a look at Google Apps and found that it had all the enterprise features we needed.

Key features include the instant global access, support for different languages across our world-wide operations, virtually limitless storage, and speed. We really did not anticipate how much faster the e-mail system would be. Additionally, we will put be adding the Postini archiving solution and will look at how we can leverage Google Docs and Sites to improve our global collaboration.

And we never shut down the e-mail system!

Moving to Google Apps has reduced our total cost of ownership by 60% over a 5 year-period. But it also gives me the great pleasure of turning off all of our Lotus Domino servers that were dedicated to email! And since Google Apps is delivered as a cloud-based solution, I don't have to worry about the next upgrade.

We learned a lot from this experience and I'm happy to share with you some insights I've learned about making a successful migration. Please join me for a webinar covering our migration. Details follow:


Wednesday, May 20, 009
10:00 a.m. PDT / 1:00 p.m. EDT

I'll be on hand to answer your questions about how we deployed Google Apps to our global employee base.

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps Marketing Team

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