New features now allow Google Apps administrators to flexibly manage Google Apps within their organizations!

Google listed enhancements from over the past few months that include multi-domain support, new data migration tools, SSL enforcement capabilities, mobile device security controls, and Google Apps customizations with over a hundred applications at the new Google Apps Marketplace.

However, Google really did outdo itself this time with a new release of the much needed administrative feature for the organizational context- Google Apps user policy management.

Now Google Apps administrators can segment their users into organizational units and control the access to these applications for each group. For example, a particular firm might want to give their office workers access to Google Talk, but not their production line employees. ”We work with businesses with 100 to 20,000 employees moving from on-premise solutions to Google Apps. The new user policy management feature helps us tailor Google Apps and provide businesses with granular control for each department within their company”, noted Mayooran Rajan, CTO of Revevol Consulting.

The new controls also allows organizations to pilot test applications for a few specific groups before making them more widely available e.g. the use of Google Wave and its relevant policies. Transition to Google Apps from on-premise environments can be made more acceptable and adaptable. E.g. a business can just only enable collaboration tools like Google Docs and Google sites for users who are still handling old on-premise messaging clients/servers.

A snapshot of the simple Google Apps Admin Interface for managing user policies

To manage these settings , Administrators will simply need to access the ‘Organizations & users’ tab in the ‘Next generation’ control panel. Alternatively, organizations can mirror their existing LDAP organizational schema using Google Apps Directory Sync. Otherwise, they can program to assign users to organizational units using the Google Apps Provisioning API.

This new features will extend to Google Apps Premier and Education edition users for free. To learn more about user policy management on Google Apps, yo can visit the Google Help Center here.

Google Apps Updates for iPhones, Android, Windows Mobile and Nokia users

Last year, we see Google Apps going mobile with new enhancements that help addresses the growing market for mobile productivity.

“In a world focused on improving business productivity, companies look to solutions like Google Apps to provide employees with seamless access to information regardless of location or device. With the rising adoption of Internet-enabled devices, employees increasingly seek access to their email, documents, and other corporate data from their mobile phone,” said Bryan Mawhinney, Google Mobile Software Engineer.

So what have we been seeing till now? Well, the Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server was launched to cater to Blackberry users. New web versions of Gmail and Google Calendar, along with updates to Google Docs were also rolled out for Android users. Google Sync for iPhone, Nokia E series, and Windows Mobile devices were also released. Google Apps users can now access and sync their mails, calendars, and contacts from their mobile device from Google’s cloud.

Earlier this February, Google further enhanced Google Apps’ mobile potential by enabling new controls for administrators to ensure corporate policy enforcement across a wide range of mobile devices.

What does this imply? Without the need for additional software or to manage dedicated enterprise mobile servers, both Google Apps Premier and Education Edition administrators can now manage their users’ iPhone, Nokia E series and Windows Mobile devices directly from the Google Apps administrative control panel.

The new management controls for mobile devices entails that administrators can now:

• Remotely wipe all data from lost or stolen mobile devices
• Lock idle devices after a period of inactivity
• Require a device password on each phone
• Set minimum lengths for more secure passwords
• Require passwords to include letters, numbers and punctuation

Access these features simply via the ‘Mobile’ tab under ‘Service Settings’ in the Google Apps control panel. Once a user starts syncing their devices with Google Apps, the domain administrator will be able to remotely wipe the one’s device data in the case of theft or loss.

Such policies will let employees conveniently access their documents and emails from their phone while allowing IT administrators to manage existing caches of corporate data on mobile devices.

But alas! Google would not just stop there. This month, Google Apps administrators will have even more options as follow to flexibly manage mobile devices from the admin control panel:

• Requiring devices to use data encryption
• Auto-wiping device after specified number of failed password attempts
• Disabling the phone’s camera
• Helping to ensure that old passwords are not reused
• Requiring passwords to be changed after specified time interval
• Disabling of data synchronization when roaming to help reduce wireless overage charges

Currently, the Google Apps editions that feature these new capabilities are the Premier and Education Editions. However, do note that in order to access these options, the Administrator Control Panel needs to be set to ‘Next generation (US English only)’ version under ‘Domain Settings’.

Such mobility of Google Apps will certainly be well-received in small businesses which are highly mobile in general. With the increasing benefits of convenience and pricing for the ubiquitous mobile device, Google is certainly seated at the forefront for implementing mobile management of corporate data security. It is without a doubt that we will see even more enhancements for the mobile in even data backup and monitoring.

Today, collaborative work can get even easier and manageable.

Google Docs recently made it easier for everyone to share their documents with colleagues and teams via a new simplified interface to control the access to your files.

To see the new interface, check out this video:

Now, documents, spreadsheets and presentations on Google Docs can be identified as “Private”, “Anyone with a link”, or “Public on the web” as settings for access. The earlier Google Docs have all documents start out as “Private” in default.

An example of how the interface looks like (from The Official Google Blog – “Easier sharing in Google Docs”)

The 3 Sharing Settings on Google DocsThese new visibility options will appear as a link next to the title of every Google Docs. Clicking this link or the “Share” button will display the new interface where you can easily see who has access, manage sharing access and invite others to share the Google Docs.

To know more about Google Docs‘s recent roll-outs and how users can share their documents easily within their organization, check out Google‘s post on the Enterprise Blog or  blog post on Technorati.

For a multinational giant as in the case of Konica Minolta, IT and communications systems are usually problematic when coming to terms with alignment and compatibility. Varied communication tools, lag-time and IT burdens during patching and storage management can prove too cumbersome to focus on strategic business functions.

Having positive experiences with cloud-based solutions in the past, Konica Minolta pinpointed Google Apps as a powerful, low-maintenance yet easy email solution conveniently bundled with essential collaborative tools.

Today, Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A. Inc. has benefited greatly from Google Apps.

Google Apps had helped Konica Minolta to:

• Deliver everything from email, collaboration, security, and spam filters all in one solution
• Continuity in adding value to the business, with Google‘s continuous efforts in innovating
• Able to easily integrate new acquisitions such as Danka
• Align business functions to move Konica Minolta ahead

For first-hand perspectives on Konica Minolta’s metamorphosis from a bulky infrastructure to a strategic business on the forefront or to achieve value from Google Enterprise, do join in this live webcast with Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A.’s Cathy Lilli, Director of Infrastructure Services & Chris Henry, Manager of Messaging and IT Security:

Konica Minolta on transforming Enterprise IT through Cloud Computing

Thursday, 17th June 2010

2:00 p.m. EDT / 11:00 a.m. PDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT

Insert text, shapes, arrows, scribbles

Add images from your hard drive or from the Web

Use alignment guides, snap-to-grid, and auto distribution for greater precision

Share drawings just like sharing your documents, spreadsheets and presentations

 

An example of the drawings you can make on Google Docs from The Official Google Docs Blog:



Above: A screenshot of a Google Launch Plan

Don’t forget that you can now edit your drawings even while chatting with your friends and colleagues! See below to check it out.

When done with your drawing, you can copy and paste the drawings into other documents types with the web clipboard to edit them with the embedded drawing editor, publish them as images, insert them into other web pages, or download them as ONGs, JPGs, PDFs and SVG. Otherwise, you can copy and paste the drawing  from one Google Doc to another via the web clipboard.

If you are interested to know more, do come down for our biweekly Google Apps Open Day Seminar! It’s free and we promise its benefits to help draw an even brighter future for your business.

Day-to-day security threats remains a never-ending tussle for companies today. Committing in-house IT departments to tackle such challenges alone while serving core functions in tandem is never a complete solution.

Fortunately, thousands of businesses everyday soon find Google Apps as an highly effective and easy resolution to their technical constraints to better manage their security needs.

To best benefit customers, Google Apps offers an extensive and robust security package as follows:

• Advanced physical security controls and multiple-level monitoring
• Fragmentation storage across multiple servers and across multiple data centers
• Immediate software patching to update users on the latest patches
• Allowance for detailed access controls for administrators in handling documents and other data stored in the cloud.
• Vast-scale operation to detect online security threats early
• Data replication across data centers for enhanced availability and disaster recovery
• Strong teams of security professionals dedicated to protecting customer data

More than that, Google lives to its expectations to always evolve and improve its security protocols for greater quality assurance. Google also goes beyond the physical knowledge of data stored in a few data centers that by emphasizing the transparency of security policies to its customers. Here, we see the Google’s recent release of a new Google Apps security white paper to help customers learn more about the security practices, policies, and technology that support Google Apps.

As you can see, trust is both mutual and rewarding with Google Apps!

This year, in place of the usual choice of a Microsoft Office upgrade to Office 2010, Google promises a much affordable, easier and effective way to assure employee productivity with Google Docs. “We’d encourage you to consider an alternative: upgrading Office with Google Docs,” said Matthew Glotzbach of Google Entreprise last month.

Google Docs enables real-time collaboration for the millions of users to edit and share documents, spreadsheets and even presentations from just about anywhere on the globe.

There is no need to worry about your existing copies of Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007 as Google Docs can further improve them. With instantaneous file collaboration, you can simply store any files (inclusive of Microsoft Office documents) on Google Docs’ online platform and share them in their original formats. Addressing concerns for possible file loss, valuable data will be protected via synchronous replication across Google’s data centers. Google also offers the best disaster recovery free-of-charge.

To top it off, Google Apps offers a plug-in – DocVerse that enables direct real-time collaboration in your current Office 2003 and 2007. So why mull over tedious and expensive upgrades when you have such choices to be spoilt for? It is certainly worthwhile when you  can also try Google Docs and the rest of Google Apps Suite for free.

Hi folks. It’s been awhile since I’ve allowed myself to be heard and today I’ve decided to break out of my blogger’s hiatus just to rant briefly about what i just read on BusinessInsider.com.

Basically the author, Henry Blodget has been writing about Google for years now and has had the “freedom to do [his] own thing..was aided and abetted by Google, which, for a while, refused to talk to anyone who worked for anything that could be described as a ‘blog’.” (I didn’t know this, rather ironic though, since Google has a whole inventory of blogs. There’s so much to read, it’s an e-book of blogpages really!)

So he wrote about his (intense) hatred for GMail’s ‘unconventional’ conversation threads, and tada!…Gets 3 replies from the Senior Googlers.

See. Google’s listening..albeit discreetly, but nonetheless!

Then..Google proves to understand. Now, Google plans to offer the option of standard email viewing; let me just say that this is a HUGE deal. This represents a step out of tradition and trademark legacy even; conversation threads are what made GMail different when it was first introduced, it is the core format of the system. Definitely, it unruffled plenty of feathers, but users kept themselves rooted (with the high inbox capacity offering for free webmail,why not? ). This format had continued much to the resistance of haters and delight of lovers, till its usability became so incredibly evident that other companies like Microsoft decided to offer ‘Conversation View’ as well.

It’s like if Coke was without fizz, where’s the pop?…You’re just left with a flat, essence-less dark pool of liquid.

I digress. My point is, Google listens, they understand, they build a product that meets your personal needs (event at work), they bend their backs to make moves that are extremely consumer-oriented. What more could a user want?

This just makes me want to submit many votes for Google’s Product Ideas page. It’s my turn Henry Blodget!

Well, have you?

Google Buzz was released two days ago and already it has caused much buzz hype amongst the online community. Many early adopters; whether for enterprise purposes (like inculcating it into their branding strategies) or for personal use. (more…)

Google has focused a large amount of effort on mobile productivity with tools like Google Sync and Google Apps Connector for Blackberry Enterprise Server. Taking it a step further, it was recently announced that new controls would be launched so that administrators can ensure policy enforcement for Google Apps across a range of mobile devices. (more…)