Share your work from Google Drive to Google+

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.

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Introducing the new compose in Gmail

Posted by Phil Sharp, Product Manager

(Cross-posted on the Gmail Blog.)

We're always trying to make Gmail faster and easier to use, so today we're introducing a completely redesigned compose and reply experience that does just that.

Faster
How many times have you been writing an email and had to reference something in another message? Saving a draft, opening the old email, and then reopening your draft wastes valuable minutes. The new compose pops up in a window, just like chats (only larger).

This makes it easy to reference any other emails without ever having to close your draft. You can even do a search or keep an eye on new mail as it comes in. And because the compose window works the same way as chats, you can write multiple messages at once and minimize a message to finish it later.

Easier to use
The new compose is designed to let you focus on what's important: your message. The controls are still there when you need them but get out of the way when you don’t. We’ve even added some new features like the ability to easily insert inline images and have more to come.

And, when you add recipients to your message, you'll see profile pictures of your contacts in autocomplete helping you find the right person faster. You can also drag and drop the new address chips between to:, cc: and bcc:. When you’re done adding recipients, the address area collapses automatically to get out of your way.


You’ll also see these same changes when you respond to a message. The reply experience has been designed to fit better inline as part of your conversation -- replies take up much less vertical height, intelligently expand to fit your content, and always keep the recipients and other controls in view no matter how long your message gets.

We're rolling out a preview of the new compose and reply today. After we've added some finishing touches over the coming months, we’ll enable it for everyone.

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One click to Docs, Sheets, and Slides

Posted by Jonathan Rochelle, Director of Product Management

(Cross-posted from the Google Drive Blog.)

Google Drive is a place where you can create, share, collaborate and keep all your stuff. Of course, there are times you want to start a new document right away–say, to take notes in class or prepare a last-minute presentation for your boss.

To make it even easier for you to create stuff quickly, Documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentations–now called Docs, Sheets, and Slides–are now available as apps in the Chrome Web Store. Once installed, shortcuts to these apps will appear when you open a new tab in Chrome.

If you use a Chromebook, you’ll see Docs, Sheets, and Slides in your apps list by default following the next update to Chrome OS in a few weeks.

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Google spreadsheets, now with Discussions

Posted by Patrick Donelan, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted from the Google Drive blog.)

Getting things done with others would be much easier if everyone was sitting right next to you. But since that’s rarely the case, we’re always updating Google Drive to make it easier to collaborate with others, no matter where you are or who you’re with.

Today we’re bringing the discussion functionality that’s already in documents and presentations to spreadsheets. If a cell has a comment in it, you'll see an orange triangle in the upper right corner and when you hover over the cell you'll see the full discussion.

The total number of comments are also tallied up at the bottom of the screen on the sheet tab, and hovering over the comment icon shows all the comments on that sheet.

And just like you’re used to with comments elsewhere, you can +mention someone to automatically include them in a discussion and send them a notification via email – and they can even reply to the comment without leaving their inbox.

Any comments that were created in spreadsheets before today are still available and saved as “Notes”. These are shown in your spreadsheet using a black triangle in the corner of the cell to differentiate them from the new discussion-style comments. You can also create new notes from the “Insert” menu if you need to leave a quick annotation on a cell.

We hope discussions makes working in spreadsheets with others more fun and productive, and we look forward to making even more improvements to collaboration in Google Drive.

READ MORE - Google spreadsheets, now with Discussions

Gmail log search feature enhances visibility for domain admins

Posted by Priya Mathew, Google Apps Senior Strategist

Google Apps domain admins have access to a new tool – Gmail log search – that increases visibility into their email traffic. This feature in the Apps control panel allows domain admins to search through the Gmail delivery logs to investigate email delivery and traffic questions. Many domain admins have requested a self-service tool like this, and Gmail log search will make it easier to answer questions like: What happened to an inbound or outbound message? Was a message sent to my domain and marked as spam? Which users sent or received a specific message?

The information that is available in the log search feature includes:

• Basic message information like Sender, Recipient, Subject, Date and Message-ID
• Attachment size
• Total transit time
• Delivery status

This Gmail log search feature was built using Google BigQuery, a Google Cloud Platform product that allows developers to store and query large amounts of data. We chose BigQuery because it can analyze multi-terabyte data sets with billions of headers to deliver precise results in just a few seconds. Gmail log search will help domain admins have the same type of visibility into the operations of Google Apps that they are used to from the legacy, on-premise email systems.

Gmail log search will be available starting today to Google Apps for Business, Education and Government customers, and will roll out to all domains over the next few weeks. Learn more about the feature in the Google Apps Help Center.

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Google Apps Vault goes global

Posted by Jack Halprin, Head of eDiscovery, Google

In March 2012, we launched Google Apps Vault, bringing enterprise-class information governance to Google Apps. Vault delivers retention, archiving and eDiscovery capabilities for email and chat messages, enabling businesses of all sizes to access and manage business-critical information. Vault offers true manage-in-place capabilities by applying retention policies directly to the Google Apps data, without the need to move, export, or create a copy of data in a separate location.

Google Apps Vault already archives, searches and manages messages in all languages that Google Apps supports (50+). Now the Google Apps Vault user interface is available in 28 languages, including double-byte languages like Japanese, Chinese and Arabic. This new, global Vault interface enables customers worldwide to more easily access and manage their data, further reducing the costs and risks that businesses today face.

"Google Apps Vault offers compelling capabilities and value for businesses around the world in preparing for litigation, investigation, and managing day-to-day business. Vault integrates seamlessly across the evolving Google platform while integrating with business and industries of all sizes. This is a key component in our forward thinking strategy to drive down costs and provide enhanced client service."

- Eric Hunter - Director of Knowledge, Innovation & Technology Strategies at Bradford & Barthel, LLP

Google Apps Vault is available for new and recent Google Apps for Business and Education customers. Existing customers will be able to deploy Google Apps Vault later this year.

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Adding business class management features to Gmail

Posted by Adam Dawes, Gmail Product Manager

Last year, we started integrating Postini’s business-class email security and management capabilities into Gmail and today we’re excited to be rolling out the latest round of integrated features. Google Apps administrators can now take advantage of improved email compliance footers, approved/blocked sender lists and file attachment policies. These capabilities help our customers address compliance requirements and effectively manage email traffic. Previously, Google Apps customers used Google Message Security, powered by Postini, to provide these capabilities.

With this new release, we’ve improved these features and designed them specifically to meet the needs of our Apps customers. Admins will manage the features natively in the Google Apps control panel (localized in 28 languages), leverage our granular policy framework to customize settings for different types of users, and join multiple rules together to address very targeted use cases.

These new features are available globally for Google Apps for Business, Google Apps for Government and Google Apps for Education editions.

Dominie Liang, IT Director at New Media Group in Hong Kong, was able to use the new features to quickly address his company’s compliance requirements:

"Our legal team wanted us to add a compliance note to all of our outbound email. Thanks to Google's new email feature set, we could easily add the rich text format disclaimer with Chinese characters to the email footer, and solved the issue within a minute."

George Krieger, Technical Services Manager, Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, adds:

"The new message footers in Gmail have made it easy for us to standardize our email signatures and more effectively promote our race schedules. And I love the ability to delegate control of these to our Media department so they can change them when they want without having to call me. This is a major improvement for us."

With the addition of these features to Gmail, there is no longer a need to use Google Message Security (GMS) with Google Apps so we will no longer offer GMS to Google Apps customers. We’ll work with those customers currently using GMS to migrate their settings to these new features. For more information on these features and how customers can migrate to them please refer to this Google Apps Help Center article and the Transition Guide.

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New apps status dashboard improves visibility

Posted by Sumeet Pannu, Site Reliability Engineer Manager

Editors note: This post is part of a series that explores the top ten reasons why customers trust Google with their business data. A complete top ten list can be found here.

People expect their email and productivity tools to just work, and we’re very proud of the reliable services we’ve been able to give our customers. Last year, Gmail was up and running 99.984% of the time, and in the first half of 2011 we’ve delivered 99.99% availability—that’s less than 5 minutes of downtime, on average, per month.

But we aren’t perfect, so providing you with information on how our apps are performing is very important to us, and we’re committed to being transparent with you in the event that something goes wrong.

To this end, we’ve developed a new Apps Status Dashboard that we believe will give you accurate information faster. The former day-by-day design will be replaced by the new dashboard which gives a more clutter-free status with a single, continuous timeline.

The new dashboard shows only service disruptions and outages. The size of the dot will indicate the length of outage and the color will indicate the severity. The dot to the left of the service name will show the current status of the service.


When you click on one of the yellow or red dots in the timeline, you’ll see a single transcript that will display all the status messages until final resolution—even if the outage spanned more than a single day. There will now be a single URL that describes the issue and resolution for the entire outage.


As before, the dashboard is visible to everyone on the web—there’s no username or password required. We hope you’ll find this new presentation of Google Apps status to be even more accessible and useful, and please share your feedback in the comments below.

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Open for business: Chromebooks for businesses & schools

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Group Product Manager, Chrome for Business

A few weeks ago at Google I/O we announced a new kind of computer: Chromebooks. Chromebooks are fast, secure and simple to manage. Users like the easy, instant access to all of their computing needs without the complexity of traditional PCs. And if you’re a business or school, they’re extremely cost-effective.

With today’s announcement that the new Google Chromebooks are available from our partners, we’re officially open for business. For businesses and schools, we’re offering a subscription that includes the Chromebook, a web-based management console and 24/7 support from Google starting at $28 per month/user for businesses and $20 per month/student for schools.

To learn more, please contact our sales team.

Pilot customer Jason's Deli discusses Chromebooks.

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Share your Google Docs product ideas with our team

Posted by Teresa Wu, Community Manager

(Cross-posted from the Google Docs Blog.)

You make Google products what they are -- and the feedback you share with us every day helps shape the future of our products. We’re always listening to your requests via blogs, Twitter, our forum, and other channels, and for the next two weeks, we’re bringing back a more structured way to get your input on Google Docs by opening up our Product Ideas page.

On this page, you can submit your ideas, read other users’ suggestions, and vote up your favorites. We’ll use the top ideas to help us prioritize our development in the coming months. After the two-week period, we'll follow up with a blog post summarizing the results. While we may not work on all of the top ideas immediately, we’ll let you know which of the ideas we’re working on.

We hope you’ll use this as an opportunity to help us prioritize the Google Docs features which are important to you -- for your business, in the classroom, or at home. Start submitting your ideas, big or small -- we look forward to hearing what you have to say!

Editors note: We’re specifically looking to hear your Google Docs product ideas and suggestions. If you’re seeking help, please post your support questions to the Help Forum. Off topic submissions may be removed.

READ MORE - Share your Google Docs product ideas with our team

New computers for the browser-based world

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Group Product Manager, Chrome for Business

Today at Google I/O we unveiled the first Chromebooks. These mobile devices are a new kind of computer designed specifically for people who live in the browser. Chromebooks are made for people seeking uncompromising speed, simplicity and security, while providing features that will delight the IT department, too. For businesses and schools, we’re offering a subscription that includes the Chromebook, a web-based management console and 24/7 support from Google starting at $28 per month for businesses and $20 per month for schools.¹

The concurrent rise of cloud computing and powerful devices like smartphones and tablets is dramatically changing the way we work. But to date the innovation has stopped at the PC. We still worry about crashes, long boot times, software incompatibilities, endless program updates, outdated hardware, viruses, and all the other headaches associated with a personal computer. What’s more, managing a PC is expensive when you include setup, maintenance and security - not to mention the lost productivity when things break. According to Gartner Research, the total cost for a desktop computer is between about $3,300 and $5,800 per year and laptops can cost even more.²

Chromebooks relieve these pains. They boot in 8 seconds, resume instantly and have WiFi and optional 3G so that users can always stay connected. Since Chromebooks update automatically, the software gets better over time, delivering the latest features as soon as they are released. Chromebooks are the first PCs designed with ongoing security threats in mind, which is critical for businesses. Chromebooks employ the principle of “defense in depth” to provide multiple layers of protection, including sandboxing, data encryption, and verified boot - to help keep your organization safe.

We also recognize that organizations want to centrally manage their Chromebooks, so we’re happy to announce we’re making this easy, with the ability to control accounts, applications and devices from a single web-based console. The new Chromebooks pricing model and simple, central maintenance means that Chromebooks are far more cost-effective than traditional PCs. Companies can save thousands of dollars per employee each year!

The browser is the platform
Chromebooks arrive as the browser is rapidly replacing the desktop as the platform for business applications. 85% of new software vendors will be focused on developing web-based apps by next year, and pretty much all software innovation takes place in the browser today.³ Typically businesses would have to rewrite or repurchase applications when moving to another operating system – not with Chrome OS! Chromebooks work with your existing web apps, browser-based apps behind the firewall and we even have a solution for your desktop applications via our collaboration with Citrix. By navigating to an HTML5-based version of Citrix Receiver, users can access virtualized applications such as Adobe® Photoshop® right from the browser.

We believe that a combination of web and virtualized apps will suit most business users today; in fact, a recent survey we commissioned found that two-thirds of companies could already switch the majority of their employees to an exclusively browser-based computing environment.⁴

What we learned from the pilot program
Since December more than 50,000 organizations have applied to our pilot program for testing Chromebooks. Participants ranged from the Intercontinental Hotels Group, Logitech® and MeadWestvaco to KIPP Academy and the City of Orlando. We heard from sales managers that the long battery life and integrated 3G helped them work more often from more places. Teachers told us that fast boot times and a reliable operating system meant more time to teach not troubleshoot. And IT administrators reported that Chromebooks were easier to manage and reduced security concerns, especially around viruses and the loss of sensitive data.

How to get your Chromebooks
Starting today, businesses and schools can contact Google regarding Chromebooks for Business and Education. This hardware and software as a service includes the Chromebooks themselves, a web-based management console to remotely manage users, applications and policies, full enterprise support, device warranties and replacements and regular hardware refreshes. Initially Chromebook subscriptions will be available in the US, UK, France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy and Spain, and we’ll be bringing them to other countries soon.

Learn more about Chromebooks for Business and how pilot customers are using them.

You can also join us for a live webinar on Chromebooks for Business and Education on Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 9 AM Pacific Time. Register here.

¹Plus applicable taxes and other fees, subject to change without prior notice.
²Gartner Research, 2010. "Desktop Total Cost of Ownership: 2011 Update”
³IDC, 2010. “Worldwide Software as a Service 2010–2014 Forecast: Software Will Never Be the Same.”
⁴Google-commissioned 2011 Hall & Partners online survey of over 400 IT decision makers.

READ MORE - New computers for the browser-based world

Google App Engine - a new version and a preview of future plans

Posted by Greg D’Alesandre, Senior Product Manager, Google App Engine

Editors note: Today we’re at Google I/O, and we have a few announcements about how we’re making our developer tools more available and better for businesses. The first, below, summarizes important improvements to Google App Engine.

Google App Engine, which provides the ability to develop and host applications on Google’s infrastructure, has gained momentum quickly since it launched as preview status in 2008. More than 100,000 developers use App Engine every month to deliver apps that dynamically scale with usage without the need to manage hardware or software. App Engine now hosts more than 200,000 active apps that serve over 1.5 billion site views daily.

Over the last three years, we’ve collected great feedback from our customers and now believe that the biggest thing we can do to help them is to graduate App Engine from preview status. When App Engine graduates from preview status, which we expect to do in the second half of this year, we’ll add additional enterprise-grade features that allow us to support many more business application scenarios. Graduation from preview status also indicates Google's a longer term commitment to the product and establishes a deprecation policy whereby we will support prior versions of product APIs for a guaranteed amount of time, allowing applications written to prior API specifications to continue to functioning.

Today, we’re moving forward with our business focus with the release of App Engine 1.5.0 which includes Backends, improved Task Queues, and more:

• With Backends, App Engine can now support applications that require long running and high memory processes. This feature allows for new classes of applications such as report generation apps and custom search engines to be hosted on the platform.
• The improvements to Task Queues allows for applications to control how tasks are executed and easily share the work using the new REST-based APIs. This API access expands App Engine’s compatibility with other on-premise and cloud services, furthering our commitment to an open development platform.

In addition, when we take App Engine out of preview in the second half of this year, we will provide a 99.95% uptime service level agreement, operational and developer support, offline billing, and a new Terms of Service agreement geared towards businesses. We will also introduce a new billing structure for App Engine based on more transparent usage-based pricing.

We’re announcing these features and pricing changes in advance so that our customers have time to review. Adding business features will help App Engine meet a broader set of needs and the new, more transparent pricing model will help customers better align their App Engine investment with their business goals. Learn more about these changes on the App Engine Blog.

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